#A Classic Contribution from yours truly. i'm....7? yrs no contact w/parents ama

[unproduciblesmackdown]

deh in the broader Genre of like telling the tale of a (probably teen) child & a difficult/strained relationship with their parent/s where the conclusion to the overarching thread there is tied to the feelings of the parent/s, with the child's sense of emotional resolution hinging on some newfound understanding/recognition/appreciation of those Feelings Of The Parent/s, namely that they Do genuinely love the kid / Care, Regardless of the otherwise "seeming" insufficiency of the provided emotional support of the child, oft justified in full as well by broad things like [doing their best] and [could've been worse / at least not as bad as i had it]. wherein the conflict is resolved probably not totally unilaterally, but mostly by the child realizing their feelings were wrong and/or at least setting them aside by virtue of recognizing how the parent/s felt all along.

like ofc larry in particular, who does Feel Sad that his son died, and other people getting to realize this helps effectively temporarily resolve the murphy family dynamic problems over intermission, and then we come back and larry tells evan he still feels justified in everything he was doing re connor, who died, and evan says that connor (reminder: who died) was really lucky to have a dad who Cares So Much About taking care of Stuff. larry also singing about how Everyone Else thinks & does things wrong for not aligning/agreeing with him on Stuff. and also of course, that doing the right thing is Hard for him. and in the end, words fail, larry hasn't actually changed re: for example never listening to his wife, whose feelings are Not inherently justified like his and who is i guess just not committing to The Hard & Right Thing for not feeling like she has the answers / knows what to buckle down on and never let up about no matter what anyone else thinks, including like, the people directly affected by what you're doing. throw in all the other classic moments like insisting connor simply dropped the ball himself, Somebody Had To Be The Bad Guy, that his daughter be shopping for also not wanting to be monologued at about larry's baseball lore in a garage. ok

but things are fine in the end through the implication that the murphys are staying as married as ever? like, no lmao. we've never seen a single instance of larry showing basic respect for his wife as a peer (tempering addendum: i'm sure this is a slight exaggeration & larry is at least being neutral enough at various times lol. but like at the least disagreement b/w them, she's dealing w/a brick wall). and was zoe being unsarcastic by positing the brady bunch as some hypothetical family dynamic ideal? she's had a hard year but she's fine and mostly what we know about her life is that fact of her parents being undivorced, like, is it assumed that We'd assume she's more bummed out if she was Dealing with that too, rather than relieved/happier. in every case of divorce were the children apparently completely insulated from their parents' dynamic & its effect on their behavior. in the case of every marriage held on to for dear life no matter what For The Children / b/c for w/e other reasons divorce is off the table, are the kids just clapping & cheering regardless of everything else like huzzah to have both my mother & father living together, legally wed. tbt like third or fourth grade & for seom reason, maybe book related, a teacher asking the class who had divorced parents, and saying it was good there was only one person who had to Go Through That. seems inappropriate lol and also inaccurate, having to note that down at the time as an informed adult / child of divorced parents opinion, while actually having a [tragically "divorce is off the table / marriage for the children" situation] unfolding & having to understand things entirely through the lens of how in fact, parents know best / are trustworthy b/c they care, kids just don't get it and are only mad about being grounded and stuff, and mistreatment is an outlier noticeable to all and characterized by nonstop cartoonish contempt blatantly expressed, physical violence/neglect, the classics. but if a parent does something like disallow boundaries / privacy, well someone Had to, and it ranges somewhere from "well that's just appropriate disciplinary measures [cite the usual "it could've been worse" and/or "well sorree that parents aren't always perfect" and/or just general sentiments abt if you don't do xyz kids will never learn that they have to abide by your authority at any time regardless of what's going on for them as their own person]" to, well, also what i just put in brackets like "sometimes you make lil mistakes but did your best, sorry i wasn't perfect, the kid i was raising & mistreating was less perfect though sooo."

