Passive-aggressive maternal combat.
Dec. 22nd, 2014 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadedcandiru2Of course, Elly does have a certain amount of justification for her campaign to turn her children against her parents. As we're about to see, Marian has the lovely habit of not admitting that her habit of undermining her daughter as a mother, housekeeper and cook and then leaving her to deal with the resultant mess when she goes back to Vancouver constitutes a problem. As we see in this strip from an earlier visit, the old doll's idea of being a grandparent consists of spoiling Mike and Lizzie rotten and dumping the result on Elly's lap like a scalding-hot bowl of not-my-problem. This leads to what we're going to see for the next few months: Marian does nothing constructive like helping Elly out with the kids but does do something less admirable when she calls the person she won't lift a finger to help a bad parent who doesn't know what she's doing.
The reason she can do this is because she's aware of one thing that eludes most people who aren't English Canadians who wish they were British: she knows that no matter how angry Elly gets, she's been programmed to think that honestly confronting someone with higher status about something they're doing wrong is the worst thing you could possibly do. The way Marian looks at it, her being older allows her to be a total jerk to her child and not actually have to apologize because that's just how the world rolls. This is possibly because Lynn herself believes that complaining to people who can possibly fight back is a terrible thing that is terrible and results in us having to deal with passive-aggressive nonsense in which she uses her strip as a means of saying the things she dare not say because if she did, she might make the faux pas of getting someone who's wronged her to get upset enough about it to possibly realize that they should heed the fifty-first of Jethro Gibbs's fifty rules: "Sometimes, you're wrong."
The reason that this is a problem is that just as Lynn lost all respect for her mother when she got too sick to take care of herself, it's pretty clear that she thinks that people who make an honest effort to make amends for jamming it to her are worthless and weak.
The reason she can do this is because she's aware of one thing that eludes most people who aren't English Canadians who wish they were British: she knows that no matter how angry Elly gets, she's been programmed to think that honestly confronting someone with higher status about something they're doing wrong is the worst thing you could possibly do. The way Marian looks at it, her being older allows her to be a total jerk to her child and not actually have to apologize because that's just how the world rolls. This is possibly because Lynn herself believes that complaining to people who can possibly fight back is a terrible thing that is terrible and results in us having to deal with passive-aggressive nonsense in which she uses her strip as a means of saying the things she dare not say because if she did, she might make the faux pas of getting someone who's wronged her to get upset enough about it to possibly realize that they should heed the fifty-first of Jethro Gibbs's fifty rules: "Sometimes, you're wrong."
The reason that this is a problem is that just as Lynn lost all respect for her mother when she got too sick to take care of herself, it's pretty clear that she thinks that people who make an honest effort to make amends for jamming it to her are worthless and weak.
