Young Adult Fiction Adaptations Set A Powerful Example

Imagine a group of children who, after suffering a tragedy that rips loved ones from their lives, set out to restore a sense of safety and normalcy. Along the way, they must rely on their education and intuition against adults who either hinder them with ignorance or actively work to discredit and demoralize them.

This is the plot of A Series of Unfortunate Events, which recently aired its second season on Netflix, and also the story of the young adults who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting earlier this year. Why compare a real tragedy with a fantastic tale? Because A Series of Unfortunate Events, and other recent adaptations of young adult fiction, remind young people that their emotions, opinions, and experiences matter, and reminds adults not to take our youngest generations for granted. The Baudelaire orphans, like so many youths in the public eye today, are trying to fix the problems that affect their lives at whatever level necessary. If they change the world in the process, then so be it.

At the start of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaires have already found niches where they feel welcomed. All three are intelligent but Violet, for example, has a capacity for engineering where her brother Klaus is steeped in academia. More important than that, though, is their social and emotional intelligence.

The books they have read, or that their parents read to them, have given them a sense of morality that drives their actions throughout the series and is very apparent. The Baudelaires devote themselves to truth and honesty, to being fully informed and making compassionate decisions. Perhaps most importantly, they don’t sit on their piles of books and think about how things should be. The children take what they learn about the people they interact with and let it drive their future interactions. Once they learn that their nemesis Count Olaf likes to disguise himself, albeit poorly, they always see right through it. And when they learn that their guardians nearly never believe their suspicions, the Baudelaires quickly accept that they have to take matters into their own hands.

But what does this mean for the real world? Well, in the eponymous series, the orphans grow to no older than perhaps sixteen in Violet’s case. At the same age and younger, we have children in the United States undergoing the terrifying trial of school shootings on a regular basis. As of late May, there were 23 shootings at American schools during the first 21 weeks of the year. The most prominent shooting happened on February 14, where 17 students and faculty were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a former student opened fire. But the most remarkable outcome of this was the fact that this time, students who survived the shooting resolved not to let this one pass by like so many others.

Instead of waiting for those in traditional positions of power to make a change that was never going to come, the teens of Marjory Stoneman Douglas began a campaign against gun violence which has not only had a notable effect on the way we speak about the issue, but which continues to this day. Driven by their education and their experience, Never Again MSD turned their ideas into action.

Why is this important, though, other than as an example of parallels between real life teens and those in? How adults react to change-making youths can be informed by the events depicted in the Baudelaires’ lives. At each turn, the Baudelaires are discredited by both the guardians who are meant to look after them and by their enemies who seek to discredit them. Count Olaf’s insistence that children are stupid sounds very much like NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch’s comment that “teenagers piss [her] off”. While youths can make decisions and exhibit wisdom based off their experiences, the real change they enact often comes through channels that exclude them. In these cases, it is up for adults to trust and empower them.

Much like the Baudelaires have no agency in where they are sent due to the bureaucracy surrounding their parents’ will, the Never Again MSD movement is operating in a system in which most of them cannot participate, being too young to vote. As we see in the books and in the Netflix series, the VFD (a secret organization to which the Baudelaires’ parents once belonged) works to provide the children with information and support that would otherwise be unavailable to them. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Without Never Again MSD, it is clear that older generations would never mobilize enough to make a difference. In the same way, until the students of MSD come of age, the best thing they can do is mobilize voters and representatives to support their cause.

A new wave of powerful, intelligent YA fiction, and adaptations of it, reminds kids and teens that they matter. Seeing people their age making a difference, and not taking injustice lying down, can encourage young people to become those role models for their peers. Young adult fiction such as A Series of Unfortunate Events shows what happens when adults trust children to make decisions that affect their world in a meaningful way. In fact, this series is far from the only relevant YA adaptation to be released this year, with Love, Simon and The Hate U Give focusing on the real experiences of LGBTQ and black youths in the United States, respectively.

So adults must remember that they were once children, and teenagers, who wanted to make a difference in the world they experienced. They must recall the opinions and emotions they had when they were younger, and remember the very valid aspects of those beliefs. Young adult fiction reminds us that adults should lift up those young people they see fighting for change, and that you don’t have to be grown to change the world.