dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
2017-06-02 01:00 am

The competence conundrum.

The VERY interesting thing about watching Mike stand there and get lectured about how, despite his unshaking and unshakable belief otherwise, people aren't actually all bit performers content to be bystanders in the drama of the life of Michael T Patterson, Axis About Which This World Rotates is having to notice the real reason why the editor took apart his very good story: someone had to come in after the fact and tell the city editor who the Hell crashed in the first place!!!

That's right, people! Michael had the one job (find out what's happening and who it's happening to) and Mister "The Living Buried The Dead" was too busy being a pompous, grandstanding twerp to bother actually doing it. Not, of course, that Lynn or the Pattersons see it that way. Just as when a Patterson blurts out a brainless pseudoprofundity about how prairie and prayer HAVE to be connected, she's wise beyond her years instead of being a ferblondzhet idiot with an advanced case of recto-cranial loopback, we have to deal with the following truism:

The more obviously inept a Patterson is at what he or she is supposed to do, the more we are supposed to believe in his or her being scarily competent and also too awesome to actually live.
dreadedcandiru2: (Default)
2017-06-01 07:41 am

The sad miracle of the inflammation of the brain.

The odd thing about the whole business about the Circle of Life bird's nest is that we have to deal with an annoying trend that makes the Pattersons look like worse people than they actually should be: their insistence on being abysmally ill-informed about pretty much everything while at the same time being convinced of their having the best words and the best knowledge. The reason for their being given a free pass for being a whole damned family of Cliff Clavin can best be summed up by the following rule of thumb:

If a character is attempting to appear profound, intelligent or worldly-wise and, in doing so, reveals him or herself to be laughably ignorant, we should take the incoherent and factually incorrect gibberish he or she pushes past his lips to be the Wisdom of the Gods.

which is balanced by the corollary

1. If someone who is not a Patterson offends a Patterson by saying something that most people would regard as both reasonable and sensible, that person is in the wrong.

2. If April is oppressing another Patterson by saying something reasonable and sensible that he or she doesn't feel like hearing, she can be considered a non-Patterson.


This is why April is an extra-selfish drama garbage troll princess person for making ill-informed and selfish drama queen noise about how Liz is big enough to get her own damned apartment and should also maybe feel guilty about rewarding a skeevy little thief.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-17 01:47 am

The eternal quest for maturity.

As you will recall, one of the things that really made a mess of Mike's romantic entanglements is his inflated self-image. As what I called Foob Fact Seven mandates, Mike believed that he was a much better catch than he actually was; while we saw a paranoid, touchy ignoramus with an inability to trust, forgive or understand, Mike still manages to blame all the mess Martha is going through now on being mean to the coolest kid ever.

The reason that I mention this is that it also makes him something of a pain in the ass to raise. While John and Elly are content to blame this on his reaching a certain age, history teaches us that his mistaken belief that he was being held back by parents who didn't want to admit that he was their peer has always made his life a mess. What he's at pains to avoid admitting is that his belief that he looks like an adult is so much nonsense because it would mean admitting something he doesn't want to. It means admitting that people who ain't gonna shut up about it are right for the wrong damned reasons. It's one thing to be an arrogant goof who thinks he's ready for things he ain't; it's quite another to be bossed around by nitwit parents who make that the case owing to what we can call

Foob Fact Forty-Eight B: Since Elly and John would far rather win arguments at any cost because they inflate the downside of letting their kids be right about something, the result of their damn-the-consequences belief that they have to win all the time has created passive idiot children who, despite their belief otherwise, can't cope with life's demands.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-16 01:15 am
Entry tags:

The librarians and the zeroth fact.

As we know, when the library staff had no choice but to let Elly go, she stood around thought-bubbling that they must not really have liked her at all because none of them volunteered to save her from the inevitable. Given that she's more or less still the spoiled child her saboteur mother Marian despaired of, she assumes that somehow, they were destroyed for being mean to her and laughing at her behind her back. What she's never going to figure out is that something far worse and more damaging to her self-concept was taking place; this is because the three of them lamented being made to take away one of the few things that made one of life's also-rans feel as if she had a purpose in life. It would probably kill Elly to realize that most people see her as either a volatile nitwit with entitlement issues or a pathetic loser who needs a bone thrown to her to make up for a threadbare and unhappy existence.

