dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
The interesting thing about this week's arc is not that we're yet again asked to prefer a self-righteous outrage artist to a jovial adolescent in his middle thirties only to end up slightly more on Phil's side because affable goofolas who wanna have a good time are more tolerable company than strident boneheads racing around looking for monsters to destroy. The interesting thing is that Elly is probably still to this day trying to figure out if her sister in law insulted her with a big phony smile on her face when she made a comment about how long hair at her age made her look like a dowdy old lady.

Given that the woman is four years or so younger than Elly is, I'd say that, yeah, she did get in a sick burn at Elly's expense and got away with it too. It could well be that she might have made a habit of saying cutting things with a big, dopey smile on her face and having her targets wonder what she meant by that crack. Elly is never going to know because she has a distinct lack of curiosity about Georgia that extends to not having the least idea (or inclination to actually know) what her birth name is.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
Of course, the problem with the family is that they fool a lot of people into believing that they're healthy and normal instead of the captives of a crazy woman who's angry all the time. The most telling example of this is Elly's younger brother Phil. As history teaches us, Phil doesn't seem to realize that Elly hasn't actually bothered growing up at all and is still the same raging imbecile ranting about fake injustices that she was when they were kids. It doesn't make sense that a grown woman would fixate on childhood bullshit and let it warp her life so Phil falsely assumes that she's gotten over all the crap that happened when they were kids.

As history also teaches us, he does so at his peril. This is because he doesn't seem to notice it but each and every time they interact for any great length of it, it's obvious that she's trying to drag him down to her level. If she doesn't want to get into a pointless, frustrating row over how she's owed this, that and the other thing because he supposedly came along and stole her childhood, she's trying to resume her role as "Big Sister, Irritating Dispenser Of Stupid Advice And Also Betrayer Of Confidences For His Own Good And Also To Her Own Advantage." Again, Phil is only dimly aware of this because it doesn't make sense that a grown woman would behave as if she were trying to get Mom and Dad to cut off his allowance for something they can't actually do much about.

What this tells me is that Georgia made a point of separating them because unlike everyone else in the strip, she remembers what a dangerous influence Elly is. Phil came damned close to finally telling Elly off and hammering home the fact that she's a spoiled brat who lives to make conflict and generate tension because she thinks happiness is bad and wrong but didn't quite reach the target. Georgia realized this was futile and did the next best thing to the conflict resolution Elly doesn't want because it means admitting that she is the chaos she's been fighting: keeping the two of them at arms' length.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
Of course, there IS a rather sizable problem with that delicious little scenario in which Elly's ignorance of Georgia is publicly exposed. Since the Pattersons live in something a lot like the real world, we have to contend with the fact that it's pretty much a given that it's falsely assumed by everyone involved (especially Georgia) that Elly actually does know what her sister-in-law's birth name and profession actually are. Such a scenario would occasion Elly's being baffled by Michael's off-hand comment about now, no, they aren't going to drive to Montreal to get the family discount and wondering which relation on which side is an audiologist in Montreal. This might tempt her to ask Phil about the problem but, well, she's still vaguely upset that she couldn't glom on to the damned pump organ to talk to him.

The end result of her discovery of who Georgia really is and what she does would thus not cause her to reflect on her living her life in a fog of incuriosity and willful blindness. If she should comment on the fact, it would probably be assumed that something she's known for years had slipped her mind because she doesn't usually have her hearing checked. This means that we're dealing with a relatively benign version of a phenomenon that will cause all sorts of mischief: Liz finally being told about the wedding for heart and the one for show. As I've said before, she'd be less angry at taking part in a scam and more angry about being 'deliberately' shut out by people who thought that she knew what was going on. In this instance, we'd be dealing with Elly wondering if she was losing it when she never had it to begin with.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
The problem, of course, with Elly's studied indifference to Georgia's past is that she's setting herself up for a rather humiliating incident. As we know, Robin has always had problems with his ears and will require the services of an audiologist. As we know (and Elly does not), Georgia is an audiologist. While it would be simpler and more true to life to have her stumble over an apology and claim temporary amnesia when Georgia offered to do a free consult at the Settlepocalypse, what I have in mind is much more entertaining.

