It's not just the fact that the most basic rules of decorum state that a second wedding should not outshine the first that make the Settlepocalypse an atrocity. It's that they're having a big party to celebrate ruining the life of Anthony's first wife as if she were nothing more than a noisy obstacle whose opinion was meaningless makes things truly rank. Having the Pattersons are being given all their barbaric splendor for next to nothing does, however, come close to that on the disgusting phenomenon chart. It seems obvious that Lynn is looking out of that weird fantasy capsule of hers when she's writing this. This is because people just aren't going to hand Liz things for free just because that Pattersons have been wonderful to them. They might get a discount but that would be it. Despite what Lynn thinks, profit margins (as eeknight said) isn't some sort of nonsense phrase heartless people use to deny Elly what she wants when she wants it. This brings me to my point. It seems fairly clear that Liz is fooling herself when she believes that people are just giving her stuff because she's special; we all know that Elly got it for her by means of flapping and honking at people until they acquiesced to her brutal demands.

We all remember that ungodly checklist date from last year. Watching those two losers award themselves a whole bunch of imaginary good qualities made for an irritating minute of our lives. If a person were going to maintain a checklist it should be about things that are real. That being said, I present my Settlepocalypse checklist for your approval.

- Elizabeth palming off her responsibilities on April: CHECK.

- Anthony locked out of the loop because he's a mayyyyuuunnnnn: CHECK.

- Liz freaking out because she actually has to do something: CHECK.

- Liz freaking out over a minor quibble: CHECK.

- Liz begrudging April free time she could just as easily take off herself: CHECK.

- Liz refusing to see that all the stress she's put everyone through is due to her own stupidity: Not proven but strongly implied.

- Liz refusing to see that April did more now for her wedding than she did for Shawna-Marie: See previous entry.

- Everyone in sight screaming at April because of an oversight brought on by their inattention to detail: Again, not proven but strongly implied.

- Liz ignoring major issues and stressing over trivia: CHECK.

- Liz valuing image over substance: CHECK.

- Liz baying at the moon because she's called on her bullshit: CHECK.

All that's left now is the last item: "As she drives off to the EconoLodge in Port Asbestos for her honeymoon, Liz tries to assign blame for all this chaos to someone else. Someone with her hair in a propeller bun."

Now, we've had a good laugh at how spineless Anthony is seeing how eager to accommodate the Settelpocalypse's being moved up at a whim he is. Or, for that matter, how he's stuck in a series of dead-end jobs that were awarded to him because his boss took pity on him. Hell, Gordo would have done that even if the Pattersons hadn't strongly hinted that's how things should be. The problem with that is that we all know how guys like him think. Gutless wonders like him who don't have the courage to dare and do maintain a mental list of people who've slighted them. In the event an Anthony is ever in a position of power over his "oppressor", he'll exact his revenge on this person. That's pretty much how he destroyed his first marriage, you see. Therese had tried to get him to be something he wasn't so in revenge he tried turning her into a photostat of Liz. That being said, Liz's desire to marry a man like her dad is going to come to pass. All John's ranting about hormones and stuff is what he called getting his own back for being called a selfish jerk.

As howtheduck pointed out today, John's plans to avoid involvement in planning the Kitsch Abomination Wedding of Ultimate Doom are not only sexist, they're the smartest thing he's ever done. Elly might tell him that she wants his opinion but when he offers it, it will be angrily rejected. This is unfortunate because he'd probably try to run things so as to not break the budget. The same thing cannot be said for the five freaks who'll end up in charge.

