On ghost dads.
Dec. 16th, 2015 01:23 amOf course, all of my talk about Elly and how she'll spend the rest of her life not realizing that she ruined the children would have taken a lot less time to say if I'd just reminded you that she's a distillation of three of Lynn's personality traits: her ambivalence about family life, her mommy issues and her warped body image. What John seems to be is a combination of three other traits: her love of juvenile wordplay, her love of unopposed cruelty to the defenseless and finally her daddy issues.
The last of these seem most damaging because of the sort of warped, incestuous father-daughter relationship that was idealized during the Settlepocalypse. We're not just dealing with a jackass father who only wants to be a parent when it's easy and fun and people gladly do what he says who turns into a surly, whiny prick grousing about disobedience and anarchy and attitudes needing adjusting and problem hair when he's required to feel something similar to the dreaded empathy that makes people weak and feminine. We're dealing with someone who's the focus of his daughter's not-well-hidden desire to couple with her daddy and it's turning him on, baby, because he likes them pliable and needy.
What he doesn't like is a son who doesn't respond well to constant threats and angry, bitter snarling about how weak and pathetic he is for not helping out like he did because of his allergy to the horrible context and nuance people use to make him look like the appalling petty tyrant whose presence is an unwelcome affront to an unhappy world he actually is. It means nothing that his own parents gave him easy chores an idiot could do no problem while saving actual work for the capable. He needed Mike to do a grown man's job and since his seven year old body couldn't do that, his son is a selfish, malingering weakling trying to coast through life because the cruel and hateful alternative is that he's a malignant jackass looking for a reason to condemn his son.
The last of these seem most damaging because of the sort of warped, incestuous father-daughter relationship that was idealized during the Settlepocalypse. We're not just dealing with a jackass father who only wants to be a parent when it's easy and fun and people gladly do what he says who turns into a surly, whiny prick grousing about disobedience and anarchy and attitudes needing adjusting and problem hair when he's required to feel something similar to the dreaded empathy that makes people weak and feminine. We're dealing with someone who's the focus of his daughter's not-well-hidden desire to couple with her daddy and it's turning him on, baby, because he likes them pliable and needy.
What he doesn't like is a son who doesn't respond well to constant threats and angry, bitter snarling about how weak and pathetic he is for not helping out like he did because of his allergy to the horrible context and nuance people use to make him look like the appalling petty tyrant whose presence is an unwelcome affront to an unhappy world he actually is. It means nothing that his own parents gave him easy chores an idiot could do no problem while saving actual work for the capable. He needed Mike to do a grown man's job and since his seven year old body couldn't do that, his son is a selfish, malingering weakling trying to coast through life because the cruel and hateful alternative is that he's a malignant jackass looking for a reason to condemn his son.