Let's assume that she's placed in a situation where she was the only one available to take Robin to the clinic. Let's also assume that she happened to find a really old brochure that has a Georgia Watson that's on staff being mentioned as an up-and-comer in the field. We'd be left with her at the very least trying (and failing) to convince herself that she'd learned both of these things despite never as such asking and realizing that she might have made a mild but harmless faux-pas. At the most, she'd make a passive-aggressive swipe at her sister-in-law for being so close-mouthed back in the day and so touchy in the here and now with her hurtful comment about how long it took someone to actually ask someone what her full name was and what she did for a living. What we wouldn't get is an admission that Elly's so focused on the useless goal of trying to get a woman who thought that the least bit of praise thrown her way would immediately cause her beloved child to give up on life and die in her own filth to admit she should have made her feel as if she was good enough to be her daughter to care about trivia like an in-law's past.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
The interesting thing about the book "The Lives Behind The Lines" is that while Lynn manages to talk about how Molly "came back to the light" and how Deanna came back into Mike's life, what she still doesn't do is say much more about Georgia than she did in Phil's Liography. We still don't know much more about her than a vague description of her family background. To someone used to this conceit Lynn has that the characters speak to her, it is almost as if Lynn doesn't especially want to hear what she has to say.

Sadly, this seems to be the case owing to the need Lynn and Elly have to see Georgia not as a person in her own right but as a plot device whose function is to drag Phil kicking and screaming to maturity. Knowing her birth name and getting too detailed about her past before Phil would tend to perhaps draw attention away from the Patterson family and that simply cannot be allowed.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
As we all know, we know next to nothing about Georgia's family. We have a vague idea that they're from Montreal, we know that she's got an uncle Bert, we know that she's got an unnamed friend who finds Lizzie to be something of a trial but other than that, she seems to have fallen out of the sky for the sole purpose of being a stand-in for a sister-in-law Lynn seems to not know very well. It occurs to me that the wedding explains why it is that her family doesn't make much of an effort to get to know the Patterson family.

This is because they have to deal with the bizarre fact that for some stupid reason, Phil's idiot brother in law seemed to be more worried about taking a load of garbage to a dump than the wedding. Not only that, the stupid fool dropped his watch in a dumpster and waded in trash to fish it out because that seemed to be more important than a silly little thing like being on time for something important to anyone else. I can see them being appalled that this fool is so impractical and so closed-off in his thinking that he couldn't wait until after the reception to take stuff to the dump. This is not a person to get to know. This is a person to whom the only correct response to is "smile politely, move away slowly and don't make eye contact." Simply put, we never get to know these people because idiot John witlessly scared them away being 'practical'.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
As you know, it's always sort of bothered me that we never get to learn Georgia's birth name. The subject never comes up in the strip archives nor does what Lynn would refer to as a maiden name appear in Phil's Liography. It would thus appear that neither Lynn nor Elly ever seem to have realized that Geo actually needed a surname in the first place. It's very odd but very telling that the same woman who spent all twenty-nine years bristling at the notion of being thought of as an extension of a man would idly consign Georgia to the same fate but it seems to me that while Elly lived in a nightmare world where she wasn't a person in her own right but just either Jim's daughter, John's wife, Mike's mother or Robin's grandmother and not Elly the individual with an identity all her own, she had no problem with consigning Georgia to that same state of depersonalization.

It seems to me that when they were introduced, Elly might have heard a surname but her mind forgot that unimportant detail because she saw Georgia as "Georgia, girlfriend of Phil." This changed to "Georgia, that poor girl my asshole brother selfishly refuses to marry and my parents won't make him either" once they moved in together. Once Phil proposed, she became "Georgia, fiancee of Phil" only to become "Georgia, wife of Phil" after their marriage. If she lives long enough, Elly will end up thinking of her sister in law not as the former Georgia whatever-her-surname-was but as "Georgia, widow of Phil." This leaves us living in an indeterminate world wherein John is the one who actually remembers what Georgia's last name used to be.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
The interesting thing about the website as it stood ten years or so ago was that people could actually ask the characters things and get an answer written in character. The reason that I mention this is that most, if not all, of the e-mails submitted had to do with warning Liz that Eric was a cheating cheater who cheats; since the answer was, as I said, written in character, the letters written before she caught him in the act were the same sort of pious refusal to see the situation as it was that we had to endure in her letters and in the strip and the letters after shrill bullhuckey about how everyone is a fink who refused to warn her so we could see her suffer. The form her pea-brained refusal to admit that she isn't paying attention to her surroundings generally seemed to take was idiotically bleating about how she didn't own the philandering shnook. The reason that I mention this is that the soap opera Lynn wanted to make of Phil's relationship with Georgia opened up with her saying that no, she didn't own Phil and would have ended up with her sitting in the church wondering why all the selfish people never cared to warn her about the obvious. Good thing that Joan was made of stern enough stuff to gently discourage Lynn from destroying her strip and everyone else's life in the name of a drama no one needed.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
The interesting thing about Connie's departure is that it looks to all the world as if it's meant to be a temporary obstacle to Elly's having someone with whom she can agree that children are ungrateful parasites who steal time and attention because CHAOS and that their malicious, self-absorbed neglect and solipsism is actually the best way to raise their ill-used offsprings and small ones. It might have looked as if we were dealing with a real-world situation in which life was a fluid thing in which people's lives take different trajectories but Lynn made it obvious that Connie's destiny is to be Elly's sidekick and fellow failure as a mother, wife and human being. The question that faces us is wondering why it is that she had to leave and why it was that it took her so long to return.

