Oh I love Holly standing his ground and being proud of what he wants. I just hope he communicates this fully with Ivy and Aster soon so he can get the reassurance and validation he requires and deserves. ?
While he should talk with them about what he’s struggling with (or at least Ivy, as Aster isn’t really his partner,) I’ve also seen this a lot in the poly communities. No amount of reassurance from your partner will overcome your own self doubt and self esteem. It can help for sure, but Holly is gonna have to do some self work to see the worth in himself and to be sure he isn’t just settling for what he can have because he doesn’t think he deserves what he actually wants. I hope when he does get to the end of this that he decides this is what he actually wants, but so long as you don’t think you deserve it, it’s impossible to be sure.
I try not to make LNF be about the world I live in. But, it’s also one of my favorite things about the story. I’m so happy that age is a topic.
It’s depressing how age discrimination works today in the environment I’ve lived in. People are segregated as if people are divided into dating pools. I don’t think daily life is about dating. Certainly not for me. I wonder what Holly’s worries are when he imagines himself being less vibrant. Does he picture cocktails and vacations as representing what daily life is? Skiing in the Alps?
People I interact with have interests that are mostly unrelated to age. The age fear seems similar to homophobia to me. People judge gay people as if interaction is all about sex and dating.
The consequences of this phobia is “rest homes” for older people. Old people accepting that their role is to wait for death and yearn for that rare phone call from a loved one. Young girls in distress because they are 30 and life is over.
If we are accepting of diversity, it should include diversity of age. The stereotype is that that would be about old men having sex with young girls… That’s a stereotype. A healthy home would have grandmother and young child all laughing at the same jokes, in my opinion. But, we’re in the situation that we are in and change would come slowly.
Most of the time, I only know of elderly people going into assisted living if they have health issues and need more professional (as in trained) support. They also allow them to do events with other people that might otherwise be hard for them to do if they are living by themselves or with family (due to mobility issues, things made to their level if they have dementia, etc.). There is some benefit to 55+ communities since they are all tired and can do stuff during the day. Actively doing things with others is a lot better than just sitting at home by themselves. I’m not saying that there isn’t issues with some of those places. Just that normally the family does it because they want what is best for the person, not sending them to just “wait for death”. I have been involved in multigenerational groups, such as a ladies’ circle group or a group that plays bunco. There are some issues with creating multigenerational events with people though, being time and difference in interests. Teenagers tend to be more interested in things like video or computer games and are up later at night and have school. Technology unfortunately tends to segregate people by age some due to interest and level of tech savviness. The lack of generational interaction is more complex than just the stigma. I do think that there should be more games that are geared for multigenerational play so even people who aren’t tech savvy can play.
I mean, my mother in law is 70 years old and has a group of video gaming friends who are younger and older than me. (The youngest is probably in her early 20s or late teens now). I’ve been gaming with people who span age ranges for over a decade.
There is definitely some issues with age discrimination and I don’t want to belittle that, but I think the biggest issues relate more to interests and ways of thinking. When you hear boomer/zoomer/millennial, that’s more short hand for attitudes and ways of thinking. Not everyone fits into their generation but the things that happened during those generations, especially the formative years, do tend to stick with you and shape your world view.
There are assisted living homes and also retirement communities, which honestly, are great for a lot of older folks because they can get their needs (social, physical, mental and spiritual) met more easily. I also think its hard to make sweeping generalizations about people at different ages and their interests. There are some *very* raunchy retirement communities in Florida with astonishingly high rates of STDs and substance use, I’m just sayin.
Also, multi-generational communities and homes are very highly linked to culture and cultural values. American cultural values, as a whole, tend to favor consumerism, independence and wealth generation, which does not favor building these communities as much. Family has tended to transition to a nuclear concept and not these large inter-generational ones.
That would be why I said some instead of absolute in reference to games and technology. There are some people that have the game knowledge base to be able to pick up new games easily. For a good reference about what I am talking about, there is a youtube video called “what games are like for someone who doesn’t play games” where a husband has his non-gamer wife try various games to actually see how difficult it is for someone not used to games to learn and play some popular games. While time passes, and people who grew up with computers get older, there are more people in older generations with general tech savviness.
As for age discrimination, I definitely don’t want to belittle it either since I have encountered it, especially when I was a teenager. I just think that there is a difference between actual age discrimination and people segregating due to personal preferences and schedule differences. There are cultural differences too, since most Americans I know want to live in their own home. There is some freedom in that, since they do have their own space (so can decorate and organize the way that they want, can do what they want with less worrying about disturbing others, etc.). While that does mean that they don’t tend to see their family every day, unless they live next door or something, most I know of do take the time to see their family, babysit their grandkids, etc.
