Tenju no Kuni
- Thread starter MangaDex
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Reading this is like drinking something warm
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Cute story but dude's eyes are gonna drive me crazy.
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I had to stop halfway through the first chapter to get tea to drink while I read this. It's so soothing!
The amount of detail in the artwork is awesome. And yes, the frequent owl eyes on Kan Shiva, his sister, and the dog are great, too.
The amount of detail in the artwork is awesome. And yes, the frequent owl eyes on Kan Shiva, his sister, and the dog are great, too.
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Oh boy. The arranged marriage argument again. Can we please not gripe about a historical period romance from the perspective of our anachronistic 21st century views? I sat here for an hour typing a lecture to go under a spoiler tag, but you know what? The simplest solution is - if you have a political problem with the basic premise of the story, stop tormenting yourself. Go enjoy something else.
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@x754 If you look at what people are saying, it seems to me not a single person has griped about the historical period romance. Nor are they being nasty to one another. They're having a general discussion of the merits and flaws, justifications and ethical problems, of arranged marriage. It may be slightly OT, but really does seeing people have an intelligent discussion rot your socks that bad?
@Pokari and @Kuroiikawa: On age, I think a lot of it is just that modern life is so complex (in some ways I think needlessly). You don't need 12 years of formal schooling and 4-8 years of university and/or vocational training to learn to be a peasant farmer when you've been surrounded with the work of farming all your life. Sure, it's not easy and there will be things that come up that you don't know how to handle; that's why you keep around and respect your elders, who have done it all before. But you basically know how to do what needs doing from young. If you threw a 13 year old into modern first world adult life, they'd be mostly unemployable both because of credentialism and because they just wouldn't know how to cope.
I don't personally believe lack of divorce is a criterion that means much of anything about how good a marriage practice is. My wife got divorced before she met me. Her church and various people connected with it tried hard to get her not to do so--despite the fact that her husband was a bastard whose general assholishness had driven her into depression, crushed her health, and was starting to wreck the kids. So if they'd succeeded in getting her to stay married, that would have been a good thing? Fuck that. So I kind of wonder what statistics about arranged marriages can be considered to mean, other than that women who go into them have often been raised not to complain.
When we try not to project "our" values onto other cultures, we often make the mistake of assuming that those cultures are (or ever have been) monolithic--that there is some set of values that defines that other culture and so people in it uniformly don't believe in, say, gender equality or not having caste systems or whatever. But in fact, there's dissent in every culture--I sure as hell dissent from plenty of mine. Everywhere that has some semblance of gender equality, has it mainly because women there have fought like crazy to make it so from within a culture that supposedly didn't hold that value. Medieval Europe had peasants' revolts . . . some values are a lot closer to universal than we give them credit for, it's just that there's so often power to be gained from suppressing them. Including here and now.
On the stock we put into freedom . . . I suppose we do, but mostly in the abstract. In practice, the US in particular imprisons far more people than any other country in the world, including the dictatorships. Its emphasis on "negative" freedoms accompanies a neglect of "positive" freedoms . . . it won't, supposedly, stop people from doing things, but it won't help people get the opportunity to do things. Throughout the Western world, we point vigorously to suppression of protests as important free speech when it's someone we don't like doing the suppressing, but equally vigorously suppress protests and avoid mention of free speech when it's at home. Google and Facebook shape what comes up in your search results and what goes into your newsfeed according to their politics . . . um, I mean, to stop you from seeing fake news . . . and few consider it a problem. The US puts away whistleblowers like nobody's business and want to try Julian Assange for treason (even though he's an Australian so he can't really be a traitor to the US) for the crime of releasing inconvenient, albeit true, information to the public. Freedom? Sure, whatever.
I don't personally believe lack of divorce is a criterion that means much of anything about how good a marriage practice is. My wife got divorced before she met me. Her church and various people connected with it tried hard to get her not to do so--despite the fact that her husband was a bastard whose general assholishness had driven her into depression, crushed her health, and was starting to wreck the kids. So if they'd succeeded in getting her to stay married, that would have been a good thing? Fuck that. So I kind of wonder what statistics about arranged marriages can be considered to mean, other than that women who go into them have often been raised not to complain.
