Lucy Van Pelt

Lucille "Lucy" Van Pelt is a fictional character in the syndicated comic strip Peanuts, written and drawn by Charles Schulz. She is the older sister of Linus and Rerun. Lucy is characterized as a "fussbudget", crabby, bossy and opinionated girl who bullies most other characters in the strip, particularly Linus and Charlie Brown.

Lucy often mocks and intimidates others, especially Charlie Brown and her younger brother, Linus. She is often the antagonist in a number of the comics. She has moments of tenderness, such as when Linus replies to her despondency over the unfairness of life by saying "Well, for one thing, you have a little brother who loves you," whereupon Lucy hugs her little brother and bursts into tears.

Although she often torments, teases, and belittles Charlie Brown, she is genuinely fond of him; their true friendship is obvious throughout the strip. In one storyline, where Linus and Lucy's family move away (temporarily, as it turned out), both Lucy and Charlie Brown become very emotional when they say goodbye to each other. In some strips, Charlie Brown gets the better of Lucy. In one, she lectures him about putting his hands in a bowl of popcorn that they're sharing after licking his fingers. The last panel of the strip shows him walking away from her as she sits there with a surprised expression on her face with the bowl of popcorn dumped on her head. Like her brother, she loves sinking into her bean bag chair.

Lucy has an unrequited crush on musical prodigy Schroeder, in part because Schroeder cares about nothing but Beethoven and playing the piano. Kevin Wong from the blog Kotaku wrote of the relationship: "Over the years, the reader empathized less with Schroeder and more with Lucy, even though she was the initial aggressor in this dysfunctional dynamic. At least she had some skin in the game—she opened herself to rejection every time she leaned on Schroeder’s piano. Schroeder was never open, and at times, he even seemed to take pleasure in his cruel reactions to her flirtations." By 1966, Lucy’s relationship with Schroeder bordered on masochistic. She persisted in her efforts to win him over, despite his indifference. During a multi-day, extended storyline during which Lucy and Linus moved away, Schroeder realized he missed her. He couldn’t play his piano without her there. Like Charlie Brown in the storyline, the reader is irritated at Schroeder for his prior callousness and emotional constipation.

Lucy operates a psychiatric booth, parodying the lemonade stand operated by many young children in the United States. Here, she offers advice and psychoanalysis for five cents, most often to an anxious or depressed Charlie Brown; however, the "advice" is usually worthless. Her advice ranges from street smart popular psychology to hilarious obvious truths to insightful investigation. One example is when, while treating Snoopy, Lucy asks him how he related, during his childhood, to the other (if you allow the expression) "dogs" in his family. Needless to say, Snoopy was quick to disallow the expression. Another is when she asks him to give her his paw and recite to himself: "I am loved. I am needed. I am important." Snoopy reacts by thinking "I am blushing!" A sign on the front of the booth declares that "The Doctor is" in or out, depending on which side of the "In/out" placard is displayed. In A Charlie Brown Christmas, Lucy reverses the placard from displaying its "Out" side to reveal the words "Real In".

On Charlie Brown's baseball team Lucy plays right field (or occasionally center field), and is characterized as a bad player, who, when temporarily kicked off the team, turns to heckling the games. Lucy has a knack for coming up with a nonsensical excuse for every fly ball she misses, such as "The moons of Saturn got in my eyes" or "I think there were toxic substances coming from my glove, and they made me dizzy." Other times, she finds an excuse to have one-sided conversations with Charlie Brown at the pitcher's mound, often over something trivial, which usually result in Charlie Brown blowing his top and yelling at her to "Get back in right field where you belong!"^{[citation needed]}

The third new character in Peanuts after Violet and Schroeder, Lucy made her debut on March 3, 1952. Originally based on Schulz's adopted daughter Meredith, Lucy was a goggle-eyed toddler who continually annoyed her parents and the older kids. Her future irascibility was hinted at in a 1953 strip when she tells Charlie Brown that she'd just been expelled from nursery school.

Over the next two years, she aged up so that by 1954, she appeared to be about the same age as Charlie Brown. (The early strips with toddler-age Lucy were not reprinted until after Charles Schulz's death.) Within a few months of her introduction, Schulz altered Lucy's eyes to have the same appearance as that of the other characters, except for small extra lines around them which were also later sported by her two siblings.