That being said, there is some discrimination for adult kids that still live with their parents for whatever reason, normally a financial one. The stereotype is that the child is freeloading off the parents and having them do everything for them, such as household chores. I think that this is due to the cultural concept that living by yourself is a status symbol of being economically stable and able to take care of yourself. It is sort of intermixed though since being able to own your own home does tend to mean that you are financially well off as well as have more freedom to do what you want, which is pretty big in US culture. To me, it seems that none of this is looking down on spending time with another generation, but instead on perceived taking advantage of others or a lack of financial security (so being perceived as poor, in which the blame of being poor and therefore needing help is normally placed on the person themselves rather than others factors outside of that person’s control). In general, due to the culture of personal freedom in the US, I think that the mainstay is always going to be living in your own house and traveling to visit people rather than living in a multigenerational household. There is just too much economic power in owning a house and cultural desires of personal freedom to make people want to consider the benefits of living in a multigenerational household.
On a final note, I think things like the boomer/millennial discrimination could be solved by people trying to understand where someone is coming from rather than assume their specific circumstances. That is not easy to do since most people relate to something based on their personal experiences rather than being able to put themselves directly into someone else’s experience. It is like having someone who’s always been blind try to describe color. They may know a textbook definition of it but it is hard for them to relate to something like the color blue if they have never seen it. Why I think that you should never belittle someone’s personal feelings or experiences since you have never been through the sum of whatever they have experienced up to that point.
It seems to happen often that I experience a difference in focus when talking to people. I am often talking about a community or group of people and what is good or bad for them and how things could be different, while the person I’m talking to thinks of the topic in terms of how an individual responds to an unchangeable environment. Things are just the way they are and you might fair better or worse if you react in this way vs. that way.
I live counter to things that could seem hopeless to change. I do things that cause problems for me because I think they are the right thing to do. I am a goody two shoes.
You and Amy seem to me to be describing how life is in a world that has been segregated by age and why people react the way they do to a world that is segregated by age. I have been imagining how it could be different however unlikely it is that that would happen, any time soon.
Artists inspire me with their idealism. Artists make the world beautiful, in my eyes. Children are filled with wonder and I am childish in many ways. I want to be idealistic and in some ways I have no choice but to be.
Kimi and Amy, I think there are reasons for things being the way they are and I’m wishing for large cultural changes, which would take a long time, like with all the isms (racism, etc.). It sounds like some commenters think that Holly is not too tired to be in a relationship with Ivy and Aster.
Ideally, communities would be mixed race, mixed gender, mixed sexuality and not segregated by age. That doesn’t mean requiring a mixed everything bobsledding sex orgy. It doesn’t mean invite a gay to your picnic. I think it means make an amazing comic like this that explores issues of age bias. Analyze one’s own biases. Make an effort to diversify where you put your attention.
The age mindset problem goes both ways. The out of touch “boomer” is stuck in their ways which I think is partly because of segregation based on age. There is also bias in equating people with an out of touch comment that they make. People do change. Communication is amazing and important.
Assisted living homes are, on average if not by majority, an awful place to put your parent… if you live in America. Three staff per hundred people, kicked out even if you do pay the bills, not getting the treatment because you don’t pay as much as someone else who doesn’t need that treatment but will get it anyway… No joke, those places are awful. And the worst part is that the government can’t do anything about it because elected officials on both sides of the aisle keep hamstringing the budget for investigation into such places for military spending and hamstring the ability to penalize such places because those places are owned by people that can lobby against such laws.
Never put a family member in assisted living. If you need it for your family member but can’t afford a live in nurse, move to a state where nurses that do home visits are part of medicare.
Verbena’s face from that second panel and how dramatically it changes in the later panels is so clearly masking. Like she absolutely understands the sentiment he’s expressing, but can’t bring herself to be any more vulnerable than she already has. Much as I want to see Holly, Ivy, and Aster grow together this arc, I hope we get to see Verbena at least get started on the path to healing from her own damage too. She responded to her upbringing by being super shitty, but no one deserves to grow up being compared to their sibling and made to feel they could never be enough for their own parents.
> Like she absolutely understands the sentiment he’s expressing, but can’t bring herself to be any more vulnerable than she already has.
Looks to me more like she’s giving him an easy way out by staying in character. And Holly plays along. And he may have needed that prodding to start working on getting out of the molasses he is in and work on some perspective rather than being afraid of stirring.
