The greatest fear of a Foob: obsolescence.

Along with being animated by unresolved issues about her childhood, Lynn seems to be fixated on another dread: being ignored. This stems from her need for control of her surroundings. This clashes horrifically with her cherished Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy world. Now, the traditional viewpoint is that, while Father has a role to play in society well into his eighties, as the years wear on Mother should gradually become a sweet old gumdrop who manifests herself socially as an absence. That belief is the necessary result of a fact that Lynn begrudgingly acknoweldges: up till about eighty years ago, most married women folded up and died in their late forties or early fiftes out of sheer hard work. However, man's customs and beliefs didn't catch up with modern medicine until the late nineteen-seventies. The upshot of this, of course, is that unlike most of her peers, Lynn thinks of people her own age as doddering old wrecks who've lived out their usefulness to society and whose only major remaining decision is 'casket' or 'urn'. Inside, of course, she still feels like the vital person she shouldn't be. The disconnect between belief and reality comes through in the strip in the person of her avatar, Elly. Her distaste for change is predicated on the worry that people will stop taking her seriously. This, of course, produces a figure of black comedy: a petty tyrant constantly bellowing that no-one listens to her, never realizing that they've learned to tune her out.