Foobonia and Points West.

The interesting thing about the comic strip "Sally Forth" is that its writer, a Ces Marciuliano, has made a late-summer wedding the engine currently driving the plot forward. What is more, the bride to be wants to contribute nothing to the planning of the thing but whining and passive-aggressive bitchery. If you'll allow me, I'll contrast and compare the two to see which author is better at describing a Settlepocalypse.

The Bride to Be:
Johnston: Liz is seen as someone who deserves a happy ending after being forced out into a big, scary world while being shown to be a passive lump who wants other people to live her life for her.
Marciuliano: Jackie is seen as a selfish, lazy adult child about to walk into a disaster in order to spite her sister. It turns out that this is the case.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Groom:
Johnston: Anthony is described as being a great guy who needs to learn to love and trust again after being mauled by an evil, ambitious career woman; the fact of the matter is that he's a sunken-chested dimwit who has to settle for a pallid little twit like Liz because he's an invertebrate who couldn't deal with a real woman.
Marciuliano: Ralph is described as being evil incarnate when it's broadly hinted that his being evil consists of being Ted McCauley with less hair.
Advantage: a tie.

The Wedding Planning:
Johnston: Liz's refusal to do anything but carp and panic is seen as pretty much a harmless eccentricity by everyone who isn't a Martian.
Marciuliano: Jackie's tendency to leave it all up to Sally only to bitch whenever her older sister comes up with an idea is seen as an aggravating act of pettiness and immaturity.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Wedding Planner:
Johnston: Elly is seen as a great old gal for making sure that Liz does as little as possible.
Marciuliano: Sally is seen as becoming progressively frustrated by the irritating and unreasonable demands made on her time.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Mother of the Bride:
Johnston: Again, Elly is wonderful because she managed to make sure that Liz stays home where she belongs. This is nuts because home is what messed Liz up in the first place.
Marciuliano: Sally and Jackie's mother is seen as a pompous, blustering pain in the arse who wants to make sure that Sally doesn't pick on Jackie like she did growing up. Since Ces has established that most of what's wrong with Sally is that she was Jackie's primary caregiver owing to parental default, this is seen as adding to our hero's woes.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Wedding Itself:
Johnston: What most outsiders would see as the culmination of hateful manipulation leading to a loveless sham marriage is seen as the magical happy ending Lynn needed the strip to have.
Marciuliano: Sally and Ted will be holding their tongue about the disaster that everyone who isn't Jackie, Ralph and Sally's mother sees coming lest they be rebuffed when the inevitable happens.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

The Human Cost:
Johnston: A wondrous time was had by everyone who was invited to the adult table at the reception. The Martian watching the kiddies...not so much.
Marciuliano: Sally will be depicted as feeling as if she's aged ten years...just like what would happen if it happened to you or me.
Advantage: Marciuliano.

This means that in every way that matters, Cesco Marciuliano has done the world the enormous favor of showing us how horrible a real Settlepocalypse would be.

As is fairly commonly known, the collection that had as it central focus the Big Fat Fake Wedding was called "With this ring." Unlike most collections, which only had the pointless inserts and altered dialog we'd come to expect, that one had text segments that gave us some background on why the characters did what they did and wanted what they wanted. I expect that the same will hold true for the latest collection about the Settlepocalypse. We'll learn valuable things about the characters. Things like:

- Therese was evil and crazy for not wanting to live like a Patterson.

- Evil and Crazy Mira forced Deanna into the evil and unfeminine career-path of being a pharmacist.

- Francoise is stubborn, evil and crazy for not wanting the woman for whom her father destroyed every single chance to make something of himself to control her life.

and

- why April has nothing to look forward to but earning her place in this world like all the other bad people the Pattersons know.

I can hardly wait to see how it is that Lynn tries to palm off the sordid business-deal non-proposal and tastelessly rushed wedding into something glorious and good.

There are two things that are horrifyingly amazing about the Settlepocalypse: the general feeling of melancholy and the desire of the people who tell Lynn she has a camera in their house to see it as being romantic and joyous. The former is fairly easy to explain: this exercise in vulgarity is the culmination of a pattern of obsessive and destructive behavior. Liz and Anthony, while not especially liking one another, plowed through lives in an effort to be together. Since they wasted all the joy they'll ever experience on deceit, manipulation and betrayal, it seems obvious that the hoped-for union looks like the culmination of a business deal. The gushing and cooing of Kool-Aid Nation is even easier to explain: they see two established characters getting married and conclude it must be romantic despite not looking like it is. They were gratified to receive permission to ignore their eyes from the creator. This allows them to say that just because we don't see things, that doesn't mean they're not there. This is, of course, their way of saying that they don't care that Lynn is a failure. They refuse to see that we have to see all the things that happen so we know they did.

As we know, the Settlepocalypse has become a tawdry farce of a wedding which is a sick tribute to how vulgar and stupid the Pattersons are. From the awful color scheme, the ugly clothes and oppressively tacky decorations, it shows us how utterly devoid of class, charm and intellect they are. What makes it worse is that they refuse to acknowledge that they're responsible for the ugliness that confronts them. They bleat about how they wanted things kept simple and whine about how other people just happen to want to be part of the magic and force complexity on them. This shows that they still haven't gotten acquainted with the odd little concept called personal responsibility. Even if the hands that hold the mortgages hadn't made it clear that they should be given free stuff, it's up to them to actively say no to things they don't want. Since they didn't stop people from being part of things, they shouldn't complain about all the tawdriness.

