The strip about unrequited love

**The first strip made the subject legal tender.** Peanuts debuted on 2 October 1950, syndicated by United Feature, and the opening panel was a small boy walking past Charlie Brown with the line 'Good ol' CharlieBrown... How I hate him!' - unrequited feeling in the form of a neighbour who cannot be placated, which is where the strip stayed for fifty years. **The world is an economy of unanswered want.** Charlie Brown's love for the Little Red-Haired Girl is offered to a girl who is never on panel; Snoopy's silence keeps the one close bond in the strip without a reply; and the habit of the boy losing - the game, the spelling bee, the object of affection - is presented as the ordinary condition rather than the exception. The reader's caring-for-a-boy-who-loses is the tie the strip runs on: the audience's side of an attachment the strip itself never completes. Nothing in the fiction ever answered any of it. **The maker defended the loss as a structure.** Schulz returned repeatedly to why Charlie Brown has to keep losing, describing the round-headed boy as the strip's conscience - the one who carries hope in a world designed to disappoint him. The counter-argument, that affection for Peanuts is really affection for a remembered world rather than for a character, is kept on the entry; the placement lands on the character because the whole strip is written from one figure who cannot be answered.

Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.