Louds In The Cradle: Chapter 3.
Lynn Sr sighed a bit before explaining to Sid why it was that she'd said the wrong thing at the wrong time and said "What you have to understand is that with Lori moving to (I expect) on-campus housing an hours' drive from the Mercado this September, the girls believe that there's going to be a power vacuum because it hasn't quite dawned on them that Mrs Loud is making plans to turn the garage into a sort of home office. This is the price we have to pay for turning our oldest child into Girl Pretending To Be Cyclops: everyone else thinks that they have the right to act like maniacs and prima donnas."
"Case in point: my vaguely spacey-acting (although smarter than she looks or talks or her behavior might otherwise indicate) second-oldest daughter Leni has finally started to develop ulterior motives. Not only is it why she tried to tank Lori's scholarship try-out, it (from what little they'll tell me about it) is why she appears to have prevailed upon poor, dim Lincoln to pull the ultimate garbage move: stealing and reading Luna's diary so she can see who's going to appointed oldest sister in the fall."
Ronnie Anne made a sour face and said "So that's Rocker Chick was giving Lame-O the stink-eye, huh? Figured he'd have done something pretty stupid to get one of the 'nice' ones angry at him."
"Figures that you would buy into that false dichotomy. There's no such thing as a 'nice Loud sister' or 'mean Loud sister' because their niceness depends on the context. Lincoln was prevailed upon to violate a trust for a questionable reason so she wasn't going to throw him a block party, was she?"
"This is why Lori's offer to take one or two sisters for a free spin in her new-to-her car just to be 'nice' and also to show off where she's been in the city and where she'll be ranking up parking tickets under her own name snowballed into the invasion you and the Casagrandes had to contend with because it was 'not fair' that other people would be left out. Rather than spend days of dealing with bruised feelings and sullen glares and such, we did what they will not do: we compromised and agreed to take the rest of them into the city. They'd merely wanted us to compromise more and prevent Lincoln from playing tour-guide because 'they want to get to know you and Sid better' because they don't want to admit that you're pretty much the distaff version of him and his buddy Clyde."
Ronnie Anne and Sid looked at one another and then looked at him as if to ask a question they didn't know they could: "Why did you agree to that?"
Lynn Sr anticipated that question and said "When you get to be my age, you learn that 'strength' isn't screaming or shouting or threatening. Strength is letting someone find out something by herself. This is why it was easy to just let them all fall behind Luna when she started ranting about how they couldn't trust Lincoln's opinion on anything because he's so out of it, he doesn't know what planet he's on half the time. All he'd wanna do is take us to lame comic shops and play dumb video games. We wanna get to know Ronnie Anne better anyway!"
That last part got Ronnie Anne just a bit peeved; peeved enough to ask "Whaddaya mean, 'dumb'? Who says they're dumb?"
Lynn Sr smirked and said "A gamer-girl older sister frightened out of her mind that liking a 'boy' thing will drive her Bobby Boo-Boo Bear away from her that she turns the remote possibility that he might vaguely object into the most fantastically vicious break-up possible. This feeds into another annoying habit the girls have. They are led by a vision. It leads them by night as a pillar of flame and by say as a tower of smoke. It is a vision of a morbidly obese, unmarried 35 year old brother living in our basement if he does not put away comics right now. Don't get me wrong, here. I think he's a bit too into them for his own good myself but I know something they don't. I know to ask for confirmation when told that video games rot the brain or that it's a science fact that sci-fi stinks just because the source is sincere-sounding. I also know that if you keep calling something stupid, you just make the person you're calling an idiot more stubborn in his love of it. It's why I have to swallow my dignity and do rituals I don't believe in to soothe a traumatized little girl clinging to something like security."
Ronnie Anne asked "So why did you stay behind, Mr Loud? I always got the vibe that you and the girls were closer than you are to him."
"Since I have a business to run and since Mrs Loud had some time off, this meant that the only boy heading back to Great Lakes City is the one who makes me worry that either Sam Register down at Warner Bros Animation or the executor of Don Messick's estate will shoot Lori right in the face for calling him Boo-Boo Bear. I tried to dress it up as well as I could but, well, you saw the look on his face. It was the same look he had when they were treating him like scum for making that video nasty about them: like he was a bug and they were a windshield. Odd how that stupid trophy case of ours messes with his head."
I'm going with the idea that Lynn is slightly more in tune with his namesake than he looks or acts and realizes that what used to be harmless fun when Lynn Jr was in elementary school turned as septic as everything else she does because of her horrible first year of middle school.