Similarly, John is seen as a rather ludicrous hermit with a bizarre fixation, Mike as a terrible father and parent, Liz as another charity case who needs to be married to yet another pathetic idiot who can't really make it and April as a screaming loon baying about a has-been. This disconnect between their glorious self-image and what people actually see is best expressed as the zeroth Foob Fact:

Foob Fact Zero: When most people think of the Patterson family, they either see an average family more or less similar to their own or as mildly sinister incompetents who don't realize how dim they are.

This is why it's always rather annoying to have to watch Elly huff and puff about how she and her family should have final say over everything that happens in the strip. This is a woman who isn't smart enough to run her own life but she arrogates to herself the right to decide if it's okay for Ed and Thelma to simply date sort of and not rush to the altar for fear of offending every random idiot on the face of the Earth. If Elly had a competent mother who could see what was in front of her instead of clucking her stupid tongue and saying that a child who thought she was despised knew she was loved, we might not have to deal with calamities like Lizzie getting double-teamed by moron parents who don't accept human weakness.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-15 01:56 am
Entry tags:

The golden age of misaimed martyrdom.

As we know, we're about to launch into years of endless moaning and complaining and martyrdom as Lynn berates her children for becoming adolescent. This endless screeching about how evil and cruel and heartless her boring-ass teenagers are is made all the more insufferable when it's made obvious that the kids haven't suddenly changed just because they reach an arbitrary milestone. Mike was always a sullen doorknob who thought people hated him because they expected him to do stuff and Liz was always a clingy weirdo who was obsessed with her looks and April was always sort of blamed for everything wrong anyway so turning a certain age had little to do with anything. The problem is that Elly had convinced herself that before this milestone, they were easier to deal with but the sudden onset of adolescence is a calamity despite the fact (made manifest by the incident in which she wailed moronically about her baby vanishing and being replaced with a hostile stranger who wanted to destroy her when Lizzie turned two) that she couldn't ever stand to be in their presence.

This is akin to how Elly has always seen herself as fat, ugly and thus unworthy of love while insisting that at an earlier time when she was also convinced of her decreptitude and fungibility, she had no problem with her appearance. This delusion that a life that was always one of martyrdom, pointless arguments and even more pointless punishments was a paradise from which they fell owing to the chaotic influence of the children is the first of the final Foob Facts:

Foob Fact Fifty: As a general rule, the Pattersons view whatever moment they are living in as being a precipitous decline from a happy past; said imaginary fall from grace is thought to lead them to a horrible future.

Of course, when I say a horrible future, I mean the collapse of John and Elly's marriage. Every God-damned panicky over-reaction to a non-event has as its basis Elly's dread that somehow, her marriage will die and she will thus become a discreditable threat to society like Ted or pre-marriage Connie and Phil just like her reproving shrew of a mother thought she would. This is the final means by which Elly's juvenile thinking and fear of chaos hampers her life because the reason she doesn't feel like mourning Thelma next June has to do with

Foob Fact Fifty-One: The Pattersons regard getting and remaining married as the be-all and end-all of human existence; this means that single people and people who cohabit are trying to destroy the world and usher in an era where Marian still wins everything all the time like when Elly was a kid.

and (of course)

Foob Fact Fifty-Two: Most of Elly's less pleasant behaviour has as its source the fact that her yapping moron of a mother refused to understand that Elly took the withering barrage of criticism she spewed for "her own good" to mean that Elly herself was worthless; she also fails to understand that her idiotic over-reaction to Elly's displaying a personality of her own has blighted the world with a woman who cannot deal with conflict.

This means that every time Elly freaks out, she, as I've said before, does so due to the reasonable fear that her idiot mother will barge in and take over and not realize how fucking damaging being the short-sighted, house-proud and rock stupid muttonhead called 'an Englishwoman' does to children and other living things.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-14 01:12 am

On the Foob Facts of hypocritical parenting.