That is an interesting point, I think. Even if David is closer, I’ve added it as a theme on the Verbena and Ivy timeline on a wiki: https://lovenotfound-fans.fandom.com/wiki/Verbena_and_Ivy I don’t know a good phrase for pretending not to care, as a crutch (I added Verbena’s fear of vulnerability…). I think that’s a common trait of Verbena’s, but I could be wrong. People can edit that wiki.
Too much internet communication makes me constantly worry about how many words I’m using. I changed it to Verbena’s deflection about caring… I’m not sure if that is clearer.
“Verbena, honey, sex is not a good solution to a self esteem problem.” — made me think of a mare here on the premise. If you don’t know her well, you might think she is bad-tempered. But she merely prefers solving problems with violence.
Like, when she got a hay net (for slowing down the feeding process), you soon heard repeated “bang-bang-bang” from her stall and saw her kicking the net against the wall. Easy to mistake for frustration until you realised that in the pause between the bangs she was eating what had fallen to the ground, perfectly confident. The idea of a hay net is that the horses pick the hay from between the loops of the net, and the others were doing just that. We had to abandon that approach because of the danger of injury.
Likewise, I don’t think Verbena picks sex as the best way of addressing a problem but as a manner suiting her, whether or not it is particularly effective for the purported goal. And let’s remember that in this universe, sex generally does not imply touching but rather pressing the other’s buttons for them.
Rereading, I got the sense that Ivy and Holly were essentially saying the same thing, in different words, when Ivy said she wants more https://lovenotfound.com/comic/ch05-p10a/. He
loves her and was letting her go find what he thought he would be
inadequate to provide.
Holly goes on to say he cares about ivy: https://lovenotfound.com/comic/ch05-p25a/ “I want you to be happy”. In other words, it’s not just convenience. He wants Ivy, not “someone to love”. Their words cross each other.
Also, the progression is familiar to me, in how I’ve processed worries in my life, from Ivy disagreeing with Abeille about old-fashioned sex, her rumination about the subject and finally arriving at wanting to have a loving relationship.
It leads me to think about how at any time, whatever I’m worrying about might be me ruminating, in the middle of a progression that will lead to a conclusion. I cause myself problems when I believe what I think, that my thoughts, at the moment, are accurate.
Oh I love Holly standing his ground and being proud of what he wants. I just hope he communicates this fully with Ivy and Aster soon so he can get the reassurance and validation he requires and deserves. ?
Oh, Holly. You should talk to your partners about what they like about you: I’m sure they’ll surprise you.
And Verbena, you need to find better ways of being supportive than bad pick up attempts.
While he should talk with them about what he’s struggling with (or at least Ivy, as Aster isn’t really his partner,) I’ve also seen this a lot in the poly communities. No amount of reassurance from your partner will overcome your own self doubt and self esteem. It can help for sure, but Holly is gonna have to do some self work to see the worth in himself and to be sure he isn’t just settling for what he can have because he doesn’t think he deserves what he actually wants. I hope when he does get to the end of this that he decides this is what he actually wants, but so long as you don’t think you deserve it, it’s impossible to be sure.
I try not to make LNF be about the world I live in. But, it’s also one of my favorite things about the story. I’m so happy that age is a topic.
It’s depressing how age discrimination works today in the environment I’ve lived in. People are segregated as if people are divided into dating pools. I don’t think daily life is about dating. Certainly not for me. I wonder what Holly’s worries are when he imagines himself being less vibrant. Does he picture cocktails and vacations as representing what daily life is? Skiing in the Alps?
People I interact with have interests that are mostly unrelated to age. The age fear seems similar to homophobia to me. People judge gay people as if interaction is all about sex and dating.
The consequences of this phobia is “rest homes” for older people. Old people accepting that their role is to wait for death and yearn for that rare phone call from a loved one. Young girls in distress because they are 30 and life is over.
If we are accepting of diversity, it should include diversity of age. The stereotype is that that would be about old men having sex with young girls… That’s a stereotype. A healthy home would have grandmother and young child all laughing at the same jokes, in my opinion. But, we’re in the situation that we are in and change would come slowly.
Most of the time, I only know of elderly people going into assisted living if they have health issues and need more professional (as in trained) support. They also allow them to do events with other people that might otherwise be hard for them to do if they are living by themselves or with family (due to mobility issues, things made to their level if they have dementia, etc.). There is some benefit to 55+ communities since they are all tired and can do stuff during the day. Actively doing things with others is a lot better than just sitting at home by themselves. I’m not saying that there isn’t issues with some of those places. Just that normally the family does it because they want what is best for the person, not sending them to just “wait for death”. I have been involved in multigenerational groups, such as a ladies’ circle group or a group that plays bunco. There are some issues with creating multigenerational events with people though, being time and difference in interests. Teenagers tend to be more interested in things like video or computer games and are up later at night and have school. Technology unfortunately tends to segregate people by age some due to interest and level of tech savviness. The lack of generational interaction is more complex than just the stigma. I do think that there should be more games that are geared for multigenerational play so even people who aren’t tech savvy can play.
