As a third option between stealing and buying- libraries

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Because stealing is a crime.

>!Count Olaf dies in the last book,!< and the kids do survive, but I don't know if I'd describe the ending as "happy." It wasn't bad either, but it seemed more open-ended. If I remembered it better, I'd be able to describe it better.

Why not spare yourself the virus and I dunno…use a library to source your eBooks?

You can also download movies and music for free but somehow people are willing to pay for services like Spotify and Netflix. Downloading illegally distributed books is illegal in most regions and it doesn't support the authors. Personally I don't find reading ebooks difficult. Nothing is easier than buying one on the Kindle store and reading it without having to lug books around.

Did I download illegally distributed copies of media when I was a student? Sure. Am I doing it now that I'm an employed adult? Never.

> Why pay for ebooks?

Because stealing is against the law? So the author will get paid for their time and effort? So you won't get suckered into downloading a file corrupted with spyware / malware? To support retail platforms that offer safe, legal copies of books; many of which also help support up-and-coming authors, offer tools authors can use to self-publish their work, etc?

¯\(ツ)/¯

At the very least, if you read something via “download” that you like, you should support the author by purchasing a hard copy of the book or eBook so they get paid for their work.

I think kids telling an adult that the adult is deluded and has been conned by an obvious fraud and charlatan and abusive manipulator is something that does happen. The reaction, as in these books, is nearly always to deny the child's claims as wrong, fanciful, or spiteful, and to defend the charlatan, and to punish the child.

Talk to any survivor of childhood abuse and they will tell you all the times they reached out to those they trusted that they were punched down. One of the worst situations is telling one's mother they are being abused by their stepfather and the mother takes it as a personal accusation against herself and punishes the child for lying about the mother's heroin addicted or otherwise questionable boyfriend who provides the needy mother with affirmations in return for pedophilic access, a trade.

This capitalistic dynamic I find to be the aspect of these books that is the most realistic detail.

"Why buy stuff when you can get away with stealing it?"

Oh you never downloaded anything on the net for free and for personal use only?

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do the kids ever get away and survive and live happily ever after? I grew out of them and never bothered finding the conclusion

"Why pay for things when stealing them is easy?!" is definitely a lifehack.

Is this just bait?

About supporting some authors ,I understand that but you’re probably just supporting Amazon and the other platforms.

Supporting authors.

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Personally, I only get e-books through my library or Prime Reading, or pay for them. There is just something about wanting to make sure that authors, especially up and coming or self-published authors, get paid for the incredible amount of work they put into their books. Whether I enjoy it myself or not. Even authors I have followed for 30 years, I buy their books. I don't pirate them.

In a little bit of defense, Monty from the second book was made out in documentation to be an uncle of theirs, as well as the late Ike, husband to Josephine.

But of course, it’s very ridiculous that they don’t return to the idea of Justice Strauss after those two don’t, erm, work out. And Poe’s ideas just get more and more outlandish compared to Justice Strauss as the series goes on. So that does require suspension of disbelief. But the plot begins to get much more interesting and complicated as the books go on, so it’s not too difficult to forget about.

My thoughts on this series are that the beginning was absolutely unexpected, and I didn’t love it. I think I will watch the rest of the show though.

Victor Frankenstein is guilty, but not of murder.

Consider this more mundane situation. A woman wants to have a baby, so she gets pregnant, gives birth... and then finds that she's not very interested in being a mother. She treats the kid like crap. After 18 years of her shitty parenting, the kid goes up... to be a serial killer.

Is the mother responsible for all the murders? Obviously not. Only the murderer is the murderer. But had she abused or neglected the child who grew up to be the serial killer? Absolutely.

Never got into these books as a kid, but I was friends with people who were into them. The common thread was that the kids who liked them a lot were bright kids who knew they were bright and would stop at nothing to ensure that everybody knew how bright they were. While they didn't necessarily always end up in the top of the class, they did better than most with relatively little perceived effort. Indeed, they tended to exude apathy for any subject they weren't very much interested in but made sure to do well enough to maintain the perception that they were simply more clever than their peers. In their minds, they had already surpassed the adults in their lives intellectually, and these books played right into that fantasy. Eventually, as they got older, the curtain of life was slowly peeled back a bit to reveal that life is more difficult and complex than they thought. They realized that maybe either they aren't as smart or everybody else isn't as dumb as they believed, and the fantasy ASoUE played into so well was shattered.

I did watch the Netflix series. It was entertaining, but anything more than the three seasons they did would be tedious.

You are fighting an uphill battle cause Frankenstein is not a sympathetic character. I would argue that by pinning all of the blame on doctor Frankenstein they are ignoring the personhood and agency of the monster and he is not a puppet but rather a person with a personality and humanity that needs to be acknowledged and respected in the proceedings. It’s a twisted take, but I’m not sure your accusers will be able to counter that so quickly.

It's not a matter of a "right to life". It's a matter of who is making choices in that life. Even if the Monster is sapient but ignorant, that doesn't change the fact that the Monster is making decisions without the influence of Frankenstein (he's just making those decisions from a place of ignorance, which is further proof Frankenstein did NOT influence the Monster towards killing people). If the Monster were even truly physically and mentally identical to, say, an average 6 year old child, if that small child committed a murder you couldn't blame the father of that child; epecially if it was a father who abandoned them at 5 years old. Sure, what the father did in abandoning the child is despicable, but in the interim period the child showed personal autonomy and made its own decisions. It was acting outside the sphere of the father's influence or control. The father can be held culpable of abandonment, negligence of the child's own safety, etc., but he is not culpable for the actual acts of murder - those were completely the idea of the child (here "Monster").

The deny the Monster this autonomy, then you are denying the Monster's humanity entirely. So, is the Monster truly an inhuman monster incapable of the free will all humans share? Or is he a man, but a man that chose to kill?

(Just as an aside, I want to make it clear that this is just how I would argue this point to defend Frankenstein. I don't actually believe that Frankenstein is worth defending, but that's the assignment at hand.)

And which of those do you imagine is excuse enough for a premeditated murder spree?

Back in the real world we'd laugh at anyone using something like that as an excuse for carefully planning and executing a series of murders for clear personal gain.