Fanfic / The New Retcons

Many years ago, the website for the newspaper comic For Better or for Worse contained monthly letters from the characters of the comic, which provided supplemental material not shown in the comics themselves. In 2007, that section of the website was ended.

Enter a group of Caustic Critics, who took it upon themselves to continue the letters, thinking them necessary especially as the comic approached the endgame.

The result was The New Retcons, an interactive story that took on a life of its own as various authors assumed the personas of the characters of For Better or for Worse, and made them more than just plot devices, hindrances, and caricatures. They made them people, with as many flaws as normal people have.

What originally started as a supplement to the comic took on a life of its own after the comic ended, in varying directions, ultimately resulting in the murder mystery arc informally known as Who Silenced Elly Patterson?, where Elly Patterson is found dead and the plot explores the family's reactions to it and the police's investigation into it.

A table of contents for The New Retcons can be found here, while Who Silenced Elly Patterson can be found here.

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The New Retcons contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • Elly is emotionally abusive and neglectful to her children. After her mental breakdown, she throws April out, thinking she’s John’s hygienist. to make matters worse, she set up the “Going After” incident, setting up her own daughter to be potentially assaulted just because she wanted her to be with Anthony. After she recovers, she realizes just how horrible of a mother she was and tries to make things right. She fails to do so, having died before she could fully reconcile with April and never reconciling with Michael and Elizabeth.
  • Gavin is cold and distant to Anthony, treating him like a child instead of an adult. He also refused to get his son help for his Asperger’s Syndrome, resulting in Anthony having No Social Skills.
• Accidental Misnaming: It's mentioned early on that John's fellow dentist Everett had to take out a full page ad in the local paper to tell him that cause John kept calling him 'Elliot'.
• Accidental Murder:
  • When Connie is discovered to be the one involved with Elly’s death, they claim that Elly tripped and fell down the basement stairs. She lied. Connie pushed Elly down the stairs in rage after Elly rejected her Anguished Declarationof Love.
  • Elizabeth and Clarice believe that Gavin pushed Hanneke into the river by accident, since he would have waited until she cheated on him so he could use it against her in the process of divorce. Still, Gavin didn’t save her and he hid Hanneke’s body for decades afterwards and lied to everyone about what happened to her.
• All for Nothing: Subverted with Tracy’s political career. She loses dramatically due to voter apathy and is thus unable to do any of the improvements she wanted, such as modernizing the elementary school or getting in a light rail line to the city. But she does kickstart the inquiry into the town’s irradiation and high rate of birth defects.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Elly justifies taking away Robin's hearing aid as a desire to avoid this trope. Mira thinks it's just so Elly has something to complain about.
• All Psychology Is Freudian: Elly believes that therapy's all about 'blaming the mother for everything in the patient's life'. This is why she disapproves of Deanna taking the kids to a therapist to deal with their post-fire trauma.
• Armor-Piercing Question: During therapy with Elizabeth and Therese, the therapist asks Anthony that when he declared that he "didn’t have anything to fight for until now" when he fought Howard to save Elizabeth, if that meant he didn’t consider Franciose worth fighting for. Anthony cannot give an answer.
• April Fools' Plot: April accused Brad of trying to pull this on her when he told her Elly was dead. When he affirmed it was true, she fainted.
• Artistic License – Biology: Liz tried this to explain how she and Anthony had a dark haired baby. Unfortunately for her, Anthony paid attention in biology and figured out the baby wasn't his.
• Awful Truth:
  • Elly had a daughter when she was a teenager and gave her up for adoption. Note that while April and Elizabeth were rather accepting of this, Michael and John did not take it well.
  • Michael's got an additional one: John isn't his biological father.
  • Anthony has one too. His father murdered his mother.
• The B Grade: While April does well in her classes, Elly's response to her getting a couple of A-minuses is to ask why they weren't straight A's. She goes on to harass April about getting a B on one test even though her grade's still an A.
• The Baby Trap: Elly tried this on Stan to make sure he stayed home. It didn't work.
• Beleaguered Bureaucrat: As much as they'd like to commit Elly without John's consent, unless Elly becomes a danger to herself or others, the law's hands are tied; they can't. This changes when she kidnaps a boy, thinking he's Lawrence.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The story in general: After Elly’s funeral and the fight, the Pattersons break up and rarely speak to each other. Connie spends a few years in prison, but doesn’t really learn anything from the experience, being a Toxic Friend Influence to Kortney while Lawrence disowns her. However, Kortney is manipulating her and all of Milborough; acting like she is a town leader and naive single mother while buying the town out and absorbing it into Greater Scarborough. But Michael, Elizabeth and April do rebuild their lives and slowly become better people for it.
  • Michael and Deanna end up unpleasantly divorcing due to the strain of the story’s events wrecking their marriage. But after years of soul searching, Michael is at peace with his life, happily in Colorado and is finally out of the closet as bisexual and engaged to a man. Deanna stays in Canada with Meredith and Robin, later remarrying a single father named Matt and having a daughter with him.
