The Son Don't Know He Shines......

As I've said before, Mike inherited Elly's trait of having a laser-like focus on slights as well as her tendency to assume that everyone everywhere wanted to crush him and laugh at him for wanting to be happy too. We see this when he joined her in misinterpreting having to do chores as being everyone's slave and we see this when he thinks that the slightest degree of praise given Lizzie for her accomplishments means that everyone hates him and ignores him and doesn't want to know about all of the great things he can do. It also means that when he is praised for his accomplishments, he's got himself convinced that they don't really mean it because they always, ALWAYS want more of him than he feels he can provide. The end result is that in the next few years, we have to contend with the Michael I think of when asked to picture him: a sullen goofola who acts out because he's too blasted stupid to realize that the girl he thinks his family fawns over is and always will be in his shadow. It seems to me that this is the case because he also thinks that when Lizzie claims that she feels awkward and ugly and unloved and so on and so forth, she's lying. Nothing that I've seen tells me that Mike ever really noticed that he didn't actually knock Lizzie off a pedestal titled "Favourite Child" when he made all of those hateful remarks because he ain't too bright.