I mean, my mother in law is 70 years old and has a group of video gaming friends who are younger and older than me. (The youngest is probably in her early 20s or late teens now). I’ve been gaming with people who span age ranges for over a decade.
There is definitely some issues with age discrimination and I don’t want to belittle that, but I think the biggest issues relate more to interests and ways of thinking. When you hear boomer/zoomer/millennial, that’s more short hand for attitudes and ways of thinking. Not everyone fits into their generation but the things that happened during those generations, especially the formative years, do tend to stick with you and shape your world view.
There are assisted living homes and also retirement communities, which honestly, are great for a lot of older folks because they can get their needs (social, physical, mental and spiritual) met more easily. I also think its hard to make sweeping generalizations about people at different ages and their interests. There are some *very* raunchy retirement communities in Florida with astonishingly high rates of STDs and substance use, I’m just sayin.
Also, multi-generational communities and homes are very highly linked to culture and cultural values. American cultural values, as a whole, tend to favor consumerism, independence and wealth generation, which does not favor building these communities as much. Family has tended to transition to a nuclear concept and not these large inter-generational ones.
I think imma retire in Florida now! ?
That would be why I said some instead of absolute in reference to games and technology. There are some people that have the game knowledge base to be able to pick up new games easily. For a good reference about what I am talking about, there is a youtube video called “what games are like for someone who doesn’t play games” where a husband has his non-gamer wife try various games to actually see how difficult it is for someone not used to games to learn and play some popular games. While time passes, and people who grew up with computers get older, there are more people in older generations with general tech savviness.
As for age discrimination, I definitely don’t want to belittle it either since I have encountered it, especially when I was a teenager. I just think that there is a difference between actual age discrimination and people segregating due to personal preferences and schedule differences. There are cultural differences too, since most Americans I know want to live in their own home. There is some freedom in that, since they do have their own space (so can decorate and organize the way that they want, can do what they want with less worrying about disturbing others, etc.). While that does mean that they don’t tend to see their family every day, unless they live next door or something, most I know of do take the time to see their family, babysit their grandkids, etc.
That being said, there is some discrimination for adult kids that still live with their parents for whatever reason, normally a financial one. The stereotype is that the child is freeloading off the parents and having them do everything for them, such as household chores. I think that this is due to the cultural concept that living by yourself is a status symbol of being economically stable and able to take care of yourself. It is sort of intermixed though since being able to own your own home does tend to mean that you are financially well off as well as have more freedom to do what you want, which is pretty big in US culture. To me, it seems that none of this is looking down on spending time with another generation, but instead on perceived taking advantage of others or a lack of financial security (so being perceived as poor, in which the blame of being poor and therefore needing help is normally placed on the person themselves rather than others factors outside of that person’s control). In general, due to the culture of personal freedom in the US, I think that the mainstay is always going to be living in your own house and traveling to visit people rather than living in a multigenerational household. There is just too much economic power in owning a house and cultural desires of personal freedom to make people want to consider the benefits of living in a multigenerational household.
On a final note, I think things like the boomer/millennial discrimination could be solved by people trying to understand where someone is coming from rather than assume their specific circumstances. That is not easy to do since most people relate to something based on their personal experiences rather than being able to put themselves directly into someone else’s experience. It is like having someone who’s always been blind try to describe color. They may know a textbook definition of it but it is hard for them to relate to something like the color blue if they have never seen it. Why I think that you should never belittle someone’s personal feelings or experiences since you have never been through the sum of whatever they have experienced up to that point.
It seems to happen often that I experience a difference in focus when talking to people. I am often talking about a community or group of people and what is good or bad for them and how things could be different, while the person I’m talking to thinks of the topic in terms of how an individual responds to an unchangeable environment. Things are just the way they are and you might fair better or worse if you react in this way vs. that way.
I live counter to things that could seem hopeless to change. I do things that cause problems for me because I think they are the right thing to do. I am a goody two shoes.
You and Amy seem to me to be describing how life is in a world that has been segregated by age and why people react the way they do to a world that is segregated by age. I have been imagining how it could be different however unlikely it is that that would happen, any time soon.
Artists inspire me with their idealism. Artists make the world beautiful, in my eyes. Children are filled with wonder and I am childish in many ways. I want to be idealistic and in some ways I have no choice but to be.