  • Elizabeth and Anthony decide to stay together in Vancouver and Anthony adopts James as his own son. However, they’re more settling for each other than love with each other and Warren doesn’t know about James; putting them at risk of repeating Elly and John’s mistakes.
  • April drops out of college when she learns that John and Kortney are having a kid. After some time working in The Farm Sanctuary and North Country Wild Care in upstate New York, she returns to school and graduates, rebuilds some of her family ties and works at an equine center in Vancouver. However, it’s unclear if she ever speaks to Michael and Elizabeth again and she doesn’t get to say goodbye or call out John.
• Black-and-White Morality: A big problem with Elly is that she sees the world as this, however, her views on what 'black' and 'white' are so warped they might as well be Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Bridezilla: A variation in that the mother-of-the-bride is the one that's overbearing and over the top about it. Though once an actual date is set, Liz steps up to the plate, to the point of delegating one of her letters to a bridesmaid.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Anthony is heavily implied to see John as a father figure due to his own bad relationship with Gavin. But when Anthony visits John in jail and sees both his refusal to acknowledge what he did wrong and his reaction to James’s parentage and Anthony’s intentions to raise the baby as his son makes him realize that John was never a good father.
  • April spent her childhood idealizing Jim, as he was more involved in her life than Elly and John. But after she meets her half sister Claire and learns that Jim and Marian sent Elly to a mother and baby home to give the baby up for adoption; partly resulting in Elly’s resentment of her and her siblings, she’s hurt and angry at him.
• Brutal Honesty: Anthony has next to no filter and is bad at communicating to people, resulting him both causally revealing Claire’s existence to John and Michael and telling Francoise and James that Elly died.
• Bungled Suicide: Learning of Elly’s death and the realization that she never loved or wanted him is the final straw for an already unstable Michael and he attempts to kill himself. But he’s hospitalized quickly and the way he does it would not have killed him.
• Career Versus Man:
  • Elizabeth says she left her job teaching because she didn't fit in, but it reads more as this.
  • April mulls over this, wondering if she'll ever get married or if she'll end up devoting all her energy to her job. She references Jane Goodall, mistakenly thinking she was never married... because, as she later explains, Elly always referred to Miss Goodall as 'the crazy ape lady who never got married'.
• Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: Elly's madness in a nutshell, or more to the point, can't tell the past from the present.
• Chocolate Baby: Warren Blackwood is James Allen's biological father, and it was obvious to Anthony that he couldn't be the father because pale blondes and pale redheads do not make tan brunettes.
• Coming-Out Story: Ted does this at Lawrence and Nick's wedding.
• Companion Cube: Meredith's toy tiger Roary.
• Convenient Miscarriage: Deanna, twice. Bonus points because the first baby was conceived despite Dee being on a birth control shot. It might have happened because being born in Millborough had an adverse effect on her ability to carry children.
• The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: Someone from the coroner's office suspects this with regard to Elly's autopsy, since there are things that didn't make it into the official report such as the contents of Elly's stomach or additional lacerations and puncture wounds, and that the chief coroner took over from the man that put the concerns forward, and that said chief coroner might have connections with someone with enough power and influence to cover it up. It was John. The chief coroner was in the same model railroad club he was in. Uniquely for this trope though, he wasn't the murderer, just did it out of a misguided sense of protecting his children.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Gavin Caine and Roger Arsenault.
• Creator Breakdown: In-Universe; Michael goes through one after both Elly’s death and the realization that she may have never really loved him. It’s years until he snaps out of it.
• Cruel Mercy: Simply put, it was not worth the court's time to prosecute John for attacking Elly. Thanks to Self-Serving Memory, though, he thought he beat the legal system. However, it proved effective as it led to his Heel Realization.
• Death by Woman Scorned: Connie killed Elly because she did not love her back.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • Jim acknowledges he screwed up in sending Elly away to give birth and put the baby up for adoption but said that was the norm at the time, a view Iris backed up.
  • In the same vein, Elly admits that she never really wanted kids and clearly never should have been a mother, but due to social expectations, she ended up having them.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Gavin opposed investigating whether Millborough being built over a former nuclear site had an effect on its citizens. And why? To get back at Anthony through Tracey and Gordon, first for going to work for them instead of him, then for opposing his expansion plans because they were outdated.
  • Kortney blamed Elly and Moira for getting fired, never mind that she was busted stealing. So she got involved with and engaged to John to get back at the now deceased Elly. Then when John died, leaving her and their two sons the bulk of his wealth, she bought out Lilliput's and fired Moira, then bought out much of Millborough itself to absorb it into Greater Scarborough.
• Ditzy Genius: As revealed in the endgame, just think of Robin as a nicer Sheldon and you're on the right track.
• Domestic Abuse: A friend of Michael's suffered it at the hands of his wife, and that experience made Michael realize that John's negligence at seeking help for Elly was just the same thing.
