I think that’s the whole point. To get you to laugh, then to feel guilty for laughing, then to laugh again at how absurd it is!

It’s like watching the UK version of The Office with Ricky Gervais. “Man this guy is such an asshole! But this situation is so absurd and I feel so awkward and embarrassed!”

Right, and we don’t know why anyone would choose to remain silent if they’re aware of the issue, unless they were paid to sign an NDA.

I’m sure there’s some kidnapped wives historically. Some wives bought from their fathers. But there’s also plenty of women who have consented to marry a man who already has a lot of wives. The issue has to do with resources and political power.

A rich and powerful man has a lot of resources available for his wives and children. A poor and weak man has few or none. Your chances of escaping starvation and death are much higher with the rich and powerful man.

Notice that I made zero mention of love. Marriage for love is a luxury of modernity, of wealth and power overflowing. You didn’t marry for love in the days when a bad year meant there was no food to last through winter.

At least he wasn’t caught promoting a browser extension that turned out to be a huge scam that stole money from both regular people and other content creators trying to earn some affiliate revenue.

Soooo true! I can’t believe how much they’ve made the damn computer fight you on this!

Multiple wives => redundant wives. Solves the issue of mothers dying in pregnancy. The more wives you have, the more you expect to survive to be able to care for the children. Having only one wife, on the other hand, means all your eggs are in one basket (apologies)!

Yes I mentioned that earlier in the thread. Polygyny = some men have many wives, others have none.

Avast, ye mateys!

Netflix selection is crap anyway!

I guess I’ve forgotten what the problem was exactly. High maternal mortality? How is that not solved by having many redundant wives?

The birth rate of XY babies is actually slightly higher than XX babies. On the other hand, babies with higher testosterone tend to have weaker immune systems and so are more susceptible to infant mortality from disease.

Otherwise, I’m not sure what the problem is with men who don’t have wives? They simply don’t reproduce. Throughout history men have reproduced at a lower rate than women. In polygynous cultures it’s only the very powerful and wealthy men who have many wives. The poor and powerless men have few or none.

High maternal mortality meant that having more than about 7 children per woman was rare. Total fertility rate was about 4.5 to 7 in the pre modern era. Population growth was low due to infant and early childhood mortality though.

If you start having children at age 12, you can have a child every year and reach 7 children by age 20. Without contraceptives, people weren’t having such large multi-year gaps between children like we do now.

Polygyny is where one man has many wives.

There are definitely cultures who have practiced polygyny to get around this issue. Some still do today, for example in many different countries in Africa where people still practice a pastoral life.

What was it like outside of Western Europe?

That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.

It’s my main problem. I found it so awful I would never want to watch them again.

Lots of ink has been spilled about the characters and plot and other issues people have with the sequels. For me they’re mostly irrelevant because the physical experience of watching the films is too uncomfortable for me to even think about that stuff.

None of these things ever bothered me when I watched the originals and they won’t bother me despite having been made aware of them by you.

Far more egregious, for me, is the way the sequel series has been edited. The movies have this unrelenting pace of cuts every couple of seconds. It never lets me relax and slowly take in a scene. It’s a completely different style of filmmaking from the original series (which had a lot more long, contemplative shots).

But then I might be a dinosaur here as I see a lot of people complaining about the length of the original trilogy and seeking fan edits to speed up the pace. I have my own personal theory that this is a result of social media (such as Instagram and TikTok) and the way Hollywood has catered to younger audiences and their lack of patience for slower paced films.

I miss slower paced films and I find almost no new films appealing (the most recent one I really enjoyed was No Country for Old Men).

Children have been documented to spontaneously invent language.

What trash in the originals?