dreadedcandiru2 | Entries tagged with mike patterson: invertebrate

We are, if I recall correctly, four months away from the first appearance of a rather distressing and irritating trend. This is because we're about to meet Martha's extended family and, for some reason, we are expected to take pity on poooooor Mike because his fantasy girl insists on being real by having a family that she loves. As I've said before, Michael's ideal girl is a personality free bit of fluff that goes off to stand inertly in the void waiting for him to let her live again. Martha's being someone's daughter and kid sister is as cruel and unfair as Rhetta's wanting to be part of her own family's business because that got in Mike's stupid way too.

How fortunate for him that he ended up with a petulant child who started throwing a tantrum because her mother gives a shit about who she's with, what she's doing and where she's doing it when she could be a swell mother like her idol Negligent Selfish Cretin Mother Elly that started when she was three and will end when the doctor notes her time of death. Since Deanna insists on being estranged from her family for selfish, stupid and childish reasons, Mike doesn't have to answer to in-laws about his being a total failure as a husband and father.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1070907.html

Now that we're about to lurch uneasily into another round of watching Mike be a boorish, petulant and self-important scoundrel driving a wedge between Martha and her friends because he assumes that the only reason that she and they would talk about him is in order to find fodder to ruin his alleged public image, let's remind ourselves of what character flaw of his the relationship actually ended up dying of: his mentally checking out of the relationship first.

While one might be forgiven for thinking that her problem with him is that he has a problem with understanding that she's a person in her own right with friends, family, likes and dislikes instead of a collection of body parts whose sole existence is oriented around servicing a goober, what really drove a wedge between them is his tendency to not notice that it matters that he checks out other girls and it matters more that she's taking a distant second to cars. This means that she finds someone who does a better job of faking that he gives a shit about her as a person and Mike runs away from her screaming because she hurt him and destroyed him publicly by seizing something no woman should have because that leads to him doing his own damned housework, the lily: the initiative.

We see this pattern repeat itself when he doesn't understand that it might bother Rhetta that he can rant for months on end about dating a girl from out of town and moving on from beyond the confines of home and so on and so forth while she's expected to remain pining away for him like a fantasy projection instead of a person. This leads to

her finding better options than a boorish child-man and
him wailing about false hearts who say cruel worlds like "I'm a person too and I have needs."

Since he's always going to be the dismal little sooky-baby howling that his MOMMA doesn't LOVE him because she doesn't see the need to hover over him non-stop, his only option has to be someone who'd do just that and excuse every last knavish act of his to piss her mother off.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1013605.html

The interesting thing about the upcoming Mike versus the trumpet arc is that Phil makes the silly and foolish mistake of exposing his mush-headed and pessimistic defeatist idiot nephew to Wynton Marsalis. You will notice that while Phil says "Here's a great trumpet player. While you and I can never reach his heights, we can at least try to do so", what Mike hears is something a lot like "You will never be as good as this man so it's simply not worth it to try. Trying will only bring you pain, embarrassment and ELLY SCREAMING AT YOU ABOUT HOW YOU NEVER TRY!!!"

As I've said in the past, part of the reason that Phil doesn't understand this is that he doesn't understand what Elly means when she says that yes, she is encouraging him. Since Phil is a bit of a thickie when Elly is concerned, he doesn't realize that she means that yes, she is calling him a lazy failure who selfishly refuses to take his life seriously because he hates her and yes, she is withholding sympathy because she doesn't want him to become an entitled monster. She's certain that if she nags him hard enough, denies that what he does is good enough and shows no sign of sympathy, he's sure to excel and thank her and stop thinking of her as a cruel and heartless monster who delights in his misery.

This intensely stupid and counter-productive means of guaranteeing that Mike will give things up in despair for reasons that can't possibly be related to her thinking that the best way to show she cares and wants the best for him is to look like a monster who hates him and can never be pleased with him would be bad enough were it not for his filling his head with mush about how people who are better than him at something only got better so they could be jerks to him. Every time she and John defame someone unfairly for trying to crush them with their family politics, they ensure that their children can't believe in the good will of other people.

