Mike’s deadly sin.

Of course, Michael can be damned hard to love. While it’s easy to see why he acts up when faced with a mother who insists that he’s trying to drain her substance and trying to argue her to death and so on and so forth and with a peevish imbecile father who won’t ever let himself be pleased, Mike would be a trial for competent, caring and intelligent parents as well. The hint as to why this is showed up really early in the proceedings when we saw his reaction to his actually having to maintain his living space like a functioning human being is supposed to. Said reaction was to wail that no one loved him in the most tediously melodramatic fashion possible because if they did, they wouldn’t expect more of him than he felt like delivering. It’s as if he’s one of the people Wilson “The Kingpin” Fisk of the Marvel Universe is talking about when he says that most people don’t want to be heroes. Most people, he says, want a big cookie at the end of the day for doing as little as possible and they want a strongman like him to give it to them. Having to earn his big cookie instead of getting it as a matter of course bums Mike the Hell out.

So does sharing his stuff or anything else he thinks he’s entitled to. He isn’t wired to think in terms of sharing because he sees life as a zero-sum game in which he’s being ordered to lose and just lay down and DIE. He can’t accept having to share with Lizzie because to him, that means that he just has to give everything away and never be loved and just sit in a corner and be told that he’s bad to want to be happy too. What this all means, of course, is that he’s motivated by his own deadly sin. While Elly is consumed by envy of anyone she thinks is having a better time than she is and John is a prideful piece of human garbage, Mike’s fatal flaw is sloth because he pretty much wants to spend his life being rewarded for maintaining a pulse. This is expressed best as

Axiom 4b:

1) Michael doesn’t actually want to do anything to earn the praise he craves more than life itself.

2) When challenged on this, he blames everyone but himself for this.