heidi is naturally more actually sympathetic but she's also on basically a [her own feelings] journey by and large, even while again it's not totally unilateral? like, there's the misalignments in between, but she and evan were always the one conversation away from their resolution (of not wanting to mutually disown each other). she realizes evan was unhappy at the start, then gets upset about his apparent increasing distance, then realizes he was more unhappy than she realized....? like, okay i guess. (""shoutout"" to cynthia noting that larry dismissed connor being suicidal as essentially Not Actually That. like evidently heidi is clearing that bar, but just throwing another tomato at whatever all larry's up to.) and in good for you, it's like. yes heidi is blindsided by things and none of this is to say that real parents, or parents as characters, should have Irrelevant feelings, or not make mistakes b/c of them, but it's sure A Time wherein she expresses Some Things like, all presumably motivated by her feeling that evan is effectively rejecting/disowning/leaving her, that he shouldn't get help from other people, and even if they're not strangers, they can't be Real Family? and like, certainly evan is just experiencing a bit of [it's free real estate] standing in for A Son here rather than this being some [found family trope] moment with a more genuine foundation, on top of the whole false pretenses thing, but heidi doesn't know any of this and is falling back on like, it's inherently unacceptable b/c they're not Real family, she is [his Real] mother, an emphatic argument Checkmate surely. and here & along the way she's cited the "i'm trying (my best)" / Sorry I'm Not Perfect matters, while being able to criticize evan about ways he's failed to do [xyz] regardless of whether he was trying (his best), generally regarding the anxiety matters like, he Needs to be able to order a pizza, and make friends, and do the therapy exercises that aren't helping, etc. unsurprising evan feels like she thinks he needs to be fixed, he's also Not Wrong that it's not his fault if he's getting support from outside The Family, i.e. his mom and being in their house. interesting that heidi presumed evan was always staying over at the kleinmans' more and was at least more okay with that, with a difference of course being that she knows them already / is(?) friends with jared's mom.

naturally a sidenote right there in the fact that jared doesn't want to / in effect can't tell his parents anything that's true. while on the one hand he doesn't seem too concerned about never breaking rules in any situation, there's also no sense he's like got this whole secret life going on / anything to Particularly hide from his parents, and having no friends doesn't help re: just his getting up to much in general. that we get no resolution for him, and the resolution for evan and zoe apparently involving the former having reconciled w/his mom and the latter just doing okay for the fact her parents are further from divorce, like, are we going to presume as we're often meant to, re: this Overall Genre, that well jared's parents probably care / are trying their best / are there & married, so ultimately He's Fine for that fact alone, aren't we all? seems a significant assumption in this story's conclusion. never heard about alana's parents at all, but i guess if jared was reeeeallyyy unhappy at home or alana was an orphan also, we'd've heard about it. in this story of everyone being completely forthcoming with each other the whole way through

anyways then heidi shifts into "oh nvm" reconciliation mode after gfy via facebook letter posts and having realized evan was That sad at the start of things? like, again that it's not completely unilateral, as is more usual, and she Is affected by understanding more about how He feels, but also like, we know she knows he had a bad year and is currently still generally unhappy / lonely, and herself knows she can't be there for him all the time / as often as she feels she'd like, but like, she had to know he was even sadder / more struggling than that? and that their strained / unideal relationship was just....more so as well? doesn't super feel like a more fundamental revelation about what's Really going on, versus just like "oh you've been Really [those things i was already aware of]" like, the change just being in the Degree of these situations/factors. i suppose a more inherent shift could be that she was thinking of it all in terms of evan's judgment of her and this conversation is showing her he was worried about her judgment of him? just this one conversation away from resolution the whole time....as well as anything being framed as like, a Two Way Street as the best answer to things rather than actually anything being shifted towards the child, like, unconditional support towards them, supposing there's some mutual grievances & hurt feelings, it's Not just [well i'm sympathetic Enough] for a parent to go "my support's a bit conditional tho" rather than in fact having to set their feelings aside more than their child might. shoutout again to larry at breakfast like "of course i openly don't give a shit b/c i'm assessing that connor doesn't either and that's some real fair's fair stuff"