When we try not to project "our" values onto other cultures, we often make the mistake of assuming that those cultures are (or ever have been) monolithic--that there is some set of values that defines that other culture and so people in it uniformly don't believe in, say, gender equality or not having caste systems or whatever. But in fact, there's dissent in every culture--I sure as hell dissent from plenty of mine. Everywhere that has some semblance of gender equality, has it mainly because women there have fought like crazy to make it so from within a culture that supposedly didn't hold that value. Medieval Europe had peasants' revolts . . . some values are a lot closer to universal than we give them credit for, it's just that there's so often power to be gained from suppressing them. Including here and now.
On the stock we put into freedom . . . I suppose we do, but mostly in the abstract. In practice, the US in particular imprisons far more people than any other country in the world, including the dictatorships. Its emphasis on "negative" freedoms accompanies a neglect of "positive" freedoms . . . it won't, supposedly, stop people from doing things, but it won't help people get the opportunity to do things. Throughout the Western world, we point vigorously to suppression of protests as important free speech when it's someone we don't like doing the suppressing, but equally vigorously suppress protests and avoid mention of free speech when it's at home. Google and Facebook shape what comes up in your search results and what goes into your newsfeed according to their politics . . . um, I mean, to stop you from seeing fake news . . . and few consider it a problem. The US puts away whistleblowers like nobody's business and want to try Julian Assange for treason (even though he's an Australian so he can't really be a traitor to the US) for the crime of releasing inconvenient, albeit true, information to the public. Freedom? Sure, whatever.
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@Purplelibraryguy
If one sees only arranged marriages between underage girls and adult men, of course arranged marriage is disgusting. If one sees only Skynet, the Matrix, and Nazi chat bots, of course artificial intelligence is disgusting. If one sees only Trump and Brexit and the Jacobin Club, even democracy is disgusting.
Anything is disgusting when it is abused. Anything is disgusting when one takes its worst examples as the standard.
Third comment on the thread. The rest of the crowd are just playing with the body that's been dug out of this shallow grave.
Most such blanket value judgments grind my gears - even the ones I agree with - because they are so ideologically loaded. Many such values are bound in grand narratives, taken for granted, and repeated without interrogation, examination, or reflection. The people who speak such value judgments seldom give any thought to the ideology they carry, frequently unaware of how much they've been indoctrinated - because the people who are aware of their own ideology tend to say "This is bad because I believe in X", and tend to say "This is bad when X is important, but I understand it served a functional purpose for Y".
And yes, going off topic also rustles my jimmies. Highly ideological statements tend to bait those people who are inclined to share their ideological views, irrespective of whether they are well-researched, well-read, or well-rounded. It's like dragging someone out of their house and flogging them in the town square - every villager wants to stop by and throw in their bit, whether they know the victim or not, and soon the entire village has abandoned the day's work.
And yes, going off topic also rustles my jimmies. Highly ideological statements tend to bait those people who are inclined to share their ideological views, irrespective of whether they are well-researched, well-read, or well-rounded. It's like dragging someone out of their house and flogging them in the town square - every villager wants to stop by and throw in their bit, whether they know the victim or not, and soon the entire village has abandoned the day's work.
If one sees only arranged marriages between underage girls and adult men, of course arranged marriage is disgusting. If one sees only Skynet, the Matrix, and Nazi chat bots, of course artificial intelligence is disgusting. If one sees only Trump and Brexit and the Jacobin Club, even democracy is disgusting.
Anything is disgusting when it is abused. Anything is disgusting when one takes its worst examples as the standard.
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@x754 That seems to me to express a positive opinion about the manga, and a negative one about arranged marriage.
Ideologically is not the only kind of loaded language, you know.
Ideologically is not the only kind of loaded language, you know.
