Speak for yourself. Anthony was clearly the better choice. And the fact you had to point out that Paul was First Nation speaks volumes.
I don’t get it. Why does it speak volumes? I believe the point being made was that Elizabeth was whisked away from her interesting but shamefully nonwhite, nonchildhood-pal, nondaddy-substitute boyfriend in order to further LJ’s weirdo obsession with pairing everyone up with their childhood sweethearts. Because apparently if you don’t marry the person you had a crush on at age 10, you’re gonna die alone and unloved.
So she turned Paul into a cheater out of nowhere and instead paired Elizabeth with depressingly predictable, bland, passive-aggressive, “I’ll take advantage of your shaken, nearly-raped state to scream that I HAVE NO HOME!” white bread Anthony.
Frankly, I’m kinda glad for Paul’s sake it ended the way it did. He’s way better off with Susan. As a character, Elizabeth lost her life and soul there toward the end; they were drained from her so she could safely drift back into Anthony’s whiny, grasping, yet creepily passionless clutches.
Whatever our differences, I always enjoy your sense of humor.
And just WTF is THAT supposed to mean?
Why, thank you, choie! So nicely put, I suspect you’re a regular at The Foobiverse community.livejournal.com/binky_betsy/
I’ve got a box I bought in England a while back labeled “Spring Surprise”. Will that do?
Which character is the proxy for LJ’s ex-husband?
The fact that Paul was aboriginal is important, though, and typical of Johnston, whose xenophobia and fear of anything that isn’t small-city-Ontario shows throughout the strip.
To a LOT of white Canadians, aboriginals/First Nations/indians/(name of specific band) are, essentially, pets. They’re fun to talk about and bring out when the company’s over, but holy shit, you don’t actually want them sleeping on the couch. Every time Canada hosts some international event or foreign mucky-muck, there’s always a hefty dash of “native culture” thrown in, usually in the form of a dance or some other flashy ceremony, which the mucky-mucks or spectactors obligingly sit through. Then once that’s over the expectation is that the aboriginals will go back to their reservations so they can continue being poor.
You’re going to see a lot of this as the Vancouver Olympics, which has, in fact, selected the inukshuk as its symbol. Middle-class Canadian love inukshuks. Propping up a few inukshuks allows you to pretend you give a shit about aboriginals without having to deal with all the pesky problems of crime, incarceration, substance abuse, systemic discrimination and adject poverty.
Paul is the absolute embodiment of this. He was good enough to play with to show Johnston’s hip to the latest Canadian political correctness, but it’s beyond the pale in her universe for a woman to actually marry an ethnic guy. Especially a “First Nations” guy, holy shit! You’ll also note Anthony left his wife, a Francophone, who was also a fearful ethnic. It’s okay to have Quebecois folks in the strip, but heaven forbid any of the Brantfordians (the town in the strip is never officially named that I know of, but I like to think of it as Brantford, Wayne Gretzky’s home town) actually end up with an ethnic. Especially a woman. Women belong at home, like Deanna, who even lives in what used to be her in-laws’ house and lives to serve her husband, or April, who was being set up to (as another Doper pointed out) end up with the first human male she ever met outside her family and the attending physician.
Ellie’s husband.
The Pattersons were originally based on the Johnsons. Other characters are based on other people in her life, though not always in the same relationship to Elly and her family.
April was added because Lynn wanted another child, but that wasn’t happening.
Ooooh, Crunchy Frog Clusters! My fa-BOOM!
[sub]wheeeee! Still has the same great kick![/sub]
I thought she left him for someone else. Or maybe he left her because she was sleeping with someone else, I disremember the details. I do remember her being painted as a dreadful bitch pretty much from Day 1, though–she was such a suspicious and bitter person to think Blandthony was mooning after Liz, even though, as it turns out, he was indeed doing exactly that. And she was such a terrible person to not want babies, and to not devote her life to the one Blandthony nagged her into having. I never connected her aura of pure evil to her ethnicity, just to her being in competition with a perfect, perfect Patterson.
Bringing up someone’s race where it has no bearing speaks volumes.
You people seem to be projecting a ton of your own shit into someone else’s worldview and then grousing when their worldview and yours don’t agree. This is like complaining that a lion roars and eats too many gazelles. That’s its nature.
