Saturday, May 27, 2006

I don't like where For Better or For Worse is going

The latest arc in FBOFW has Liz uncertain about living in the North and wanting to move back down south into a nice suburban existence (it has been mentioned before that she'll be working in Mississauga in the summer, that's where I'm getting suburban from).

I don't like this. I'll be the first to admit that, as an individual, Liz totally has the right to be uncertain or change her life direcction whenever she wants. I would not hesitate to advise any of my peers that none of the career decisions they make now need to be permanent.

However, I've always perceived Elizabeth as an everywoman. She's my precise age and demographic - when I was little, I called the comic strip "Elizabeth" - so I've always taken her to be somewhat representative of me. My own life has been plagued with people treating my major life choices like they're "just a phase" [insert smiling knowingly over my head]. I strongly feel that what I do and where I live are perfectly right for me - and I have been striving to live and earn my living this way for the past almost 10 years - so it's very tiresome and even a wee bit dehumanizing when people assume that one day I'm going to wake up, find a nice engineer or MBA, move to a big house in the suburbs, and start squeezing out kids and spending my weekends doing home maintenance. Similarly, Elizabeth has always been passionate about teaching in the North, and by having her suddenly, apropos of nothing, want to go back to 905, it feels like Lynn Johnston is dismissing her passion for the North as "just a phase - she went off and had her little adventure and now she's back to normal life." And, by emotional extrapolation, it feels like she's being similarly dismissive of all my and my peers' life choices that don't follow the exact path she would have set out herself.

It feels almost judgemental of the fact that different people have different needs from their career and their lives, it feels like the author is sitting there with a smug, superior smile passing judgement on anyone who dares make different life choices than their parents. I grew up with this comic strip, it's always the first one I look at when I open the paper or go online, when I create SimPattersons I always play the Elizabeth character. I don't like getting these feelings from a comic strip that has always figured so strongly in my psyche.

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