anyways like, ofc already heidi was Never going to disown & leave evan, who ofc doesn't want to disown & leave her either (& even more Of Course doesn't have that option w/the murphys at that point anyways). and like, yeah surely important that they both know that but like, nothing else particularly changes? or is somehow guaranteed to change for their now having this newly informed mutual understanding on how each other has Felt all along. like, guess evan won't be so distant now that he knows his mom doesn't hate him, that's a difference yeah, but again he also Couldn't be b/c [my bad re: the murphys] [fell out w/his one friend and i guess is even More like "well, can't talk to him ever again / that's that" b/c not like we hear in the finale about having had, or planning to have, a chat w/him too]. sure It Matters that evan know his mom wouldn't hate him for xyz, or that heidi knows evan doesn't already hate her or something, and resolving this surely makes a difference, and it's not like this mutual Emotional Component is irrelevant. but it's oft handled as All that's relevant, and definitively tilted in favor of the parent's(s') feelings justifying / negating the child's(ren's) feelings as an impact of their treatment by the parent/s. is heidi going to have a different approach than going "ugh cmon evan" when he's not doing what he "has" to in whatever various situations, besides perhaps reminding him she won't Hate & Leave him if he can't, just still be disappointed & critical & hoping for him to become Can do it....we've all been there re: "i love you / will support* (*how?) you No Matter What.....But....." unless you haven't been there, at least in terms of this only being meaningful to the person saying it & is merely a Hypothetical intro that automatically justifies whatever Actual treatment is about to unfold, in which case hell yeah

the other key thing that happens here i suppose being heidi using her parental experiences to let evan know it feels overwhelming now, but later, it won't. fun re: her character, simultaneously like, well it's true and useful that how you feel on any given day / in any given moment is never permanent, helpful perhaps re weathering negative ones / appreciating positive ones, on the other hand the sentiment can also be applied dismissively like "well you'll get over it" especially re: children / teens, like "oh prom or being bullied or whatever else won't matter to you in ten years so whatever" (also that Feelings Changing Always obviously doesn't mean people are like, psychically made anew in every moment, and unaffected by things that happened prior, even during childhood / adolescence, like oh cringe weirdos still affected by how their parent/s treated them or how they were treated by their peers or how their affected by these kinds of things Now) or that pretty much anything they feel is immature & thus effectively incorrect and irrelevant, b/c the only Real Feelings in this life are [i have to pay a bill :(] or [i have to parent a child :( / :) (?)] like. any sentiment / idea can be cited in any situation, citing it for the purposes of "so it doesn't really matter how i treat you / how i Don't bother to do fuckall for you" as it may to dismiss [my child's upset rn] or something, is not helpful. but for our purposes heidi doesn't seem to be being dismissive, And ofc due to the specific situation there's not really anything she or evan can do to otherwise improve it rn (i mean, he could potentially also talk to jared again or consider it at least, but.) but the conclusion being that Your Parent Doesn't Hate You & Won't Leave / Will Always Be Here For You, Which Means: Step one: Being Here always; Step Two: [???] is certainly thusly unspecific, not exactly revelatory, and like....Thee Whole Time heidi was not hating evan & was planning on being there always, but that alone didn't mean there weren't these major failures to communicate / understand him / conflicts. well and good to i guess keep sitting on the couch like "remember: i don't hate you & won't disown you & leave" but that's like, certainly a premise of the relationship rather than [a particular way that fact manifests in her supporting / interacting successfully with him]. like her saying she Has, Does, And Will fuck up ten zillion ways (real lyric. jk) is like, again, Yes, parents are people which mean having feelings and making mistakes, and it's presumably important to her re: Not feeling so overwhelmed by parenthood that she recognizes this, but it's also like....yeah but then what, what happens when you make the mistakes re: Being A Parent. she wasn't ever going to leave or hate evan, that's irrelevant. again: how will their avg dynamic such as we've seen it, resulting in [failed connection] across the scenes, change re: the day to day for evan now knowing heidi's not planning to ditch him.