"playing with the body"? "like dragging someone out of their house and flogging them in the town square"? Give me a break. They're discussing a widespread social practice, you seem to think that should be taboo (not just this particular case but apparently all potentially political discussion of any sort), and you're defending the notion with ridiculous metaphors because you don't have an actual good reason.
Basically, it seems to massively upset you that anyone except you, with your magisterial command of nuance, should ever take an ethical stance of any sort--much less (shudder) an ideological one. Politics, it seems, should be tacit and uninterrogated. Otherwise, "soon the entire village has abandoned the day's work". In this case, the "day's work" of . . . reading manga? Well, sorry massa that us uppity peasants done talked about stuff that we should leave to our betters.
Basically, it seems to massively upset you that anyone except you, with your magisterial command of nuance, should ever take an ethical stance of any sort--much less (shudder) an ideological one. Politics, it seems, should be tacit and uninterrogated. Otherwise, "soon the entire village has abandoned the day's work". In this case, the "day's work" of . . . reading manga? Well, sorry massa that us uppity peasants done talked about stuff that we should leave to our betters.
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@Purplelibraryguy
It would be more constructive if the people making the comments could state or become informed of their biases - it isn't about "being better" as you put it (unkindly), it is about becoming better. Self-improvement, and education. Making ethical judgments without ideological or social context, research, or evidence is extremely problematic. If one takes their ethical judgement, and thus their ideology, to be infallibly and universally true, then one can be trapped by it in the face of unsolveable problems. If one isn't capable of stepping back and understanding that all ethics and ideologies are constructs, then one cannot rebuild or adapt ideology to improve quality of life or ensure survival.
Take this modern example that happens to bear at least decent similarity the social and geographical context of historical Tibet as depicted in this manga: Greenland has the highest suicide rate in the world. Some of that is social acceptability - as more people commit suicide, it becomes more normal and acceptable to commit suicide. Some of that comes from significant isolation and desolation. I'll source this article: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...ctic-suicides-its-not-the-dark-that-kills-you
Now, given this problem, "people in small, remote communities are committing suicide because their love partnerships fail, and they feel like they have no other romantic or relationship options due to the small population and the difficulty in meeting new partners," what do you suppose might be a solution to prevent suicide, depression, and subsequent depopulation of these villages? If we're able to understand that our ethical attachment to "freedom of choice" and our concept of "romantic love" are both constructs, then you can look at this problem and deploy "arranged marriage" as a social tool that supports the continued survival of the community.
If young men and women in these small, remote communities are simply instructed to marry this other person, and told that divorce is an option only if abuse and irreconcilable differences arise, then much of this stress about finding a romantic partner evaporates, and the blame for difficult or failed relationships falls on the community instead of the individual, and consequently depression and suicide rates fall and population likely increases - because even if they don't romantically love their partner, at least they're certain that they have someone to go home and talk to, and someone to bang and raise kids with, and that it isn't their fault if the relationship is less-than Hollywood-ideal.
But if you can't get over the ideological importance of "freedom of choice", then you need to invest heavily in systems like online dating, road clearing, and communications infrastructure - to serve communities of only several hundred or several thousand inhabitants, or slowly watch the young people in these small, remote communities die or move away, until eventually the community is no longer able to pass on essential jobs and services to new workers and everyone is forced to abandon the town. This is what I mean by saying that people can be trapped by their ideology. This is why repeating value statements without understanding the ideological biases behind them can eventually cause problems when circumstances change, or blind people to possible solutions for unexpected challenges.
Edited for italics & bold.
It would be more constructive if the people making the comments could state or become informed of their biases - it isn't about "being better" as you put it (unkindly), it is about becoming better. Self-improvement, and education. Making ethical judgments without ideological or social context, research, or evidence is extremely problematic. If one takes their ethical judgement, and thus their ideology, to be infallibly and universally true, then one can be trapped by it in the face of unsolveable problems. If one isn't capable of stepping back and understanding that all ethics and ideologies are constructs, then one cannot rebuild or adapt ideology to improve quality of life or ensure survival.
