She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not
If I were Gerald Delaney-Forsythe, I would wonder why it is that when my girlfriend April turned 16, she turned into this “Now I hate you, now I don’t” crazywoman. Either April is angry and insulting Gerald for no logical reason or hugging on him and talking about how they are going to be eventually together forever. It’s almost like she is alternatively possessed by an angry young woman, or by a regretful old woman.
In today's For Better or For Worse, April tracks down Gerald, and while she doesn’t exactly apologize to him for her behaviour this week, she tells him she wants to stay friends always. She wants to keep in touch. Lynn seems to have forgotten April and her friends are in Grade 11 and not Grade 12. I know that idea is ridiculous, and what Lynn really wants to happen is to setup all this future talk in preparation for ending the strip; however, the dialogue is not written that way. It’s written like the characters are going to say goodbye at the end of the school year, and Lynn is doggedly persistent in presenting it that way.
I had this same feeling when the Pattersons were discussing the home move to the George Stibbs’ house and the joke was, over and over, that the family forgot April existed for 2 more years in Milborough before she would go to university. Where April was going to live was never mentioned, even when the grand list of who was going to live where was presented in the strip, she was not on the list. Finally, the strip turned towards April’s future abode, but not until the very end. I was never sure if Lynn did that because it was her plan all along, or if so many people complained into the Coffee Talk that someone convinced her to address possible April concerns.
As for me and my brood, we are off to the Arizona State Chess Championships in Flagstaff, Arizona this weekend, so once again, the Howard Bunt Blog is going on hiatus for the weekend. For those of you interested in the situation with my mother-in-law, my wife reports she is home from the hospital and finally resting. The first night back from the hospital was not that restful, however.
In today's For Better or For Worse, April tracks down Gerald, and while she doesn’t exactly apologize to him for her behaviour this week, she tells him she wants to stay friends always. She wants to keep in touch. Lynn seems to have forgotten April and her friends are in Grade 11 and not Grade 12. I know that idea is ridiculous, and what Lynn really wants to happen is to setup all this future talk in preparation for ending the strip; however, the dialogue is not written that way. It’s written like the characters are going to say goodbye at the end of the school year, and Lynn is doggedly persistent in presenting it that way.
I had this same feeling when the Pattersons were discussing the home move to the George Stibbs’ house and the joke was, over and over, that the family forgot April existed for 2 more years in Milborough before she would go to university. Where April was going to live was never mentioned, even when the grand list of who was going to live where was presented in the strip, she was not on the list. Finally, the strip turned towards April’s future abode, but not until the very end. I was never sure if Lynn did that because it was her plan all along, or if so many people complained into the Coffee Talk that someone convinced her to address possible April concerns.
As for me and my brood, we are off to the Arizona State Chess Championships in Flagstaff, Arizona this weekend, so once again, the Howard Bunt Blog is going on hiatus for the weekend. For those of you interested in the situation with my mother-in-law, my wife reports she is home from the hospital and finally resting. The first night back from the hospital was not that restful, however.
posted by howard at 10:22 PM
10 Comments:
howtheduck:
It does seem odd that she'd simply forget details like where April would live and how old she was. The cause is simple, though. She has April's story written up ready for "Lives After the Lines" (i.e. The Tome of Destiny) and assumes her audience knows something we do not: her definite plans for the character. We have a good idea but it's incomplete.
I'm glad your MIL is home and on the mend, howtheduck. :)
I think you are onto something with Lynn wanting to get all this "future" talk in simply because she plans the end the strip, regardless of the odd effect she creates by having grade-11 students talk this way. Also, like you, I think she missed some worthwhile opportunities in April's story arcs WRT vet school. Why not have April meeting with her guidance counselor and figuring out which courses she needs, what her grades have to be like, and exactly what she'd have before her in terms of pre-vet and the DVM program? It would be more interesting than "April is such a Martian, hurr, hurr."
Today's strip was yet another senseless filler.
april_patterson:
The previous two weeks have been nothing but senseless filler so this isn't much of a surprise.
howtheduck:
I'm glad to hear she's doing well too. I remember when my dad had a bad case of pneunomia. Somehow, the infection had gotten in his legs and we had to spend most of the summer putting antibiotic ointment on them. Not fun.
Given that Lynn magically stretched Liz's university years into five, I'm guessing she is planning to compress April's high school years into three, to conveniently coincide with the (hopeful) end of the strip. Let's just also hope that Liz's wedding will mean we don't get another four weeks of strips with characters saying the word "grad" every time they open their mouths for four long weeks.
The first thing I thought when I read this strip was the same as you: I am sick of April being an inconsistent, overly emotional jerk where Gerald is concerned. She wants to establish that she is better than him and he is beneath her, and she wants to continually have arguments and make statements that make it look like she is dumping him. Then she goes back all cheerful and makes him thing--without telling him outright--that they are still together.
