SALUTE
I have barely watched Breaking Bad
As a reminder, be sure to properly give content warnings and put sensitive subjects behind proper spoiler tags. It’s for the mental health of not just your comrades, but yourself as well.
Here is a screenshot of where to find the spoiler button.
Let’s have another good week everyone 
Angry
Oh. Oh she’s even like mine than I thought.
Absolutely fuck her, you aren’t in the wrong here at all for her blowing up at you, don’t fall for her god damn gaslighting. I know it’s a lot harder to do that than it is for me to say it, but that is what’s happening, she’s blowing up at you because you aren’t her perfect housemaid 24/7, because you have the gall to be a complete human being with interests and needs of your own. Because you have your own internality. She’s not going to recognise that fact because she wants that housemaid perfect child and won’t accept anything else until you fall into that shape. You know why your brother is the clearly favoured child? Because she doesn’t have expectations for him being a family caretaker at all ever, because he’s a man and doesn’t need to. Because he likely hasn’t drawn her ire not due to the fact that he’s just better, but rather because of the fact that he, like you suspect, isn’t diverging from her perfect nt cishetoronormative family conception as much. But that’s not him being better than you at all, it’s her having lesser standards for him as a man than a (perceived as) woman. But I guarantee you if he decided he was trans or whatever else that might push himself just a bit too far out of her bounds for perfect children, then she’ll have just as much or more ire for him.
Nothing you do is going to actually make it better or worse, she’s going to perceive every divergence from exactly what she wants as a slight. And she’ll keep building that narrative of you being against her or lazy or both every single time no matter what you do.
I’m sorry this isn’t really any comfort or advice, but you’re not alone in experiencing this, and I want to help you recognise that it’s not at all your fault, she’s the one being unreasonable, and she likely will continue to be so.
spoiler
I feel like I was very easily able to recognize this when my brother was catching a lot of flak from my parents for struggling in school (this was several years ago, when I was still in high school). I was very angry at them, I did my best to comfort my brother and stand up for him as much as possible. But eventually, my brother’s relationship with my parents improved to the point where now he is their favorite child, and mine continued to deteriorate until I’ve basically become the family pariah. The thing that I get kind of sad about is that my brother in turn doesn’t really try to understand or comfort me at all. I get that he probably doesn’t want to stick out his neck for me, but he defends my parents to me even when they aren’t listening. I feel like in the past we had more solidarity as siblings, and now it’s completely gone.
There’s definitely some enmeshment going on here. I was skimming through a book yesterday that talked about how in family dynamics where there’s a preferred child, usually it’s because that child is on a more similar plane of emotional maturity to the parent (don’t know if I agree with the framing of “maturity” exactly but it’s what the book uses.) My brother is definitely less outspoken, less visibly mentally ill, and honestly, much less of a leftist which I think is a part of it (he’s vaguely “apolitical” but in the
way that a lot of teenage boys are, I’ve caught him saying slurs in Heated Gaming Moments™ before.)
spoiler
Yeah, it’s a lot easier to see it when it’s not happening to yourself because part of the control is to use your own feelings against you. It’s good that you stood up for him, having good older siblings like that is a godsend. It’s awful that he hasn’t done the same for you though. I would hope it’s just him being a typical teenage shithead and that he’ll grow out of it, but it’s unfortunate he turned out like that regardless. I would say he probably genuinely doesn’t recognise it, my brother never noticed the ways my mother parentified my sister in regards to taking care of him, again that whole idea of invisible labour, he doesn’t recognise what you’re really doing and how taxing it is so it hasn’t registered as an abuse. Which it is. God I fucking hate your family now, it’s so fucking shit that they’re treating you like this.
Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that concept before. It does seem to make sense though. I’m the most like my mother in my family and I was easily her favourite outside of being trans breaking her brain. I agree it probably isn’t the maturity so much as personality/value similarities more generally.
I hate teenage boys.