Bart is a result of bad parenting, and Lisa is only good in spite of her family
So how bad of a parent is Marge supposed to be? Like we know Homer is supposed to be very flawed and there's ton of episodes about him learning to be a better one, but what about Marge?
Homer works full-time and goes to the pub, so the children's education is pretty much completely in her hands, and she's fricking up big time.
Marge suffers from a combination of projection and willful ignorance because of that projection.
Their were multiple stories about it in the early years mostly surrounding her realizing bart had issues but the last one I can recall is the one where she projected her childhood dream onto Lisa and almost fricked her up from the middle seasons.
>Their were multiple stories about it in the early years mostly surrounding her realizing bart had issues
And she straight up found Bart's hidden potential in Whacking Day, only to get hit with status quo is God.
Flanders kind of summed it up in his rant in “Hurricane Neddy,” where he points out Marge thinks it’s enough to have “good intentions” even while her family is out of control (presumably including Lisa, Springfield’s answer to a question no one asked).
There aren’t and probably should be episodes about her realizing what a frickup she is with the kids, but there are a lot of jokes around the idea of her just being in denial about any unpleasant facts, which is how I sometimes remember my mom and probably how some writers remembered theirs.
Until the moment of the Hurricane, what problems had the family generated?
Without a doubt, I can think of several things like Homer causing them to have to move the city because he turned the city into the country's garbage dump or Bart when he used the megaphones one after the other to destroy all the glass and perhaps damage people's ears.
It’s hard to say with a show whose continuity is so loose, but since everything that happens involves the Simpsons (“All the recent events of your life have revolved around him in some way,” as Smithers describes Homer to Burns) a member of the family is at least somehow at the scene of every disaster, even if they hadn’t yet got to Homer physically destroying the town until a year later.
Barts worst behavior was in the earlier seasons, last I watched he doesn't even pull pranks anymore
Lisa and Maggie are just smarter and have better mental health, and they respond better to Marge care.
The problem with Marge is that she never realizes that Bart is an idiot and a psychopath, so same way of parenting failed completely.
>Lisa
>the moaning, depressed little shit who falls for radical ideologies
>has mental health
Good one, anon.
In the early seasons Marge was meant to be loving but naïve bordering on enabling which usually leads to her burning out and breaking down when she gets hit too hard by the reality of her family being a bunch of inconsiderate frick ups.
I think Marge Be Not Proud and Bart the Mother are episodes where she realizes that but in the first she kind of takes the worst approach which is just washing her hands of Bart and Bart the Mother..is actually kind of the same come to think of it. So yeah Marge has a problem where she overly coddles her family until she can't deal with them but then just reverts back once they prove they're not total pieces of shit.
she doesn't protect her son from her abusive alcoholic husband. terrible mom
Bart isn't really stupid, at least back then. He was book dumb, meaning he did poorly in school but still had normal intelligence and was skilled in some areas. It's incredibly common for book-dumb characters to get flanderized into being just stupid though, because it's simpler.
The whole point of their characters back then were that they both had mental health struggles. Bart gets an F anyone?
With Lisa they had prior experience. With Bart they didn't.
But at the same time they had to control the situation with a jealous Bart who wants to get rid of Lisa (childish attempts, nothing horrible or problematic), plus we saw that Lisa was often left alone because Bart was a hyperactive child to the point. in which she learned to put her own diapers
How is Maggie going to turn out? I know some future episodes show it but there's contradictions between them, so who knows which one, if any, is right?
Maggie should be 38 by now. The same age as Marge.
Maggie seems to follow the basic arc of being a stereotypical 90s style teen girl before cleaning up in college and making something of herself.
Better since both Marge and homer are older and Bart and Lisa would be more focused on other shit meaning Maggie gets exposed to the least amount of bullshit
Marge mostly babies Bart and has trouble punishing him. But the most devastating thing she did was that Christmas episode where she doesn't even look at him and tells him to go his room. Normally that would correct Bart but we can't have that. He's gotta continue being that lovable hellion.
