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.