The answer seems to be that it was impressed upon Lynn that she couldn't have the soap operatic love triangle between Phil, Georgia and Connie that her day-time television obsessed brain makes her see as being the most desirable means in which to have people interact. Since she couldn't have the drama, it made sense to put Connie on a bus until such time as Alan stopped telling his crazy lie about how Joan was the one dragging her feet about marriage and got married already. Simply put, we have to endure cheap theatrics about how Lawrence has to adjust to living in a whirlwind so that his idiot creator can pout about people having no sense of reality.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
As I once said long ago, the reason Lynn wants old flames to not flicker out and die is because she is mildly envious of relationships that last. This yearning for a world in which the flame doesn't gutter out and die is, as I said, why even unto the last days, Connie still played "what if" when thinking about Doctor Ted.

The reason that I mention this is that Lynn needs to assume that some sort of lingering attraction to an old flame is why Alan wouldn't hurry up and marry Joan already. We are, as we all know, dealing with someone who assumes that because she wanted to rush down the aisle with the first thing with a pulse, the same thing must be true of all women everywhere. This means that any sort of reality that involved Joan being the one slowing down the wedding machine could not be real to her. Since Joan 'clearly' wanted to get married as soon as possible, Alan must be to blame for the delay. Thus do we have Phil singing about his love for a woman he barely had time for in the real world.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
The odd thing that Connie's sudden departure forestalled was a sort of tension between Georgia and Phil over the fact that she might present something of a threat to their relationship. The strip in which Geo thought-bubbled that she'd ignore Phil's behaviour this time was, I should think, a sort of warning that if Connie were still in town, there'd be a lot of simmering resentment. Fortunately for all concerned, Connie decided that not only did she not want to see Ted with another girl, she couldn't possibly intrude on the happiness a passing fling had found for himself. Also, by the time she'd returned, she and Phil were married to other people.

The reason that I mention this is that I was reminded of notes in which Lynn confessed to wanting to nag Alan to marry a single mother they both knew in order to 'do right' by her. What this means is that every strip in which Phil's presented as being an idiot for not 'dealing' is another example of Alan being told what to do by someone whose business it isn't. I should also think that it took quite a while for Lynn to warm up to the woman Alan did end up marrying owing to the fact that it took until the whole wedding planning thing for Georgia to become someone other that "Phil's girlfriend". The only sign that she was still a bit of a stranger is that even now, we don't know her maiden name.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
As we know, we're hip-deep in the middle of an arc in which Georgia is angry with Phil for not only spending far too much time talking to Connie but for also not making her aware of the woman's existence. The problem, as has been noted, is that Georgia and Connie had already met the previous Christmas. The reason that we have this awkwardness is that Lynn seems to have forgotten and her father-in-law (who was the one keeping track of these things) didn't remind her in time.

What this means is that instead of an awkward moment in which Georgia got blindsided by the sudden revelation of a key piece of his past that everyone kept from her, what should be happening is her wondering why Connie's boyfriend Ted is a no-show and if that means that someone is looking for a Mister Rebound. Her somewhat insincere declaration that, no, she didn't mind that Phil talked to someone who meant a lot to him (even if that meaning only meant anything if he couldn't have her) even though it really did could stay but the 'Who's that in the tube top' needs to go.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
Of course, Elly and the gang aren't alone in being self-absorbed jerkwads who squeal about being cruelly mistreated while they're in the process of denying someone his or her rights, freedom and/or property. Phil is also a rather horrible jerk in his own right. As the recent sequence in which he pulled a Jedi mind trick on Georgia so that she would agree that only he gets to make decisions because he has the Y chromosome that permits them to be made, he likes to play a lot of nasty head games because he's an infantile petty tyrant.