Take this modern example that happens to bear at least decent similarity the social and geographical context of historical Tibet as depicted in this manga: Greenland has the highest suicide rate in the world. Some of that is social acceptability - as more people commit suicide, it becomes more normal and acceptable to commit suicide. Some of that comes from significant isolation and desolation. I'll source this article: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...ctic-suicides-its-not-the-dark-that-kills-you
Now, given this problem, "people in small, remote communities are committing suicide because their love partnerships fail, and they feel like they have no other romantic or relationship options due to the small population and the difficulty in meeting new partners," what do you suppose might be a solution to prevent suicide, depression, and subsequent depopulation of these villages? If we're able to understand that our ethical attachment to "freedom of choice" and our concept of "romantic love" are both constructs, then you can look at this problem and deploy "arranged marriage" as a social tool that supports the continued survival of the community.
If young men and women in these small, remote communities are simply instructed to marry this other person, and told that divorce is an option only if abuse and irreconcilable differences arise, then much of this stress about finding a romantic partner evaporates, and the blame for difficult or failed relationships falls on the community instead of the individual, and consequently depression and suicide rates fall and population likely increases - because even if they don't romantically love their partner, at least they're certain that they have someone to go home and talk to, and someone to bang and raise kids with, and that it isn't their fault if the relationship is less-than Hollywood-ideal.
But if you can't get over the ideological importance of "freedom of choice", then you need to invest heavily in systems like online dating, road clearing, and communications infrastructure - to serve communities of only several hundred or several thousand inhabitants, or slowly watch the young people in these small, remote communities die or move away, until eventually the community is no longer able to pass on essential jobs and services to new workers and everyone is forced to abandon the town. This is what I mean by saying that people can be trapped by their ideology. This is why repeating value statements without understanding the ideological biases behind them can eventually cause problems when circumstances change, or blind people to possible solutions for unexpected challenges.
Edited for italics & bold.
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@x754: If it's about becoming better, how are people supposed to improve their ideas without discussing them? What then is the value of smothering debate?
. . . None of what you said actually implies that ethical attachments to freedom of choice or concepts of romantic love are constructs.
. . . None of what you said actually implies that ethical attachments to freedom of choice or concepts of romantic love are constructs.
It just means there might be situations where some other value competes in importance, and so it may be worth giving up some valuable thing or things to get other valuable things. I suppose it might also be plausible to say that people living in situations where they are in some ways better off not exercising freedom of choice, will also be better off pretending that freedom of choice has no value, so they don't feel as much like they're missing out. But that wouldn't make it true. All else being equal, of course people fundamentally want to exercise freedom of choice. It's such a basic value it's not even a human value--apes like to have freedom of choice. My cat likes to exercise freedom of choice. Sometimes I don't let her, because it's important (eg she would consistently choose not to be stuffed in a little cage thing and taken to the vet), but that doesn't mean choice has no value to her.
For that matter, in the situation you describe, you imagine only two possible solutions. There are lots of possibilities--you could have a matchmaking system where you get partners proposed to you by the matchmaker but still have the option--the "freedom to choose", if you wish--to say no. On the other hand, investing in communications infrastructure is a good thing for lots of reasons besides helping people fall in love. Or perhaps most people would just be better off not living in Greenland if it sucks so bad. Or if the root is people raised without love, maybe rather than dealing with the matchmaking it would be more important to improve people's childhood situations so they could be happier more centred people when they arrived at adult relationships, and better able to exercise their freedom of choice in ways that would make them happy.
More broadly, in most social setups where we are supposed to accept diminished freedom of choice, for instance, for the sake of "the community", or "stability" or whatnot, it often turns out that it's not really for "the community"--it's for elite groups in the community, whose gatekeeper roles and prestige depend on other people in the community taking it in the neck and getting convinced that it's for the greater good. So for instance, in American right wing evangelical Christian communities, much is made of the importance of chastity, appropriate and traditional gender roles, avoidance of divorce and so on--but the function of all this is mainly to inflate the authority, importance and even wealth of the more prosperous, "pillar of the community" older men, at the expense of women and younger people, and far from actually resulting in stability it often seems to create quite brittle family situations with a lot of surface virtue but, since that doesn't really meet people's needs, a lot of tension and "sin" under the table as it were--high teen abortion rates, lots of adultery, kids getting out of Dodge when they grow up and so on. The system continues existence because it is dominated by certain elite groups like clergy and it meets their needs, not because it's good for people in general or the things they give up actually lack value.