Isn't the point that Marge and Homer shouldn't been parents in the first place.
The point is that they're a dysfunctional family where everyone is flawed but at the end of the day they still love each other. Flawed parenting, flawed kids, but they're still loving family.
The point is they've become the collective role-models for all American families since their creation, you're idealizing those "flaws"
It's not that deep anon. It's a dysfunctional family sitcom. They say and do stupid stuff but they're still a family. You laugh at them. Credits roll. See you next week.
As if the average American parent is too smart to have their own IRL parenting be influenced by TV
Face it, without being explicitly told when they're wrong, the average viewer will ALWAYS assume the characters are right
But Bart has ADD, when's he's medicated, he's actually not a terror.
Marge is in denial that Bart is a troublemaking idiot, so he's never going to change.
sure
Her reaction to bart shoplifting was I don't live my son anymore you tell me
I haven't seen every classic Simpsons, but I just watched OP's and found it really sweet, plus Homer and Lisa had some great lines and bits throughout. Do most fans NOT like "Marge Be Not Proud"?
Marge Be Not Proud is a controversial episode because it doesn’t have a lot of jokes (by Simpsons standards) and feels like it could have been done as a live action episode.
I think they were trying to do a throwback to Season 2, the least jokey season with a lot of genuine emotional pain for the characters.
>Gavin
>Designated Drivers: The Life-Saving Nerds
>GOTTA CHANGE MAGGIE
>Stay out of my booze
>Lisa with the egg nog/fake snow
>Milhouse getting Bart kicked out of his house
I dunno, maybe I'm just easily impressed, maybe Classic Simpsons's humor just feels like a breath of fresh air from today's comedy that relies on graphic violence or sex jokes as punchlines. The pacing's a little weird in this episode, but the emotional beats hit and the jokes were silly and clever. It's a really good Christmas episode.
Almost forgot the best one
Marge was in the wrong.
You don't just freezeout your kid like that.
Marge was in the right. She wasn't even mean about it, just a little distant because she believed her special little guy was outgrowing his need for his mama. That lifeless "Good night" to mirror "Tuck-in time" from the first act establishes Marge's adjustments to her perceived over-mothering. And the 'snow family' scene best shows how Marge approached this new mindset in a civil way. Marge didn't go to extremes by DISOWNING him or anything, but that subtle change in behavior was enough to shake Bart to his core and send him spiraling until he made a sincere gesture to try and make up for what he did.
Mike Scully's track record isn't perfect, but he did good with this one.
I'm sure being dipped in boiling water was just to "build your character"
I doubt you'd blindly defend any of these actions if it were Homer doing them instead
Zoomers can't comprehend the concept of tough love and just equate everything to modern day terminology and try to explain it all through mental illnesses. Everyone has their limits with what they can put up with, including parents when it comes to their children. Mothers will almost always be overprotective of their sons in particular because they want to raise men that will treat women right and show them that it's okay to have emotions, while boys will be boys and get into trouble no matter what. Be it for their own selfish reasons, or because they're vying for attention due to their sibling receiving more praise than them. Lisa gets praised just for breathing, so no shit Bart acts out every now and again. Marge also has a tendency to baby Bart, which is once again completely normal for mothers to do, with the unfortunate downside being those kids aren't used to getting punished, so it's difficult for them to be reasoned with. It doesn't help that every adult in Springfield is dysfunctional the same way he is, I mean who the hell is he even supposed to look up to at the end of the day? The Simpsons isn't trying to depict a perfect family, either. You could easily compare them to a family like Malcolm in the Middle, for example. They might not always see eye to eye, and there are times where it seems like they can't stand each other, but ultimately blood is thicker than water, and at the end of the day, it's them against the world, and through it all, even if they yell and shout at each other, they still love one another, because that's what families are.
Marge is too fricking adorable for me to hate her
Ayo what the frick, that seriously was the finale?
Yup, shit was fricked.
And the thread is filled with feminist mommybots who think everything a woman does is good as long as it provides some made-up sense of structure or purpose to them