May. 31st, 2015

dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
As we saw in a recent strip, Elly really doesn't seem to be all that good at detective work. Most people who encounter the phenomenon of things coming off in their hands because they've been unscrewed would remember that they have small children who don't quite understand what they should and shouldn't do and come to the conclusion that some little person is running around with a screwdriver messing with things. Elly seems to have been made unequal to the task for the sake of a joke despite the fact that she comes across as being somewhat slow-witted. A casual look at history shows us another occasion in which Elly was made stupid for fun and profit: the one with the curling iron where Lizzie wrecks her doll by melting its hair.

That earlier strip was also predicated on the idea that Elly had a few screws loose. As I said when I described it, she seemed to have a tunnel vision of the mind's eye that made her forget both Lizzie and the hot-ass curling iron the minute she stopped paying attention to them. Making a joke of Elly being so dumb that she couldn't foresee the outcome "Lizzie will grab this thing if I give her half a chance so I'd better keep it from happening" doesn't make me much happier than the more modern "Elly is too dumb to understand that someone's just messing with her" because it isn't any more humorous than "Elly turns into a shrieking moron at Lizzie because she did something Mommy was too stupid to allow for."

The question that is left is why is it funny and cute that Elly is angry all the time and as dumb as a sack of hair? Surely Lynn could have arranged things so that Elly doesn't have to look like a short-tempered imbecile all the time.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
As we know, the current arc is not the only occasion in which a Patterson makes a spectacle of him- or herself protesting an issue about which he or she doesn't have all the facts. In about six years time, Mike is going to make a huge fool of himself protesting a planned increase in bus fares because he's too blasted stupid to get his facts straight before shooting his mouth off on the evening news and looking like Ignorant Idiot Teenager Number Seventeen because some charismatic nitwit told him that he was being rooked. John was not ecstatic and told him that the issue was not what he thought it was and to learn what he was talking about before being a big, stupid blowhard baying at the moon about how unfair it is that gravitational acceleration is thirty-two feet per second per second.

It seems to me that behind the "I'm gonna kill that boy for making a big fool outta all of us all" is an "OH, NO. Not again." This, I should think, is because of a fact that I just realized that I should have realized all along: Elly is the last person in town to have heard of the plans to level the Old Town Hall. This explains why she's seen as something of a nutcase; not only is what she's doing not exactly popular, she's pretty much seen as just having crawled out from under her rock at the last second to try to stop something that was agreed upon months ago. What's more, I don't think the issues are what she believes them to be. There might not actually be any connection between the arena and the town hall in the first place so we could well be dealing with an ill-informed woman trying to sabotage a project because she doesn't know what the problem really is. It would be as if she believed that Michael wanted to dress up like Adam Ant for Halloween because nuclear war made him turn his back on happiness.

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