Jul. 9th, 2011

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Lynn's interviews, podcasts, Lynnsights and the clingy neediness of the characters in the strip all point our way to one inescapable conclusion: she seems to have a bottomless need for reassurance. This not only manifests itself in the rage that Connie and Liz feel when people don't devote themselves one hundred percent to stroking their fragile egos, it also tends to explain the odd habit the Pattersons have of not believing that a person can be in a place where someone else is not and still devote him or herself to the second. Since they lack imagination and substitute it with self-loathing and paranoia, they can't help but think that absence must make the heart go wander.

This also affects how Rod and his surrogates John and Deanna are depicted in the strip. We, of course, mourn that all the interesting things that Rod does end up on the cutting room floor while the boring stuff he does is lauded as a sign of his alleged greatness. What we end up having to remember is that Lynn doesn't see his giving of himself or his volunteering as being a good thing; what the idiot who's convinced herself that the least bit of regard paid to someone else as proof that a third party loves that person more than he or she loves her sees is not a good man giving of himself out of a sense of obligation to his community; what she sees is a man looking for an excuse to cheat on her because she'd rather be a paranoid nitwit borrowing trouble than trust other people.

Without her running the asylum, it seems to me that when other people state that Deanna's running her little hobby business need not be the last word on her life, they're pretty much on to something. It might be that she'd do so as a sideline for the winter months while her charming literary grifter husband churns out his admitted crap novels while the two of them spent summers volunteering or going back to work as a pharmacist because her batteries recharged. What she wouldn't be is a mouthpiece for how great it was that Mike was an immature twinkie trying his damnedest to force praise out of impossible-to-please parents.

What she also won't be is a pre-programmed clone of a flawed parental figure out of a need to spite someone whose equally-glaring defects are inspired by a somewhat hyperactive interest in her welfare. A skilled writer would depict a couple finally figuring out that the need to tell children how they feel about a situation is both limiting and wrong and trying to undo the damage they did in their childrens' formative years.

Also, given the clear homoerotic subtext we see whenever Mike and Weed interact, we'd have an opportunity to show Deanna deal with something that she tries to not admit: that her mother is trying to tell her that she's Mike's beard and has been since she picked a fight with another gay man. Watching Mike and Dee work out a reasonable compromise would be a lot more interesting than watching him huddled over his computer looking like a zombie.

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