I feel sorry for poor Gerald. I knew girls who played games like this on their boyfriends in high school. Unfortunately, they grew up and revealed that it wasn't just hormones--they have much more serious emotional problems. Like borderline personality disorder. "I hate you!" "I love you!" "Wait, I hate you again! But don't you dare leave me for Becky!" At this rate, I expect the April/Gerald/Becky saga would play out something like the movie Fatal Attraction, except that instead of April getting shot and killed at the end, we would all just be expected to ignore that April's a nutter, just like Gerald does. Becky would be a bad person for pointing it out, and anyway, she would be having an affair.
P.S.--I stupidly keep forgetting to say that I have been thinking of you, your wife, and your mother-in-law, and I hope things improve for her in the very near future. :)
DreadedCandiru2,
It does seem odd that she'd simply forget details like where April would live and how old she was. The cause is simple, though. She has April's story written up ready for "Lives After the Lines" (i.e. The Tome of Destiny) and assumes her audience knows something we do not: her definite plans for the character.
Lynn has, in the past, written character dialogue as if the characters already knew what was going to happen before it happened. It occurs to me that maybe Lynn is no longer able to concentrate on the perspective of a character as he or she exists at that time, if the future has already been written. If she is actively writing "Lives After the Lines", then she may not be able to get those storylines out of her head in order to write the daily strip.
Thanks for the well wishes for my mother-in-law from you and the other HB Bloggers. My wife called this morning and told me she is starting to get some rest, but it is taking awhile. They went for a round of doctor’s visits yesterday and everything is looking well for recovery, at least as far as the doctor is concerned.
aprilp_katje,
Why not have April meeting with her guidance counselor and figuring out which courses she needs, what her grades have to be like, and exactly what she'd have before her in terms of pre-vet and the DVM program?
Exactly. If Lynn’s point is that students preparing for the future are better than those who don’t, what better way to make that point by showing a career where even in senior secondary school, you have to take the right classes to get in?
qnjones,
She wants to establish that she is better than him and he is beneath her, and she wants to continually have arguments and make statements that make it look like she is dumping him. Then she goes back all cheerful and makes him thing--without telling him outright--that they are still together.
The part I find the most difficult is trying to understand where and why Lynn is going this way with the character. It’s like she is trying to mix the following elements together:
a. Gerald is the new Becky, i.e. profession musicians = poor, misguided fools
b. Gerald and April break up now, but keep in touch, so they can get together later (see Liz and Anthony high school romance)
Mixture of April’s Becky hate and Liz’s temporary break-ups with Anthony just don’t seem to work together unless April has a borderline personality disorder, as you said.
I really don't understand why Lynn keeps having April circle back and recover the same ground, over and over again, both with Gerald and with Becky.
April and Gerald are broken up! But maybe not! Yes they are! No they're not! Well, they are. Sort of. And sort of not. And she's above him. Except when he's on top (sorry, I couldn't resist).
And she HATES Becky! But they've made up! Just kidding, she hates her! Only they had a heart-to-heart and they understand one another again. More hate! Now they've made up. Just kidding, ha, madeja look!
Total WTF.
I suspect all this goes back to my theory I wrote up on Foobiverse. Maybe in Lynn's mind, there are just a finite number of April "points" to cover, and Lynn thought she'd put them to bed and wrapped up all her "April" stories. Then the goshdarned readers said they wanted to see more of her. "Well, okay, let's go over our 'April' points again. Gerald. Becky. Future vet. Blahblahblah." As if there are no other possibilities she could develop and build upon.
aprilp_katje,
Maybe in Lynn's mind, there are just a finite number of April "points" to cover, and Lynn thought she'd put them to bed and wrapped up all her "April" stories. Then the goshdarned readers said they wanted to see more of her.
It could be that. I have noticed that Lynn has a tendency to cycle through her characters, sometimes without them doing anything new with them. For example, when Mike and the Kelpfroths were fighting, Lynn would cycle over to Mike and it would be another variation on their battle with the Kelpfroths. It was if she were saying, “Well, it’s not Christmas Eve yet, so I can’t burn down the apartment; but we have to cycle by Mike to show what he’s doing, and what he’s doing is fighting with the Kelpfroths.”
She does the same thing with most of her characters, as if there is a plotline waiting to be developed, but she hasn’t got quite around to developing it yet, so the cycle will be a repeat of the same sequence with the character she did before. Take Iris suffering while taking care of Jim. I can see Lynn Johnston wants one of her final strips to be putting Jim in the Sunset Manors; but she is just not ready to do that yet. In the meantime, what to do with Jim for this cycle? I know! How about a second stroke?
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