• Drama Queen: Elly, more than anyone. If there's not something to confront or fight over, she is NOT happy.
• Dysfunctional Family: Many families in Milborough are dysfunctional to varying degrees, with cases of both familial abuse and spousal abuse.
• Dysfunction Junction: The town of Milborough is essentially a harmful environment full of toxic people. This might be because Milborough was built over a former nuclear site, which had a psychological effect on everyone.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Elizabeth and Anthony. Mike individually.
• Executive Meddling: In-Universe, Michael sees his book editor's attempts to correct his grammar as this. He considers the errors to be part of his characters' Voice.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Happens to Anthony as he puts two and two together that his father murdered his mother and covered it up.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Anthony’s literal-mindedness and bluntness constantly get him in hot water with people.
  • Elizabeth’s fear of commitment and settling down damages her marriage to Anthony.
  • Michael’s defeatist attitude, which gets worse in the second half of the fic.
  • John’s worries about what his hometown will think of him drive some of his actions, mainly refusing to get help for Elly. It’s later revealed that his family and hometown don’t really think much or at all of him.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo:
  • Michael Patterson finds out from John that he’s not his biological son. His real father is Elly’s first husband, Stan Watson. He was conceived as an attempt by Elly to keep Stan from traveling. It didn’t work and he left shortly after Michael’s birth. John married Elly when he was a toddler and Elly pretended that Stan never existed after that, lying to him that Michael hated him. This makes his sisters Elizabeth and April Michael’s half sisters and Stan the biological grandfather of Meredith and Robin.
  • According to Word of God, one of Lawrence’s cousins is actually his half-brother. Connie got pregnant with him as a teenager and sent him to live with relatives. She met Elly at the same mother and baby home when the latter was pregnant with Claire.
• Family Versus Career: This is a bit of an odd example. Elizabeth wants to break out of this trope, yet at the same time believes she's expected to follow this trope. She's actually surprised when Anthony makes suggestions to put James and Francoise in day-care and get a job if she didn't want to be just defined as 'Anthony's wife, James and Francie's mother'.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Elizabeth returns from her honeymoon with Anthony pregnant, Elly reacts with delight that she managed to "catch" him, much to Elizabeth’s confusion. Turns out, that’s how Michael came about — she pulled The Baby Trap on Stan.
  • Early on, Carla and Weed visit Michael and Deanna for dinner, and Weed is rather awkward and quiet the entire time. Because he slept with Michael sometime prior to the fic.
  • At one point, Elizabeth recalls overhearing Elly and John fight about Michael and someone named "Sam" or "Dan". they were fighting about Stan-Michael’s biological father.
• For Science!: One of the plot points that was established was that back in the 1960s, the Canadian government decided to simulate what would happen in a nuclear war by seeding the ground of various out of the way places with a radiation source to see what effect low-level fallout would have on wildlife. One of those places was a small farming community near Toronto called "Milborough". The revelation that a corrupt member of Parliament and local businessmen colluded to let the place get built on despite the risks is a bit of off-putting background to the domestic failures of the Patterson family.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Elly's hatred of motorcycles stemmed from being rejected by a man that rode one. That man was Frank Day, Elly's one-time fling and the biological father of Claire. She also became a Neat Freak to cope with her own feelings of dirtiness after her grandmother called her unclean for having a child out of wedlock, a feeling made worse after her first marriage ended.
  • Seeing how his parents treated Elly after she got pregnant with Claire caused Phil to decide he would never have kids.
  • Elly believes that her neglect of Elizabeth and not trying to prevent Michael’s bullying resulted in Elizabeth feeling unsettled anywhere and running away from potentially settling down, damaging her career and relationships.
  • Elly’s resentment of Thèrése is due to the former seeing the latter as the kind of person she wanted to be, but held herself back from becoming.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": Only at a Patterson funeral can a food fight break out. And that's where all the Pattersons' dirty secrets and resentments broke out.
• Generation Xerox: Elizabeth and Michael ultimately manage to avert this, though only with considerable time, effort and soul-searching.
• Glorified Sperm Donor:
  • Wilf regarded both Elly and John as this, with regards to April.
  • Elly had Stan believe that Michael regarded him as this for many years, when in truth he didn't remember Stan at all and never knew that he was his biological father.
  • The ending implies that Warren Blackwood becomes one to James, as it’s never revealed if Warren and James know each other in the future.
• Go Among Mad People: Elly certainly believes this during her stay there.
• Gold Digger:
  • What Frank and Stan both believed Elly to be, with some of The Baby Trap thrown in for good measure for Stan.
  • Who Silenced Elly Patterson? gives us another example: Kortney started out as this, dating and then getting engaged to John for his money. She realizes she fell in love with him when he defended her from Connie at Elly's funeral.
• Good with Numbers: Taken to its logical extreme with Anthony, who sees all of his life as a sort of account system, with seed capital and debts in the people. This causes a disconnect between him and other people.
