David Cooper
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0027 - Ned Flanders
🕑 Added 2021-10-07 08:00:03 +0000 UTCHens love roosters, geese love ganders, everyone else loves Ned Flanders!
Flanders is an excellent case study for this project. There's an entire trope named after him - flanderization - that is related to how TV characters change over time, and how a character's central quirk can take over their entire characterisation.
Ned is primarily introduced as the next door neighbour with the better life than Homer. Someone to compare the Simpsons terrible lives to. Quite a standard sitcom mainstay, I think. But once Flanders is shown to be a model Christian, that slowly becomes more and more of his personality. His Christian values are meant to represent his kindness and "love thy neighbour" attitude, friendliness without judgement, but soon he represents more conservative Christians, the judgemental angry American Christians, almost the opposite of where he started.
I suspect this shift came, albeit not on purpose, when George W Bush was voted into the presidency. I was a teenager but I could see how the 'crazy' Christians were more prominent in this time, when people hid behind their religious beliefs to support abhorrent viewpoints. Ned didn't deserve to be lumped in with Westboro Baptist Church types, but it was the show's best way of commenting on the Christianity that America was experiencing at the time.
Despite this, I wouldn't necessarily say Ned is the show's primary source for making statements about Christianity. Lovejoy and the church are more targets for their stances on organised religion. So more religion chat in the future I guess.
Ned's other odd characteristic now is being a widower? Obviously this is an important aspect once Maude is written out of the show, but a sad side effect of Marcia Wallace's passing is that now he has been widowed twice. Poor fella.
This post is part of my "Every Simpsons Character Ever" series. For a list of my rules in this project, click here.
