>>82488865cont.
>Probably my favorite characterThat being said, I think she's out of place in Peanuts, and shouldn't be in it.
For those who don't know, Peppermint Patty was originally conceived as the main character to her own comic strip, but Shultz eventually just put her in Peanuts, and I think it really shows.
In Peanuts, Charlie Brown is sad and sympathetic and just kinda a mess, and all the other characters are relatively normally and well adjusted, and react differently to Charlie Brown. That's what makes it work. Sure some people have their own issues, like Linus and his blanket, but that's mostly to characterize them further, they're still mostly functional, normal people.
Peppermint Patty isn't like that though. She's the one character who's life is probably as sad and as much as mess as Charlie Brown's. If anything her prospects are worse too. It distracts from Charlie Brown, and feels weird and jarring.
Secondly, there's the plot point of her having a huge crush on Charlie Brown. I mean, what the heck. Someone has a crush on Charlie Brown? Charlie Brown, life's biggest loser, for whom nothing goes right, has a cute girl die-hard in love with him? It just seems so odd and bizarre, it simply goes against the natural order of things, and never really seems to be addressed.
But not just that, he always turns her down, which is fucking devastating to her. So here you have this really sympathetic character, almost more sympathetic than Charlie Brown himself, a character who we want to see succeed, and Charlie Brown just crushes her every time, and for reasons that come across to the reader as totally unreasonable. It just serves to make the main character MUCH less relatable and sympathetic.
As much as I lover Peppermint Patty and how she interacts with the world of Peanuts, I do often feel like she should have had her own strip.
