dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
Of 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.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru)
As I tried to say yesterday, it seems to me that a lot of the animosity that Elly directs at Marian comes from the same source as the hatred Deanna feels for Mira. From what we've seen, both alleged dictator parents are being upbraided for expecting more of their daughters than they're willing to (or, for that matter, able to) deliver. Just as we have Marian not seeing how stupid Elly really is, Mira seems to have convinced herself that most of why Deanna's life sucks is because Mike is dragging her down because she doesn't want to have to face the fact that her youngest is an apathetic dumb-ass with an allergy to being happy and a fear of failure that mandates that she not do anything to improve her lot.

What compounds this horrible mother-daughter cold war is that we have to remember that Deanna and Elly deign to feel pity for their fathers owing to a belief that their domineering mothers overruled them too much. While it's true that Marian point-blank refused to let Jim own a dog because she thought she was doing right by the family and that Mira tends to engage in a certain amount of social climbing and doing the whole apron matron thing to Wilf in a similar belief that she's doing her husband a solid, it seems to me that when Dee and Elly bemoan the cruel way in which their mothers tyrannized their fathers, they both wound up speaking fluent Nonsense. It seems to me that Jim is a lot stronger a personality than the daughter who thinks of him as something of a victim realizes. The most tragic example of her belief that aside from spanking her, Jim could do no wrong is that she doesn't realize that most of why Phil 'got away' with things is not just because Marian freaked out because Elly was more active than a girl 'should' have been, her poor, frail dad seems to have spent a lot of time transfixed by the idea that his daughter having pre-marital sex and/or smoking a joint would inevitably to the Soviet conquest of North America. She also can't see that Marian was less a tyrant than she was an enforcer for a real ogre.

As I said, she shares this defect with Deanna. A man who sits on his arse watching his wife and child get into a pointless scrap because he's too lazy to do something about it can't exactly be called a good guy so it occurs to me that just maybe, Wilf is the same sort of jerk Jim was. We don't really get the sort of proof that we get when Jim ranted about Society heading into the abyss because he lives in a world where Liz ain't going to be burned at the stake for playing house with Eric but watching Wilf let Mira take all the blame tends to disabuse me of any idea that he's all that nice a person.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
The really very stupid thing about Phil's asking Elly how long he's supposed to be her kid brother is not that she takes out her anger about her parents' hypocrisy on him but that he suggests doing something she simply cannot do. The very stupid thing about Phil is that he expects Elly to confront them about it. Simply put, the dumb bastard has lived on his own so long, he forgot what his childhood was like back when he and Elly were growing up stupid under the Red Ensign. Complaining to the people you wanted to complain about was very bad form and punished harshly; the ideal situation in a lot of English Canadian households was that everyone would be pissed off about their crappy lives but never say anything about it lest CHAOS ensue. I blame the stiff-upper-lip, no-dissension-in-the-ranks bullshit that we got from Mother England. The more legitimate the grievance, the less the idiot enforcing a law she probably knew was stupid and counterproductive was willing to budge.

This, of course, means that Marian and Elly never, ever had a substantive conversation about how Elly felt about anything. The closest either of them got was the old doll grousing about all of the things Elly did that disappointed her. Funny. The dimwitted old hen witlessly pitted Phil and Elly against each other in the name of respectability and even on her death-bed never understood why they didn't get along. Jim is no help either because he'd rather not say anything because a) he fears what people might think of him if he starts dissing the contents of an urn and b) he never had any input in their raising aside from administering the punishments his boss Marian decided on so he can't have any opinion about how Elly was raised in the here-and-now.

That being said, I can still imagine he and Phil having a conversation after the Big Sham Wedding. What'd happen is that Phil would think back to this week's arc and ask Jim what Marian would have thought of what Mike and Deanna did. Jim would allow as how Marian would have been perturbed but begrudgingly gotten behind like she did in Phil's case. When told that Elly said that Marian would surely have disowned her if she had dome something like this, Jim would be baffled. Why would Elly mention a possibility that neither he or Marian ever saw coming. The Elly he and Marian knew would have never have done so in the first place because she, for reasons they never understood, accepted sight unseen the morals and expectations of those irritating social development films they showed her in Home Ec.