As you have all long known, I've got a lot of trouble with how John and Elly say one thing and do another. From John's thinking that spanking Mike will teach him to not to hit people to Elly's criticism of her children for the terrible eating habits she possesses, it's clear that the Pattersons are a pair of sanctimonious frauds who don't like the idea that they're to blame for the worst of their children's habits. As by way of example, Mike's endless wailing about how nobody loves him because they insist that he get off his fat ass and help has as its source Elly's own infinite moaning about work...but you can't tell Elly that or else you'll get yelled at. This is because of what I like to call:

Foob Fact Forty-Eight: The most irritating side-effect of John and Elly's previously established refusal to admit that what they do has consequences if said consequences are negative is that they don't bother to establish an especially good example.

After all, it's clearly the children's fault that they still have bad habits because it's as clear as anything to John and Elly that they're perfect. We see in John a cruel, thoughtless, insenstive, boorish, chickenhearted, humorless and self-absorbed nincompoop on a power trip while he sees himself as a great guy and in Elly, someone who is rather the reverse of loving, fair, firm, calm or kind despite telling herself she's all of those things. This leads us to:

Foob Fact Forty-Nine: When held to account for their children's failings, John and Elly tend to arrogate to themselves positive qualities that they do not possess.

Since they lack self-awareness, it's clear that they don't see what hypocrites and blunderers they are. Why, they don't even acknowledge the biggest mistake they make when dealing with their children. It's a mistake so glaring, it deserves its own blog entry...which I will provide tomorrow along with the final facts.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-13 12:15 am
Entry tags:

On the pecking order.

I should think that the thing that is not the Pattersons' terrible table manners that most annoys an outsider is watching them make a whole load of glum wailing about how everybody loves someone else the best. Time and again, we have to watch X be friendly to Y and have Z come along and moan "Now Dawn loves Candace/Shawna-Marie best and she doesn't love me at ALL!!!" owing to a very stupid way the Pattersons have of seeing the world. Just as Mike is still convinced that sharing the spotlight with his siblings means that he's chased away from it and kicked and laughed at for wanting love he can't deserve, Liz can't live in a world where three isn't a crowd because of what we can call the forty-sixth Foob Fact:

Foob Fact Forty-Six: The Pattersons are obsessed with who has the most power in a relationship because they're convinced it's not them.

What makes it all the more annoying is that they're so obsessed with the vision of being packed onto the curb to be hauled off with all the other obsolete trash is that they can't speak English properly. I should think that someone's Freudian slip is showing when Elly insists on calling "family dynamics" "family politics" because of that obsession with who gets to be Lord Muck. Given their reliance on biased sources (as was evidenced by Liz being told Therese's back-story by two men who fear and hate what she represents) and their lack of curiosity, we end up contending with yet another Foob Fact:

Foob Fact Forty-Seven: Owing to a collective drive towards solipsism, the Pattersons tend not to be especially well-informed or overly concerned with the proper use of certain words.

(It should be noted that Lynn herself has this tendency. She seems to be so fixated on avenging herself on the evil people who tell her that she doesn't know what she's talking about and being proven right all the time that she unfailingly misuses "vindicate" where "validate" makes more sense.)
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-12 01:45 am
Entry tags:

The very bad question that is bad.

As I recall correctly, it's been three years since one of the stupidest arcs in the strip's history. This is because Elly spent entirely too damned long wailing about how horrible it was that Mike wanted to dress up like what a boring kid from the 'burbs thought a punk-rocker looked like. While deep down, she was simply tripping because he had an idea on his own and that meant she was obsolete now and had to be put out of her misery, her public irrational panic rotated around the idea that since nuclear war made him turn his back on happiness and goodness and niceness, he wanted to become an enemy of the forces of law and order and get into trouble with the police. In both cases, a very stupid woman took a look at a harmless event and spiralled off into a vortex of lunatic idiocy. Also, in both cases, her 'evil' mother showed her lack of faith in and hatred of her by asking the worst possible question ever: "Why did you think that his dressing up like Ziggy Stardust would inevitably lead to his getting gunned down by the police and left to rot as a warning?"

Marian is great at asking evil questions like that because she asks another sort of evil question: "Why did you expect that this Brad person would be friends with Mike just because you thought he would? A mean kid is going to stay mean no matter what Mike does." This habit of Marian's of asking terrible questions that ruin people's lives is, of course, because like most outsiders, Marian is hampered in her quest to get Elly to think straight by another Foob Fact:

Foob Fact Forty-Five: As a general rule, the Pattersons tend to not anticipate the normal consequences of an action and prefer to live in a world where everything might result in either an insane and implausible catastrophe or boundless success.