• Go Out with a Smile: Claire's mother. She was found dead with a smile on her face while waiting to go Christmas shopping with Claire.
• Got Over Rape Instantly: Elly tries to invoke this on Elizabeth and Anthony by arranging the Attempted Rape of Elizabeth so Anthony can rescue her and rekindle their romance.
• Happily Adopted: Claire. One of her regrets is she never got to tell her mother how much she meant to her before she died. Elly even ruefully admitted that Claire turned out the best of her children because of this trope.
• Heel Realization:
  • A couple of months after Elly is committed John realizes what he's done and who he is. Because of this he tends to stay away from everyone as he knows he would just make things worse.
  • While not quite being a Heel by any means, Anthony gets something like this when he realizes all the crap he's done to Elizabeth.
• Hidden Depths:
  • According to one of her letters, Mira is a Trekkie.
  • Elizabeth, of all people has read Death Note.
• Honest Corporate Executive: Therese, in stark contrast to her father.
• Horrible Honeymoon: Elizabeth and Anthony Caine’s honeymoon in Niagara Falls gets off to a bad start when Anthony has a fit about Elizabeth not being a virgin (despite him obviously not being one since he has a daughter from his first marriage). Elizabeth runs out of their room crying and goes to the lobby to calm down. She runs into her ex boyfriend, Warren Blackwood there. They end up having a one night stand that produces James Allen Caine. While the rest of the honeymoon goes smoothly, it kicks off several months of marital discord between each other.
• Hope Spot: For a time, Michael and Deanna thrive alongside their kids in Colorado, giving off the impression that they’ve become the most stable part of the family. But then the truth about Michael’s parentage comes out, Elly gets arrested, Claire arrives and his repressed bisexuality come out, resulting in Michael regressing into old habits and a divorce.
• Hustler: Fiona.
• Hypocritical Humor: Mixed with Irony.
  • In his very first letter, Michael laments how difficult spending time around his children is:
  Michael: "How Sheleigh must have suffered, having a husband who didn't help her with her children!"
  • When April comments that it was irresponsible for Elly and Connie to not have their dogs fixed, Elly blames her for opening the gates, then goes on to say that if Edgar hadn't alerted them the day she wandered down to the creek, she would have drowned. April points out that Elly knew she could open the gate, and since she was only four, it was Elly's job to make sure she couldn't get out. Cue Elly yelling about her 'dredging up the past'.
  • Elly complains about how texting corrupts and ruins the English language, and then April corrects her own English. And then there's this:
  Elly: Just what [Michael] doesn't need; some busybody (Mira) making him live out her dreams.
• I Am Not Your Father: John isn't Michael's biological father.
• Identical Grandson: It's stated more than once that Claire looks like Elly circa April's birth, but with less stress wrinkles and better fashion sense.
• Ignored Epiphany: John's letters reveal him to be more self-aware from the start. Unfortunately, even when he acknowledges his flaws, he refuses to do anything to correct them. For instance, he acknowledges that it's awful for him to refuse to get Elly help after her psychotic break, but he still won't swallow his pride and act.
• Important Haircut: Elly got one when she snapped out of her fugue state to symbolize her growing confidence and desire to break away from her past. Not that her family noticed.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Anthony when he realizes that his father murdered his mother.
• I Reject Your Reality: Elly's descent into madness started with her denying April was her daughter and claiming that her two children were little kids and that Eddy was his father Farley. It got worse from there.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: Elizabeth said John had a mean temper and blatantly accused him of murdering Elly and he takes offense at her calling his favorite food 'greaseburgers'.
• Innocent Innuendo: A nonsexual variant with Elly and Meridith. Elly, thinking Meredith is Elizabeth, threatens to send Meredith to the farm. Since Meredith was told when Elly "sent the dog to the farm" meant the dog was put down, Meredith thinks that Elly wants to kill her.
• It's All About Me: Elly. Elizabeth starts to act like this when she gets pregnant. Mike has it worse, particularly in the beginning, when he can only see things in the context of himself and his book. He viewed watching his children as research for pete's sake! Not that John's much better: he wouldn't get help for Elly cause it'd make him look bad, and his eulogy at Elly's funeral was about how he'd miss her cooking. And then there's Connie...
• I've Come Too Far: Elly says as much after complaining about some of the negativity she'd heard about Anthony and Liz's engagement:
  Elly: "I've come too far, been made to give up too much not to receive some sort of compensation for the pain."
• Jerkass Has a Point: While Fiona was clearly using Elly to take some of John’s money, she is right that none of her family came to visit her in the mental hospital and that the Pattersons barely visited Fiona despite both being John’s cousin and living in Milborough. And she makes better progress in her recovery with Fiona than in the hospital.
• Keeping Secrets Sucks: In his defense, Anthony didn't know Claire being Elly's daughter was supposed to be a secret.
