dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As most of us would agree, to have Mike casually admit to the persistent unauthorized consumption of someone else's beer is a far worse problem than 'corrupting' Liz by making her use bad language and would no doubt result in a far sterner penalty than whatever Elly thinks she's doing by keeping him from watching reruns. Unfortunately for all concerned, Elly's teeny-weeny, itty-bitty little baby brain tends to seize up and go into vapor lock when confronted with genuine problems because they're too damned big to process. She's too dumb to admit to playing favourites and yeah, she probably thought that Mike was 'really' planning to watch television and thus had to play catchup years later when she started doing the Breathalyzer kiss thing.

Even more unfortunately, she's dealing with a fellow mental pygmy in Michael. We start off with his not being aware of the fact that Mom is of course going to get angry if her favourite child is heard to swear. He can also stand in front of bookshelves loaded with stuff he could read and declare that the place is a cultural Gobi desert because that would involve opening his damned eyes instead of walking around in the same stupor Elly does and he's big enough a nitwit to miss out on what the point of punishment means.

This cycle of one dumbass trying to modify how an equally stupid dope acts pretty much ensures a cycle of failure in which she gets angrier and he bleats more idiotically about persecution. Good thing for her that the only person willing to put up with his shit thinks the world of her. To keep from having to live on his own, Mikey Girl does his damnedest to curry favor with his idiot mother.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
The interesting thing about this June is that Lynn appears to have created a sort of capsule version of the first few years of the strip for the express purpose of appearing in the tenth anniversary collection. The form it takes is Elly sitting with Liz and Mike telling them the about the Lizzie era. What Lynn tends to not notice during this is the same thing that Elly herself doesn't notice: her insistence on assuming that Mike will simply get over feeling left out because they don't actually have to reassure him that he's not being tossed aside for the new baby. He should know things he's not told and they shouldn't have to tell him things he already knows and besides, he's only five so what harm could result from being overly effusive about the cute little doll baby we're so lucky to have?

It seems to me that a man in his mid thirties whining to his wife that he had to be a massive weeping dick to his kid sister because she was cuter than he was ain't quite over having them fuss over her while telling him "suck it up and let the cute girl win or I can't like you" but you can't tell Elly that. She might have to look back at her life and say the five words that she hates to say ("Yeah...I fucked that up!!!") because they lead to her having to lower herself and become a defeated person by admitting error and asking for forgiveness.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
It occurs to me that [livejournal.com profile] howtheduck is on to something when he suggests that the real reason that Michael is being punished for swearing is that he is somehow magically corrupting Elizabeth. While Liz has always lived in fear of Elly's palm interfacing with her rump because if she spanks Michael for driving her up the wall, it makes sense that if she herself were to get Elly angry enough, she too would get spanked, this is not the case. Elly doesn't like the idea of offering 'innocent' children like Liz violence and, as we'll see, cares far more about Liz's opinion than she ever did any child with dark hair.

This, I think, is because Elly never managed to quite get over her childhood and how Phil won all the time and she was just his maidservant and so on and so forth through all the comfy lies she tells herself about how he got handed everything on a tray because he's a dude and she was cruelly mistreated and so on and so forth. I should think that she'll die ignorant of the fact that most people are of course going to like a happy-go-lucky hedonist who gives his parents the right kind of trouble to a tetchy, short-tempered ignoramus screaming like a banshee about how the world is a horrible place because other people get to enjoy things she cannot and how unfair that is.

What this means for Mike in the here and how is the same thing it was supposed to mean for Phil back in the day because of Elly's weird, stupid and punitive idea of fairness. Just as Elly never wanted all the privileges Phil had but instead wanted all of his privileges taken away because she couldn't have them, Mike is supposed to suffer cruelly because his mother never got over the idea that he is so supposed to simply stop wanting to be noticed now that a child who reminds her of the self she wants to be thought of is in view.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As you might recall, one of the "Calvin and Hobbes" collections started with him talking about his parents MUST be evil aliens plotting to take away his childhood and turn him into the same sort boring, unhappy drones who think that suffering actually builds character instead of curdling it like it does in real life that they are. This is because he looks at his parents and sees people who appear to have been born without the ability to enjoy life because as a hyperactive and daydreaming six year old who just might have Asperger's, he doesn't realize what a pain in the ass he is to raise.

The reason that I mention him is that Mike is a dumber, less imaginative and more stolid version of Calvin in that he doesn't understand that Elly is convinced that if the kids ever see her smile or laugh or enjoy anything, they'll never take her word seriously ever again. To be taken seriously, she thinks, means being needlessly grave and fretful all the time because she didn't know what it was like for Marian to raise a pain in the ass like her until she had a theatrical and rock stupid irritant of her own to raise. It ain't easy being a clown when you gotta run the circus so she don't smile no more. Also, she likes the idea of the world being a far worse place than it actually is because it makes her feel more important.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
 The interesting thing about this arc is that the realization that Elly had failed in her responsibility to warn the people at Kamp Kawkawa what a disruptive jackass Mike was going to be made [livejournal.com profile] howtheduck and [livejournal.com profile] aprilp_katje wonder what would happen if, by some chance, Elly had been forced to accompany Michael on a long-distance trip somewhere. The example that comes readiest to my mind involves that minor-league hockey team of his playing a tournament in, oh, say, Thunder Bay for a week or so. The boys would need chaperones and more or less by accident, Elly would be 'volunteered' for the job.

It should probably go without saying that she'd be fairly reluctant to break out of her happy little routine for her child. As I've said before, the deluded nitwit seems to be transfixed by the idea that for some reason that makes little sense to anyone who isn't an always-angry mother who wants to stab her children to death with a potato peeler for having needs of their own, the children want to kick her in the teeth and laugh at her when they tell her that she's their slave and she'd better stop thinking that she's a person too. This transmutes being a supportive parent into a sacrifice the children are out of line to expect.

It should also be fairly obvious that while Elly loves to point the finger of blame at everything within her field of vision, she's rather averse to admitting that she herself is to blame for things that go wrong. If Lynn were to write the arc, we could have a straw unfair critical person who hates the idea of Elly expressing herself make an unfair and cruel connection between what she does and does NOT do and how Michael behaves in the loutish fashion he does that we would be told to ignore. If Team Fungus People were to write it, the other volunteer wouldn't look like a half-orc, her name wouldn't be something comically grotesque and the Reason You Suck speech would end up sticking.   
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
The inability Marian had to quite see that Elly felt as if she could never measure up to the standard she set for her leads, I should think, into the third character trait I tend to associate with her: her unswerving belief that this life is a conspiracy in which everyone is allowed to be happy and be publicly praised and live a worthwhile life expect her. The problem I have with her problem is that she doesn't quite realize that she's setting herself up to fail.

We're going to see that in about eight months when she takes her short-sighted nincompoop son Mike's self-serving whining about how HER public identity is a bad thing that has to be suppressed so that HE can avoid being teased by irrelevant children seriously. She also stands there like an idiot and lets the smirking irritant talk her out of wearing shorts because it would make him look bad and doesn't quite understand why it is that someone who's shown that her self-respect is negotiable treats her as shabbily as Mike does. It's like Doctor Venture said....give'em an inch and they think they're rulers!

Of course, admitting that most of the reason that she's failing is due to her own choking when firmness is required is going to be a non-starter because she's not quite sold on this concept of cause and effect yet. She's as likely to admit "Hey! Letting my son get to me because I do what I want is a dumb thing!" as she is to admit that her childhood was not a bleak expanse of servitude because of her habit of glossing over her victories in life so that they too can be defeats.

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