A Brady Bunch Fan Theory Explains Why Marcia Suddenly Got So Marcia
Over the course of a long-running franchise, there’s a tendency for writers to distill characters down to their core traits and exaggerate them until their earlier incarnations would not only not recognize themselves in a mirror but maybe try to fight them. It’s commonly known as “Flanderization,” for the evolution of Ned Flanders from a character whose religious devotion is just another expression of his superiority to Homer Simpson to a frothing evangelist, but it can also be seen on Seinfeld, when Kramer transforms from kind of strange to possible alien, and Friends, where Joey starts out as a womanizing himbo but eventually becomes someone in need of round-the-clock supervision, lest he Mr. Bean himself into oblivion.
The same is true for Marcia Brady, who begins The Brady Bunch as a self-confident young woman aware of her beauty and charm but not abusive with it to a narcissistic monster. Rather than the slow whittling that Flanderization usually entails, however, it seems to happen to Marcia overnight. In fact, Redditor paulvs88 believes they can pinpoint the metamorphosis to a single episode: Season Four’s “Love and the Older Man.” In the episode, a miscommunication occurs between Marcia and her dentist, her infatuation with the, you know, older man that leads her to believe an invitation to babysit while he attends the ballet is an invitation to join him there. When Marcia finds out the dentist is married, she decides that they “can’t go on seeing each other like this, even though we haven’t had our first date,” and he plays along to avoid embarrassing her.
“Believe me, I won’t, either,” he says, after she promises not to tell her friends and family.
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“This one event really sent her over the top and into irreversible smugness,” paulvs88 wrote to r/FanTheories in 2020. “Before this episode, sure, she was pretty and confident but not over-the-top obnoxious about it.”
By allowing Marcia to believe not only “that a young, good-looking doctor wanted to start a relationship with her only to be turned away by Marcia’s own superior righteousness” but also that he would have left his wife and family had she not been gracious enough to “give (him) back” to them, he sent her into a spiral of egomania “that would bring havoc on the Brady family and their circle of friends for years,” paulvs88 continued. “This one event caused Marcia’s head to swell so large she would be a burden to the family for the remaining 32 grueling episodes of the series.”
Maybe that’s what really happened to her nose.
