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Notes -
Traditionalist-progressive thought posits that the only worth women have is their beauty (and it is the social role of men to offer the highest price for this service). Progressivism privileges women at the expense of men, so reducing the quality of the service men are forced to accept while not reducing the price for such means, in a zero-sum society/economy, more power and resources for the more beautiful. QED.
I understand what you mean, but i resent the use of the term "traditionalist" to describe this tendency, when actual tradition explicitly rejects the idea that beauty is of primary importance in favor of motherhood and homemaking.
There used to be a whole genre of fiction praising men who choose plain moral women over femmes fatales, and this general wisdom is so hard to kill that it even bubbles up in modern fiction (to wit, Knives Chau's obvious moral superiority over Ramona Flowers).
BAPism and other such Nietzchean ersatz reject in part this wisdom in favor of more base passions, but they needn't do so and the devil is in the details. The whole internal contradiction of that movement is a known problem that they haven't managed to deal with yet, mostly bursting out as that constant tension between Christians and neo-pagans.
Hence I believe it important to name things accurately given how tricky this philosophical entanglement is.
Although in the movie Knives Chau gets tossed and the Good Ending involves Scott getting Ramona. My take on the movie (I haven't read the comic) is that the screenwriters want to, but don't explicitly, condemn the Scott-Knives relationship as inappropriate because she is still in school and he isn't.
Also, I don't think Ramona is supposed to hotter than Knives in the movie - her most prominent feature apart from being taller than Knives (who IIRC is tiny) is her electric pink buzz-cut hair - this is not something that is attractive to most hetrosexual men. Ramona is supposed to fun (unspoken subtext - slutty) in a way which an Asian-Canadian middle class teenager is not.
It’s a good comic, especially for someone starting college. Fun, funny, and thematically cohesive. I highly recommend it.
It’s also not a rom-com.
Characters comment on how the age gap makes Scott kind of creepy from the beginning. This is not moralist condemnation, because this is a comedy. Scott is being set up as goofy and likable but also pathetic and self-absorbed. From this springs the entire plot.
Likewise, Ramona is supposed to be fun and hot and a walking red flag. Yes, that includes the hair (which you might be misremembering). If you don’t think her look would be catnip to the Scotts of the world, you’re delusional.
There’s a particularly good bit near the end which may or may not have made it into the movie. Scott, during his dark-night-of-the-soul, hits Knives up knowing she used to have a thing for him. “Would you care for some…CASUAL SEX?” It’s awful. Pathetic. Naturally, she’s long over him, and he has to actually figure out what he wants to do with his life rather than paper over it with hedonism.
And that runs directly into the finale—people actually expressing agency. Scott doesn’t pick Ramona over Knives. Knives was never a real option. Once he knows what he wants he actually has to work for it rather than remain in a stasis of rebounds and second choices. Extended adolescence. That’s how Scott completes his arc from a loser to a functional adult. It’s not a rom-com, but a coming of age story.
Link.
The only thing more pathetic than that scene itself is the fact someone wrote it in the first place.
I rate it Californian brainrot/10.
Isn't he Canadian. Which means the whole thing's retarded because she was legal the whole time, and he was just a coward to give up on Best Girl.
It is truly ridiculous how Hollywood has managed to meme 18 into the canonical age of consent around the world despite it being lower in 39 states and most countries you could mention (Japan: 16, Russia: 16, Canada: 16, UK: 16, Spain: 15, France: 15, Germany: 14) just because that's what it happens to be in California.
This is a large part of why Prince Andrew was not prosecuted - Virginia Guiffre was 17 when they had sex, which makes her legal in London (16) and NYC (17). So for there to be a crime they would have to prove they had sex specifically on Epstein's island (age of consent is 18 in the US Virgin Islands).
That Epstein transported teenage girls from jurisdictions where they were legal to the USVI where they were jailbait is one of the great absurdities of the whole affair, and a point in favour of the "planned blackmail op" hypothesis.
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