As we all know, Jim's recent heart attack is supposed to derail the Kitsch Horror Wedding somehow. Instead of having the Big Fancy Wedding of her idiot mother's dreams, Liz will suddenly realize that Family matters more than Material Goods and rush off to Jim's hotel room so as to have the simple wedding she wanted and people are supposed to have anyway. This is, of course, a Warped Aesop that's so far removed from the reality of the strip that it inspires derisive hooting instead of the praise Lynn wants. Not only does it seem obvious that Liz barely seems to be aware that Jim exists, the Pattersons are the most materialistic load of bumpkins to mar the surface of the planet. What makes this situation even more appalling is that we got so caught up in deriding the wedding planning, we overlook all the signs that Liz was going to lead a convoy of people to the Treacly Annoyance Wedding at the hospital. This tells me that as she says her I do to Anthraxny, Jim can dance off to Batiuk's Great White Void to be as one with Marian, Farley, the grandfather from Family Circus and Lisa Moore. Not only must we retch at the hokey fakeness of it all, we also have t endure the gushing praise of the Camera-in-my-living-room Squadron.

A while back, I speculated that in the event that Liz has any sort of problem down the line, her family will take Anthony's side owing to their own basic stupidity and selfishness. When that happens, they'll have a powerful ally in the holy cause of lionizing and cooing over a selfish and manipulative bully: his mother. As howtheduck has said, there have been signs of her presence in the background backing his desire to be loyal to the Pattersons, signs that were confirmed by the strip for the ninth of August. As we all know, Elly found that she liked Mrs Caine because of the woman's desire to bow down and worship the Holy Family of Suburbia. Her husband might want her son to stay married to the Evil Career Woman but that's because Anthony's Dad is set up as being Evil himself; she, like the people of Mtigwaki, know that he and Liz are fated to be together.

As we've seen and will continue to see, the presence of Lawrence Poirier, Token Gay, is a divisive one. His recent appearance, accompanied with a reminder of gay marriage ha split what fan base Lynn has left into those who don't care one way or another about him and those who hate it that they've been reminded that gay people exist. Since his sexual orientation is about the only thing that makes him more important than Gap-Toothed, Smiley-Faced "HOOOOO!!!!!" Guy, it seems to me that Lynn might have placed him there deliberately so we could read hate mail in Coffee Talk. This has three advantages. First, she gets to play the martyr as incensed people scream and holler at her for placing her politics in the strip when she should be putting theirs in. Second, she gets to conflate all her other critics with the lunatic fringe. Third, she has people so wound up about the issue that they forget there's a Kitsch Abomination Wedding between two pathetic losers going on.

Like all families, the Pattersons have a lot of days of the year that they must remember. They can be good days such as birthdays and anniversaries or bad such as the anniversary of someone's death but they have a mean to the Foobs that other days do not. What's more, most of them can remember when a particular day was simply another calendar day. A case in point is the first day of April; up until 1991, it was simply another day of the year. There's another day that I can think of that currently holds no meaning for the Pattersons: the twenty-third of August. After this year, it will be Elizabeth and Antony's anniversary but as it stands, it's just another late summer day. There's a problem with their not respecting this particular date, though. Through some strange coincidence, it just happens to be the day when Therese married Anthony. To a person who's always half-way assumed that the Pattersons regard her as little more than an obstacle to be removed, selecting the day she'd thought all her dreams would come true as the day the rival she believes to be plotting her ruin as the day she gets to sink her hooks into her ex would seem a deliberate insult. To do so, though, would be to malign the Pattersons unfairly; they're far too stupid to go out of their way to be hurtful. This act of nastiness is caused by one hundred percent Grade A idiocy. They were simply following someone else's suggestion. Anthony's contribution to the planning of his wedding is, sadly, the date. He clearly wants to repeal a mistake he'd made once and make the day good again.

As you know, we've predicted that Meredith and Francoise will get into a tiff over who'll get to be the lead flower girl and that Robin will mislay the rings entrusted to his care. This, of course, will be yet another example of Lynn's most favorite plot device: presenting children as an annoyance. That being said, it's clear that the children have a different and individual take on what's going on around them than the adults. From what we've seen of her, Meredith probably views the Settlepocalypse as a great big party where she gets to wear a pretty dress. Since she's six, she's not exactly willing to share the spotlight with some timid little girl that she doesn't know that well. The fact that said baby is the daughter of the man Auntie Lizardbreath is marrying doesn't enter into her thinking; as far as she can see, it's her big day and that's that. As for Francoise, this is yet another scary part of dealing with the Silly Sandwich Lady and her family. She's afraid Liz is trig to steal her daddy, she knows the Pattersons don't feel comfortable around her and she's worried that the blond girl will be pushing her around and getting away with it. The wedding itself is going to reinforce those fears as will Liz's failure to respond in a productive manner to the child's emotional state. As for Robin, it's just some annoying thing where he's told to sit still and wear something itchy.

As we know, Liz had a fairly lousy time of it as a teenager. There were many reasons for this. First off, she had difficulties handling stress. When she wasn't acting out because of hurt feelings she was too timid to talk to someone about, she felt overwhelmed by all the details and basically shut down. At the first reverse, she immediately quit, whining about how hard everything was. Her idea of getting help from someone was to have that person do all the work for her. To her, the pride of accomplishment meant little because nobody ever really gave her credit for it. No matter what she did, her ugly brother was always there messing with her and she couldn't get him to stop.

She also had deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Even if Mike hadn't been acting out on his own feelings of inferiority by lashing out at her, she still would have spent her youth moaning about how nobody really liked her. This is because she had an extended awkward period after years of being praised for being pretty. When the attention faded away with her looks, her self-esteem went with it. She was too preoccupied with feeling bad to notice that she had a pretty good life.

This has left us with a bitter, entitled woman who feels that everyone else has to make her wedding perfect while she just stands there in her white dress looking perfect. They should not expect thanks because her life was sooooo hard.