The supposition would then have been that Elly had deliberately invoked an impossibility as a means not of expressing a legitimate grievance but as a means of saying that she should have final say over how he lived his life.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru)
There is, of course, another reason that Phil Richards did as little as he could when it came to looking after his dad in his last days: he assumed that it was Elly's responsibility to look after the old boy because she was a woman thereby making it her job. Like most of the horrible mama's boys that people the strip, Phil's peace of mind is predicated on his not admitting that when Elly pours her heart out about how awful she felt knowing that she was hobbled by a very shallow historical tradition and denied things in the name of respectability, he has a moral responsibility to not blow off her concerns. His constant rattling on about how their childhood doesn't matter much is a rather vile means of denying a reality that warps how she sees the world and treats the people around her. It's also a load of old cobblers because he still believes in one key belief that makes his life worse. Sure, he might have abandoned a lot of the preconceptions that Jim and Marian shoved down his throat but the belief that any opinion a woman might have that differs from his own is strictly optional is one that makes an ugly fool of him. The nadir of his stupidity was not, however, his constant attempt to deny that Elly had a point about his being treated like a king by his mother. His stupidest expression of his tendency to being a macho dickweed isn't even how he ran his ugly mouth about how insane and stupid Connie was for not responding the way he wanted to his grunting "MERE OOMAN" like the Neanderthal he can be sometimes. His worst moment was when he refused to hire a moving van like a sane person because he wanted to look like a conquering hero.

This is why he's still baffled that Elly wanted a pump organ she couldn't play. He still can't see that Elly wanted to win and make the world fair because, like anyone who's just handed a privilege sight unseen, he thinks that the playing field is level when it assuredly isn't.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)

The reason that I came up with that little scenario I’ve been hammering on is that by taking John out of the equation, something that has a severe negative impact on how Elly interacts with Mike and Lizzie would go away. It doesn’t matter if they got divorced or if Phil ended up having to dine on smug rat-bastard idiot to survive that doomed camping trip, having John go away would eradicate the feeling of being trapped that Elly feels. The desperation not felt because she had children before she was ready to be a mother is, of course, derived from her marrying a nerdy and entitled weakling with a need to tyrannize his family because dealing with the public makes the gutless, sunken-chested, witless douchenozzle feel like the man he’ll never be. Freeing Elly from having to ‘admit’ that she’s bullying him by insisting on being treated like a human being would allow her to have the breathing room to see that she shouldn’t be taking out her rage at being connected with a plum duff on their children.

As a for instance, she would have the peace of mind needed to see that her habit of shoving Mike aside whenever he wants attention is a piss-poor way to deal with the collapse of her hopes of returning to the university life that she never really wanted to live in the first place. She’d also be able to see that there’s a good God-damned reason her children try to get her to admit that she loves one child more than the other and always will: she acts the part because she can’t seem to find the time to play fair. Also, she’d notice that whenever she overhears Lizzie play Mommy and talk like a shrew, it’s not just her she’s quoting, it’s Marian. Figuring out that the mother she saw as a role model is an idiot who fears her would do a lot more for her than getting a diploma. It’d allow her to be an adult at long last.

dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As we know, the Pattersons never told Georgia anything about Connie Poirier until she asked Elly "Who is that mannish-looking, flat-chested woman with the bad dye job talking to Phil?" While this didn't lead to the ugly scene that the leering gargoyle Elly calls a husband wanted, our heroine's studied refusal to whine about how her selfish younger brother left poor Connie at the mercies of an awful man like Ted seems to fly in the face of her being what she calls an objective observer. You'd think that if she defined being objective as hammering people over the head with a laundry list of a sitting-duck antagonist's character flaws while ignoring any good traits, Phil's refusal to become an instant father so that Elly might crow about his misery as a means of getting pay-back for having a better childhood would be somewhere at the top of the list. The matter resolves itself when you realize that Elly also wanted an ugly scene so she could hector Phil about how his bad behaviour finally caught up with him. The really annoying part is that the same woman who was willing to throw Phil under the bus so she could finally avenge herself for being treated less leniently despite having seniority merely because he was a boy has no idea why there's a distance between them now.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)

