svbhv

if you repeatedly coerce your wife into performing her ‘marital duty’ (rape by any other name) then you need only manipulate your wife into believing that you are her saviour and eventually confess several “i love you”s to balance the scale. if you continually reduce your wife to a sex object and sociopolitical trophy (also an object) then you only need to feel several panel’s worth of self loathing and admit as much to the reader so random people can forgive 120 chapters worth of violent abusive dehumanisation on your wife’s behalf because they understand now that you were acting out of fear or trauma and so all the fear and trauma you have caused may all be excused. if you are such a self obsessed vitriolic misogynist that every woman in your vicinity is reduced to a trope, a concept — villainess then saint for erna, saint then devil for gladys - like you need to understand that a man like bjorn could have silenced the chatter if he cared to (like when he swiftly cut walter hardy out of erna’s life, like when he swiftly resolved the life threatening debt that was the whole premise of the story), i need you to understand that when you own a bank that the funds at your disposal is not called world building money for nothing. if he wanted to what stopped him from having her do old money reputation laundering level of charity? why not have her teach middle class women of her age group the making of artificial flowers to build an image? (from a publicity perspective it both helps make her a real person and not just a celebrity (a brand) and expand her social circle from only high society to wider public, it will also interest the working class because it has monetary value). why not have her go out to the streets with an entourage and hand out bread to the starving of which im sure there will be many if the wealth of the royal family is so extravagant that gifts are the only way he knows to express himself? why have her throw tea parties when she could have been throwing charity galas of which noblesse oblige will oblige attendance where she may have these young people her age display and even auction their artificial flowers instead? i need you to understand that he didn’t not because he couldn’t but because he didn’t care to. that he found her suffering to be a mandatory duty of which he bought her for (so he justifies her isolation and pain with the fact that at least hes not some old bastard). that the purpose of erna’s ritualistic humiliation and suffering is to ensure the wealth of the royal family. the purchase of lars bank, the maritime trade concessions, etc, are all for the sake of the royal family’s financial prosperity which is continually justified as a sacrifice that ensures the health of the nation but if women can’t own property nor inherit property and women can still be sold like cattle on the marriage market because they can’t own property then where does that wealth flow? if a society is so determined to sanctify and blaspheme living people equally, so hungry for punishment that even a teenage girl can be biblically condemned as a devil temptress but a man believed to have abandoned his wife and baby is only hehe haha poisonous mushroom then who benefits from the strengthening of a society structured to always punch down on the most vulnerable?

i fell into the cycle of getting through like 5 chapters of this and feeling so full of rage and disgust then frustrated with myself for enduring it for nothing then putting it down and forgetting about it for several weeks then in the middle of the night when i got nothing but time i’ll innocently scroll through my last read list and rediscover the story and after ~5 chapters ill go bed seething gritting my teeth.
i think the author is very good at twisting the knife into you (that’s why there are so many comments lashing out at the mcs supposed stupidity. like yes he is stupid. but hes not suffering because of his stupidity but because he is subjected to the classist pedophilic claws of capitalism. and being able to see and feel the mcs helplessness first hand is devastating but lacking the ability to comprehend the wider structures that keeps the mc helpless is why people are prone to turn inwards and attack the mc for making the reader feel that way. when really you feel that way because empathising is human. but experiencing that hurt outside of its situational context can make it incomprehensible which easily trigger defensiveness. anger doesn’t have to blind you. it can be eye opening. if you don’t sit with that upset long enough, you won’t see how this horrific and enduring abuse was started by debt and was sustained by debt which is a deeply capitalist construct. without which there would be no incentive for other characters to look the other way when they witness such suffering. because the attempt at being humane such as to shield a young boy from prolific harm would not be an action that might cause permanent damage to their livelihoods) which is a solid literary skill for sure. but knowing that he will choose the son is just waiting for the guillotine to fall when i already feel it at the neck ╥﹏╥ because genuinely the son and the father is the same by a difference of what 20 years? im only 30 chapters in but they have both raped him so what differs them to each other besides eye colour? when the son called mc a liar i think my heart dropped all the way to my ass. if i was a weaker man it would have straight killed me. to rape someone and think it is affection then to accuse them of lying because you were not their first rapist?!? i would shit in their food every day. i would feed their own shit back to them. love the chicken love the egg.