This living in a world wherein everything that's trying to kill them had a baby with everything that wants to because they hate how wonderful the Pattersons are is the reason for something that baffles and disturbs most people who have to interact with them. As you know from my comments about the Declining Years, someone unfamiliar with the family would reel with horror when confronted with something that looks like the deck of the Flying Dutchman. To the untrained eye, we seem to see a group of phantoms that pass through one another without interacting; this resolves into the troubling real-life image of something that's a family in name only. Most people by now have grown used to the fact that the Pattersons look and act like a group of strangers to one another who happen to share a house and a last name without quite realizing that their fear of a simple comment leading to the Apocalypse is what keeps them from really bonding as people.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-11 01:25 am
Entry tags:

The kid in the hospital and the road to the zeroth fact.

Now to get back to the horrible mess that is how Elly made one stupid mistake after another in telling April how to deal with that repulsive shitbird Jeremy, let's remind ourselves that her last great big stupid piece of advice was to force April to be nice to a sonofabitching looney-tune nincompoop who wanted to cripple her child because the only reason the dumb sack of shit could come up with for her liking the harmonica is that she knew something she only learned when he was in a body cast and felt bad for afterwards.

The problem is that Elly didn't and doesn't see a festering sore on the buttocks of humanity when she thinks of the wretched little delinquent. She continues to see a misunderstood little fellow who'd be wonderful company if her closed-minded daughter would get off of her high horse and give the criminally insane and congenitally stupid a chance. This is, sadly, an instance of yet another axiom by which we may know, understand, fear, hate and avoid the Patterson family:

Foob Fact Forty-Four: By and large, the Pattersons tend to be terrible judges of character owing to a distinct lack of curiosity as to motives.

This is why Elly doesn't understand that people were not going to line up to visit a hot mess who made school a more oppressive place to be. It's why Liz thinks that Therese yearns to see her die alone and unloved. It's why Mike thought that Liz was plotting his destruction. It's why April thought that Becky should have been thrilled to wham away at a tambourine so a dumb kid could go on an ego trip. It's why John is at odds with a family he can't be asked to get to know. It's also why it took him so damned long to figure out that Ted's mother is mostly why he was a bachelor so damned long.

The interesting thing about this is that it's all leading to a fact that would rattle the Pattersons to their bones if they knew it. I'll get to that fact after I tell you about the worst question you can ask a Patterson.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-10 01:51 am

On the protection of face and also innocence.

The interesting thing about the upcoming week is not that we're introduced to Thelma's new love interest or that this is the last time we actually see Mrs B before Elly wonders why she didn't do more for an old lady who she didn't especially like or care about. The interesting thing is that yet again, Elly expected that The Quality Women would show up and lynch her stupid ass because Lizzie wanted to know what was going on around her and asked questions instead of doing what a nice child would do and being in a total fog where she didn't know anything and didn't care to know either because that way, her lack of curiosity or interest wouldn't cause trouble for her parents.

This fear of what people might say or think if the kids knew what was going on around them or knew things that made their folks upset or scared or embarrassed can best be formulated as follows:

Foob Fact Forty-Three: Given the Pattersons' exaggerated dread of public embarrassment, they seem to be at pains to suppress their children's curiosity so as to shield themselves from censure.

This need to keep the children from saying something that might make people who don't actually give a photon in a solar wind about what they say or think that it says anything at all about Elly's competence has an interesting side effect that the Pattersons aren't aware of. Said interesting bit of blowback is that we live in a world in which people ask themselves who exactly Elly thinks she's fooling when she acts like Lady Muck or what precisely does she think is going to happen if her children do things like ask someone to their face what's going on.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-09 01:04 am

April has cathode-ray poisoning.

The irritating thing about having to remember that Jeremy's clever plan to get April alone so he could knock her the Hell off of her bicycle and punish the Patterson family for taunting him because everyone knew that his daddy left him to play a harmonica by having them deal with a hopeless cripple is not that he's as crazy as a shit house rat, dumber than a load of manure and as mean as a rattle-snake; it's that April thinks that he didn't want witnesses to his running over her like his bicycle was a sedan.

