YMMV / Community S 6 E 02 Lawnmower Maintenance And Postnatal Care

• Accidental Aesop: The episode's subplot is clearly meant to have the Aesop that parents are ordinary, flawed people and it's unhealthy to hold onto and preserve grudges against your family members for your entire life. While those messages are all perfectly valid, considering how terrible her parents previously treated Britta and how the subplot is resolved, the episode can unfortunately be seen as instead arguing that victims of Abusive Parents should just forgive their abusers and not seek justice for how they were previously treated.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Were Britta's parents as genuinely abusive as she claims they were? While a lot of their actions are described as being incredibly cruel, it's pointed out In-Universe that it could just be both Britta and her parents remembering the same events very differently as it's shown several times that Britta "remembers" things that didn't actually happen (possibly due to her self-admitted drug use) and lies to herself so often she believes it, and Britta is ascribing motivations to events (like her cat running away) that were never actually there because of how upset she was and looking for someone to blame due to emotional distress. Coming off of this, is them never bothering to apologize to Britta for having been so horrible to her in the past just a cruel Kick the Dog moment and an example of them having never really changed at all, or a justifiable instance of them not wanting to apologize for something that they never actually did? Additionally, have they really mellowed out and want to make amends with her, or do they just want to control their daughter again?
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The series previously had a Running Gag of Britta being a Crazy Cat Lady who often took care of various never-seen cats (all of which had a comically vast number of ailments). This episode reveals that Britta's parents let her pet cat run away when she was just a kid after she tried alcohol for the first time, implying that the real reason Britta has gotten so many pet cats is that she's never gotten over that betrayal and so uses her cats in the present day as a replacement source of emotional validation to make herself feel loved in lieu of her parents.
  • Throughout the episode, the majority of Britta's screentime is spent being judged for declining to reconnect with her parents and acting very bratty and childish. In addition to this, her reasoning isn't properly explained and the examples of the bad parenting she gives are certainly terrible, but undercut the reality by a mile. The biggest reason that Britta hates her parents is because she was sexually assaulted by a man in a dinosaur costume as a child and her parents did not believe her. With the accusations of sexual harassment against Dan Harmon that would be made public just a few years later, the decision to make Britta come off as childish and petty for harboring resentment toward her parents for not having supported her after being raped feels much more sinister and ill-intentioned.
• Jerkass Woobie: Britta, who spends most of the episode acting like an obnoxious Womanchild because of her emotional struggle regarding her abusive parents wanting to come back into her life despite them never really trying to make amends for how they previously treated her. Not helping matters is that her "friends" all want her to forgive her parents mostly because they're just tired of her leeching off of them.
• Memetic Mutation: The Dean going mad with power thanks to the VR set-up from Elroy and shouting "JESUS WEPT!!!" has become a very popular phrase to repeat in the greater Community fandom.
• The Scrappy: Britta's parents. The Retcon that seems to have been applied to Britta's Dark and Troubled Past of being molested as a child and her parents being Innocently Insensitive did not go over well with the fans, and a combination of their annoyingly cheery demeanor and asking their abused daughter to forgive them and let them back into her life made them pretty instantly hated by most of the audience.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Britta's unwillingness to be forgive her parents for their past abuse of her is portrayed in the episode as her acting like an obnoxious, entitled brat. However, while she is admittedly acting out in a pretty immature manner, her initially being unwilling and unable to forgive them for having treated her so abysmally is actually completely understandable and justifiable, particularly since they never even bother to directly apologize for how badly they used to act.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Britta's parents are clearly meant to be portrayed as sympathetic and likable in this episode, but a combination of their previous actions towards her being horribly cruel (such as letting her pet cat run away as a punishment for her having tasted alcohol for the first time) and them having previously not supported her after having been raped as a child makes them come across as sociopathic assholes who want to be let back into their daughter's life since they're not as dickish as they used to be. Heck, they never even apologize to Britta for how they previously acted, even laughing off Britta's righteous tirades by admitting that they don't remember virtually any of their previous abuse of her because they were often high when she was a kid.
  • Relatedly, Britta's friends — most notably Jeff, Abed, and Annie — being very unsympathetic towards Britta's hatred of her parents makes them come across as selfish jerks who want to enjoy her parents being loaded with cash more than anything else. It's made particularly glaring since all three of them have dealt with their own Abusive Parents and parental issues, so one would normally expect them to side with Britta here.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: On the surface, the premise of the episode's subplot is an interesting one, as Britta's poor relationship with her parents could have been an excellent opportunity for the character to receive some of her lost dignity back, as well as for Britta to deal with her biggest trauma (that was exacerbated by her parents) in a tasteful way. Instead, she is characterized as stubborn, childish, and 100% in the wrong for both the situation with her roommates and her parents, while the parents are basically treated like saints who only want the best for their daughter. When Britta confronts them, listing off some truly terrible things they have done (such as forcing her to take a drug test at 11 because she was "laughing too much"), they only acknowledge their wrongdoing in passing by saying they "don't remember [it]", and even laugh it off. Even Frankie, who is the only person to empathize with Britta in the entire episode, leaves her with the remark that "we all suck" as a means of excusing her parents' behavior, and the episode ends with Britta completely forgiving them for all they had done to her.
• The Woobie: Poor Chang gets an ugly bite from a cat, which gets so infected that his right hand visibly swells and deforms and he's left constantly wandering in a miserable daze with no one bothering to help him until literally the last few minutes of the episode.