referring back to this as a general genre, it's this sort of point in an exploration of a parent/child relationship being A Limit as well, like, welp, where can you even take things beyond "aw hey. remember that your parent really cares & is trying" lol like. and there's the fact that this point as [the resolution] will probably make the child simply Less "Difficult" / "Wayward" in their teen behavior as well. like yes heidi's sympathetic, her feelings are relevant as a character and a parent to another character, yes also to a degree evan Is being somewhat "difficult" and distant and lashing out / verbally critical at times, but ofc Also a) not for no reason, and b) those reasons being His feelings about things / being Imperfect with it, but that herein more sympathy lies with the parent for those same facts / the resolution must be that the parent was already ultimately Enough re: their support, regardless of acknowledged imperfection. larrycore, except he also won't acknowledge imperfection lol.

and then, naturally, cynthia's the entire other parent character, but she just has like, less going on? she's mostly interacting with [the concept of connor] and evan doesn't like get a glove scene with her or anything and i guess her satisfaction with life manifests in how Normal her family dinners are, cough (made it all this way w/o yet citing Normalcy lol (i think). but it is intrinsically relevant throughout) and she's happy with larry so long as he's been outwardly sad about connor. and that according to zoe she was Too Lenient (convenient as well re: us getting to imagine for ourselves what the supposed perfect middle ground would be) which like, seems particularly relevant To zoe if she was apparently nonzero times tormented by connor's goings on with no recourse. but the overall situation staying very Vague, though with enough impression that cynthia a) is sad that connor died and b) doesn't blame him about it / wasn't dismissive of everything and c) her approach involved pursuing anything fundamentally supportive rather than, say, deciding someone can't have basic privacy and you just keep at that until they're a flexible piece of athletic equipment, so she wins out over larry for sure, don't really have to just throw up our hands like well i guess they're both wrong and the answer is generally somewhere between their general approaches. and other than that it's like, what, she wouldn't be having continual identity crises if her family was more brady bunchesque? there's zoe's vague suggestion that being stuck in the house (b/c if she doesn't Have to work, how could she leave) is also a factor in her identity crisis moments that are manifesting in ruining the Family Dinner experience and evan is lucky to mistakenly think he has problems not having much money. but then she's also just like, fine enough by act two, and again in the finale wherein i guess she's still fine enough for the fact of still being married. noted that cynthia is also the most forthcoming / straightforwardly emotionally expressive character here (ft. larry telling her to calm down jeez cynthia our cringe son only died or whatever or we're now being cyberharassed while everyone hates us for that, chill, so hysterical. women be shopping)

oh wait cynthia and evan do have that bit of a one on one prior to ywbf. definitely something, even if ofc cynthia doesn't get a whole song in that scene, and she and evan have less of a direct exchange in it. and naturally she gets the first song but it's like, where's, idk, heidi and cynthia having a later parallel payoff interaction Parent To Parent about not knowing how the hell to do this. didn't Have to be setup thusly but eh, society if. god knows cynthia talking to larry is a dead end, and talking to evan is limited, him not being a parent also. it's kind of like you can get support / understanding / validation from peers / Outside of [your lifelong nuclear family setting up romantic partnership], but this romantic partnership is the only Peers relationship of evan's that he Needs resolution on. though tbf the Real mystifying aspect of this in the finale is why zoe wanted to / why what she was apparently getting from their relationship all along was such that she now feels like he's this theoretical romantic ideal, rather than it being possible that she needn't regret the relationship for what she could've been getting out of it at the time but also doesn't need to now wish she could do it all over again, without the premises that led to them even dating in the first place. dunno why in either love song led by either of them, evan can't cite a Reason he likes zoe, while zoe textually declines to cite a reason she likes him. if you're Not relating to "if he was a boy & she was a girl & they not only don't hate each other but could share the same house with awkward tense amicability / lack of absolutely blowing up at each other all the time....why Shouldn't you assume you might be in love and start dating your way towards ideal eternal soulmateship" then it's like, kinda at a loss out here. ofc evan can be relieved she doesn't hate him forever and zoe can feel she doesn't hate him forever and have the generosity to pat him on the back abt stuff and the orchard, but their already baffling relationship is only way more so when for some reason zoe has to definitively tell evan he's still this theoretical romantic ideal like....we can still interpret it as, idk, zoe having low standards / limited experience at this juncture tbh lol but even so, regardless of this, there's the fact that this Romance being established as centrally crucial in the very beginning and end (and ofc in between) is The Story / Work Overall considering it centrally crucial and it's like ummm. holding this and looking at it like okay..........what is this

