This is my first ever post on tumblr and I’m not sure if anyone will ever see it or if it’s worth reading but I had this thought and I wanted to share it with others. If anyone does read it I’d love to hear your thoughts.
In the famous comic/movie “The Killing Joke” the Joker says that it only takes one bad day to drive a person insane. As a fan of the Lackadaisy I had the realization that this can applied to all of the current and former main Lackadaisy characters (Mitzi, Mordecai, Victor, Zib, and Rocky). This collective “one bad day” was the day Atlas was murdered. This might not sound like it makes sense or could be applied to everyone but the day Atlas died started a chain of events that permanently changed all those affected by it. To best break it down I’ll go over how this “one bad day” affected each character.
As the grieving widow Mitzi let her grief drive her to make increasingly morally questionable decisions that led to her losing Wick and Zib. Her pain led to her manipulating those around her, Wick for money, which would be discovered and ultimately lead to a break up with a woman he clearly had feelings for, and getting Rocky into getting alcohol despite the danger this puts him in. She becomes so obsessed with saving the Lackadaisy that the ounce beautiful Georgia rose was reduced to a prickly bush. When Zib offered her a way out her pain her trauma prevented her from doing so, all stemming from that one bad day.
a man defined by order and precision, Mordecais meticulously constructed world fell to pieces thanks to one bad day. Atlas raised him and when he was taken away the structures that protected him collapsed. Despite his cold exterior he does hold compassion for those he cares about like Victor and Atlas. He abandoned and crippled Victor, his one and only friend after he refused to retire. Mordecai infiltrated the Marigold to find Atlas’s killer, making reckless choices, like crippling his best friend, getting sucked into a voodoo cult, kidnapping a man for information under the Savoy’s noses, and robbing the Lackadaisy, choices defined by pain, fear and desperation.
he never cared much for Atlas but his death made him lose his one freind who crippled him and now is forced to watch the Lackadaisy a place he helped build, rot. All while being reduced to a bartender and being further damaged by a shotgun blast to the chest, one can compare it to being trapped in purgatory all thanks to one bad day.
Zib hated Atlas, not because of what he was but for what he did to Mitzi. Mitzi married a villain and after Atlas’s death became one. He held on to the hope that she would leave, that they could go on the road again. In the end, Zib would give up on her leaving her to pick up her pearls. After years in the Lackadaisy, Zib had been hollowed out, reduced to a drunken, tobacco stained shell of his former self, but watching Mitzi turn into the ruthless criminal she married broke him, a chain of unfortunate events stemming from one bad day.
Rocky is arguably the most tragic of all the characters in Lackadaisy, losing his parents at a young age, dominated by some form of mental illness that leaves him despised by most, kicked out of his Aunts house for an incident he may or may not have been responsible for, finding solid ground with the Lackadaisy only to see it all fall apart. Seeing everything burning around him he gave into his worst impulses in order to make himself useful to the Lackadaisy. His love (plutonic love) for Mitzi and his desire to be a part of the band led him to become increasingly erratic and reckless, he enlisted his cousin and Ivy into the fight, leading to Calvin becoming a killer and Ivy becoming more afraid and confused. Rocky may always have been crazy but the innocent antics of his youth were transformed into something darker and more destructive. One bad day brought the worst side of Rocky out just like the others.
“One bad day”, the Joker lost his family and was deformed by chemicals, his already poor life experiences provided a foundation for his madness. Like Joker the characters directly affected by Atlas’s death provided the final push that sent them into a spiral of despair, chaos, sadness and even madness. While none of these characters were exactly “ordinary” or good people in general, they had stable lives but when that was stripped away they were left broken and vulnerable leading them on their respective paths to damnation. Of course this is just my interpretation of these characters and I wouldn’t consider this little essay to be anything taken seriously.
thank you for anyone who took the time out of their day to read this and if you have any comments I’d love to hear them!
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