01-26-2014, 01:41 AM
I still think the healthiest thing for both Penny and Sheldon would be for them to sneak out one night and make a break for it. That whole group enable each other's dysfunction.
In reality, hanging around with people like Leonard and Amy, and pre-Bernadette Howard, would mean that other people would start to avoid you. Sad, but true. It has nothing to do with their geekiness, and everything to do with them being straight up creepy. I can see Penny's other friends falling away after being exposed to any combination of intellectual smugness, over eager desperation, lack of boundaries and general social ineptness. They simply aren't nice people to be around. Now, Stuart, before he got turned into something out of Chekov, was much sweeter - he was geeky, but not in a way that disturbed anyone. Leonard's sabotage of that was a good indicator of what a sneaky jealous little shit he is.
Penny has been made the dim pet of the group. The lack of surname emphasises this, like she's not a total person. S1 or 2 Penny wouldn't have rolled over after having her nose broken, she'd have come up swinging. She's been Stockholm'd into this emotional dependency, and yes, they are going to encourage her to drink, because again, just because she was pretty and popular, doesn't mean that she gets to be 'better' than them. I don't think it is necessarily a conscious thing in-show, but I do think it is the same thing as Sheldon, the urge to tear down anyone the group perceive as standing out or having aspirations that might unsettle the status quo.
(On a writing level, I think she's the stand-in for whatever girl refused to date someone in high school - probably because she was weirded out by the creep following her about and undressing her with his eyes the whole time.)
In reality, hanging around with people like Leonard and Amy, and pre-Bernadette Howard, would mean that other people would start to avoid you. Sad, but true. It has nothing to do with their geekiness, and everything to do with them being straight up creepy. I can see Penny's other friends falling away after being exposed to any combination of intellectual smugness, over eager desperation, lack of boundaries and general social ineptness. They simply aren't nice people to be around. Now, Stuart, before he got turned into something out of Chekov, was much sweeter - he was geeky, but not in a way that disturbed anyone. Leonard's sabotage of that was a good indicator of what a sneaky jealous little shit he is.
Penny has been made the dim pet of the group. The lack of surname emphasises this, like she's not a total person. S1 or 2 Penny wouldn't have rolled over after having her nose broken, she'd have come up swinging. She's been Stockholm'd into this emotional dependency, and yes, they are going to encourage her to drink, because again, just because she was pretty and popular, doesn't mean that she gets to be 'better' than them. I don't think it is necessarily a conscious thing in-show, but I do think it is the same thing as Sheldon, the urge to tear down anyone the group perceive as standing out or having aspirations that might unsettle the status quo.
(On a writing level, I think she's the stand-in for whatever girl refused to date someone in high school - probably because she was weirded out by the creep following her about and undressing her with his eyes the whole time.)