one explanation being "well we don't need an explanation. soulmate romance Is supposed to fix and/or justify your whole life and the more isolating it is the more its proven how much Love their is / how that's all you need" and ofc high schoolers would want that asap so long as the other party seems nice enough. whoops compare and contrast with how when we check in with evan in the finale he's also Been doing okay enough and the sole relationship we even know of is that with his mom, and hey, if that's all he has then that just shows that that love of a parent is enough / all one needs. which is the limit here, and the limit of The Genre, like, hmm, families aren't ever perfect and can have these major issues and failures huh: the critical examination/exploration of this then not getting more specific than "but in the end that's who's always there for you, which is heartwarming in and of itself rather than its own problem b/c when people Don't get actual support there for any reason/s, there's nothing else for them, except perhaps support via marriage / romance" where the problems also can be considered utterly unavoidable in a [throw up your hands, can't even begin to speculate on alternatives w/any meaningful specificity] way, and justified as like, kids who just need to be more appreciative / understanding of their parents, and parents who should be appreciated / understood as simply human, which means they're not perfect and they have feelings, but Everyone is simply human with emotions and mistakes, but then the fact in & of itself of Some people's imperfection & emotions gets to invalidate Other people's imperfections (see: however the Former People reacts to the Latter People's mistakes is fine) and their emotions (see: however the Latter People react to how they're affected by anything the Former People do is not fine, so long as the former people feel that their own feelings were sympathetic and/or that they merely made a mistake / can't be expected to be perfect, ugh well sorrreeee) which happens in the direction of Who Already Has The Power / Authority: that being The Parents, vs. children having zero leverage or other options than the immediate family & "ideally" (suburban single family home) isolated, or at least bounded off, living situation they just so happened to be born with. and parents, themselves isolated like "if you don't love your spouse enough that you aren't perfectly happy from just living w/them forever and you'd throw everyone else in your life into a volcano for them & still be perfectly happy, that's just your failure to find a soulmate ig b/c otherwise At Least being able to go 'yeah it's not perfect but it's good enough. & what else is there. also i can't afford to live without splitting 8 jobs w/a partner' is within your grasp" and isolated as parents like, you know what they say, it takes a two parent household to raise a child, if you're obviously overwhelmed like e.g. dealing with a newborn, haha well it's the damnedest thing but that's just how it is and anyone struggling w/parenting alone or even as only two people is experiencing that [just how it is]ness, nothing else to be done, unless legal custody is revoked to punish the parents. if the children are punished then that's just family business, they're the ones who also have no choice in entering a family via entering existence, belong to their parents, oft aren't considered to need / deserve basic elements of personhood, cue connor losing his Basic Privacy b/c someone Had to and whatever.