• Kick the Dog: Gavin's opposition to the investigation on the effects nuclear fallout had on the citizens of Millborough. Roger's flip-flopping on the matter isn't much better, he's saying what he needs to to buy property dirt cheap.
• Kids Are Cruel: This is Elly's excuse for trying to take Robin's hearing aid away: in her mind, she's 'saving him' from getting teased. She's drawing from her own experiences here:
  Elly: "So what if the principal said I was the only one calling the girl with the orthodontia 'Tin-grin'? Everyone was thinking it."
• Kindhearted Cat Lover:Fiona. She even took in a displaced Shiimsa.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Deanna does this when she muses that the strangeness that permeated Millborough in September 2008 felt like someone took two years out of their lives because it was no longer in print and tried to sell the rest of it. Of course, then she makes references to how life would have turned out had the comic gone a different direction like it actually happened (ex: Elizabeth marrying Richard Nichols).
  • In truth, Elly's madness was this as well; it's a reference to the 'new-runs' Lynn Johnston attempted to do, combining strips from the eighties with new strips. Various memory problems (particularly with Deanna) are also attributed to the new-runs. And Elly's life flashing before her eyes signaled the return to straight reprints. And Claire came across someone in her travels eerily reminiscent of Lynn Johnston herself.
  • Becky said that her on and off feud with April felt like a sixty-year-old woman writing a story kept forgetting that they made up.
  • April got a chill down her back when she found out her dorm room was located in Johnston Hall.
  • John runs into the man he was based on, Rod Johnston. Neither Rod or his receptionist were amused.
  • At Elizabeth and Anthony’s wedding, Meredith runs into a woman who behaves like Lynn herself.
  • At the fic’s end, Connie muses to Kortney that Milborough once felt both like an Canadian and American town, not entirely sure where it was. It’s a reference to the original strip heavily downplaying its Canadian setting to the point where it could be mistaken for it to take place in America.
• Literal-Minded: Anthony.
• Love Hurts: Michael suffers a psychological breakdown after both Elly’s death and the realization that she may have never really loved him. It’s years until he snaps out of it.
• Luke, I Am Your Father:
  • Elly is Claire's biological mother.
  • Stan Watson is Michael’s biological father.
• Malicious Misnaming: John constantly called his fellow dentist 'Elliot' instead of Everett. He only stopped after the other man published a full-page ad in the paper declaring "MY NAME IS EVERETT, YOU IDIOT!"
• Mandatory Motherhood:
  • In the sole letter from Carleen, she mentions how she's always asked when she and Weed are going to have kids and is constantly given the 'you'll change your mind' spiel. Particularly from Weed's dad, with some Heir Club for Men overtones.
  • Also overlapping with Heir Club for Men, Therese's father stops speaking to her after she gets a tubal ligation since she can't/won't provide him with a grandson.
  • Elly resented Phil and Georgia because they didn't want kids; she didn't want them either but she thought she had to have them.
• Marriage of Convenience:
  • What Elly and John’s relationship essentially is: John only married Elly because he needed a wife and no other woman could stand his sexist behaviors, while Elly was scared to be a single mother after Stan divorced her. While there’s some implication that they grew to love or at least tolerate each other, John had been cheating on Elly long before Elly died.
  • By the story’s end, Elizabeth and Anthony have become this, but they’re more stable than John and Elly thanks to considerable amounts of character development.
• Maternally Challenged: Therese acknowledges that she is this, and while she does love Francoise and will take care of her, she just can't handle being the primary caregiver and thinks Francoise better off with Anthony and Elizabeth.
• May–December Romance: John and Kortney. His coworkers point out how unusual it is that he can say his fiancee is the same age as his daughters.
• Meat Versus Veggies:
  • April becomes a vegan, and Elly is in denial about it, constantly trying to get April to eat a burger or tuna casserole. Not to mention she has to try recipes at Mike and Dee's because she gets snide comments from her parents every time she tries at her house.
  • By contrast, Dee is initially skeptical of April's new diet out of concern: one of her friends tried an extreme vegan diet and had all her hair fall out. After being reassured by April's research into the matter, she supports her.
  • The debate was revived later between April, her aunt Bev, and her uncle (Bev's brother) Bill. Bill's also a vegan due to environmental factors, and April is baffled that Bev can't see the contradiction in being a vet to animals that will be slaughtered for food.
  • And then when Who Silenced Elly Patterson began April told Brad that Elly 'forgot' that she was vegan again, and that she threw out the vegan margarine tarts April made cause 'real butter tarts have butter in them'. All this when she was trying to make amends with April! And because she couldn't admit that she ate them all.
• The Mentally Disturbed: Elly.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Investigating into Elly's murder ended up opening the cold case on Hanneke Caine's disappearance, when Gavin came under suspicion and a house search found Hanneke's body.
• Mistaken Identity: John mistakes Claire for a lawyer hired by either Mira or the Mayeses to force John to give up his shares in Gordon's business. He takes it much worse when Anthony inadvertently reveals her true identity as Elly's illegitimate daughter and attacks Elly.