Similarly, the Indian caste system is evil. It always was, and the people on the bottom end of it are constantly struggling to get rid of it because it totally sucks for them. Their suffering isn't a "construct". It's great for the top castes, though, so it hangs on . . . seemed for a while in the mid 20th century like it might be gotten rid of, but of late years it's been reasserting itself. In general, the sociological turn tends to take a society as given and assume that it works, basically perfectly, for them in the situation they are in. But this is never true, and rarely even an approximation of the truth. Most historical societies have been savagely unequal and imposed massive unnecessary suffering on the majority of their members for the benefit of a few. Run them through the Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" and you'd end up with something very different. Many hunter-gatherer societies are an exception, largely because it's difficult for elites to gain much leverage--each individual largely controls their own means of production, so there's no reason for them to sit still for much exploitation.
Even romantic love . . . frankly, the idea that romantic love is a construct . . . is itself a construct, and a very recent one. Sure, there have been plenty of societies where arranged marriages were common, or were common in some strata of those societies. But they all still had and believed in romantic love, even if they tried to keep a lid on it. If you look at the stories those societies tell, they are full of romantic love stories. Medieval European nobility generally had arranged marriages, as a tool of politics. But look at the Arthurian cycle of stories, which was the main group of tales for noble consumption in Engand and number two on the charts in France. Tristram and Isolde having a forbidden love because she was supposed to be marrying the king of Cornwall, knights falling for girls and fighting for love left right and centre and sometimes going mad for love, and of course the central triangle of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. Whatever the social arrangements, romantic love tended to come squidging out the seams. Some people think romantic love was invented by medievals because Eleanor of Acquitaine came up with the "courtly love" rules for people at court to play at, but that's just silly; it's not like they didn't have love before that. The Greeks were big on arranged marriages and on pretending women weren't really people. And yet look at the Iliad and the Odyssey--the first about a war started by some guy grabbing the awesome girl away from her arranged marriage, the second about a man struggling like crazy to get back to the wife he loved (well, give or take a bit of fooling around on the side), and to some extent about a brave wife desperately hanging on, refusing to enter an arranged marriage with any of the suitors as she waited for a husband who might never come. Half the Greek myths are about romantic love. Many are about romantic love causing big social problems and/or leading to tragedy . . . it often seemed the Greeks would be pleased if romantic love would go away--and yet there it was. It's not a construct, it's a basic human impulse. Like most other basic human impulses, it can be ignored or denied with some success, as soldiers ignore or deny their fear. So a society can be run on denying romantic love . . . but it is never erased, it creeps back in.
For that matter, in the situation you describe, you imagine only two possible solutions. There are lots of possibilities--you could have a matchmaking system where you get partners proposed to you by the matchmaker but still have the option--the "freedom to choose", if you wish--to say no. On the other hand, investing in communications infrastructure is a good thing for lots of reasons besides helping people fall in love. Or perhaps most people would just be better off not living in Greenland if it sucks so bad. Or if the root is people raised without love, maybe rather than dealing with the matchmaking it would be more important to improve people's childhood situations so they could be happier more centred people when they arrived at adult relationships, and better able to exercise their freedom of choice in ways that would make them happy.