anyways, Thee Genre where "welp, this is just how it is" can only be preserved like this, like, well, guess this Has to resolve where of course a child is stuck w/their parent no matter what, right, so in turn the child must just ultimately feel okay with whatever's up with their parent/s as Fine Enough, while parents care enough to not want to renounce their claim of this being their child, but really nothing Must be conceded by the parent in terms of behavior, the Family Unit ultimately cannot be denied in any way such that the child really ever has any recourse but to try to accept the parent/s Being Only Human as justification for it all, and more, and/or the potential sort of theoretical threat of ideas like "be glad you had Anyone in the first place / don't have Worse parent/s / aren't Disowned, b/c think of how much worse you'd have it on your own," which yknow spoilers, threats aren't really support, nor are the effects of any failures in support / outright mistreatment Justified by the inner world of the party responsible for it being declared / judged as Good Enough, or certainly as good as you deserve.

anyways obviously it's not a nightmare in deh (at least for evan, lbr. larry....) and in the story it Is posited as enough b/c it's a fictional construction that can say whatever, and or let plenty be unspoken, like skirting around why exactly zoe's supposed to be regarding evan in any which way that she does at any point after iicth, tbh. but this is really a subset of "deh arguably has this premise that The Pursuit Of Normalcy is correct re: amending the kinds of problems evan has here; normalcy is the nuclear family as an ideal, whether Your Parents (as close to two married suburbanite ones as you can get) or You As A Parent (same as prior parenthetical)" wherein that subset genre is another one that must ultimately accept Normalcy as well, where parents have this irrevocable authority in their children's lives, and an exploration of a strained / messy family dynamic at any age can only resolve with "well in the end, parents aren't perfect but they try & care, and their kids have to accept this as ultimate justification for any & all of their experiences they have grievance with. fill in any blanks with [throw up your hands / whaddaya gonna do / c'est la damnedest things]" like. again that jared is only worse off for [the plot] and we have no update on him and we know he has no friends now (evan too, presumably) and only his parents he doesn't talk to. and we can presume this is good enough only by a) dismissing whatever feelings he has to make him not want to share anything w/said parents as Surely frivolous/unfounded and/or b) operating on that premise that, well, he has parents, and they're only human, so that is automatically All You Need To Know (with a little bonus of (c) that any Real Abuse must be so extraordinary that it's this rare outlier and what are the odds? rather than a common experience that's this guaranteed option when parents own a kid and the kid has no choice but to accept this situation / no other support. And, as with all "unusual" Abnormal things, all normal people would be able to diagnose someone with Abused or Disabled or Trans, Closeted Or Otherwise based on fleeting interactions and Not on someone declaring their own understanding of their experiences, which is actually probably wrong / an exaggeration/lie....But also if anyone experienced something abnormal like that, they'd know right off and be talking about it all the time to get help resolving their situation; if people have the idea it's a secret, that people don't just Believe Them, and/or that people Can't just help them up and resolve their situation wholly and safely and soon enough, that proves it's not real or at least not That big a deal, who cares if you have some gender thoughts or ""mild" autism" or kinda shitty parents, if it's relatable just deal with it, if it's not, you're just being weird and try being more normal, which is also supposedly just dealing with it, but all the more dismissively / emphatically) like iunno jared would Have to tell us more explicitly that his parents are terrible, and then we could just disbelieve him, or figure he deserves it, or that he's just mad about being grounded once or whatever. there's two of them, probably married, and they have feelings and are imperfect, so he's fine.

also the fact that any relationship with peers, besides looking for your romantic soulmate asap, is frivolous and optional. coincidentally (is it??? jk. it's not) it's a form of support outside the nuclear family you were born into / establishing your own nuclear family. friendships are about the chats you can squeeze in with coworkers you happen to tolerably get along with, or prior, same but with other students, and if they're not Perfectly Working Out At The Start And Forever (see, in fact: evan's illustration of the perfect friendship in For Forever, wherein he needn't even explain like, how they became friends, or how it was so different from any other dynamics. or explain to us the audience how he and jared threw together this material that emulates it via this roleplaying sesh, but that doesn't warrant eventual resolution) then a friendship does not deserve either "well they're only human, so i guess i have to accept Whatever" like re: parents, nor "i Need to put effort and intent into an active pursuit/continual maintenance of this relationship" of the [it validates your life so you need it, as well as it being the only appropriate/expected support in a legal adult's life, move out with your spouse already] Romance. that alana, though her motivation and sort of silver lining reward in the end (re: the orchard) isn't all about evan, also gets no resolution and was sure not evan's parent nor love interest, so Well Whaddaya Expect....again, if she was a tragic orphan, she'd've announced as much, and if she has parents, they're human and she's Fine Enough

