The Love Axiom

I know that it's been quite a while since I last posted here but a certain in-strip event haa taken place that took time to digest: Mike's boy-meets-girl, boy-ascribes-insanely-horrible-and-cruel motives to girl, boy torments girl for pants-on-head stupid and stomach-churningly cruel reason, boy alienates girl, boy learns fuck all saga. The reason that this distracted me is that I think that his boneheaded shenanigans in which he witlessly mistreated Martha for less than nothing serve as something of a template for how Romance Is Fit in the Foobosphere. When one remembers that he's still vaguely pissed off at her for being who she actually is instead of the person he would like her to be and that he's the son of a clodhopper who, having noticed that his wife is and always has been a poor fit for domesticity, retreats into a shed lest he find out why, one can safely formulate rules that explains why they mess up so often:

Axiom 7a:

Upon encountering a person he or she finds attractive physically, a Patterson (or Patterson-like entity) assigns his or her love interests personality traits that he or she finds pleasing.

Axiom 7b:

When it comes to pass that he or she learns that this person is who he or she actually is instead of being the fantasy creature he or she is "supposed" to be, a Patterson is within his or her rights to be angry about being tricked by a cruel monster who deceived him or her by being his or her actual self.

The April/Farley joint axiom.

The irritating thing about having to look at both April and Farley is remembering two things:
1) They either get the shit kicked out of them or are threatened with mayhem on a regular basis by damned near everyone in sight.
2) This is treated as not being an especially big deal because they are thought to deserve it for getting in someone else’s way or provoking them or whatever and besides, it’s not as if Elly or John were getting hurt or anything.
This is because something I like to call
Axiom 6a:
We aren’t supposed to care if a child or a dog gets fucked up because it’s not as if Lynn thinks that either really matter especially much.
This is, of course, Lynn has never made much of a secret of her disdain for dogs and her belief that children lead boring, pointless lives that do not matter to anyone including the children themselves. The reality that what we experience as children shapes who we become does not seem to appeal to Lynn because it implies that her need to run away from her kids might be why they are the way they are now.

The awareness axiom of Lizardbreath

As we all know, the Pattersons’ opinion of their own moral excellence has little bearing on reality. We have Elly and April loving saving face too damned much to admit to the anger and jealousy that consume them, we have John thinking that he’s a good guy that fallen moderns don’t understand and we have Mike grousing that he would be the good kid people like if it weren’t for the fact that everyone’s trying to crush him so they can laugh at him for wanting to be happy too. What these four sad losers have in common is that they’re aware that people don’t like what they do and it bothers them. Liz is different, though.

How Liz is different is simple: she isn’t really aware that people don’t like what she does and she isn’t aware of what she’s doing to begin with. The strip that best defines Liz has her stand around watching John and his model railroading buddies do their thing. We know that she’s too chicken and also kind of too dim to ask if she can participate but she doesn’t. When John says that if she’s just standing there like a mook, she can at least try to be useful, she’s enraged. She’s not some dimwit just standing around like a wooden Jesus in a country graveyard. She’ll prove that she’s not….and then, she’ll go back to hovering around in the background with that baffled, dead-eyed frown on her face because she doesn’t know what’s going on and she doesn’t like it anyway. This leaves us with:

Axiom 5b:

Elizabeth is pretty much devoid of anything like self-awareness and tends to ascribe herself positive traits she doesn’t have.

The sibling revilery axioms

Of course, it’s not just Mike’s belief that television is ‘real’ that makes him an insufferable jerk. We also have to deal with the fact that his stupid need for the worthless approval of his idiot parents and default negativity caused him to be a willing participant in his parents’ campaign to drive a wedge between him and Lizzie. Neither of them can see it but
Axiom 3e:
John and Elly don’t actually want their kids to get along for fear that they’ll gang up and destroy their parents.
holds true and always will. The Olds may say that they want peace but they don’t mean it because they have the stupid fear that peace between the kids means ganging up and overthrowing their parents….by which they mean “forcing two idiot yuppies to face the reality that they’re not nice people and they’re not victims and making amends for that.”
The reason Mike is at pains to obey Mom and Dad and hate his sister is that he’s not very good at understanding why people do what they do. It leaves me shaking my head in bemusement that someone that poor at answering the question “What does this person want” is pretending he’s an authory but there he is, thinking his horrible kid sister is trying to be unfair to him and cheating to get the attention she’s supposed to concede all to him because he is older and he can do things and she’s weak and stupid and has the wrong parts and, no, people are all wrong when they say he’d hate a kid brother just as much because that means that he’s not a victim either but instead a selfish little creep who needs his fucking teeth punched in. This is owing to
Axiom 4g:
Mike doesn’t like the idea of being to blame for things because that’s a humiliation.
being the case.
What makes Lizzie act the way she does is somewhat different. Unlike Elly who envies or John who’s sick with pride or Mike and his slothful ways, Lizardbreath shirks from responsibility for her own reason: she lacks anything like a sense of morals. To her, what makes her feel happy is good and what doesn’t is bad. We can codify it thusly:
Axiom 5a:
Elizabeth loves unearned attention and hates to have to do things for it because she actually did like being a parasite who gets love for nothing.