• Murder by Mistake: Connie said that this happened in the case of Elly's death; the target was actually John. She lied.
• My Beloved Smother: Another thing Elly is guilty of.
• My Girl Is Not a Slut: Anthony did not take it well when he found out Elizabeth wasn't a virgin, and the fight drove her out of the wedding suite and into the arms of Warren Blackwood, leading directly to James's conception.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When Elly snaps out of her fugue state and is confronted by her doctors about what had happened, she is horrified, particularly when she looks at the letters she had written, and is equally horrified at just how much Connie enabled her.
• Nature Versus Nurture: All three of Elly's daughters worry if they have inherited Elly's madness or if their different upbringings and paths in life will prevent that from happening.Worries increased further when a letter from their maternal aunt Phyllis gave hints that mental issues were genetic in grandmother Marian's family.
• Neat Freak: Elly attempts to be one to purge her own feelings of dirtiness due to having Claire out of wedlock and being a divorced single mother. It didn't work.
• Never My Fault: A favorite of the Patterson bunch. Elly especially is keen on blaming April for letting Farley and Sera loose when she and Connie never bothered to spay and neuter them, then when confronted over the gate, she accuses April of dredging up the past. This is also one of the things Connie enabled her on, seeing as she was the same way: blame John for Elly getting better and trying to make amends (or as she sees it, turning Elly against her), Claire for seeking out Elly, and Liz for Lawrence's homosexuality, since she believes Cure Your Gays works.
• Not Blood, Not Family:
  • With the exception of April and Meredith and Robin, Francçise Caine, Anthony’s daughter and Elizabeth’s stepdaughter is treated as this in varying degrees by the Pattersons: Michael and Deanna are nice to her but don’t build a strong relationship with her, John ignores her and Elly is more directly hostile towards her step granddaughter, calling her "someone else’s castoff" during her last letter before her breakdown.
  • As the fic progresses, John is shown to have this attitude: When he reveals that Michael isn’t his son, it’s implied that John resented being a stepfather and he’s shocked when Anthony says that he’s going to raise James as his own son, despite knowing that Elizabeth conceived him with Warren.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Claire has a doctorate in geology.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: Everyone views Mira and Wilf as this, at least in the beginning. Conversely, Mira views the Pattersons, barring April, as this.
• Parental Neglect:
  • The only reason Michael's willing to spend any time around his children is as 'research' for his book, which he considers to be incredibly hard work.
  • When Elly falls into her fugue state, April's her first victim. She only remembers having two children and rejects April as a stranger.
  • After marrying Elizabeth, Anthony leaves most of Francoise’s care to her. She in turn constantly has Francoise babysat by family members so she can "focus on being pregnant".
• Pet the Dog:
  • When Dee expects April to cancel her plans so she can come babysit, Elly surprises them both by volunteering to sit instead. Not only that, she actually tells Dee that they need to give April more advance notice!
  • For all the bad choices and line crossing John did, he did make a good one in siding with Tracey and Gordon and saying that there was a need to investigate the nuclear fallout and its effects on Millborough's citizens.
• Precision F-Strike: "Christ, what an asshole!!" Notable in that Anthony said it, and he's not one prone to swearing.
• Promotion to Parent:
  • In an odd sense. When Elly lost it, she insisted that April wasn't her daughter and April got thrown out of the house. Since she was still technically a minor, this could be applied to Michael since he let April stay at his house. Definitely more plausible when John gave up on convincing Elly that April was their daughter, effectively disowning her.
  • In an odder sense: Claire didn't even know she had siblings for years, yet she's becoming more of a parental figure to April than Elly ever was. Was made kind of awkward when April nearly said she was old enough to be her mother-they're 22 years apart.
• Psycho Lesbian: Connie has the hots for Elly and will do anything to earn her love. Elly rejecting her because she doesn't swing that way pushes Connie to murder her in a jeallous rage.
• Quitting to Get Married: Elizabeth quits her job at Milborough Elementary School while she’s planning her wedding to Anthony, claiming that she "didn’t fit in", but it’s heavily implied that she’s making an excuse that it’s not this. She regrets doing this after the family moves to Vancouver, as she’s stuck alone with a preschooler and a baby in an apartment all day.
• Race Lift: Technically, James Allen Caine. In canon, based on the one image◊ we see of him, he got his looks from Anthony. Since he's a Chocolate Baby in The New Retcons, his hair and skin were darkened to resemble his biological father Warren.
• Released to Elsewhere:
  • Elly tried to pull the 'sent the pet to a farm' variant on April to explain what happened to an aging and ill Dixie. April was pissed. Not so much because of the lie, but because Elly decided to get rid of her because tending to Dixie was "too much work", even though April was the one tending to her and Dixie was getting better.