What bothered some people is why does April not look back and see the broken spine and broken life she was going to get because she fixated on the idea of something totally implausible like getting run over by a ten-speed? How much television does this child watch and how badly does it warp her perception of events? If you said "too damned much" and "to a frightening degree" to that last question, you're probably ready for another Foob Fact:

Foob Fact Forty-Two: Elly and John seem to have allowed the television set to become a third parent in their household; since the one that plugs in tells the children that they're smart and loved and wanted, they follow its teachings instead of those of the angry idiot living people who are angry with them all the time.

This is, I should think, why Mike seems to have thought that Elly was bad for wanting to be a person in her own right instead of a sitcom monster and why Liz thought she was the victim protagonist of a soaper like Days of Our Lives or What Next For Weird Betty? Elly can't be asked to pay them attention because it's messy, boring and difficult so she let the box raise them to think that they can get run over by bicycles.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-08 01:56 am

On the root source of stupid advice.

I think that we can all agree that the advice Elly gave her children over the years about how to deal with bullies is at best useless and at worst downright dangerous. Mean people like Brad, Richard and Jeremy don't become suddenly wonderful if you avoid them or befriend them or do anything like Elly says to them. That being said, we're supposed to regard it as a victory for Elly's beliefs that Jermy Wormy Jeremy simply insults and demeans April and has for now foresworn hitting her. There's a good God-damned reason for this and also, a Foob Fact:

Foob Fact Forty-One: Elly is too damned obsessed with the surface impression she and her family might make when they do things and can't be asked to care about anything deeper than the merely superficial.

Not only is this why Elly is at pains to present a good image while either shrugging feebly or whining about persecution when asked to address anything deeper than how she looks, it's also why she has her children do stupid things against their best interest like this. She doesn't want to look like a bad person who doesn't give people a chance when people might comment on it so she indulges thieves and ignores evidence that tells her that her youngest child was getting the shit kicked out of her by a God-damned lunatic. She also ignores the fact that she's set things up so that her child doesn't even understand what was about to happen to her.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-07 01:11 am

The Richard perplex.

As we all know, Lynn appears to have been going to a real "boy next door" thing by pairing Christopher off with Liz before her questionable decision to more or less write Anne's children out of the strip because she couldn't bear to look at someone who "tolerated" infidelity. What got lost in the transition to Anthony is the fact that history teaches us that Richard hates Lizzie and does his damnedest to be a shit to her because he can. From being a malicious pile of crap to her about ice cream and chores to being a rat-bastard about swings and missing dogs, it's clear that he shares Michael's yearning that Lizzie would somehow disappear forever and make his life good and keep him from having everything taken away from him and all the other crap he spouts when he's told to grow up and stop expecting to be coddled.

If Lynn had pursued this, we would have been reminded of another of my Foob Facts:

Foob Fact Forty: Michael suffers from confused thinking and believes that Elizabeth is somehow to blame for his life being 'bad' because he doesn't understand that correlation does not mean causation; this results in his daffy belief that if she were to be made to disappear, he would be treated better.

when it would be revealed that Richard suffered from the misapprehension that Lizzie wants to take his brother away from him and ruin his life and be mean to him because he's the same sort of crazy-as-a-shithouse-rat idiot Mike and Jeremy turned out to be. Were that to be the case, he'd be just another idiot male with fragility issues.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-06 01:40 am
Entry tags:

Being fooby means never having to say "I'm sorry."

As we know, the current aggravating annoyance of an arc seems to have been touched off because a little creep with a power trip decided to come along and make a pain in the ass of himself by siccing Elly on Lizzie. When we combine this with all of the times wherein Elly was terrified out of her tiny mind because her banishing her kids from her sight blew up in her fact, we wind up with what can be called Foob Fact Thirty-Six:

Fact: Elly usually has to rely on other people to tell her what her children are doing because she's too up her own arse to care.

This, of course, mutates into a reminder that when the chips are down, the kids can count on Elly to be there with stupid advice about how losers need to win or how people who demean you for shits and giggles are just lonely or some such nonsense that just shows how out of touch she is. This is best expressed as Foob Fact Thirty-Seven:

Fact: Elly is loaded with dubious and/or downright destructive advice that her children have to take seriously.