Now, I’d say it was pretty safe to say that Deanna clearly sees herself as being a better mother to Meredith and Robin than Mira ever was to her. Strip after endless strip is, after all, predicated on the notion that Deanna has to defend the new, better way of being a mother from the evil criticism of the domineering monster mother who used her evil family politics to dominate HER DADDY!!!!!! and make Deanna’s life a misery. There is a problem, however, with the time-not-presents orthodoxy that The Sainted Elly preaches: it doesn’t work out so good because neither she nor Deanna seem to be willing to spend any time with their children. What generally happens is that the two dimwits stand there scared out of their tiny, tiny minds because children evilly refuse to do what they’re supposed to: sit quietly where ever it is that Mommy plops them down and not do anything or think anything or want any sort of mental stimulation. I can readily see Deanna shrieking that she cannot be asked to give her children attention either. Simply put, Deanna is a worse parent to her children than Mira was to her. All Mira wanted was a tacky wedding without that gay guy angering God by stinking up the joint and a son-in-law who isn’t a sponge-headed man-child. What Deanna clearly wants is to have the evil, scary, baffling tendency of children to move around, speak and think on their own initiative to go away so that they can become mindless drones who only move when she wills it.

This desire, this longing to abolish the free will of her children seems to be why she idolizes another pair of failures who think themselves superior to their better antecedents. Granted, Jim and Marian did do something wrong by giving the world a petty, manipulative and tyrannical imbecile woman and her yawping man-child of a kid brother and somehow, Will and Carrie messed up big-time by blighting the world with a grinning gargoyle with a train fetish but they’re clearly better parents and people than their children. April, as a for instance, pretty much owes her life to Jim’s presence in it and it shows. One could say that Jim saw her as a way of raising Elly properly. It’s kind of too bad that the old boy popped his clogs before he could crow about how his way is better but you can’t have everything, right? 


One of the things he wasn't allowed to have was a daughter who actually believed that he and Marian did a good job. Oh, they tried their best but they were hampered by a double standard and thus made her life a misery. This means that Elly sees herself as trying to raise her children the way Marian could have raised her had she not been brainwashed by the patriarchy. She thus differs from Deanna who wants to raise her children the way Mira should have raised her had she not been sick with the impulse to interfere.

dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As you've noticed, Elly and her mother don't get along as well as they should because they are far too similar in temperament; the very few times Marian does appear, we see the narcissism of minor differences working its destructive magic on any hope that they can coexist for extended periods. Elly's hatred of being thought of as a child and yearning to be taken seriously always seemed to collide with Marian's not taking herself seriously at all. About the only thing that they can agree on is how difficult it is for them to get rid of things and to not accumulate things that they do not need.

It seems to me that this need to have too many things might be why Elly does all those loads of clothes every single day; we get broad hints that it's because Mike cannot put them away properly or put them in the hamper without mixing clean clothes in with the dirty thereby making what looks like a case of OCD actually a case of inconsiderate spoiled jerk of a child.

The problem with that reasoning is that it's not as simple as Elly would make it. Leaving aside the very obvious problem of his having outgrown certain garments that his mother simply cannot bring herself to dispose of, we have to remember that the huge pile more than likely contains clothing that is out of season and gifts from well-meaning outsiders.

This excess leads to problems because Elly seems to have not considered that Mike's fumbly little eight-year old hands simply cannot put clothes away the way she wants. Not only does he not have enough space in his dressers, he cannot reach the coat rod in his closet nor can he work a hanger effectively. This means that treating the floor like a large, low-hanging shelf is pretty much a necessity because his mother can't seem to figure out how to help him be neat.

