Thread:Gumball2/@comment-30953185-20171226202550/@comment-4618045-20171229035358

This is always a fun one to talk about.

In general, I have high standards for parent characters. While parents can be flawed or human, I believe these aspects must be treated seriously. Parents are important figures and the environmental factors that would affect their children must be considered as significant, not thrown out like candy for the sake of a joke.

I say this for two reasons. One is that the bad comedic parents are a cliche at this point. There’s nothing left you can do with this trope that’s original; one’s only hope of standing out is to do it in excess, to go so over the top with incompetence/selfishness/neglect that any gesture of affection parents have with their children become hollowed out. And two, I have been raised to believe that strong, proactive parenting is favorable to weak, latchkey parenting. I go into more detail about my view of parent characters in a blog if you wanna check it out.

While I don’t think Lynn Sr and Rita fit cleanly into the mold of bad parenting, they’re terribly inconsistent. In some episodes, they can effectively lay down the law or give some much needed love/care to their children, while other episodes depict them as cowardly or insensitive. It’s in these episodes that leave me disappointed in them or (in some cases) drag down certain episodes to unfathomable lows.

If I had to pick one, it would be Rita. While she is far from perfect, she is less of a dirty coward than Lynn Sr