What makes this all the worse is best exemplified by Elly being told flat-out that the reason Jeremy Jones wanted to beat the shit out of April was his belief that she somehow knew that his daddy left him to play harmonica and wanted to rub it in. Instead of saying to herself "Holy Balls! I wanted my daughter to make nice to a God-damned psycho. I should be ashamed of myself", she kept on with the loser-needs-to-win crap because of Foob Fact Thirty-Eight:

Fact: When the facts arrange themselves in such a manner as to make explicit the folly of following an older person's bad advice, said elder cannot apologize lest he or she be diminished in his own eyes.

and Thirty-Nine:

Fact: Apologizing for screwing up is only for people without power.

because admitting that she was wrong about the little bogan would mean that she wouldn't be allowed to be right about anything. This is because she herself is a God-damned lunatic obsessed with the tiny bit of power she's got over others.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-05 01:33 am

The accountability absence effect.

There is, of course, a definite reason as to why it is that the Patterson parents felt as if they had no control over their kids and were fighting for their lives. It might look to an outsider that we're dealing with petty idiots shrieking about next to nothing but a close examination shows us that they'd wasted their lives and warped their kids because they couldn't see what was in front of them. I've told you about their genetic inability to see what's right about their lives but I have yet to remind you of Foob Fact Thirty-Four:

Fact: John and Elly are burdened with the delusion that how they feel about an action is what the person intended.

The best example of this is Lizzie's good-faith mistake of breaking that damned milk bag. She didn't mean to inconvenience a pair of fragile morons but you can't tell them that. Every damned time a kid does something stupid or silly out of sheer blank-witted ineptitude, there's old Elly thinking that her children are plotting her destruction because she doesn't know how cause and effect work. She also doesn't know how memories work because of her idiotic belief that everyone who is not her or Phil is supposed to forget all the hurt feelings and constant blathering about how terrible it is to do chores and how horrible and ungrateful everyone is for also having emotional needs and how everyone is supposed to not do the stupid crap she does and so on and so forth. This leaves us stuck with Foob Fact Thirty-Five.

Fact: Since they fear condemnation more than anything else, John and Elly behave as if whatever they might be doing has no connection to how their children act when it reflects badly on them.

If Mike thinks that growing up means losing the ability to enjoy life and hating laughter and wanting to crush people who still can, it has nothing to do with Elly's short temper or John's fear of being seen as a sympathetic person with problems like they have, it's his being wicked. If Lizzie feels as if she doesn't belong, it has nothing to do with Elly's dumb advice or John getting angry at her because she feels lost and unloved. If April doesn't want anything to do with them unless it's absolutely necessary, it's not got a bit to do with being shat on by boomer assholes who resent being parents at their age. Nothing is ever their fault so they can't destroy themselves by admitting error or apologizing for idiot cruelty.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-04 01:45 am

Why it's also funny that John and Elly sabotage themselves.

The irritating thing about this 'my children are my enemy' crap John and Elly are into is that it's based on a lot of very stupid assumptions that really only ever made everything worse. The first of these great stupid ideas that limit their effectiveness as parents relates to Elly standing around wailing about how children have to be taught things and how they only ever seem to care about their own concerns instead of things that really matter (by which I mean 'her concerns') because they're bad and selfish and want to hurt her because they hate her. This need to pillory the children for acting like children instead of coming out of the womb as child-hating idiots like her and John is best summarized as Foob Fact Thirty:

Fact: Elly tends to assume that her children know more than they actually can because that would make her life easier. Since she can't admit to that being stupid, she ascribes the onset of reality to her children being evil.

This need to fear and hate childhood as a process because it requires her to actually earn her status would be bad enough were it not for the end result of Marian's stupid habit of rearranging her kitchen to suit her own needs as a means of reminding Elly that she doesn't intend ruining her by making her feel like she's loved and respected because she 'knows' something a literal-minded idiot built to see only bad things cannot. This need to receive praise that only came when Phil came along and finally managed to convince their mother that people like Elly actually exist and that she wouldn't see as real anyway owing to that mental defect I keep talking about leads us to Foob Fact Number Thirty-One:

Fact: Elly has a very rigid way of doing things and feels as if the world might end and as if people hate her and yearn to see her destruction if they do things their own way.

