April: Lynn's berzerk button.

As we all know by now, cookie77 recently had occasion to actually discuss her concerns about the Declining Years of the strip with Lynn at a convention in Pittsburgh. It started placidly enough with Lynn making the usual whiny comment about how mean-spirited the comments we make are when our friend tried to lead Lynn to a place she simply did not want to go. Her comments about how the Pattersons themselves had become a group of selfish and unsympathetic jerks dumping all over April elicited the standard snippy comment about how we shouldn't care about how people are treated in something that's just a comic strip. Leaving aside the fact that it turns back into a magic land wherein the characters talk to her when her interlocutors fawn over her like she wants them to, what caught my eye was the thing that made Lynn reveal herself to be the unlikeable, ungrateful incompetent we have all been sickened by; simply put, her right to demonize April was called into question and she hated it. Well, that or she was asked to feel sorry for someone who is in Elly Patterson's way and, well, that clearly is too much to ask of her. Every time the Pattersons want to do something self-serving at the expense of other people, there's April hinting that their excuses are so much rubbish. She's against Liz and Anthony screwing people over so that John and Elly can get the even tighter stranglehold over Gordon that they think having to fulfill the moral obligation of caring for the children they brought into the world entitles them to. She's against casting Jim adrift on an ice floe to be forgotten. She's against Mike bullshitting his way into seizing the Pattermanse so John can play with trains. She's against Elly letting a thief flatter her. She's even against letting Liz fall for Jesse's weak bullshit. Since she's always in the way of the Pattersons acting like swine, defending her is a bad thing because Lynn doesn't see the same vermin we do.