The problem was that before she broke up with Quill, her defining attribute was “boy-crazy.” But once Greg realized that she was now old enough to be sexually active (and that readers might start to wonder why she never actually engaged in the activity she was so obsessed about), he removed that part of her character altogether but didn’t replace it with anything, leaving her personality as an empty void.
You see folks, this cartoon is taking place in modern times, and these are young people, not silly old boomers!
You could’ve fooled me. These supposed college students are so chaste and repressed that they make Bob Jones University kids look wild.
As for Luann herself? The TV Tropes entry for this strip says it best: “Emotionally, Luann is still basically a 1950s ‘boy crazy’ 12-year-old who spends all her waking time obsessed with the abstract idea of making every male she meets into her boyfriend, but rarely dates and never would even consider having sex. Juxtaposing this with everyone else in the strip being a realistic 21st-century adult has made her character even more jarringly weird than it was before.”
It’s been almost a week now and they still haven’t given any useful info. I think it’s safe to say it’s just smoke and mirrors rather than any useful product (it doesn’t help that Luann is so boring that it’s like putting lipstick on a pig.)
Luann does need fixing, although Tiff and Bets aren’t the ones to do it. Luann spends days just staring off into space. She’s the most boring character in the strip. Today’s strip flat-out acknowledges how uninspired she is.
Wow, the strip is admitting what many of us have known for years: Luann has nothing she’s passionate about, which makes her a pretty boring character. Now if they could only do something about it instead of letting it just be fodder for punchlines.
The problem was that before she broke up with Quill, her defining attribute was “boy-crazy.” But once Greg realized that she was now old enough to be sexually active (and that readers might start to wonder why she never actually engaged in the activity she was so obsessed about), he removed that part of her character altogether but didn’t replace it with anything, leaving her personality as an empty void.