What really makes him screwed is that Elly is averse to advice because she thinks that picky-faces are trying to humiliate her. Since she won't accept help and needs to feel persecuted, Mike never will learn to look after himself and have to rely on a wife to keep his environment in order.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As we all know, John really doesn't think that Elly is going to get her Bachelor of Arts degree any time soon; that's because he does things that are unfair and cruel and hateful. Those heartless things he does are called 'remembering the past' and 'drawing a logical conclusion.' He knows from experience that Elly's proud boastings always give way to whining about how hard the assigned material is and how the teacher is out to get her followed by her quitting in frustration and blaming him and the children for not being supportive of a thing she's not really serious about. We're about to be reminded that someone has had decades more experience of having Elly sneer at for plugging away at something because she thinks that dedication is for suckers; that's because Phil makes an offhand comment that echoes something John once said about learning something that she has some chance of actually using. That's because, as I said, he and his parents have dealt with Elly's smugness, victimism and defeatism for a lot longer than John has. He's also had to deal with the fact that a lazy, entitled blowhard who isn't going anywhere in life because she's too gutless to do anything doesn't respect what he does for a living longer as well.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As I mentioned yesterday, I've noticed that the Pattersons tend to choose marriage partners to make up for a perceived defect in one or both parents. The example that I gave was John; as you will recall, it seems to me that he married Elly because she tends to yield to him on most issues; he's willing to put up with a lot of aggravation in order to have a much more submissive woman than his mother in his life. Not for him the existence of Will "Mind your mother, imbecile" Patterson; he gets to be king of his split-level castle without having to do much aside from buy the occasional bookstore or two. This leads me to why Elly thinks of him as the best friend she ever had despite his being a patronizing turd who stands around bleating about how he shouldn't take his obvious contempt for her to heart. What makes him a wretched husband is exactly what she's looking for because about the only thing he really has in common with Jim is a certain measure of conservatism. Not only can he be counted on to share her discomfort with children and not only can he afford all the nice things that she likes, he doesn't expect nearly so much of her as Jim does. Jim, you see, was able to look beyond his very understandable need to have a traditional home life after the Second World War and keep in mind that the white knight on a steed that Elly pinned her hopes on might not arrive as quickly as she might like. You and I see a man who wanted her to cover her ass; she sees a man who lacked faith in her ability to land a husband. John is thus ideal because he doesn't expect much from her and doesn't get it.  Instead of a grouch who can adapt to circumstances, Elly clearly wants a reliable and incorrigible buffoon to rail against so she can pretend that she can change him; a man who was amenable to her pleadings wouldn't be man enough for her. Her idea of a man dislikes her lecturing because he doesn't want to have the little wifey in his face; Jim hates her lecturing because she doesn't know what she's talking about.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As I have mentioned before, Jim and Marian tended to have little patience with Elly's claims that her life had slipped away and she'd become old before her time. Not only had they had to listen to nonsense like that since she was a high school freshman whining about her non-existent social life, they also knew that she wouldn't recognize maturity if the word were tattooed on her retina. She had the same irritating tendency to lecture, the same refusal to admit that she might be in the wrong, the same passive-aggressive habit of pouting if she didn't get her own way, the same spinelessness and the same lack of foresight she'd had since she was in pigtails. Since she hadn't substantively changed mentally despite having got herself a husband and children to play with, her claims that she was aged beyond her years were absurd. They never had to deal with that sort of foolishness from Phil; he might not have had the steady, regular life Elly had but he also wasn't as immature and silly. The only time he ever showed signs of being immature is when he got frustrated by dealing with the idiot sister who thought that she was the boss of him even after they became adults. It seems to me that Jim moved to Milborough with the purpose in mind of keeping the girl who didn't grow up from causing mischief; his son didn't need his help because he was a grown man.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
Over the years, Elly has had one consistent desire that leads her like a pillar of flame by night and a pillar of smoke by day: the desire to be taken seriously and have people admit that she matters. She's never been satisfied with being a wife and mother because she thinks she should be allowed to contribute more to the world that children. This is a laudable goal but there's something wrong with her that prevents her from ever achieving it: the belief that authority figures will grant her the recognition she seeks without her having to work for it. Simply put, she thinks if she waits long enough, some daddy figure will admit that she's a big girl now and take her seriously. That's not how things work in the real world, though. To be taken seriously, she'd have had to dare to upset people instead of trying to comply with their wishes. She married the first man she dated, for instance, simply to avoid an unpleasant conversation with her parents about her having casual sex. We all know how that helped her career, don't we? If she'd had the spine to really argue with her folks instead of hectoring them about inconsequential crap, she'd have seized the respect her nit-witted conformity and hatred of real confrontation denied her ages ago.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As we all know, there's nothing more appalling than a Patterson attempting to be virtuous. A fairly good example of that was Elly sitting April down after the Housening and admitting that she and John should have probably tried to find out what was bothering her but now, after things were too late, she understands the issues she should have addressed when she had the chance. The revelation in the strip for 22 July 2008 that she's going to stay with Jim while Iris gets a well-deserved rest put a nasty idea in my head about how Jim was going to end up in Sunset Manor. As we know, Elly is fairly ignorant and gets frustrated really easily and quickly. Instead of stolidly and somewhat witlessly plodding along like Iris has been doing, she's going to want a fast, fast solution to what will seem to her an insoluble problem: dealing with her father's needs. This means that before he needs to and before Iris or April can object, Elly will check him into Assisted Living. Watching her justify a decision borne of impatience rather than real need will be almost as entertaining as criticizing the Coffee Squawkers who think that Elly's a saint.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
We can tell by looking at John what kind of person he was growing up. Given his smug chauvinism, his self-absorbed nature, tendency to fall back on tradition when threatened and inability to deal with the messy real world, we can readily see that he was something of a momma's boy. Simply put, he was allowed by his adoring mother to drift through his youth not having to think too hard about things. As long as he said and did the right things, his life was trouble free. The end result is a man who reacts to serious issues by either making a facile joke, harrumphing about how things were easier when he was a boy or simply denying that there's a problem in the first place. He means well, I suppose, but since his prejudices and ignorance prevent him from seeing the world as it is, he's useless.