First off, of course, is Mother-of-the-Bridezilla herself, Elly. What we lost sight of in all the chaos of Deanna's Big Sham Wedding seven years ago is that Saint Flapandhonk has tastes that are similar to the family's arch-enemy, Mira. As we know, all the stuff that was horrible when Mira was doing it will be good when Sheet Shaver does it. Queen Kong will be ably assisted in executing her plans to have the most revoltingly garish wedding of all time by her faithful toady, Connie. As we know, her Number Two wants to experience the alleged glory of a white wedding but an unkind fate has foreclosed on that possibility by making Lawrence gay. This means she'll be even more eager to do this than Elly herself. Elly simply wants someone in the vicinity who can agree with the proposition that men are jerks, children are an intolerable burden and women's lot in life is to suffer unanswered indignities; Connie wants to show her son how ungrateful he is for denying his mother her due. The third idiot in charge of things is Deanna. Since it's clear that she shares Elly's desires to make her children do things she bridled at, it seems clear that she'll help Elly give Liz a wedding she herself would not have. Fourth, of course, is Liz herself. It seems clear that she'll make this as garish as possible to avenge herslef on all the people who've betrayed her by having better lives than she does. Last and least, we have the idiot who set things in full gear: April. She's desperate enough for parental approval that she'll agree to any damned thing.

It seems obvious to Your Humble Servant that, though each of the members of the Wedding Committee have different motives for what they're doing, their visions of the Perfect Wedding will be eerily similar. All five will give birth to a barbarous vulgarity of a wedding that will be the subject of derisive hooting. What would be more entertaining is seeing the thought processes that went into it but I, like howtheduck doubt that Lynn can see the potential for low comedy that he can. What I do know is that if JSTF were to do something stupid and point out how expensive it had become, he'd get something a lot worse that a work glove hurled at him

As we launch into Jim's last great plotline in earnest, it looks as if Lynn might be pulling out all the stops. We were, after all, given a strip that wasn't the typical substandard sort of idiocy we've come to expect from the Declining Years. Instead, it hearkened back to the glory days of the mid 1990s. If she can maintain the quality she started with, she'll have earned back a lot of the good will she squandered trying to convince the world that the sordid behavior the Pattersons wasted their lives on was somehow good and noble.

On that note, there is a lot of unpleasantness she tried to transmute into heroism. So far, we've seen:

- John uprooting his family without taking their hopes or dreams into consideration at Mike's behest so he can have a large lot in which to build the eyesore model train layout of his dreams. Even though he did eventually realize that his daughter wasn't being moody for moodiness's sake, it didn't modify his behavior.

- Mike himself ignoring his family's needs for the sake of churning out derivative trash destined to be dissected in English classes for decades to come.

- April destroying every friendship she ever had because of her silly belief that that's how things are done.

These are unpleasant things but they pale in comparison to the ultimate example of wasting heroic means on mean ends: the Settlepocalypse. We know that what Liz and Anthony had in high school was a mild infatuation that would have petered out if left alone. It was not, though. Elly was so entranced by how cute these two people who had little in common besides being at the periphery of high school society to know or care that puppy love couldn't be built into anything lasting. Worse, nobody in the immediate vicinity seems to care what happened to the people whose lives were affected by the need the turn them into a pale copy of John and Elly's crappy marriage. If only the Pattersons could somehow be made to pull their heads out of the sand, they might realize that the pleasant wastes of time they've embarked upon really aren't all that important.

I think that saying goodbye to Jim might offer these people some well-needed perspective. Liz and Anthony might indeed get married but they'd do so with the knowledge that their alleged romance was not the central thing they thought it was, that there are other needs and concerns to be dealt with. Who knows. It might even get a Kool-Aid Drinker or two to wonder why everyone was racing around worrying about it in Jim's hour of need.

The most annoying part of the Settlepocalypse is that Liz is incapable of describing what she's looking for in life with any honesty. We can see that she's not looking for love and, while it's depressing to see her settle, it's her choice to place security and stability over passion and, as such, we have to respect it. If she'd admit that she's not seeking a love interest, we wouldn't care that she found the man she felt most comfortable with. What makes it even more irritating is that, despite what she tells herself, Elly and John want this to happen too. They want her to marry for comfort, not romance. Sure, she was in love with the sensation of being in love with three other guys but it's as against her real nature as her time in Mtigwaki was. She's a homebody who loves the familiar in a world that doesn't seem to value that any more. If she told the world at large to just plain deal because she was going to live the way she was going to live, this would simply be another unspectacular wedding that led into a tidy, uneventful life instead of the cosmic horror that awaits us.

