1. This week for my US History class I learned why most people only quote the first paragraph or so of Lincoln’s ‘house divided’ speech; because after that it kind of devolves into a paranoid rant of how the Democrats want to impose slavery upon all the states, including speculation that Stephen Douglass etc. were conspiring with Justice Taney on the Dredd Scott case.

Not that I necessarily blame Lincoln for that; he was a politician speaking at his party’s convention, so portraying the other side as evil incarnate working to undermine all that is good and holy is only to be expected. It does sort of make the Southern response to his election more understandable, though.

2. On that note, here’s how I would summarize the Civil War on days when I’m feeling cynical:

Confederacy:
“We have no factories, no navy, no allies, no trade partners, and no professional army. Let’s go to war with the economic powerhouse that has all those things plus three times our usable population. And just to make it fair, let’s position our seat of government less than a hundred miles from the front lines.”

Union:
“Given all that, took us four years and half-a-million casualties to win.”

3. The Free Market is rather like ChatGPT: it will sometimes produce the right answer, but it will never produce it because it is right.

4. I revisited some of the manga Love is War this week. That one is addictively funny most of the time, but as far as shoujo manga go I’d rate it far below Fruits Basket. It’s a good deal raunchier for one thing (though that can be funny), albeit not explicit (hard PG-13 rather than R), but more importantly it tends to be too heavy-handed and one-note whenever it tries to get serious, so that it feels much less convincing to me than the other story. For instance, the Sohma family in FB is ancient, has some horribly cruel traditions and many corrupt members, but it also has many honest and decent branches, including the ultra-rich ones (e.g. Momiji’s weak-but-not-wholly-unsympathetic father runs a multinational corporation, which he inherits in the sequel), and the family hierarchy itself becomes a force for good in the end. Some of the worst members are among the servants, but even they receive some empathy. That is to say, there’s a lot of balance in the portrayal.

The heroine’s family in Love is War, on the other hand, is pretty much just evil incarnate save for her and a small handful of distant relatives and servants, and she’s sheltered to a frankly unbelievable degree, which leads to some funny jokes (e.g. her wrestling with creating a ‘Twitter’ account), but it means that when it tries to use this material to get serious and somber and make a point, I don’t buy it. It feels to me like an unnecessary and ill-done addition on a perfectly serviceable romance to try to up the stakes. They should have cut or drastically reduced the whole evil family element and focused just on the relationships.

5. By the way, someone might reply “But some family’s really are like that,” to which I’d say, “Be that as it may, it’s not very interesting to read about, at least as portrayed here.” The fact that something happens in real life doesn’t necessarily mean it makes for good fiction, and it’s certainly not a defense against poor execution. In fact, the more you claim ‘this really happens’, the more care and artistry you need to show in how you depict it.

In Fruits Basket, for instance, we have depictions of child abuse, but for the most part they’re restrained and tastefully done. We never see exactly what Rin’s parents did to her, for instance: only a single shot of them grabbing her by the hair, followed by scenes of her being afraid to enter the house, pathetically promising to be good, collapsing on the sidewalk, etc. Her parents have very few lines and only really appear in one chapter, but that, in the context of the rest of her character, is enough to be very effective. And it all fits in with the general course of the story being about healing from trauma and broken family life.

On the other hand, as Love is War progresses we have an increasing number of scenes of the heroine’s family trying to control her, delivering long evilly-patriarchal speeches, teaching her that love is weakness and others are there only to be used, being drawn with distorted faces, etc. (FB took a subtler approach by leaving the faces of its more monstrous figures mostly hidden and undetailed). It’s too much, too heavy-handed, annoyingly modernistic, and doesn’t really fit with the overall theme and thrust of the story, which is mostly about the need to expose oneself and become vulnerable in order to find love.

6. The end result is that on my first read-through I ended up losing interest as it got toward the end and the serious side took center stage. Now I’m mostly just skimming it for the funny / sweetly romantic bits, of which there are admittedly a lot.

7. Winter has come abruptly to Southeast Michigan this week, with snow and arctic temperatures. Fortunately, I don’t have anywhere to be today, and I can sit and enjoy the snowfall as I write this.