Tear Jerker / Ma

• Nearly everything about Ma is tragic whenever she isn't being psychotic.
  • Through flashbacks, Ma is revealed to have once been a bookish, quiet young woman who developed a crush on Ben when they were both in high school. She became ecstatic when she thought she got a chance at popularity by doing Ben a "favor." Unbeknownst to her, it was all a prank orchestrated by Ben; she actually gave a blowjob to a complete stranger, and she is made fun of and humiliated by the entire student body.
  • While Ma can be clingy and possessive of Maggie and her friends, it makes more sense why she has trust issues. It also slightly explains her drugging her daughter as her way of ensuring that she wouldn't leave her and be exposed to the cruelty of others.
  • Ma leads a group of adolescents to her house...only to then get her side window egged. Her reaction and subsequent breakdown is truly upsetting.
  • In some ways, her death. Ma is stabbed in the back by Maggie and she is left alone in the house as it burned. Instead of going after them, Ma accepts her fate, and goes to her bedroom to lie with Ben's corpse.
    • Even worse: after getting stabbed and losing Genie, Ma goes upstairs and watches the teens gathered on her front yard as they support and comfort each other, with no one inside to comfort her. Sue Ann is back on the outside looking in.
• Genie's situation. She has the misfortune of living under the same roof as Ma, who gives her drugs under the pretense that she is sick. She lives in constant fear of her own mother, and to further compound it, she is nearly pitched into the flames by her.
• Regardless of how much of an asshole his father may have been, Andy will wake up to the realization that he had lost both his parents. That is, assuming that Ma didn't mortally wound him.