The Elly Patterson saga: tragedy in the key of 40 degress Celsius.

As I said a while ago, Lynn seems to want to make Elly's being forced to quit the class into a horrible twist of fate that deprives the world of an eager and talented writer. The reason she's doing so is to show the world how hard her life would have been if she had not had the opportunity to share her point of view with the world. The method by which she's going to inflict a Batiuk-like catastrophe is by reusing a motif we saw in the "Letters from Elly" phase of Coffee Talk. As we all know, she was trying to pick up First-Year English only to miss a few classes because she got sick; since she couldn't keep up, she let things slide and quit the course. At the time, we thought little of it because of the questionable nature of the letters; since her having to give up something she wants because she's sick is about to be canon, the effect I expected her quitting to have on the straight reprint era will be magnified. I should think that John might try to put his foot down because of an exaggerated, unwarranted and hypocritical-looking concern for her well-being; since it will take him decades to figure out how much this hurt, he gets to look far worse a man than he originally did.