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Mandy’s actions are really starting to bother me. Her character’s actions and words appear to run against the character she is portrayed/supposed to be. Mandy is supposed to be intelligent, cunning, manipulative, and heartless. However, her actions portray her to be the opposite. Some of you might think the opposite but remember that just because she has been drawn very well to this image of her character (in terms of the comic’s art) does not in any way mean she is correctly acting it.
So, now to the reasoning behind this. It is just simple logic. Let us take a view of the situation and create an optimal decision pattern for Mandy, taking into consideration her general character:
CONSIDERATIONS OF CHARACTER:
- She likely sees people as objects
- She has been shown to value and strive to attain power, primarily via the control of others
- Through her lack of emotion towards her children, combined with the way she has gone about producing them (mating for power and abilities), there is a high likelihood she sees them as objects to subjugate/manipulate and use to increase her power
CONSIDERATIONS OF SITUATION:
- Right now we have Mimi, the presumed only child of HIM (an incredibly powerful being) in her home turf. It is likely that Mandy recognizes that Mimi has two sides to her – a good side and an ‘evil-ish’ one. Mandy likely knows, or is able to infer (given her intelligence), that HIM’s plan is to further demonize his daughter to be more like him. If HIM was to succeed in this plan, it could give him an immense power object with Mimi that could potentially be used against Mandy in some as-of-yet-unknown future conflict.
- Mandy likely knows that her son is an empathic being who naturally seeks ‘do the right thing’. Basically, she knows he’s a ‘good guy’ who is standing up for Mimi right now because he sees that Mimi has good in her.
LOGICAL PLAN OF ACTION
- Based on both considerations of situation and considerations of character, the probable outcome would be that Mandy would seek to co-opt Mimi into her power structure. This would increase her power in two ways: it would remove power from HIM and it would give her power. So the question is, how could she do this? Easy, just go along with the methods of manipulation available to her. She would seek to create a situation where Junior would act in such a way to portray him to be a ‘knight in shining armor’ to Mimi while Mimi was in her good side, creating a bond between them. She would seek to find a reason to keep Mimi within their domain (their home I guess) so that Mimi could form further emotional bonds to Junior through additional interactions. If Mandy got it right, Mimi would effectively become a pawn of some sort to Junior (though he would not realize this) and thus as Junior can be wielded easily by Mandy then Mimi would thus fall under her power structure.
- Also, Mandy would seek to push her son to get a backbone, or so to speak, as she has done by making him stand up for himself. However, she must act very carefully now as she has placed herself in an enemy/adversary position to Junior and if she keeps being cold and abusive to him then it would decrease his loyalty/bonds to her.
So, while the situation at hand roughly matches the logical plan of action for her - superficially at least - she just doesn't seem to be doing it on purpose. It seems to be like she’s done what she has done because she felt the whim or because she’s mad. This goes against her character – if she was doing it on a whim, it means that she doesn’t recognize the situation as she should, indicating a lack of cunning/intelligence or a lack of a drive to attain more power. If she’s doing it because she’s mad, then that clashes with her in terms of her being emotionless. Also, keeping her son at a distance like she has done seems to violate what she’d logically do – she should logically try to form emotional bonds with Junior as he is the type to be most easily controlled through a relationship with emotional bonds. Overall she just doesn't seem to be acting out of a desire to manipulate the situation at hand to increase her power assets, which clashes with the character she has been portrayed to be (seeks power, sees people as objects, manipulates others for power, very selfish, etc).
The only scenario I can think of where what she has done would match up with her character would be if she is capable of political manipulation but not emotional manipulation. If this were true, then she may not have viewed the situation at hand as one ripe for attaining more power assets by 'attaching' Mimi to Junior. This would fit well with her character as she seems to be very emotionless, but at the same time I think that she would be able to make up for this by simply using reasoning to determine how to emotionally manipulate others.
Anyways, these are just some of the thoughts floating around in my head, feel free to add your own.
EDIT: Mandy doesn't seem to be really trying to beat Junior up, nor does she appear to have malice towards him. Seems to me like she's mad, but not so much at Junior, and is just given him 'light' physical parental punishment for acting against her ('talking back' as some parents say).
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