To continue merrily along, let's remind ourselves that John sees doom and ruin coming too but from a different direction. He cultivates this mystique of being an unapproachable figure the children can neither know or identify with because he sees being known to have things in common with them as a weapon that can be used to destroy him. He might turn around and cluck about how strange and silly his kids are for not sharing his interests or knowing much about him but, hell, Foob Facts Thirty-Two:

Fact: John needs to preserve his image as a stern, unyielding authority figure more than he wants to be a valued part of his family's life.

and Thirty-Three:

Fact: John isn't exactly burdened with curiosity as to what other people care for or about or how they see the world and this limits his effectiveness as a husband and father.

combine with his short fuse to make him look like a menacing cipher that no one can love. Every so often, it occurs to him that he has no friends and no one will come to his side when he's ailing but he can't see why because of a fact that I'll get to tomorrow.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-03 01:43 am

The Tao of Trash-Bag Johnny.

Now, it looks as if I'd missed a key Foob Fact that explains why Elly and the kids don't get along very well but first, I'd like to remind you of the bludgeon she uses to enforce her off-kilter vision of perfection: John. The reason that he's such a handy weapon is owing to his not being very smart and not really spending much time asking why he's supposed to beat the crap out of Mike this time. This is where Foob Facts Twenty-Five:

Fact: Outside of a very narrow range of competence, John is an astonishingly stupid, ignorant and ill-informed man who's pretty much too stupid to understand how stupid he actually is.

, Twenty-Six

Fact: If things don't go exactly his way, John turns into a humorless rage-goblin who takes out his frustrations on his son because the alternative is getting over his damned self like someone without power.

and Twenty-Seven:

Fact: John is insanely jealous of the very little bit of authority he's been granted and views its potential loss as a crime against nature.

come into play. It's pretty much impossible to watch John interact with anyone for very long without seeing a maniac obsessed with the dread that he's supposed to bow down and surrender his power to others when 'everyone' knows that this, that and the other thing happen and if it happens to work to his benefit, he didn't make the rules. He just enforces them. The reason is, of course, due to Foob Fact Twenty-Eight:

Fact: John hasn't had an original idea in his sixty-seven years on the planet; the contents of his brain are self-serving folk wisdom and crap he gleaned together from sugar packets.

and Twenty-Nine:

Fact: John has never actually met any of the people in his life because he slots them into categories that serve his needs.

Since John is a narrow-minded dope who doesn't know what's going on and who the players are, it makes him the ideal goon. It makes him a terrible father by most people's terms but, well, not by Elly's.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-02 01:49 am

Elly's crusades, part three: the blowback variations.

To continue on with why Elly wasted most of her children's childhoods racing around in a state of moral panic, let's remind us of why she's at odds with her mother Marian. As I've said too damned many times in the past, the part of Elly's brain that has to focus on imperfections and won't be reassured makes it next to impossible for her to even consider that her mother is in her own dim way trying to help her be a happier person when she nags her. This leads us to what we can call Foob Fact Twenty-One:

Fact: Since her brain is hard-wired to never see what's good in her life, Elly seems to not have outgrown the belief that when people criticize her, it means that they hate her and want to see her suffer; this means that she doesn't get better and things and never develops anything like a sense of responsibilty.

This leads us to what sets her at odds with Mike, Lizzie and April: the fact that she envies them because at least they don't have a heartless monster like her own mother who can only find fault. Despite the fact that early on, she had occasional glimmers of awareness that she was the same sort of mother inflicting the same sort of damage out of the same vanity, the Elly of the Middle Years onwards seems to have come to believe that love was everything she did. Every tirade, every demeaning lecture that made her children feel like crap, it came from love so it confused her that her children didn't seem happy. They must have been faking feeling terrible to make her feeling bad about loving them because children aren't smart enough to know what's good for them. This is best capsulized as Foob Facts Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three:

Fact: Elly firmly believes that her job is to teach her children to reject all the things they like because they by definition cannot know what's good for them.

and

Fact: Despite constantly bemoaning the fact that a childhood that she perceived as a bleak Hell-world where she was abused and trivialized because she didn't get her own way all the time has blighted her life, Elly seems to believe that nothing that happens to her children can possibly matter because of a self-serving belief in their resilience.

