(I would like to preface this by saying that Lemony Snicket is the author's pen name, not a real person, and he exists as a character in-universe as well as being the one in-universe who writes the books!) I'd say he's unreliable because he spent time collecting information about the Baudelaire kids and then... wrote books about it. He has no idea what any of their dialogue actually was, what they were thinking, or even the whole plot, he's just doing research into the incidents and then filling in the gaps to make it a story. What ACTUALLY happened to the Baudelaires? Nobody really knows for sure
While the Baudelaire siblings are in potentially life threatening danger, he will randomly start talking about his own life and just leave the siblings hanging. For example, once Count Olaf was threatening to kill Violet, and then Lemony randomly began talking about how he met the love of his life at a costume party. This man CANNOT stay on topic. Usually when a new character is introduced, Lemony tells us right at the start that they’re either going to die or that the Baudelaire siblings will never see them again. Foreshadowing is not subtle in these books. CONSTANTLY emphasizes how miserable he feels while writing these books. At one point he admits that he had to put his pencil down and go cry for a while because of how sad it made him. Once he filled an entire page with nothing but the word “ever” to emphasize how dangerous it is to put forks in electrical outlets. He also repeated a paragraph about deja vu later on in the book to give the reader deja vu.
Kuruto Ryuki Propaganda:
Okay this is HUGE spoilers for the game like HUGE HUGE spoilers so beware. Like, the whole game will be ruined for you kind of spoilers. He is one of 2 (technically 3 (again, spoilers)) narrators in the game. Not only are certain important events left out if his side of the narration, but also (again huge spoilers) events are not told in the correct order. Each day in the game alternates between things that happen before the timeskip, and things that happen after the 6 year timeskip. (The other narrator(s) also have this same thing but I’m submitting Ryuki specifically) playing the game in the order it’s presented to you and playing the game with the events in chronological order are practically 2 different experiences
Ryuki is an extremely mentally ill man, whose issues are front and center as the player's first point of view character. The main twist of the game relies upon exactly his unreliability as a narrator, given that what we assumed was a series of linear events were actually scenes plucked from the past and the present, six years from what we had originally been led to assume was current time, and the only reason we hadn't realized it before is because his mental issues make him slip into a delusional state in which he believes himself to be in the past, or rather, that the past is the present.
Frequently has hallucinations of the world glitching out, often causing him to lose long periods of time and obscuring what really happens from the player. These get worse over time, causing a key suspect to be unrecognizable, and the return of a supposedly dead character to look fake. The game's twist involves seemingly linear events actually happening out of order--his warped sense of time contributes to hiding this. Events he thinks happened yesterday may have been years ago.
Don't want to be too spoiler-y but he can't tell what time period he is in sometimes, making the audience think he is in one time period, when in actuality he is in another one. Either way his narration makes the narrative like 10x more confusing.
I’ve opened up my etsy shop with new prints! Just putting these listings up for now to see how much I like it (my storenvy will still be open for a bit with all my older charms and whanot), any support is much appreciated!