This meant that most of the lead-up to their inevitable marriage meant that she wasted the best years of her life trying to reform the whimpering sack of sewage. In the normal course of events, she might have eventually fallen into the orbit of a less depressingly stupid and entitled and wound up bitterly resenting the time lost pursuing an imbecile who lives to trivialize the hopes, fears and dreams of the women in his life. Sadly, he and John decided to get away from what they called "feminine tyranny" and what actual men call "having to admit that they're most of why their significant others are so damned moody all the time."

Since the two of them had no more idea of what they were doing in the wilderness than a member of Possum Lodge, their canoe capsized owing to being weighed down by all the junk they needed to enjoy the simple life. While Elly was wondering why John's leaving whiskers in the sink like a slob was a big deal, Georgia stated that she simply couldn't go on living if Phil were dead.

Since she didn't have to pine away and die of grief or commit suicide so she could be with her mayyyyyyuuuuunnnnnn, she was glad to take him on, bad habits, verbal abuse and everything. What Phil never seems to have quite realized is that the idea of being free of a puerile moron who spent the better part of the eighties pretending that it was still 1972 had been made so scary that he had no choice but to marry her lest she do herself an injury.

Just as she would later do with Liz and Anthony or Mike and Deanna, Lynn would declare this to be the triumph of True Love. She would be dead bang on were the words "true love" to be pronounced "stock-holm syn-drome."
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
As you will recall, I wrote something a few weeks ago that likened Phil and Georgia's wedding to a dry run of the Settlepocalypse. That's because the point of the whole thing was to lecture Alan about how big, stupid and juvenile a bastard he was being by not putting a ring on his wife's finger. Always and ever, Phil would be made to look like a stupid child who doesn't know what's good for him when it was clear that if he wanted to be taken seriously, he would have to step up, get in that tux, marry that girl and quit his bitching about how living a steady, regular life like everyone else is 'going down in flames' or whatever.

The odd thing that I'd noticed is that a certain pattern would emerge whenever Phil tried to explain his concerns. What would generally happen is that Phil would start to pour his heart out about his fear that he was going to make a decision he couldn't back out on without looking like a son-of-a-bitch only to have Elly or Georgia tune him the Hell out and start running their damned mouths about china patterns or dresses or whatever. The way it looked to Phil was that he was being steamrolled by the wedding machine because no one God-damned listened to him about how anxious he was, how worried he was that he was going to do wrong by everyone.

While Lynn wants to make it look as if he were making a big deal over nothing by having his concerns fade away on the day itself, the fact that the Georgia who manipulated him into stepping up by threatening to walk out the door waited until they were packing for their honeymoon to share the trivial fact that she was just as anxious as he was makes me somewhat pissed off. That's because no one listens and no one talks to one another; somehow, this refusal to share somehow leads to a happy married life.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
As I indicated in yesterday's post, I think that Deanna and Georgia have a lot in common in that they married artistic types who clearly need a certain amount of weaning away from their mothers. Granted, Georgia had an easier time of it because while Marian doted on Phil to a rather off-putting extent, she at least made sure that he could live on his own so that she didn't have to put up with an over-grown teenager cramping her style. Not for her and Jim the dreadful prospect of her adult children camping out for extended periods because they couldn't cope with life on their own.

Deanna, on the other hand, had a much more difficult time dealing with Mike owing to the fact that he acts like a character from a sixties sitcom preaching Strict-But-Fair Parenting By Bad Example. If the Pattersons' world were a television program, Deanna herself would be the kid protagonist learning that the "free" kid whose ability to come and go as he pleases and do pretty much ever he wants craves the structure lovingly imposed on him from Sainted Mira and Wilf; instead, his father is more a growth oozing out of a chair and his mother a negligent idiot Who Should Probably Not Have Had Kids. It's quite obvious that Michael cannot cope on his own and needs to be dependent on a kindly adult to save him from himself. Deanna's job is to make sure that that adult is Elly.

Good thing for Elly that all Deanna can do is rebel against her mother; that way, she can have Mike to be her BABY forever and always while allowing Phil to be one of the kindly adults who parents her children for her.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
While it is quite clear that Phil and Georgia simply seemed to click when they first met, the fact that dimwit Elly still can't get over the fact that she's seven years younger than he is isn't the only complicating factor in their relationship. After all, Phil seems to have came out of the womb with a need for what he calls simplicity. Given that he defines 'simplicity' as being able to leave town in an awful hurry whenever he feels 'trapped', it would seem that 'simplicity' turns out to mean 'arranging matters so that he doesn't have to leave a very narrow comfort zone'.