Kimi and Amy, I think there are reasons for things being the way they are and I’m wishing for large cultural changes, which would take a long time, like with all the isms (racism, etc.). It sounds like some commenters think that Holly is not too tired to be in a relationship with Ivy and Aster.
Ideally, communities would be mixed race, mixed gender, mixed sexuality and not segregated by age. That doesn’t mean requiring a mixed everything bobsledding sex orgy. It doesn’t mean invite a gay to your picnic. I think it means make an amazing comic like this that explores issues of age bias. Analyze one’s own biases. Make an effort to diversify where you put your attention.
The age mindset problem goes both ways. The out of touch “boomer” is stuck in their ways which I think is partly because of segregation based on age. There is also bias in equating people with an out of touch comment that they make. People do change. Communication is amazing and important.
Assisted living homes are, on average if not by majority, an awful place to put your parent… if you live in America. Three staff per hundred people, kicked out even if you do pay the bills, not getting the treatment because you don’t pay as much as someone else who doesn’t need that treatment but will get it anyway… No joke, those places are awful. And the worst part is that the government can’t do anything about it because elected officials on both sides of the aisle keep hamstringing the budget for investigation into such places for military spending and hamstring the ability to penalize such places because those places are owned by people that can lobby against such laws.
Never put a family member in assisted living. If you need it for your family member but can’t afford a live in nurse, move to a state where nurses that do home visits are part of medicare.
Very well said!
Verbena’s face from that second panel and how dramatically it changes in the later panels is so clearly masking. Like she absolutely understands the sentiment he’s expressing, but can’t bring herself to be any more vulnerable than she already has. Much as I want to see Holly, Ivy, and Aster grow together this arc, I hope we get to see Verbena at least get started on the path to healing from her own damage too. She responded to her upbringing by being super shitty, but no one deserves to grow up being compared to their sibling and made to feel they could never be enough for their own parents.
The quality of the art in expressing this is so good!
<3
> Like she absolutely understands the sentiment he’s expressing, but can’t bring herself to be any more vulnerable than she already has.
Looks to me more like she’s giving him an easy way out by staying in character. And Holly plays along. And he may have needed that prodding to start working on getting out of the molasses he is in and work on some perspective rather than being afraid of stirring.
That is an interesting point, I think. Even if David is closer, I’ve added it as a theme on the Verbena and Ivy timeline on a wiki: https://lovenotfound-fans.fandom.com/wiki/Verbena_and_Ivy I don’t know a good phrase for pretending not to care, as a crutch (I added Verbena’s fear of vulnerability…). I think that’s a common trait of Verbena’s, but I could be wrong. People can edit that wiki.
Putting up a front and/or deflection?
Too much internet communication makes me constantly worry about how many words I’m using. I changed it to Verbena’s deflection about caring… I’m not sure if that is clearer.
Verbena, honey, sex is not a good solution to a self esteem problem. *sigh*
I get that you like Holly, but if you actually want to help you’re gonna have to think a little further outside the terrible box.
“Verbena, honey, sex is not a good solution to a self esteem problem.” — made me think of a mare here on the premise. If you don’t know her well, you might think she is bad-tempered. But she merely prefers solving problems with violence.
Like, when she got a hay net (for slowing down the feeding process), you soon heard repeated “bang-bang-bang” from her stall and saw her kicking the net against the wall. Easy to mistake for frustration until you realised that in the pause between the bangs she was eating what had fallen to the ground, perfectly confident. The idea of a hay net is that the horses pick the hay from between the loops of the net, and the others were doing just that. We had to abandon that approach because of the danger of injury.
Likewise, I don’t think Verbena picks sex as the best way of addressing a problem but as a manner suiting her, whether or not it is particularly effective for the purported goal. And let’s remember that in this universe, sex generally does not imply touching but rather pressing the other’s buttons for them.
Rereading, I got the sense that Ivy and Holly were essentially saying the same thing, in different words, when Ivy said she wants more https://lovenotfound.com/comic/ch05-p10a/. He
loves her and was letting her go find what he thought he would be
inadequate to provide.
Holly goes on to say he cares about ivy: https://lovenotfound.com/comic/ch05-p25a/ “I want you to be happy”. In other words, it’s not just convenience. He wants Ivy, not “someone to love”. Their words cross each other.
Also, the progression is familiar to me, in how I’ve processed worries in my life, from Ivy disagreeing with Abeille about old-fashioned sex, her rumination about the subject and finally arriving at wanting to have a loving relationship.
It leads me to think about how at any time, whatever I’m worrying about might be me ruminating, in the middle of a progression that will lead to a conclusion. I cause myself problems when I believe what I think, that my thoughts, at the moment, are accurate.