Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Nov 15 - Nov 20th (4656-4660)
Gyrre:
....... Do any of you have siblings?
Moreover, siblings within 2 years of your own age?
A lot of this scans like the answer is 'no'. Maybe it's because I'm from a highly dysfunctional family.
EDIT: I'm not saying that this degree of sibling rivalry is natural or 'normal'. Nor am I defending it. I'm just saying that I understand it and have seen plenty of IRL examples (both related and not). A common thread is very much some form of family dysfunction.
And from what we know of their father, he was a PoS.
Penquin47:
My brother is 18 months older than me. If he treated me the way Claire treats Clinton, I don't care how chaotic our childhood was that led to us becoming best friends because then we wouldn't have to either leave our best friend or have them leave us in two years, we'd be seeing each other at holidays and that's it.
BenRG:
Something tells me that Marten has a long evening ahead of him trying to manage Claire's reaction to this. Most importantly trying to help her reject her fear that she is a failure and a disappointment to her mother. (Of course the real one disappointed in Claire is Claire herself.)
"No, Claire, quitting your job after one day won't help anything!"
Prestwick:
--- Quote from: ihaveavoice on 16 Nov 2021, 22:07 ---
--- Quote from: Gyrre on 15 Nov 2021, 23:26 ---Siblings --especially those with less than two years between them-- tend to have at least one of them like that. Especially if one or both have issues with anxiety, ego or srlf confidence. Though, one would think they'd be past it by their 30s. When they do, they'll may still fall into bickering at the drop of a hat (family stuff with some boomers with a crap childhood).
--- End quote ---
Claire and Clinton are in their early 20s. The internet says 24 and 21, which is further apart than I thought they were! That's the age difference between me and my brother. And I would expect that all siblings have at least one or two triggers to pretty much age in reverse, lol. That's normally a behavior aimed directly at each other while in the same place, though. At least in my experience, with a sibling I bitterly fought with at times but would never have thought to publicly humiliate. Not sure if that's on a different scale of rivalry or just a different variety.
--- End quote ---
There is certainly some level of vindictiveness in how Claire handled herself on the stream but I feel it is subconscious rather than deliberately malicious and it reflects the fact that both Claire nor Clinton have a lot of repressed issues between themselves which haven't yet been resolved and this in turn will lead to very irrational behaviour, passive aggressive behaviour as well as repeated attempts by one to get the attention of the other regardless of whether that attention is either positive or negative. One or both will crave that even if it makes either one or both of them miserable in the process and because they haven't really been shown the concept of seeking positive attention (e.g. enjoying coffee, lunch or dinner together or with friends, talking about stuff without the need to put down or demean the other, etc) then that cycle will continue.
It is possible for brothers and sisters - even those closely tied by age - to co-exist without constantly needing to compete, bicker or even engage in full on negative behaviour. As a foster parent, I've seen siblings transition from a very fraught and negative relationship to an overwhelmingly positive one but that only happens when that behaviour is identified and worked out of the system and unfortunately when you have a parent figure who herself has significant behavioural challenges then that is going to be difficult to do. I feel that rather than helping, Aurelia ends up enabling Claire and Clinton's mostly negative relationship with each other.
A clear example of Claire's rather negative behaviour towards Clinton by the way: Her need to call give herself the nickname "Devanche" which, as one viewer pointed out, is French for "of the cow" which to me is a clear dig at her brother and a passive aggressive way of saying "I'm closer to Mom more than you are, SUCK IT, BROTHER!" Theres a clear insecurity and need for one to make themselves look the more authentic child than the other there and that would probably mean we'd be sitting down with her for a few hours to work out why she felt the need to do that, her feelings towards her brother and so forth. Theraputic parenting helps ;)
BenRG:
--- Quote from: Prestwick on 18 Nov 2021, 03:43 ---Theraputic parenting helps ;)
--- End quote ---
Unfortunately, Aurelia's strategy seems to have been 'get high and hope the problem goes away'. It isn't working, as she just realised in today's strip.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version