While it does sort of irritate me to have to give John credit where it's due, the reason Phil made irritating noise about not needing a piece of paper was not that he didn't truly care about the social norms that Elly regards as iron-clad laws but more that if he started to feel the least bit of discomfort with his living conditions, he could back out no matter how much it might have hurt Georgia. This is why it took her four or five years to finally get the big mope down the aisle: she had to fight the stupid little kid who doesn't care who gets hurt so long as he doesn't have to feel pain so she could marry the man who loves her no matter what happens. Also, she had to finally wean him away from his mother and his sister and all the other competing females who want to make an infant of him so that they can control him. Since they live in her home town and since Elly is the one dealing with Jim, it would seem that she finally managed to kill the little kid dependent on Mommy and Big Sis.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
I'd like to move away from Elly pouting about how unfair it is that her horrible children wanted to torment her by questioning the iron-clad rule that only their generous parents get to decide what they will allow the offsprings and small ones to keep to talking about how Phil took a very long time adjusting to the idea of a more settled life. Given how often Lynn liked to have him compare the steady, regular existence the Pattersons had to some sort of cruel punishment meant to trap people and keep them from being free, what we were looking at was her hectoring Alan about how worthless and stupid he was being for not settling down NOW and making of himself a disgrace to everyone everywhere.

What she doesn't realize is that when Phil talked about some fellow he knows going down in flames, he (and Alan) were more than likely trying to tell her that he had convinced himself that he was sure to make a complete blunder of the whole work-a-daddy, mind-your-mommy Patterlife held up as a model for all. While John might overshoot the mark with his rattling witlessly about evil, distracting stars that mislead people into living a miserable nomadic life of nomadic misery, Elly is genetically incapable of understanding putting a brave face on things. Since John is too blasted insensitive to understand how dull it is to drift along aimlessly and Elly too angry at him for winning their childhood, it's a good thing for him that he has a reasonably sympathetic life partner in Georgia. She might want to remodel him too but at least it's not because she hates him and wants to torment him to death for the sins of her idiot parents.
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)
The real problem some of us have with the sudden return of the Liographies is asking why it's necessary. After all, it'll be at least ten years before we see Weed reappear so it's not like we need to wonder why the party-hearty buffoon we see in the strip has been assigned such a screwed-up back story for quite a while. The answer one of us came up with is that the market for the kids' books dried up and Beth needs to express herself somehow so she's back to ranting about anachronistic heavy parents and the children whose hopes they crush because their inhuman greed has made monsters of them.

The only upside I see in this mess comes from having read the insane biography of the sunken-chested gitface Anthony. That's because we finally learned the birth name of the woman he used and discarded like tissue paper in a repulsively effective effort to gain the sympathies of white trash. What this tells me is that sooner or later, Beth will get around to depicting the insanely warped background of Georgia Sevenyearsyounger and finally give her something Lynn never bothered to do: give her a maiden name.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)

Another thing about Elly that clearly seems to have alienated Georgia is the fact that she made no secret of her desire to revel in their confusion and hurt feelings. Knowing that the only time that Elly smiled and meant it when she was either volunteering derogatory information, anticipating something unpleasant or nursing an obsolete old grudge was almost as annoying as her unsubtle hints that their doing anything that she wouldn’t do is evil, bad and needs to be set to rights so that a vengeful, hostile, wilful, sullen, entitled and dumber-than-shit little brat stuffed in the body of a dimwitted little wifey can get her jollies avenging herself against an unfair little brother who ‘won’ their childhood. Having to listen to Elly rant about how the two of them are evilly failing society by evilly refusing to have the children that they probably couldn’t and shouldn’t raise coupled with her clearly getting off imagining how miserable, angry and confused the two of them would be seems to have given Georgia a measure of incentive to put distance between her and her insane moron of a sister-in-law. Back home in Montréal, she could at least count on her family to protect her from the maniac with the horse-bun, said freak’s horrible family and the clingy, mannish virago Phil is ‘supposed’ to have ‘done right by’.

I suppose that this would be overkill but it seems to me that watching Elly and her friends deal with their children is also a good reason to not have kids of her own. What she sees when she looks at Mike and Lizzie are two apathetic, slug-like losers being treated like supervillains by a hysterical clod and since she wants to avoid going insane raising members of a family who clearly have a mental defect that prevents them from listening, wants not to create dumb, lazy, entitled idiot children of her own.

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