Since children can't know what's best for them and since children can just walk off being made to feel unloved and unappreciated because it makes life easier and since Elly thinks that having to consider how her actions might affect her kids as their being made the boss of her, it stands to reason that the reason she protests arenas and makes pious noise about how the crowd should be ashamed of itself for expecting Lizzie to fit in is the result of Foob Fact Twenty-Four:

Fact: Elly can only care about how her actions affect her personally because of that fear of being run over by her children that I mentioned.

After all, the in crowd at the junior high isn't going to say anything nasty to her if Liz doesn't wear Boston Original so Lizzie shouldn't feel like garbage. And, hey, if the kids don't like it, she can just sic John on them and get them to like it.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-10-01 01:47 am

Elly's crusades, part two: the victory vexation.

Given who Elly is, you've probably guessed what Foob Fact Nineteen would have to be but let's start off by reminding ourselves of how quickly a situation escalates to Elly becoming a foaming-at-the-mouth maniac and then a whining martyr wailing about how much people all hate her and want her to suffer. I will be the first to admit that Mike was an insufferable little shit as a kid and the urge to just haul off and smack him is really hard to resist. The problem I have aside from the fact that it doesn't solve sweet [BOXCAR] all is why Elly does that. Most abusive assholes (Hey, Hi, Trash Bag Johnny and Greg Wilkins! Rot in Hell!) do that sort of thing to remind kids that Mommies and Daddies have all the rights and the only right a kid has is the one to remain silent. Elly's different. Elly isn't interested in reminding kids that she's got all the power because she won't admit she's got any. This leads us to the Foob Fact I'd mentioned:

Fact: Elly seems to see every little thing that happens to her as a sort of combat to the death with implacable and heartless opponents who will stoop at nothing to crush her. This makes sense to her owing to her own childhood career as the neighbourhood thug.

Not only is this why minor bullshit arguments turn into ungodly rows that Mommy refuses to get over, it's why we used to see the recurring image of the house looking like a bomb went off. Elly's fevered mind can only see one of two things: a sterile show-room out of a magazine or chaos and anarchy so should one single thing be out of place, the house is a mess and she's failed and the Quality Women will simply have someone shoot her and replace her with a good mother and so on into her going nuts seeing chaos wherever she goes. This is also why she can't look at her own reflection without seeing a very ugly woman no one could ever love. This leads us to Foob Fact Number Twenty:

Fact: Elly isn't really aware of it but she's hard-wired to fixate on flaws and imperfections and cannot see what's good in her life. This means that she cannot be consoled because she thinks people who see the good things are trying to trick her in order to mess with her.

Since she thinks everyone's out to destroy her and there's something wrong with her brain that makes her see her tidy, humdrum life as a dystopic Hell, it's fairly obvious why she makes every little damned thing into a big God-damned thing. It's also obvious that said state of unreasoning panic is why she can't be bothered to care how her actions affect others. More on that next.
dreadedcandiru2: (Snarky Candiru2)
2016-09-30 01:54 am

Elly's crusades, part the first: the comfort complexity.

Of course, Elly's need to let her fears, envies and hatreds run riot in the form of one sort of doomed crusade or another is not the only reason she indulges in great public displays of moralism. There is a very deep psychological need that must be fulfilled by her making an insufferable nuisance to those around her that isn't just her need to be horrible to people and her lust for power. The yearning seems to me to be best described as a yearning for comfort.

For years, I've been wanting to share my idea that the whole bloody Patterson saga was all about her seeking out a world in which she could finally feel comfortable living in. Given that we seem to have in her a Good Socialist who wants praise to be divorced from effort or merit, her idea of 'comfort' is best expressed by formulating what I call Foob Fact Number Eighteen:

Fact: Elly judges a person, event or cultural trend to be moral or a situation or mechanical contrivance to be fair in inverse proportion to the effort said person, device, trend, event or situation requires of her.

This is why she's always angry with her family and always screaming about injustice. She wants to drift through life getting her own way all the time and she doesn't want to be bothered with situations that require her to do things that are boring, messy, difficult or prove her to be in the wrong. This also means that if something or someone disrupts her mellow, she's going to want to crush it to death no matter what the cost because of another stupid belief that I'll get to tomorrow.