--Just a warning--this is a rant...and also maybe a soap box. There might be spoilers, but also like meh.
Hey it's like
The Sound of Music (the trickster children, and the single father who hecka absent but well-meaning, and the girl who comes in) except I don't get to stare at Christopher Plummer for three hours, and instead of Nazis, there's stigmas against mental illness and people who struggle with suicidal thoughts. Oh and women.
Yes. The mentally ill do recognize that they're typically seen as burdens. That's typically what hits them on the head in their brains. But all humans are burdens because that is the inherent nature of being human. Humans take up space.
I just
love it when someone says "Your problems don't matter or count or compare to mine because I've suffered more,"
I really wanted to like Phillip... Because there were parts of him that were so good--he cared a lot about his children and he was nerdy--and then he would ruin it by saying something stupid. Maybe I'm just sensitive to depression and suicide for personal reasons, because other people enjoyed the book and thought it was romantic because he's a suffering hero or whatever. I think his first wife suffered more than him.
I recognize that Julia Quinn was trying to "explore mental illness in the time period." I don't think she did it well. She may have "represented" the time period and what mental illness was like, but like...no. It's fiction, so that means that you can treat your characters better than the time period would have.
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Hey we talks about writing. 
