It’s really not that depressing an experience to read IMO
Because ok first of all you underestimate exactly how many (like 70) chapters we go fucking around in the garden
To be disenchanted you have to first be enchanted and it’s good at making you enchanted.
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And second of all like it’s reality. It’s relieving to watch this unreal place suddenly become real. With money troubles
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This sounds like it’d be depressing.
Like, Turning Red’s ending made me depressed because I calculated that it’d take the family decades to pay off the damage that their teenage daughter’s impulsive actions caused.
you really are the type of mf to watch an inspiring movie and say “how would this affect the economy”
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I mean it kind of is but it also isn’t. Like you have to understand how incredibly absurdly rich these people are. Their lives are so fake before this. Unbelievably fake. Baoyu can’t recognise a 1-tael coin, he doesn’t know which one it is. That’s like over an ounce of silver. That’s like $35 worth of silver today, and he cannot recognise the coin
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There’s a certain melancholy to it but I don’t feel the same intense “ow” I would get at, like, the Turning Red scene you describe. Because I also get that really intense “ow” when people create really big practical/financial problems in fiction and it’s just brushed off like that
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I couldn’t hear jokes about having to shovel out the road by hand as a kid. It upset me too much. Thinking about all that work. It’s the same with movies with big problems like that. Where “oh it’s fine because everybody is happy”. There’s this really big problem. It’s not a happy ending there’s this really big problem… and it’s not acknowledged like “oh this is bittersweet” the movie just treats it like everything is resolved… but the problem
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But Dream of the Red Chamber is like. It’s different. Because they are unimaginably wealthy. Their maids are way, way richer than the average person. They spend years’ and years’ of a farmer’s wage on one dinner. I feel like I know the value of a tael of silver better than Baoyu does because the book is really good at hammering home the unimaginable scale of their wealth. It all feels so fictional
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Which is the point. The good parts are so so fictional. They’re exactly the kind of pretty I would daydream about as a kid. Honestly a lot of the book has young May aesthetics to it. Lots of flowers… lots of flowers and poetry and such. I’ve always been big on flowers
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is that why you picked your blaseball team or was it just masachussets
I would’ve taken a just Boston team and I would’ve taken a just Flowers team, it was like a perfect May overlap
There’s a reason my name is like doubly associated with flowers. April showers May flowers etc, and also hawthorn blossoms. Half my wardrobe is florals. Basically the only thing I can draw is flowers. They’re just kind of my thing…
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what if there was a boston team and a different flowers team
I knew you were going to ask this and I was doing mental calculations in my head beforehand. It depends on exactly what hte Boston team and the Flowers team were. Like if it was Boston thing I kinda like, versus Flowers place I don’t associate myself with at all, then I’d take thing I kinda like. And vice versa. It’d probably take me a little while to decide
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New York Flowers vs Boston Mechanics I take New York Flowers. Alaska Flowers versus Boston Cranberries I take Boston Cranberries y’know
Boise Flowers vs Boston DMV Employees
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Boston DMV Employees, I have family near Boise but I don’t like them
I had dining hall ice cream and it tasted REALLY bad. Couldn’t eat very much at all and I basically ate what I did in the name of not being terribly wasteful. I think this might be a sign of nutritional improvements because I used to be unable to not eat it. Probably because I was sufficiently malnourished that I badly needed the sugar
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