On Christmas Angels and their fall.....

While having to remember that Lynn gutlessly dropped plot lines that could have had endless potential to amuse us while the strip was still a going concern is a rather unfortunate reality, the feeling I have of being cheated is amplifyed by Lynn deciding sight unseen that the Pattersons' story ended at the exact moment that Liz and Anthony finally got married. This is a very bad thing because we have all been robbed of something that could have been delightful: Lynn proving that Liz and Anthony are the best couple ever by making them the worst couple ever. I'll get to why they're awful as a husband and wife tomorrow but today, I'd like to talk about how they're horrible parents to Françoise and how they use Christmas to remind her of the "fact" that she doesn't really belong anywhere because she's not really a member of the Patterson family. It should come as no surprise that when Anthony looks at his daughter, he doesn't see the innocent victim of his sick, fatuous obsession with Liz Patterson, Inert Object In Need Of Rescue; he sees a reminder of the awful woman he wish he'd never married and a means by which she can dominate him and try to make him believe an evil lie about how his preconceptions about how women are supposed to behave are just so much junk. Lizardbreath also sees Weird Frenchy Girl as being a problem owing to her confusing love for a woman who clearly threw her away because Anthony said so. She doesn't want to hear rumors from crazy, selfish people who don't want her to be happy about how Pornstache's lawyers threatened her or anything. Anyone who doesn't understand her need to be where she wants to be when she wants to be there is clearly crazy and heartless and wrong.

When these two hateful people get together, things become even more tenuous and problematic for the poor child. We're expected to praise Anthony for penning her up in the basement and threatening to cancel Christmas because she doesn't want the scary fat woman who says bad things about her mother around just as loudly as Liz screaming at her to stop scaring her with scary words and putting her dead last in the wedding procession because she's not really part of the family. This tells me that as I write this, Françoise Caine has endured five long, miserable years of emotional, verbal and psychological abuse for the fantastic crime of being born. One would think that Christmas would be a relief from this burden but you'd be wrong. We're going to be dealing with a rather depressing modern-day reprise of the Christmas Angel scenario. Twenty years ago, Liz was told that she had to suck it up when confronted with self-absorbed vermin treating her like a hindrance because they're too lazy, short-sighted, selfish and heartless to notice the damage their screaming about nothing is doing to her. In the 2010s, the Christmas Angel would tell Francie that Liz might not be her but she's here so she should stop being such a picky-face already.