TCampbell wrote:Let's not forget that Penny and Stan, at least, were making repeated efforts to stop Cyndi, or at least curtail her effectiveness, and they were mostly failing at it. Aggie underestimated the danger she represented after the Popsicle War, for reasons more to do with Aggie's own idealism than anything else. But as direct and reactive as she normally is, I can't see her beating Cyndi in a battle of wits either.
This was actually one of Charlotte's chief motivations: "The smartest people I know have tried to stop your headgames any way they can, and you giggle at their efforts, like they're animals you've crippled."
I'm not going to pretend that I don't want to engineer certain responses in my audience. But the answer to virtually any question that begins, "So, do you want us to think...?" is "It's more complicated than that."
Oh, I'm not saying those three characters, as they were in the strip, would've been able to stop Cyndi. Rather, I'm saying that there were ways for them to be--smarter, more effective, less blinded by other issues and idealism--that would've been effective in exposing Cyndi to her parent's scrutiny sooner. They tended to be too sure that Cyndi would fold quickly when confronted, rather than re-group and attack again. My point isn't that Charlotte didn't accomplish something good with her madness--merely that Charlotte's approach was not the only one that could beat her.