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dreadedcandiru2As we know, John and Elly aren't the only people who view those around them not as the people they are because getting to know them would take a lot of work and expose them to a crippling loss of face. This not only blighted April's life during the infamous Housening, it also made the roller-skating thing a horrible mess. It, as had been said, would have made more sense and made John and Elly into something resembling actual parents had they said "Well, Mike, we'd like to help get the skates but you change your mind so rapidly, it's kind of hard to justify buying you something you won't want. Tell you what. If you're still interested at the end of the week, we'll match whatever you raise and get you a pair, okay?"
The reason for this is pretty much the same reason a lot of people love the strip itself. Unlike strips that require a lot of mental effort to understand, Foob is unchallenging pabulum that doesn't make craven mush-heads who played it safe feel stupid, lazy and ignorant and tells them that they're right. This sort of poison syrup of the mind doesn't just attract whimpering fools who think that the world owes them a living because they confuse a Depression kid's justifiable need to not want to imitate a vending machine with actual want; it also appeals to a confused and angry little boy who feels as if the world is trying to crush him.
Given that the years in which Michael's personality congealed into its current Lovecraftian horror-freak state were spent listening to the organic adjunct of a sofa and a hysterical loon of a mother scream GO AWAY at him when he wanted to know if he was still wanted, it must have been a grand and glorious thing for him to discover that the large box in the living room told him "Come hither. You are wanted." The problem is that his need to have someone who will accept him and tell him that there's a place under the Sun for him despite what his parents seem to think is that said person has pretty much the same level of good will as Kortney Krelbutz.
The reason that I say is that that I know that the idiot lantern not only sold him tooth-rotting cereals and gender-specific toys, it also sold him a damaging and limiting world-view. Take, as a for instance, his insistence that Elly's constant striving to have a life out of the confines of a home she sees as a penitentiary she shares with sadistic inmates means that she's not a real mother. Granted, the kid is self-absorbed and blind enough to think that not wanting to be shackled to his groovy self all day long is a bad thing and would have made that accusation were the Pattersons living in interstellar space; adding in media imagery that state that 'everyone' knows that mothers love waiting hand and foot on their families and never ask for praise just made a bad situation worse.
The trick box also seems to amplified the horror caused by Elly's stupid need to pit the children against one another in order to not cry herself to death knowing she was the 'bad' guy. Seeing Lizzie as a fellow victim would have taken effort on Mike's part; effort that his wonderful friend who never lies to him and tells him that he's stupid, lazy and ignorant says that he doesn't need to waste because everyone knows that if people get in your way, they're trying to get you. The idea that he's a person in Lizzie's way is not one that occurs to him because he'd rather not be the bad guy either.
The real problem, however, comes from his dealings with obstacles to his getting his own way all the time like he's 'supposed' to that aren't related to him. His being in a constant state of confusion as regards Martha's intentions tell me that we're not dealing with a person who 'gets' girls at all. He never saw that she too had a code of honour in which she was required to divulge every little detail of her personal life to 'friends' who would turn into tormentors in a heart-beat because the sitcom writers never mentioned them. Diito with his dealings with Rhetta in which he didn't understand being on break any more than Lizzie did. It was about when he started wailing idiotically about cruel, false-hearted women who lied about liking him so they could laugh at his torment because the alternate would be his being a puerile, self-absorbed dick who didn't understand how things worked that Aaron moved to Vancouve. Since she had started to retreat into herself and thus wasn't around Rod enough to refresh her memory, Lynn had no males she cared to model human behaviour on and Mike transmuted into an effeminate monster horror freak who behaves how someone who is terrified of normal man she can't intimidate because she thinks that since they might hit her if she pushes them too far, they will hit her thinks men should behave. This is why I thought that his reaction to Divala would be to shriek and hit her with his purse. This is why I thought that when he cravenly quit Portrait, he was going to down to the spa for a good cry with the gals. This is why it gets harder and harder to see him mincing around and not burst out in derisive laughter.
The reason for this is pretty much the same reason a lot of people love the strip itself. Unlike strips that require a lot of mental effort to understand, Foob is unchallenging pabulum that doesn't make craven mush-heads who played it safe feel stupid, lazy and ignorant and tells them that they're right. This sort of poison syrup of the mind doesn't just attract whimpering fools who think that the world owes them a living because they confuse a Depression kid's justifiable need to not want to imitate a vending machine with actual want; it also appeals to a confused and angry little boy who feels as if the world is trying to crush him.
Given that the years in which Michael's personality congealed into its current Lovecraftian horror-freak state were spent listening to the organic adjunct of a sofa and a hysterical loon of a mother scream GO AWAY at him when he wanted to know if he was still wanted, it must have been a grand and glorious thing for him to discover that the large box in the living room told him "Come hither. You are wanted." The problem is that his need to have someone who will accept him and tell him that there's a place under the Sun for him despite what his parents seem to think is that said person has pretty much the same level of good will as Kortney Krelbutz.
The reason that I say is that that I know that the idiot lantern not only sold him tooth-rotting cereals and gender-specific toys, it also sold him a damaging and limiting world-view. Take, as a for instance, his insistence that Elly's constant striving to have a life out of the confines of a home she sees as a penitentiary she shares with sadistic inmates means that she's not a real mother. Granted, the kid is self-absorbed and blind enough to think that not wanting to be shackled to his groovy self all day long is a bad thing and would have made that accusation were the Pattersons living in interstellar space; adding in media imagery that state that 'everyone' knows that mothers love waiting hand and foot on their families and never ask for praise just made a bad situation worse.
The trick box also seems to amplified the horror caused by Elly's stupid need to pit the children against one another in order to not cry herself to death knowing she was the 'bad' guy. Seeing Lizzie as a fellow victim would have taken effort on Mike's part; effort that his wonderful friend who never lies to him and tells him that he's stupid, lazy and ignorant says that he doesn't need to waste because everyone knows that if people get in your way, they're trying to get you. The idea that he's a person in Lizzie's way is not one that occurs to him because he'd rather not be the bad guy either.
The real problem, however, comes from his dealings with obstacles to his getting his own way all the time like he's 'supposed' to that aren't related to him. His being in a constant state of confusion as regards Martha's intentions tell me that we're not dealing with a person who 'gets' girls at all. He never saw that she too had a code of honour in which she was required to divulge every little detail of her personal life to 'friends' who would turn into tormentors in a heart-beat because the sitcom writers never mentioned them. Diito with his dealings with Rhetta in which he didn't understand being on break any more than Lizzie did. It was about when he started wailing idiotically about cruel, false-hearted women who lied about liking him so they could laugh at his torment because the alternate would be his being a puerile, self-absorbed dick who didn't understand how things worked that Aaron moved to Vancouve. Since she had started to retreat into herself and thus wasn't around Rod enough to refresh her memory, Lynn had no males she cared to model human behaviour on and Mike transmuted into an effeminate monster horror freak who behaves how someone who is terrified of normal man she can't intimidate because she thinks that since they might hit her if she pushes them too far, they will hit her thinks men should behave. This is why I thought that his reaction to Divala would be to shriek and hit her with his purse. This is why I thought that when he cravenly quit Portrait, he was going to down to the spa for a good cry with the gals. This is why it gets harder and harder to see him mincing around and not burst out in derisive laughter.
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Date: 2014-05-12 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-12 02:00 pm (UTC)