anyways you can perhaps critically explore/examine these experiences beyond these not explicitly, directly expressed premises that in the end the parental feelings override the the child's and justify the reality that the child has no recourse anyways when their nuclear family is all they have and the familial Belonging can be [the children are parental property], wouldn't it be great if that was always okay enough anyways, b/c that's all we can get, and considering otherwise is weird and probably an unrelatable outlier anyways. so The Conclusion to stories abt parent/child relationship problems can't/don't upend the premise that a child can be stuck with their parent/s as people who forever unconditionally retain some ability to actively impact that child in whatever ways, and even if this is questioned, it has to be resolved with the child accepting this Reality w/whatever justifications that supposedly validate the parent enough / even just being like well it's better than the alternative of Not having your "support," surely, b/c that was even unhappier. the child can feel badly about whatever treatment, even treatment they don't think had any ill intent, but the parental authority is A Fact and ya just gotta make peace with it, whether the parent only personally justifies it with "b/c i'm the parent" or "i mean well enough / sorry i'm not perfect"

this versus material where the parent actually does have to change their behavior regardless of their feelings, in recognition of An Actual Relationship rather than eternal justification of the parent = superior / authority figure. or where, as is true re: any actual relationship, a child does get to withdraw from said relationship (as is true even if the child is still in the parent's life / the parent thinks there's A Relationship b/c of the child still being in their life and their feeling they totally have adequate authority here) and like, frankly points to how that often seems to work best when the viewer isn't privy to seeing said child's experiences / interactions w/the parent/s directly. Just Like Real Life, a) can't really convey the reality of such a dynamic via "wow look how Obviously bad it is" snippets, even such [obviously bad] moments can be Dismissed as snippets like well but on Average it's not That Bad(tm), and this leads into b) the premise when we Don't get to be shown the interactions directly being: what we Do get shown being the child's perspective / feelings and That actually getting to be what matters and can in turn justify their being supported regardless of if the parent tries / cares at all / means well / makes mistakes etc etc, and any illustrations from the parent's end of things being secondary really, while things lean such that the child's feelings have more weight and what is Justified by said feelings isn't [anything they do to anyone ever] but actually having other avenues of support than w/e parents they happened to have. and whether things were Really That Bad don't have to be judged by other people who can't have the full picture or direct experience or be Better at understanding the situation for having had more "normal" experiences, and who aren't them and why should someone be judged thusly like "oh sorry it's Not That Bad" and then, again, have no recourse like, can't go anywhere else, and if you can, there's zero guaranteed support Unless it's via whatever particular personal relationships you happen to have, which is why it's great that isolation isn't basically a guaranteed feature of abuse, and that [social support can only come from Personal Relationships] doesn't foster isolation / insecurity / vulnerability overall. this was politics all along, what isn't?

anyways, these like "hmm....social phenomena...." approaches that are limited by unquestioned concepts of Normalcy that the audience must understand similarly too; including this genre here of the Inevitable Reconciliation b/w parent and child justified by the parent having feelings, and the child's feelings being dismissable. kinda the case in deh that said feelings just needed to be aired so as to be understood, and then things are fine enough indefinitely now. arguably Having A Talk is a change in behavior/the dynamic, but also it comes about via a wild specific convoluted series of events and still only manifests last minute b/c heidi saw a facebook post and evan's at the end of his rope here lol. and he has no friends and the nebulous potential of [i'm still theoretical soulmate material for another the perfect girl. someday] and a customer service job??????? godspeed. and the idea of other people and we're out babeyyyy