April versus Mira

You'll have noticed over the last decade or so that I'm rather fond of pointing out that April has gone out of her way to misread her frienemy Becky because she looks at a lucky one-hit wonder who wonders why her pal hates her and sees a big celebrity monster trying to crush her and the other idiots in that damned garage band with her star power so she can laugh at their carcasses. This is because the Martian is what TV Tropes refers to as being 'wrong genre savvy'. She and her creator think of themselves as being the protagonists in some sort of Karate Kid kind of thing wherein the plucky underdog has to fight back against a bully who wins all the time when it's just two dumb teenyboppers engaging in a tiresome rivalry because they can't admit that they're functionally the same person. (This, it should be noted, is the same narrative engine that drives the Dork Diaries series.)

The reason that I mention this is that it's really terribly obvious that April sees Mira not as she is (which is to say "a fatter, louder version of her mother") but as a soap opera monster plotting the family's destruction because Elly let television raise her. We know that the Pattersons go out of their way to try to shut the woman out because we know that Elly doesn't want to admit that she and Mira are the same person. We also know that Elly loves how Deanna seems to hang off of her every word and is willing to do anything for her. We know that because of this, Elly wants to live in a world wherein Mira grovels pathetically and agrees that she was wrong to ever want anything from the Pattersons and to go away and not interfere with Deanna because that's wrong. We also know that April is too dense to question this because she sees the loud voice insisting on standing up for itself and sees the family as being under attack by a monster who wants to do to them what they do to other people.