On the fear of happiness.
May. 4th, 2018 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadedcandiru2The very odd thing about how Elly's 'triumph' (which is to say "having a traffic ticket vanish because an accident couldn't be prevented") turned out to be short-lived because she'd double-parked is that we got no follow-up about the injustice or irony of it all. Elly had tried to show the world that she couldn't be messed with and the world messed with her anyway because it wants to make her miserable.
The reason that I mention this is that Elly tends to lack the same measure of self-awareness Val Stone does because neither person wants to admit that she thinks that she's being a dutiful daughter by making herself miserable over nothing. We know that Elly lived and died by what her stand-offish, praise-withholding mother Marian thought and we know that Val grew up believing that happiness was a bad thing to be avoided because of her own puritan idiot mother. This resulted it two women who made themselves unhappy on purpose in order to prove to an indifferent parent how mature they are. Both of them are worse for it.
The reason that I mention this is that Elly tends to lack the same measure of self-awareness Val Stone does because neither person wants to admit that she thinks that she's being a dutiful daughter by making herself miserable over nothing. We know that Elly lived and died by what her stand-offish, praise-withholding mother Marian thought and we know that Val grew up believing that happiness was a bad thing to be avoided because of her own puritan idiot mother. This resulted it two women who made themselves unhappy on purpose in order to prove to an indifferent parent how mature they are. Both of them are worse for it.
