Elly : Failed Caretaker

[dreadedcandiru2]

One of the things that howtheduck has noticed that Lynn's attempts to make the Pattersons look better fail to do so. Instead, the Patterson whose reputation Lynn tries to salvage looks worse. As we all know, her attempt to prove that Anthony was the injured party in his marriage turned his wife into a folk-hero and her sequence with Mike and his children six months ago only proved that he was a worse failure as a father than we'd thought. Where the Pattersons really shine as horrible people, of course, is how they interact with Jim. We've seen that Mike and Liz only appear when they want something. This is bad enough but who really fails as a person is Elly. We've seen her stand there looking at Jim with an oddly-detached look on her face as if his and Iris's needs had nothing to do with her. Now, we're going to see that she's, as anna_bat_sarah said, far too immature to be trusted with his care because she seems to regard her duties as "sitting down and supervising the nurses", "acting as if Jim were a naughty child" and "spouting nonsense about how she understands what he's going through when she doesn't have a clue". This will provide us with more examples of Pattersons Behaving Awfully. It will also make his usual dimwit caregiver look good.

Comments

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

One of the things that howtheduck has noticed that Lynn's attempts to make the Pattersons look better fail to do so.

At the heart of the problem is Lynn’s “Tell not Show” method of story-telling. It’s one thing for April to launch into a speech about how her grades are good and how she’s working at the vet clinic, because we have seen her studying and we have seen her work with animals before. There is nothing there displayed in opposition to what April says. However, when Elly says she is trying to understand her father and you can see she is not, or when Iris tells Elly how wonderful she is for subbing in, when we know that 18 months have passed since Grandpa Jim had his stroke and this is the first time we have seen Elly sub in; then there is a lot there in opposition clearly evident.

The second part of the issue is that Lynn Johnston has spent a good part of last year addressing the complaints about her story-telling with these little strip sequences which also run in opposition to what we have seen before. She doesn’t seem to get the idea about why “Tell not Show” does not work. She could do a strip sequence with every single character in her entire universe jumping up and down and saying, “Elly is the perfect daughter”, but it will not reverse strip after strip of her talking down to Grandpa Jim.

But why does Lynn want to show all those strips, when the answer to the problems of communication (the picture board) was already presented in the strip. The answer is that it is too hard to do jokes and puns when you have to show 2 characters struggling to understand each other with a picture board. And when I say “too hard” what I mean is “too hard for Lynn”. Her method is to come up with a final panel pun and work her way back. That would be tough if you are showing a character pointing to a little symbol in a book. It’s a lot easier to have Elly and Iris talk to Jim as if they know what he’s thinking and they are always right about it. I think it could be done, but we are talking about the artist who can’t be bothered to put the eyes in the right spot on the head of a character, so you know she is not going to make the effort to come up with picture board jokes.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

In all her talk about reading between the lines she forgets that there's more than one way to do that. It's clear that she doesn't herself realize that having Elly talk down to Jim or Mike hollering for Deanna to take the weird half-sized people away from him contradict all the boasting she does about how great they are. What we see in the strip is more important than all the retcons she and Beth can concoct; the second she forgot that was the second she failed as an artist.

OT, but

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

I remember we were talking about what kind of life Elly must've lead before marrying Jim and a possible theory came to me. My guess is that Elly never really liked herself and never really felt like she was noticed. I wouldn't be surprised if she was in her brother's shadow or wasn't the favorite child growing up. She probably didn't have the drive\talent to be a superstar so she probably got her attention with her fits and "suffering" so people would feel sorry for her. And leeching off those who were better off than her like as you mentioned, the queen bee of her school and guiding Michael to fofill her dream of writing. Not to mention comeing from a time when gender roles were being questioned and broken and Elly was torn between tradition and empowerment. (She probably came from a rather conservative neighborhood or such). But empowerment means that she'd have to stop being martyr, but tradition means that she risks not living to her fullest. Not that John was any help pulling her one way while Connie was taking the other. So in her own twisted mind, she thought she reached a compromise by being the impact she longed to be by manipulating her kids to be utterly independant on her, making her son live her dream, and playing martyr so everyone knows how much she suffers.

Re: OT, but

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

She does have deep-seated issues with self-loathing and she and Phil look to not have gotten along all that well as children so that makes a lot of sense.

Re: OT, but

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

The story of the Pattersons is pretty much a southern gothic novel waiting to be written. And now that I think about it, Al and Peg Bundy were better parents than those two.

Re: OT, but

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

True, that. Al and Peg were also micer to each other than John and Elly.

Re: OT, but

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

And that show was supposed to be a satire. You just look at some of the facts...

-The Bundys never tried to force others into their idea of morality and\or look down on those who didn't.
-Bud and Kelly can take care of and make decisions for themselves.
-If you messed with one member of the Bundys, you messed with them all.
-Al at least tried to improve his lot in life even though he almost always failed.
-When Peg did pay attention to the kids, at least she was honest with them.

Re: OT, but

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

And most important, they never claimed to be things they weren't.

Re: OT, but

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

The strange thing is that the Bundys might've been the more moral of the two.