  • Later on, as Elly fell deeper into her madness, she said that she would flip a coin and that Edgar would go to a 'farm' if it came up heads. When Meredith asks what would happen if it landed tails she was told that Meredith would be the one going to the 'farm'.
• Rescue Romance:
  • Elly tried to get Anthony and Elizabeth together by sending Elizabeth to get raped, which would lead to Anthony rescuing her and therefore rekindle their love for each other.
  • John viewed his marriage to Elly as this. Same with Kortney.
• Resentful Guardian:
  • According to invokedWord of God, Connie is this to Lawrence because she tried to give him to family members when he was born like she did with her first son. But they refused to take in a biracial child.
  • Elly later admits that she never really wanted children, making her one to her son and daughters.
• Retcon: Obviously, given the title and that they picked and chose what parts of the Strip of Destiny made it into the story, but even minute things like Elizabeth and Anthony's hair colors were retconned. In the earliest color strips, Elizabeth was shown with dirty blonde hair and Anthony with what could only be called orange hair. By the of the series, both their hair colors have lightened to where Anthony could be called blonde too. Yet the distinct reference to Anthony being a redhead indicates that the writers went with the older color scheme.
• Sarcasm-Blind: One of Anthony's failings; being Literal-Minded, he takes sarcasm at face-value.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After breaking up the brawl at Elly’s funeral, Brad makes plans to transfer out of Millborough, having had enough of both the town and the Pattersons.
• Secretly Wealthy: The authors went back and forth on whether John was this or only pretending to be eventually settling on it being true, as Kortney and her twins inherited most of it.
• Self-Serving Memory: A lot of people are guilty of this, but the most egregious example would be John choosing to believe that he got off easy for attacking Elly because the judge was sympathetic to his having a crazy wife, understanding of a man with no priors, and because John was a contributor to his campaign. In reality, John got off because he was not worth the effort to prosecute, the judge called him out for being a waste of space, and his 'contribution' was buying a five-dollar bumper sticker.
• Serious Business: Of all things, whether Elizabeth using 'Mrs. Elizabeth Caine' was correct or incorrect. Started a minor Flame War when that happened.
• Shipper on Deck: Michael (among others) was convinced April and Gerald would eventually marry. He was dead wrong.
• Shout-Out:
  • Meredith's toy tiger Roary is based on Hobbes. Meredith also sees Roary as her daemon.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four gets a few references, comparing Elly's memory with Oceania's mutable war against Eurasia/Eastasia.
  • Francoise's favorite show is The Secret Saturdays.
  • When Mike and Dee pondered the 'what ifs' regarding who they married and Mira said that Dee would have the same life had she married Perry, just in Seattle, she compared it to Star Trek (2009), and how despite Nero changing history the Enterprise crew still got together.
  • Elizabeth said that Elly was due for a verbal smackdown such as Near gave Light.
• Significant Birth Date: April and Claire share the same birthdate, April 1st. This is another reason Elly tries to ignore April, her birthday just reminds Elly of Claire's.
• Someone to Remember Him By: It's implied that John died not long after his twin sons by Kortney were born.
• Stay in the Kitchen: John’s attitude towards women can be summed up as this, alongside seeing them as damsels in distress. It’s especially prevalent in why his relationship with his college girlfriend Sylvia Makepeace ended: he told her that she would have to drop out of her master’s program and become a housewife because “it wouldn’t look right for her to work”. Elly and Kortney were the only women who would put up with John, the former because she feared being a single mother after Stan left and the latter because she was a Gold Digger. He also believes that "married men shouldn’t have to grocery shop" when Michael asks him to go to the store instead of coming over to eat his and Deanna’s food after Elly goes insane.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land: Therese muses that in ten years Millborough will be unrecognizable and just a part of Greater Toronto, a view Liz shares, seeing Elly as the last bastion of what was Millborough. She also chose to attend Elly's funeral to invoke this trope so she can make a clean break of her memories before emigrating to France. This is confirmed in Elizabeth's final letter when she and Anthony went to attend the closing of their alma mater. The only thing that didn't change is her neighborhood. While Kortney accelerates the town’s decline, it’s implied it would have happened regardless.
• Streetwalker: Kortney
• Stepford Smiler:
  • Elizabeth jokes that she'll be accused of being this for defending Anthony for his Literal Mindedness.
  • Michael isn't happy with how Blood Cargo turned out, but still plasters on a smile and acts like he is.
• Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism: Elly (and Connie) was sent to a church-run academy after she got pregnant with Claire to put her up for adoption when she was born. According to Mira, the term they used for girls like her was 'wayward'.
• Sucky School: Milborough’s elementary school still uses a blackboard and has no computer lab, despite it being 2009. While some like Elly Patterson are fine with it, Tracey Mayes is unhappy with the quality of education her children are getting and attempts to run for office to fix the problems.
• Teacher/Student Romance: Claire expressly suggested to April that she avoid this trope.
• Teen Pregnancy: Elly with Claire. Word Of God is that Connie did this too, and that is how she and Elly met; they ended up at the same school for wayward girls.
