The very bad question that is bad.
Oct. 12th, 2016 01:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
As I recall correctly, it's been three years since one of the stupidest arcs in the strip's history. This is because Elly spent entirely too damned long wailing about how horrible it was that Mike wanted to dress up like what a boring kid from the 'burbs thought a punk-rocker looked like. While deep down, she was simply tripping because he had an idea on his own and that meant she was obsolete now and had to be put out of her misery, her public irrational panic rotated around the idea that since nuclear war made him turn his back on happiness and goodness and niceness, he wanted to become an enemy of the forces of law and order and get into trouble with the police. In both cases, a very stupid woman took a look at a harmless event and spiralled off into a vortex of lunatic idiocy. Also, in both cases, her 'evil' mother showed her lack of faith in and hatred of her by asking the worst possible question ever: "Why did you think that his dressing up like Ziggy Stardust would inevitably lead to his getting gunned down by the police and left to rot as a warning?"
Marian is great at asking evil questions like that because she asks another sort of evil question: "Why did you expect that this Brad person would be friends with Mike just because you thought he would? A mean kid is going to stay mean no matter what Mike does." This habit of Marian's of asking terrible questions that ruin people's lives is, of course, because like most outsiders, Marian is hampered in her quest to get Elly to think straight by another Foob Fact:
Foob Fact Forty-Five: As a general rule, the Pattersons tend to not anticipate the normal consequences of an action and prefer to live in a world where everything might result in either an insane and implausible catastrophe or boundless success.
This living in a world wherein everything that's trying to kill them had a baby with everything that wants to because they hate how wonderful the Pattersons are is the reason for something that baffles and disturbs most people who have to interact with them. As you know from my comments about the Declining Years, someone unfamiliar with the family would reel with horror when confronted with something that looks like the deck of the Flying Dutchman. To the untrained eye, we seem to see a group of phantoms that pass through one another without interacting; this resolves into the troubling real-life image of something that's a family in name only. Most people by now have grown used to the fact that the Pattersons look and act like a group of strangers to one another who happen to share a house and a last name without quite realizing that their fear of a simple comment leading to the Apocalypse is what keeps them from really bonding as people.
Marian is great at asking evil questions like that because she asks another sort of evil question: "Why did you expect that this Brad person would be friends with Mike just because you thought he would? A mean kid is going to stay mean no matter what Mike does." This habit of Marian's of asking terrible questions that ruin people's lives is, of course, because like most outsiders, Marian is hampered in her quest to get Elly to think straight by another Foob Fact:
Foob Fact Forty-Five: As a general rule, the Pattersons tend to not anticipate the normal consequences of an action and prefer to live in a world where everything might result in either an insane and implausible catastrophe or boundless success.
This living in a world wherein everything that's trying to kill them had a baby with everything that wants to because they hate how wonderful the Pattersons are is the reason for something that baffles and disturbs most people who have to interact with them. As you know from my comments about the Declining Years, someone unfamiliar with the family would reel with horror when confronted with something that looks like the deck of the Flying Dutchman. To the untrained eye, we seem to see a group of phantoms that pass through one another without interacting; this resolves into the troubling real-life image of something that's a family in name only. Most people by now have grown used to the fact that the Pattersons look and act like a group of strangers to one another who happen to share a house and a last name without quite realizing that their fear of a simple comment leading to the Apocalypse is what keeps them from really bonding as people.