Further notes on Funky's first marriage.
Mar. 24th, 2015 01:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadedcandiru2Looking back at the whole "Mike wails like a total imbecile because Rhetta tried to introduce him to the concept of being on break" calamity makes me think that when he stopped being Evil Linus Van Pelt, he became a sort of horrible amalgam of Les Moore and Funky Winkerbean in that he's what happens when a very lucky no-talent who has less than no idea how the publishing industry works is fused with a pompous clod who lives in fear of female domination. It thus behooves us to discuss why his first wife Cindy is about to become the victim of what's clearly the same sort of stupid revenge fantasy as the current ungodly mess with Ted.
We can start off with the fact that their divorce and Funky's descent into alcoholism was touched off by the fact that his fragile male ego couldn't handle the idea of Cindy making more than he did and perhaps calling the shots in their marriage. We began with his getting sloshed with an old high school girlfriend and blowing off a birthday party she'd thoughtfully planned for him and ended with his finding out about her being hired by ABC New York before he did. Despite the fact that she had no idea that they were going to do so, the sullen yahoo still thinks that she deliberately violated their agreement to make decisions together and he mutated into a worse punk than Mike Patterson.
While it's obvious to me that Cindy could and should have demolished the idiot, she took pity on him when she found him sprawled in a damned gutter because he drank away his self-inflicted torment and left him the house and his stake in the pizza parlor that was supposedly more important than her silly little network news thing. What happened next should be obvious if you understand the psyche of the North American Entitled Mansplaining Dunderhead: rather than having the decency and brains to be grateful, he acted like any boomer frat rat asshole whose fragile little ego had been threatened and decided that she somehow needed to be punished for daring to hijack the marriage. The result of that was, of course, expansion plans that foreshadowed the doomed attempt Target made to break into the Canadian market. Rather than blame his failure on his horrible pizza, predatory acquisition tactics, horrible relationship with his suppliers, human resource methods rejected by the Gestapo as being unnecessarily punitive and tone-deaf refusal to understand what century he was living in, Fat Boy blamed the whole ungodly mess on his long-suffering first wife because of course he did.
The reason that I mention this is that we're heading into the end game; Batiuk telegraphed his punches when he made what looked like the bafflingly unrealistic move of having her fired from every network because she was too old. This will, of course, herald in an annoying conclusion that, after a swipe at the evil interwebs for unleashing a plague of bullies and haters that Batiuk thinks never existed beforehand because he's too much like Les to realize that features editors used to toss complaints in the garbage, depicts her simply crawling into the Gutter Of Wounded Assbucket Male Pride and, before dying, lamenting her hateful need to surpass a man.
All of this happened because Funky is the part of Mike whose male ego is too blasted fragile to cope with the idea of having a girl tell him what to do. As I'll remind you tomorrow, Les is the part of Mike who's rewarded for writing horrible books about trivial stories and also not having the least idea how the publishing industry actually works.
We can start off with the fact that their divorce and Funky's descent into alcoholism was touched off by the fact that his fragile male ego couldn't handle the idea of Cindy making more than he did and perhaps calling the shots in their marriage. We began with his getting sloshed with an old high school girlfriend and blowing off a birthday party she'd thoughtfully planned for him and ended with his finding out about her being hired by ABC New York before he did. Despite the fact that she had no idea that they were going to do so, the sullen yahoo still thinks that she deliberately violated their agreement to make decisions together and he mutated into a worse punk than Mike Patterson.
While it's obvious to me that Cindy could and should have demolished the idiot, she took pity on him when she found him sprawled in a damned gutter because he drank away his self-inflicted torment and left him the house and his stake in the pizza parlor that was supposedly more important than her silly little network news thing. What happened next should be obvious if you understand the psyche of the North American Entitled Mansplaining Dunderhead: rather than having the decency and brains to be grateful, he acted like any boomer frat rat asshole whose fragile little ego had been threatened and decided that she somehow needed to be punished for daring to hijack the marriage. The result of that was, of course, expansion plans that foreshadowed the doomed attempt Target made to break into the Canadian market. Rather than blame his failure on his horrible pizza, predatory acquisition tactics, horrible relationship with his suppliers, human resource methods rejected by the Gestapo as being unnecessarily punitive and tone-deaf refusal to understand what century he was living in, Fat Boy blamed the whole ungodly mess on his long-suffering first wife because of course he did.
The reason that I mention this is that we're heading into the end game; Batiuk telegraphed his punches when he made what looked like the bafflingly unrealistic move of having her fired from every network because she was too old. This will, of course, herald in an annoying conclusion that, after a swipe at the evil interwebs for unleashing a plague of bullies and haters that Batiuk thinks never existed beforehand because he's too much like Les to realize that features editors used to toss complaints in the garbage, depicts her simply crawling into the Gutter Of Wounded Assbucket Male Pride and, before dying, lamenting her hateful need to surpass a man.
All of this happened because Funky is the part of Mike whose male ego is too blasted fragile to cope with the idea of having a girl tell him what to do. As I'll remind you tomorrow, Les is the part of Mike who's rewarded for writing horrible books about trivial stories and also not having the least idea how the publishing industry actually works.