• There Are No Therapists: Inverted. There are therapists, but John just refuses to seek them out for Elly due to his sexist mindset until he's no longer given a choice in the matter.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Elly's letters after her post-wedding breakdown.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: John’s intelligence and self awareness is severely downgraded in the sequel.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Connie. She was behind a lot of Elly’s actions in her life, such as trapping Stan Watson into a pregnancy.
• Trauma Conga Line: After Elly and John’s arrest, Michael’s life completely falls apart: John reveals during his arrest that Michael isn’t his son, which results in him finding his real biological father, who wants little to do with him due to Michael being the result of The Baby Trap. Then Robin is diagnosed with autism on top of his health issues, Deanna miscarries for the second time, he learns that Milborough was seeded with radiation in the 1960s by the government and that it had major effects on the people, he develops Imposter Syndrome and regresses into old habits, Deanna files for a divorce, his repressed bisexuality comes out, Elly dies, he attempts suicide and realizes that Elly never really loved or wanted him. It takes several years before he can rebuild his life and be happy again.
• The Un-Favourite:
  • April, so damn much. She's at best ignored, and at worst effectively disowned, when John gave up on convincing Elly she was their daughter. A good indicator of this is that only Michael and Phil attended her high school graduation. While two people had good excuses (Liz was in Vancouver dealing with her own family crisis and Jim was on his last legs), that does not excuse her parents (Elly still denied that April was her daughter, and John just couldn't be bothered).
  • Not that Francoise was much better at first: Barring April and Meredith, she was practically ignored by the Pattersons and Elly even called her “someone else’s castoff”. It got worse after Elizabeth got pregnant, to the point where she would drop off Francoise to be babysat by April or Mike so that she could “focus on being pregnant”. It wasn’t until Francie had nightmares about being dropped off at the “used kids store” and Elly got worse that things got better.
  • You wouldn't think of it at first, but Lawrence is this for Connie. Connie was able to give her first son to relatives, and had been banking on that when she got pregnant with Lawrence and Paolo refused to marry her, but the relatives wouldn't take him in cause of his mixed race. So Connie resented being stuck with Lawrence. That he later came out of the closet didn't help matters.
• Unreliable Narrator: All over the place. It was discussed in the comments for Liz's February 2009 letter, particularly in the context of if Liz was one concerning the going-after.
• Vacation Episode: Michael and Deanna take Meredith, Robin and April to Disney World and Universal Studios in Florida for Christmas 2008.
• Walking Spoiler: Claire, Fiona and Kortney.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Some time after the move to Vancouver, Elizabeth stopped mentioning her cat Shiimsa. It’s later revealed that Fiona took the cat in and it got lost in the chaos of the move and Liz’s pregnancy.
• Wham Line:
  Liz: "Said "friend" was a forty year old (she'd just turned the big four-oh April the first) woman named Claire Thompson; when Anthony said she could be my sister, Frank said that was for a good reason: she was!!"
  Michael: "On the way back, our house sitter called with the news that the Patels filed kidnapping charges on my mother."
  Deanna: "Mike and I have tried to fight this out, cry it out, pray it out. Saturday, he moved out."
  "Valley Voice Exclusive: Elly Patterson Found Dead"
  Brad: "Seal it up. [The Caine house] is now a full on crime scene.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Endgames and Epilogues, the last chapter of Who Silenced Elly Patterson, which covered Elly's death, and final letters from the characters in this story, ranging from six months later to fifteen years later.
• Wicked Stepmother:
  • Step-family, more like. Once Elizabeth got pregnant, it was like Francoise didn't exist to the Pattersons. Elly even called her 'someone else's castoff'. Only April showed her decency until Elizabeth got a wake-up call by seeing how unhinged Elly got. Then she started behaving more like a mother.
  • John's piss-poor treatment of Michael makes him a wicked stepfather in light of him revealing that he's not Michael's biological father.
  • Kortney becomes this to the kids, especially April.
• Workaholic: Mike. Between that and his repressing his bisexual nature, it tore his marriage with Deanna apart.
• Word Salad: Elly starts to talk like this as her mental state deteriorates.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: Elly ends up here after Fiona gets her out of the psych ward.
• The Un-Reveal:
  • It’s never revealed if Elizabeth and Anthony ever decide to tell James and Warren Blackwood about each other.
  • It’s also unknown if Elly’s madness really is hereditary or preventable.
• Un-person: Gavin does this to Hanneke after accidentally killing her by erasing traces of her existence and lying to everyone, including his own son.
• Younger Than They Look: Elly expresses jealousy that Annie, who's Connie's age and three years older than Elly, looks ten years younger, despite that she didn't try to fight aging like Connie.
• You Should Have Died Instead: April accuses John of this trope concerning her near drowning and Farley’s death. She also points out that she was never taken to a hospital afterwards and he and Elly went on another kid free vacation less than a year later.

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