What we do not know is what Elly was like as a child. We do get some hints but she's something of a mystery, to tell you the truth. We know that her parents were sick of her tendency to lecture and that she's done things that flat-out baffle them (such as drop out of school to get hitched) but other than that, nothing. This is because Elly cannot be honest about herself and thus tends to reinvent herself as being better than she is. All we really know is that the Richards thought of her as a pain in the ass. The reason this is an important thing is that without knowing who she was, it becomes impossible to judge if she is indeed geting what she deserved by having to deal with Mike.
dreadedcandiru2: (Angry Candiru)
Elly, as we have seen, loves to scream. There are a host of ideas and habits that simply infuriate our protagonist. Let's take cigarette smoking for a start. We read in one of her retcons that she thought it would be hilarious if somehow a group of poor slobs having a smoke could somehow burn half to death. What makes that infantile power-fantasy even more disgusting is that her father used to be a two-pack-a-day guy. This is a symptom of a deeper problem: Elly is ashamed of her parents. As far back as she can remember, they were too old to live. It's also not like they were grateful for all her and her brother's helpful advice, either. Sure, an outsider might see two ungrateful pseudo-hippie jackasses badgering their parents but that's because they're squares, too. In fact, most of the habits and values that antagonize Saint Eleanor can somehow be associated with her folks. Playing guitar to show off like she did is groovy, man! Playing for personal enjoyment (like Jim did) or as a career (like he wanted do), on the other hand, has to be stopped immediately. I was reminded of a particularly appalling story arc wherein she and her brother steamrolled their dad into selling his acoustic guitar so as to avoid 'embarrassing' them. This is also why she attended university thousands of miles from home: to avoid having to live near her awful, awful parents. It's a contributing factor in her marrying the Train Douche: she was practically trolling for a retrograde idiot who'd stand in the way of her continuing her education while her parents were alive. The most disgusting thing of all, of course, is that she will not tolerate her sort of hatefulness from her own children. They have to do exactly what she tells them, no questions asked, or they're in for some incoherent, vulgar, childish screaming. Old fogeys like her parents may respond to relentless yapping like hers by articulate, well-thought-out words spoken in a level tone of voice but not her. She's above that bummer logic trip.

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