Why Holly Stone is 'evil'.

The interesting thing about the Valerie Stone of the distant past is that she wasn't really all that different from what Holly is right now. Teenage Val liked make-up and fashion and the attention of cute boys and kind of let her grades slide and she really didn't worry too damned much about things she couldn't do much about and she turned out fine....mostly because she managed to escape the 'help' of a nutcase like herself piling on the pressure because she thinks that makeup and fashion and boyfriends will destroy her children's futures and leave them pretty much as unable to cope with life as she was when her first husband died.'

As I've said before, I think that most of the problems Val has with Holly would go away if she stopped thinking in terms of apocalypses and ruin and despair because she blames the wrong things for personality defects she'd have if she actually were the aspirational figure she claimed to be. As a for instance, it's not Revlon's or Yves St Laurent's fault that she set herself up to be the mule of her office. People know to dump their unwanted tasks on her because she's too stupid to object and it's not the fault of lusting after John Travolta. It's not a cute floral top's fault that her children wrapped their head around the idea of her remarrying long before she did. It's not her childhood's fault for a lot of things. It's her adult's inadmissible envy of Holly's supposed freedom of action that's pretty where we can put the blame for most of what's wrong and why Holly is supposedly bad.