If Lynn Johnston’s world-view is so opposite to your own, then why the hell did you ever read it? You should have been reveling in other strips more to your liking. I sure don’t read strips that represent a view counter to my own.
The fact she was a stereotypical Quebecois in a lot of ways wasn’t an accident. I don’t believe so, anyway.
The more I think about how the strip went off the rails the more I think that it’s not because of any one character but because it veered away from its own characters. Anthony being bland and awful, or whatshername being a bitch, aren’t bad things by themselves. After all, good comedy and drama always has people you love to hate. If you like everyone there’s no conflict.
I have 20 minutes down time here so I’m gonna go on a little. The problem with the Elizabeth-Anthony romance is that it’s totally impossible. Absolutely, flatly ridiculous. Marrying a central character to someone the audience hates is fine - shit, it’s the subject of many fine TV shows, movies, and books. But having Elizabeth decide to marry Anthony simply didn’t make any sense at all. It was logically equivalent to having Hannibal Lecter, halfway through “The Silence of the Lambs,” become a kind and caring Okinawan handyman who teaches a Jersey teen how to do karate.
Here’s the thing; FBOFW describes my life perfectly. I mean, it’s absolutely, precisely my life experience. Comfortable white middle class family in a small Ontario city, son born in the early 70s, daughter in the late 70s, both bundled off to a liberal arts education? Two goofy dogs? That’s my family EXACTLY. (The second daughter’s the only difference.) I know people like the Pattersons because we WERE the Pattersons, as were almost everyone we knew. For all I know FBOFW is secretly set in Kingston, my hometown. It may as well be. v John and Elly Patterson are the same age and background as my folks. Mike and Liz are the same age (minus maybe 2 years for Mike) as my sis and I.
So I know Elizabeths. My sister is an Elizabeth. I dated Elizabeths. I was friends with Elizabeths. There’s like sixty of them in my Facebook list; my sister and my sisters in law and my wife’s best friend and her friends and a few ex girlfriends and women I went to school with, five of whom are named Jennifer and on and on. My WIFE is an Elizabeth; white girl, from a small Ontario town, pretty smart, fiesty, went away to school, the works. And I’m telling you here and now that not a single damned one of them would have given up their life and career and other romantic interests to move back home and marry the guy they sort of dated when they were 15 because they felt sorry for him having to deal with an existing wife so they could take care of his kid. The idea of my sister, or my wife, or my sisters in law, or any woman I ever knew in that cohort doing something like that is just preposterous. Any woman I can think of, I try to imagine them going back to some wet noodle they dated in Grade 10 and… I mean, it’s laughable. It would suggest a mental illness of some kind.
You can’t write about a character for 25 years in a remarkably realistic manner and then just completely alter the character in a most absurd way and expect it to work.
I agree with choie. Paul was cast in the role and deliberately made a First Nations person to scream Danger!Danger! at Liz as a cautionary tale for us all.
I decided it would be better to teleport a box of Belgian chocolates to Natalie Portman and a box of Exlax-laced candies to Sarah Palin. I’ll keep the exploding ones for an emergency.
Maybe I just didn’t pick up on it because I don’t know what a stereotypical Quebecois is. Of course, that’s around the time I quit reading comic strips on a regular basis because I didn’t get a newspaper, so it’s likely a bit from Column A and a bit from Column B.
FWIW, I believe the Pattersons lived in Thunder Bay, occasionally mentioned when the kids went west to the family-related farm in Manitoba. Living in the Excited States does not lend itself to knowing if Western Ontario is similar to Southern Ontario, though. I loosely followed the strip (if only to see how it was going to end) and the reboot, but the reboot was blander than Anthony.
I do believe Lynn saw her strip, with Liz’ storyline, heading into something she (Lynn) was unable to handle. It was like, whoa, Liz is dating a First Nation man (non-white, non-high-school sweetheart)! With a dangerous profession (cop)! Living up there in the middle of nowhere (no mall nearby)! She (Lynn) HAD to pull back, she had to get Liz back home and her fate sealed by marrying Blandthony, because that was all Lynn could depict. Her research into the ways of the Others extended only so far; OK, Liz had her bit of freedom, travel, adventure - now back to the ‘normal’ world. She literally killed Liz, her soul anyway, made her into a mindless thick-lipped robot, because that was her fate by the time the strip came to an end.