Instead of a generation gap, a cathode ray chasm

Of course, to really understand who Michael is and why he does all of the stupid things he does, we have to focus on a Very Special Story that’s going to appear in the next five years: the Very Special Story in which it’s revealed that Gordon’s father gets drunk and hits him because working class people are deplorable vermin who can’t help themselves, they’re just drunk, mean and racist. While Brian told Mike to tread carefully and to not pry into something he couldn’t fix because life isn’t a very special episode of everything, Mike was confused, angered and disappointed because Gord kept his mouth shut about something painful and humiliating like a real person instead of blubbering for the camera like Mike expected him to because, as he said, on television, Gord would’ve talked.
When he pushed that absurd and ignorant comment past his lips, I finally knew who Michael was and why he behaves the way he does. I knew this:
Axiom 4f:
Through a process of default, Elly and John delegated to network television their responsibility of teaching moral lessons to their son Michael; the end result is that he shares his father’s delusion that people are the part they play on TV instead of who they really are.
This is why he thinks that Lizzie is plotting against him….he thinks that instead of the dim, timid child she is, she’s a sitcom baby. It’s why he hates the idea of Elly having interests that aren’t him….sitcom mothers love their children uncritcally. It’s why he doesn’t understand girls: men who write for television don’t either. It’s why he hates his mother-in-law: television tells him to. It’s why he fails at everything….television isn’t real.

On being cuter than Michael

As you’ve no doubt noticed, Pattersons tend to be terrible at interpreting the motives of other people when what they do inconveniences them. While John sees people as the stereotype that makes the most sense to him and while Elly frets about the big conspiracy to hold her down, Mike is a different animal entirely in that he has no idea whatsoever motivates people to do what they do. We see this coming into play when, after having our noses rubbed in the fact that his landlady Mrs Dingle had a miserable, windblown past in which happy experiences were conspicuous by their absence, an unhappy present of collecting rent from kids who were going to have a better life than she did and a horrible future of anonymous and unmourned death, Mike had no clue whatsoever as to why she was so short-tempered and unyielding. Clearly, he thought, she was just being mean for no other reason than to be mean.

This blankness of mind would be irritating enough in itself if it didn’t begin and end with making him a lousy brother who assumed Lizzie deliberately plotted to ruin his life because of his nitwitted inability to understand cause and effect. Sadly, being a moron who thinks along those lines owing to

Axiom 4e:

1) Michael is incapable of understanding what cause and effect are.

2) This results in his being haunted by the delusion that if a phony cause to his problems could be made to vanish somehow, something that would happen anyway would not happen.

is only the beginning of why he’s a really irritating person. This is because a man who simply cannot understand why people do what they do has decided to inflict his insight-free version of reality on the world as a pretentious incompetent of an author. He really thinks that it’s his idea to blight the world with crap like ‘and the living buried the dead’ because he doesn’t understand that  he’s been steered to a career that he’s not suited for by a mother who needs to live through him. Since people are a black box to him, he can’t understand

Axiom 1x:

Elly can only picture her children following careers she doesn’t have the courage, stamina or brains to follow. Following a different path leaves her cold.

Double-dolt daring Michael

Of course, Michael doesn’t spend most of his time at home being told what a horrible child he is for expecting his parents to do more for him than they feel he deserves. The problem is that he’s still the product of their inept parenting and his own innate stupidity. This results in suffering because he gets to be a terrible judge of character for a different reason than his parents. John is a lousy judge of character because he cannot be asked to get to know anyone; his insistence on assigning them character traits based on media imagery means that he’s always blindsided by the blazingly obvious. Elly’s a shitty judge of character because she thinks that to be a good person, said person must never challenge her blinkered vision of reality and also give her the endless undeserved praise she craves more than life itself.

Michael is a terrible judge of character because of two very stupid reasons. The first very stupid reason has a lot to do with his paranoid dread that his parents expect him to just sit in a corner somewhere and apologize forever and ever for wanting recognition and love and happiness because Lizzie is here and he’s disposable really. This is where John’s pea-brained belief that Mike is a terrible child who needs to have his defiant attitude erased and Elly’s dread that he’s trying to siphon away her substance because he wants more attention that she can ever give make his and everyone else’s life worse. By endlessly harping on how he’s supposed to cooperate and share (by which they mean ‘do what they tell him without question’ and ‘never win because it’ll hurt Lizzie’), they not only make him hate his kid sister, their negativity meshes with his innate fear that no one loves him to make him an endless accepter of dares.

The reason, of course, is that since he can never get the attention he wants at home for being a good kid, he’s of course going to seek out attention of any kind because he thinks that if he follows along with whatever the guys are planning, this time, he’ll fit in and be liked and people will be glad such a great kid as himself is part of their lives instead of being like his awful parents who tell him to shut up and watch the cooing lump of a kid sister do nothing and still be praised to the skies. This can be best summarized as

Foob Axiom 4d:

Since his parents have better things to do than to praise Michael for any sort of positive accomplishment he’s made, he’s settled for being an annoying clown who does stupid things just so people will actually notice him.