Foobonia and Points West.

What a lot of people who follow the strip kind of don't remember because we were too busy watching Mike be a lousy boyfriend and Elly angsting because she was doomed to diaper pails and kindergarten at forty is that at some point between 3 November 1988 and 9 March 1993, Connie's step-daughters went from "being mentioned off camera" to "moving away from Milborough because reasons". This, of course, is owing to Lynn's belief that she had too many characters anyway....by which she seems to mean "she can't spend too much time not focused on the Pattersons' doings."

The reason that I mention this is that Lynn's shortcomings meant that she had to create a new character in order to implement the standard sitcom plot "adolescent child chafes under the rule of someone else's slightly older daughter" when Liz aims a fire extinguisher at one of John's employees six years from now. If she'd kept one of the Thomas girls around instead, we could have had wacky sitcom hijinx much earlier.

Of course, the really ludicrous thing about Elly giving Molly the benefit of her inexperience is that Molly sought Elly out in the first place. As aprilp_katje pointed out, Molly does not especially like or trust Connie overly much. From what little we know of their family dynamics, it took until Molly was a grown woman for her to understand and to warm to her. Lynn might squawk about Molly going into a dark place and not coming back until years later but it's damned obvious that it's as I said: Molly blamed her parents' divorce part way on herself and viewed reconciling herself to Connie and Milborough not only as accepting the fact that she couldn't have the life she wanted but also that her opinion doesn't actually count.

It therefore makes no sense that she'd confide in the reason why she had to be taken away from her friends and that year's Forever Love. What she sees when she looks at Elly is what everyone sees: someone whose job it is to barge on in and berate her about how foolish and heartless and cruel she is for missing her friends and not accepting someone who treats her like something of an annoying joke. Only in some sort of kiddie cartoon would that happen because here in the real world, people don't seek out advice from hostile strangers who disrespect them merely because that reproving ignoramus is one of the main characters.

Sadly, we're starting to live in the world of the Declining Years wherein the healing touch of the Sainted Patterson Family lifts the Wretched Of The Earth out of the muck if they have the humility to accept their benevolence. What was supposed to happen was that Molly was supposed to agree that boys who frighten Greg and Connie are jerks and mutate into a craven gumdrop from one of those God-awful fifties social programming films about how keen it is to conform to a tight-assed, male-oriented norm. It is thus fortunate that she got written out; otherwise, we'd have established a precedent for someone being murdered by rough trade because she doesn't agree with the Will Of Elly.

As you know, I wish that Lynn had been prevailed upon to simply drop the first year of the strip when she started the Classic Foob experience. That way, we'd be watching Lizzie hint at why Elly fears team sports by cowering in fear of the baseball heading her way because if she gets hurt, the pain will last forever and ever and she'll cry FOREVER and so on into eventually running around in downtown traffic protesting something that was decided a year in advance. We'd also be watching dimwit Connie not realize that the reason she's treated like an evil stepmother who dragged Molly and Gayle from their homes so she could drink coffee with some other old woman who hates children is that her gutless husband absents himself when it's time to accept him some blame for being a jackass.

It kills me that Connie doesn't realize that she's simply a figure-head for why Milborough isn't a very appealing place to Molly because she's kinda dumb and kinda doesn't get that her happiness is a side-effect of her arsebucket husband's need to step on a relationship like the cowardly, ignorant ogre he is. She also doesn't realize that Mike's stupid need for sensation became something of a deal-killer. There's Molly sitting there feeling lost in a strange town where she knows exactly no one and next thing she knows, the horrible son of the unsympathetic clod housewife who ALWAYS takes her mother's side is getting the other kids to peer into her window like she's a sideshow attraction and not a person; worse, when he gets caught and punished, the scruffy little piece of trash whines about the inconvenience to HIMSELF because her feelings clearly don't matter to the little arsewipe.

Speaking of said Mommy's Cheerleader Supreme Elly Patterson, you'd have to be a real freaking idiot to wade into a situation in which Greg is clearly maintaining a sort of communications barrier meant to protect his viri.....little girl from a clear threat to her father's mascu...virtue and declare someone she's never going to meet a no-hoper just because her first crush called her an adhesive irritant to her stupid face. Having one high-handed imbecile who doesn't know what's really going on dismiss her feelings is one thing. Elly's presence leaves Molly with the impression that Milborough is populated by scruffy mutant children like Mike and self-absorbed, judgmental and unsympathetic drips like her and Connie. Getting away from there and spending the rest of her life with people who don't treat her like a chump might baffle a Foob but it makes perfect sense to someone not as dumb and vain and short-sighted as Elly is.

As I've said before, Lynn's need to avoid certain parts of her past translates into the strip. The greatest example is when Annie and her family had to vanish so that Lynn couldn't honestly re-examine the collapse of her first marriage and confront the terrible possibility that maybe, she wasn't totally the victim like she likes to think. The second great example is how Molly lasted just long enough to make sure that Connie didn't learn enough to tell Elly that she was making a mistake with April. It seems to me that Lynn isn't facing up to the fact that her strip made her children's teenaged years a big freaking mess and doesn't especially want to remind herself of that. To that end, her stupid need to keep the cast small marched in lockstep with her need to not see herself as being a jerk to her family; thus it is that Connie looks back on a conflict that never really got resolved until years later and tells Elly to stay the course with the Martian.