The Big Fix-Fiction.

The almost reassuring thing about the shoplifting arc is that it reminds us that Lynn's need to make her characters do what she thinks that the people she'd based them on should have done isn't a new thing. Much like her love of making Elly look frowzy on purpose so that her fans can see what she thinks she really looks like has been with us from the beginning, her need to repair history has, by her own admission, been with us from the beginning. Granted, she used to be able to keep it in check but, as time went on and real life started to veer more and more from what she'd hoped for, her strip started to become a huge fanfiction in which she'd fixed reality. Let's see what happened in the last few years of the strip to see what Lynn thinks should have happened.

• First off, April herself is a huge piece of fix-fiction; as we know, Lynn wanted a third child but couldn't have one so she simply created one based on Katie's more tomboyish elements.
• Not only was Deanna herself a result of the fact that the dead woman whose car accident Aaron covered had lived, their marriage was the result of Lynn's wish that he hadn't gotten divorced.
• Speaking of divorces she wished that she could wish away, there's a reason she says that she was married to John instead of Rod. That reason is that the comic strip character has a canine loyalty she loves.
• Finally, the Settlepocalypse is the end result of a wish that she had, after all, gotten together with a real-life Anthony instead of the bad boy she did marry right out of high school.

It should be noted that the strip's deterioration into the mess it became accelerated at roughly the same time Lynn started revising history. I know that correlation does not always mean causation but the parallels are somewhat ominous.