John's sudden and questionable desire to retire is going to have one annoying side effect based on his impsoing austerity measures on Elly that he himself won't really submit to: it will mean that Elly cannot prove herself the superior mother to Evil Mira by outspending her. Wha it will mean is that she'll prove her superiority in another way: by listing all the friends she has who'll provide for her in her time of need. Deanna already provided the wedding dress so that will set the pattern. Lawrence can be pressured to provide the floral arrangements, for instance. This is because when the Pattersons are "generous", it's with the expectation of being able to call in a marker at a later point. And call they will. We can look forward, then, to a sort of potluck ceremony wherein Elly beats us over the head with who supplied what.

What struck me as odd is that Liz was pleading for her grandmother's spirit for permission to wear the Miracle Dress. Why is it that the only person whose good opinion she'd want is dead? This is a woman who's selecting her bridesmaids based on how much she wants to avenge herself upon them. We've seen her smack down her picky-face sister as a reminder not to make her feel bad. We've seen that the reason the word love was never mentioned in the Fauxposal was that neither person loves one another. He wants a wife around to make his house a hoooooome. She wants a husband so she can prove that she's arrived as a member of 1950s society. Caring for or about one another is strictly unnecessary. She regards her parents' bliss as a pleasant bonus, not a necessity. Her living grandfather is, to her, a moribund irrelevance. And, to cap things of, by settling for Awfulny, she's telling herself she's not good enough to know what love is. Why the out-of-nowhere concern for her grandmother? I'd saye that she was the only person who ever made her feel good about the person in the mirror. Everyone else added to her innate feelings of inadequacy so they don't count.

I think we can all safely agree that John's sense of what's right and wrong is based on what's most convenient for him. We've seen twenty-eight and a half years of him moping and bitching because he was being asked to inconvenience himself by doing something that took hard, continuous effort on his part. His refusal to budge on Elly's working outside the home, his running off in panic when confront with a five-year-old who was afraid she was being abandoned a year after she damned near drowned, his refusal to consider that the same child's later fears about the Housening were inspired by anything other than hormones, to say nothing of his wife's anger at his stupid behavvior being a result of the same thing are all a result of the fact that he wants to do what's easiest for him and everyone else better get on board. In his lazy, self-justifying mind, there cannot, or more properly, should not be a legitimate hindrance on or objection to his antics. This is why he loves Anthony so much. Seeing his daughter, whose marriage is of little import in the first place since she can't carry his name into the future, marry someone so similar to him is mission-critical because if he has the pasty-faced little jerkwad as a son-in-law, he doesn't have to listen to that nasty little voice in his head that keeps telling him what a choad he is. That's because he can see a copy of himself and trick himself into believing he isn't an abberation.

It seems to me that there's someone who might not be as behind to Settlepocalypse as the rest of the Pattersons: Michael, the guy who lit a fire in a gas station and may have come to regret it. I remember him advising Liz that she shouldn't go to Anthony's first wedding if all she wanted to do was make a big spectacle of herself and steal the spotlight from Therese. This struck a nerve because it reminded her that she might be mistaken for a homewrecker. What's more, Liz's escort backed Mike's analysis. Her breezy condemnation of Therese as an iceberg based on her avoiding having to admit that she had good cause to be jealous seemed to alarm and anger Mike. Having to listen to his parents encourage something he regarded as gratuitous jackassery on Sistwirp's part might have made him curious about a person he'd never really noticed before: Anthony Caine. I'd assume that he'd probably fall in with the party line enough to think that Anthony was the victim of a manipulative woman he purported to be. I should think he differs from the rest in thinking that Liz is the monster that messed up his life and that if she'd left things alone, he'd be happily married. I fully expect to see him try to save Anthony from what he most wants and worked so hard to get.