The art of acting as if you're the only person who cares about anything.

[dreadedcandiru2]

Before I get to the point I want to make, I'd like to remind you of why I really, REALLY hate Eva Warzone. The reason I hate her stupid, self-serving and ignorant nonsense about war zones and expiration dates is that when April tries telling her something, the jerk's reaction can be best stated as "Her concerns do not affect me in the least so therefore naturally cannot be said to matter to anyone anywhere, least of all her! How do I make her realize that she should not be worried about these meaningless things either?" The method chosen is to play a filthy trick on her by trying to force her to say that if she only cares about her own immediate concerns, she's too selfish to worry about something else.

The reason that I mentioned her is that Elly is a lot like her. This is because every last one of her stupid lectures is based on the insane assumption that she is the only one allowed to care about anything and the only thing that people are allowed to care about is her witless, self-serving and ridiculously negative misrepresentation of events. If Mike wants not to come home to an empty house, it's not because being along scares him but because he doesn't care about her needs. If Mike doesn't act as if making trumpet practice enjoyable means that he'll die in a gutter, it's not because her endless beefing and refusal to offer the least encouragement has made it no longer fun but because he doesn't care about what it'll do to her. If Lizzie loses her glasses, it's not because she made a mistake but because she doesn't care about how much trouble her poor mother has to go through to replace them. If April behaves as if she doesn't know that everyone can only mean "Mommy", it's not because she's three and that's the deal with three year olds no matter how sincere Flapandhonk is but because she doesn't care about Mommy enough.

The added benefit of all of this is that the kids try to defend themselves based on what's actually going on. When they do, Elly gets to stand around wailing that her children think that she's an ignorant idiot because she's an ignorant idiot. Given her bulldog-like tenacity when defending a ludicrous misapprehension, she not only gets to shout her way into making people agree that one and one make five, she can whine her way into making her lie the truth. Yay.

Comments

[kefkaownsall.livejournal.com]

Another thing both of them share is that the awful situations they cite are by their own causing. Elly's by being Elly and Eva's daddy's coming from working for Papa Doc

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

The third is being as dumb as a sack of hair and mean as a rattlesnake. To both of them, empathy's just another word for hating them.