More broadly, in most social setups where we are supposed to accept diminished freedom of choice, for instance, for the sake of "the community", or "stability" or whatnot, it often turns out that it's not really for "the community"--it's for elite groups in the community, whose gatekeeper roles and prestige depend on other people in the community taking it in the neck and getting convinced that it's for the greater good. So for instance, in American right wing evangelical Christian communities, much is made of the importance of chastity, appropriate and traditional gender roles, avoidance of divorce and so on--but the function of all this is mainly to inflate the authority, importance and even wealth of the more prosperous, "pillar of the community" older men, at the expense of women and younger people, and far from actually resulting in stability it often seems to create quite brittle family situations with a lot of surface virtue but, since that doesn't really meet people's needs, a lot of tension and "sin" under the table as it were--high teen abortion rates, lots of adultery, kids getting out of Dodge when they grow up and so on. The system continues existence because it is dominated by certain elite groups like clergy and it meets their needs, not because it's good for people in general or the things they give up actually lack value.
Similarly, the Indian caste system is evil. It always was, and the people on the bottom end of it are constantly struggling to get rid of it because it totally sucks for them. Their suffering isn't a "construct". It's great for the top castes, though, so it hangs on . . . seemed for a while in the mid 20th century like it might be gotten rid of, but of late years it's been reasserting itself. In general, the sociological turn tends to take a society as given and assume that it works, basically perfectly, for them in the situation they are in. But this is never true, and rarely even an approximation of the truth. Most historical societies have been savagely unequal and imposed massive unnecessary suffering on the majority of their members for the benefit of a few. Run them through the Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" and you'd end up with something very different. Many hunter-gatherer societies are an exception, largely because it's difficult for elites to gain much leverage--each individual largely controls their own means of production, so there's no reason for them to sit still for much exploitation.
Even romantic love . . . frankly, the idea that romantic love is a construct . . . is itself a construct, and a very recent one. Sure, there have been plenty of societies where arranged marriages were common, or were common in some strata of those societies. But they all still had and believed in romantic love, even if they tried to keep a lid on it. If you look at the stories those societies tell, they are full of romantic love stories. Medieval European nobility generally had arranged marriages, as a tool of politics. But look at the Arthurian cycle of stories, which was the main group of tales for noble consumption in Engand and number two on the charts in France. Tristram and Isolde having a forbidden love because she was supposed to be marrying the king of Cornwall, knights falling for girls and fighting for love left right and centre and sometimes going mad for love, and of course the central triangle of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. Whatever the social arrangements, romantic love tended to come squidging out the seams. Some people think romantic love was invented by medievals because Eleanor of Acquitaine came up with the "courtly love" rules for people at court to play at, but that's just silly; it's not like they didn't have love before that. The Greeks were big on arranged marriages and on pretending women weren't really people. And yet look at the Iliad and the Odyssey--the first about a war started by some guy grabbing the awesome girl away from her arranged marriage, the second about a man struggling like crazy to get back to the wife he loved (well, give or take a bit of fooling around on the side), and to some extent about a brave wife desperately hanging on, refusing to enter an arranged marriage with any of the suitors as she waited for a husband who might never come. Half the Greek myths are about romantic love. Many are about romantic love causing big social problems and/or leading to tragedy . . . it often seemed the Greeks would be pleased if romantic love would go away--and yet there it was. It's not a construct, it's a basic human impulse. Like most other basic human impulses, it can be ignored or denied with some success, as soldiers ignore or deny their fear. So a society can be run on denying romantic love . . . but it is never erased, it creeps back in.
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tibetan mastiffs are wavy
"deploy "arranged marriage" as a social tool"
this is every incel's dream lol. idk why traditionalists always try to crack down on people in the name of preserving "the community" when that just invites more resistance and makes more people want to leave
also "social construct" isn't intended to mean something is meaningless; it's intended to debunk appeals to naturalism. all that really matters ethically about a social construct is whether it is being enforced ethically, i.e. whether the participating members consent to it.
anyways this manga is cute
this is every incel's dream lol. idk why traditionalists always try to crack down on people in the name of preserving "the community" when that just invites more resistance and makes more people want to leave
also "social construct" isn't intended to mean something is meaningless; it's intended to debunk appeals to naturalism. all that really matters ethically about a social construct is whether it is being enforced ethically, i.e. whether the participating members consent to it.
anyways this manga is cute
