I’m almost done listening to Wooden Overcoats, s4 ep2, and I’m crying about the Funns’ childhood.

In S3 ep3, they got called weird and were kicked out of the scouts.

In s3 ep4 the worst five-word sentence they could think of was “Mum. And. Dad. Are. Back.” Like, what? The worst thing you can imagine is your parents being around? I mean same, but dang, your parents sucked.

And there are other hints that their parents weren’t great, but season 4 episode 2 really just shows how awful their entire childhood was. They were outcasts in the village and everyone hated them, to various degrees, their parents, their peers, their teachers.

At the beginning of the Rudyard’s story Mr. Funn took Rudyard’s lunch money.

In their previous school the other kids called them weird and threw them into ponds. (The previous episode said that Rudyard can’t swim.)

They have a game they play called “happy families”

They got forced to be more active than they physically should have.

They had angry dogs chase them around the school.

Rudyard was told to ignore his imagination to avoid disappointment.

Antigone gets bullied by her peers.

I guess Rudyard was wearing a skirt, but at least that’s not what Mr. Askey had an issue with. No, his issue was Rudyard existing, so he had all the other kids to kick soccer balls at him as hard as they can.

Rudyard gets bullied by his peers, until a teacher comes, and then he’s bullied by his peers and his teacher.

Then Rudyard gets chased around the school by both his teachers.

At least, Ms. Khatri wasn’t really that bad, she encouraged Antigone, and even though she threw away the gerbil, she didn’t show outright disgust in front of Antigone.