FOOB: Oh SNAP!
They’ve been building
up to this
ALL
WEEK!
And now we come to the big climax (pun intended) of the big Lizzie-Paul-Granthony triangle, and even if this is just an exercise in character assassination (in more than one sense), even if I’m reading the story completely differently than Lynn Johnston intends, it will be awesome to see Lizzie get her long overdue comeuppance. It seems the person who’s been carrying on what bears more than a passing resemblance to an emotional affair with her flacid penis of an ex-boyfriend, Granthony, himself a deceitful, manipulative creep, is shocked, SIMPLY SHOCKED, that the career policeman who transferred from his precinct to be nearer to the woman he loved only to have the rug pulled out from under him when she chose to move home for reasons she never quite articulated, with a consequent demand that he put in for a SECOND transfer, may have decided to end the relationship. She’s come up early: he had probably planned to tell her during her regularly scheduled visit, which while harsh is better than dumping her over the phone.
Quite frankly, after the past two month etude en Liz, I’m happy for Paul. If Granthony is really the best match for Liz, Paul is narrowly evading a joyless, sexless existence in a bland Toronto suburb where everybody’s made of oatmeal.
As anonymous pointed out at the Foobiverse today, “I thought there was a letter where Liz thought how great Paul was because he didn’t get mad that she would talk to Anthony during the trial time, and how other men wouldn’t be so understanding of such a friendship. Shouldn’t she give Paul the same kind of understanding until proven otherwise?”
Why yes, yes she did. From the December 2006 letter (sorry, no direct link, so browse the right sidebar):
I haven’t seen Paul in quite a while, so it was very strange indeed to be spending days at the courthouse with Anthony. Most men wouldn’t be happy to know that their girlfriends were spending entire days hanging out with ex-boyfriends having long conversations. Paul has been wonderful; he understands the circumstances and while he couldn’t be here with me during the court process (because of his job), we talked on the phone daily and he gave me as much advice about the law as he could.
The entire scenario is absurd. While distance certainly killed my romantic relationship with Sam’s mom, I think both of us would admit there were already underlying problems to begin with. But in the 1990s, when I was closer to Lizzie’s age, my fiancee and I spent two years of a five-year relationship a two-hour car ride apart while she finished grad school. Unless Paul’s a real douchebag, the idea that he can’t be faithful for a few months is silly. And to be sure, nothing up to this point has pointed to philandering tendencies: Paul’s been quite up front about his feelings for the little twit. Embarrassingly so.
If the guy’s been talking with her every night after this piece of jackassery:
…the odds are that in real life, he wouldn’t be nailing the round the way girl.
But alas, it’s not anything near real life, which ironically is where Lynn Johnston’s fame is rooted. And so, because the narrator is not only unreliable, but openly biased toward the characters in a non-literary way, the inherent goodness of a thoroughly reprehensible family is driven like circus-tent stakes down our throats with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It’s like being forced to root for the Bush family. OK, perhaps not that bad. But you get the point. There will be the inevitable outrage that Paul led Lizzie on: you can see that coming a mile away, just as you can sdee no mention of all about the way Lizzie led on Paul.
You might think that I have favorites myself in this whole story, hence my obsession, but I dont: rather it is the consistently bad writing I object to. A good writer would have continued along the underlying “wait” theme, exploring issues of fidelity, doubt, and the crazy compromises that are part and parcel of human relationships. That doesn’t happen here: the characters are as flat and banal as Beetle Bailey, but not funny.
It’s getting late, and I’m sure tomorrow there will be more atrocities… so I’ll just close with “to be continued”.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Hey…landed here after lurking @ Foobiverse. I can’t believe I’m so upset about a comic strip, but this is really, truly atrocious storytelling. Unless Paul is about to go postal on Liz and articulate every little thing she did to kill the relationship dead…but I won’t hold out hope. I still can’t believe LJ went there, even though it was predicted far and wide. I want to ask her if she’s knows she’s painting Liz as such an unsympathetic jerk.