As you might have guessed, I really don't think that Mike should have the insane success that he's had in life. It bothers me that he pissed his pants in terror and ran crying home to Deanna because an authority figure was a big meanie-pants for expecting a managing editor of a magazine to behave like a managing editor and was granted an insanely generous book deal instead of being sued into the Proterozoic Era for breach of contract. This is because it is somewhat aggravating to have to realize that he really never bothered growing out of the same stupid, limiting tendencies that hamper him as a boy in the strips we're reading now. As we're about to see in the upcoming "Phil beats his head against the stone wall called Mike's being a whiny defeatist" arc, Mike has a lot of behaviour patterns that really screw him up:

Self-Aggrandizement: As I've said over the years, dirt-average clodhopper Michael seems to be transfixed with the laughably stupid belief that he is some sort of super-special snowflake when he's actually something of a mediocrity. Just as having to obey the same classroom rules as boring, ordinary people who might as well be processed into dog food brought out the sullen dipshit in him, Mike derailed his career for a while because he needed to get revenge on Divala for her humiliating insistence that he was just some clod hired to do a puff piece instead of the probing look into her life no one asked him to write in the first place.

Dimwit Martyrdom: The same ludicrous ape who wasted his childhood wailing idiotically about how noooooooooobody loved him because he had to do things he didn't like mutated into a boorish adult who caterwauled about being a rung on a ladder because some uppity person who clearly hated him told him that he had to write the article the magazine asked him to write, his own need to show off be damned.

Impulse Control Failure: While it's true that Michael has outgrown his need to flail around and holler about how HARD something people who HATE him and want to see him SUFFER is when confronted with not being able to get his own way all the time, his despicable act of ruining someone's career for insulting his excellence is hardly an improvement.

Blame Avoidance: Given that the asshole still thinks that Liz deserved to be the victim of his cruelty because she was somehow magically plotting his downfall, it's not much of a surprise that he thinks that being inconvenienced by someone means that said someone is clearly trying to ruin him. The idea that Divala is still trying to figure out what she did to irritate the thin-skinned idiot who thought too much of himself is not one that can occur to him because he's genetically incapable of understanding that people can get in his way and still be good people.

Defeatism: Of course, anger and victim-blaming aren't his only responses to adversity. The same goof who, when confronted with someone who he can aspire to become even if he'll never quite make it, thinks that he should quit in despair and die because he can't be the best grows up to become someone who, as I said, pooped his diaper when told that he'd end up being 'the bad guy.'

Putting this all together, it's really something of a miracle that Mike's career doesn't consist of either wearing a blue vest and asking us if we would like to apply for a Wal-Mart Mastercard or a hair net or asking us if we want fries with our Big Mac. He sure wouldn't last long in the publishing industry with the attributes I'd listed so it's either minimum wage or specializing in flopsy schemes.

In a recent discussion of a Lynnsight,

howtheduckgetting a reward for turning in on-spec alphabet samples while hers would have to drastically improve in order to qualify as being illegible. Years of being told to pay attention in class end up leaving Liz with the mistaken impression that people who expect her to understand the entire core concept behind education are horrible people who hate her for no reason and single her out for abuse because they hate the idea of her being happy.

The reason that she'd go on to accuse Evil Career Woman of willing her to slip on glare ice because the alternative of having to admit that she was so pissed off at being accused of trying to destroy someone's marriage to look where she's going is that she's been raised to think a certain way. Michael's struggle with playing the trumpet shows us what that belief is when Phil makes the stupid-ass mistake of showing him what a real master of the form sounds like. While Phil has the same work to win philosophy that his parents have, he doesn't realize that Mike has grown up in an environment where the following belief:

"If doing a certain thing means that I can't have all the praise right now, I should quit in despair and wail about the cruelty and injustice of the world and all the uncaring and horrible people who hate me and want me to suffer and mock me who live in it."

is held as being axiomatic because Elly never quite managed to figure out that people who tell her that her work needs improvement aren't trying to destroy her because they hate her. This is why I almost prefer John's active antipathy to his kids' interests to Elly's poisoned support; at least with him, you know what you're in for. With her, you get mixed signals, hypocrisy and bafflegab.