Marriage of Convenience

TL;DR AT THE END If you didn't know, Marriage of Convenience is one of those age gap rofans; specifically, they're nine years apart. She's younger. Now, there's a lot of interesting commentary leading from this: perhaps the ethical implications of a man selling his nine-year-old daughter into a marriage with a young man, who has no choice but to accept, to achieve a positive outcome for the country at large; perhaps an indictment on the society that blamed Bianca for not having a child with Zachary despite the circumstances. It could've been about a woman healing from her tough circumstances and becoming better—that's what I assumedit'd be. However, Marriage of Convenience never fails to reinforce traditional gender roles whenever it can. Firstly, the manhwa can't really decide on how much it wants Bianca to have agency within the plot. Sometimes she's girlbossing all over those gals at a fancy noble party and flexing her eloquence or whatever, which is pretty goddamn cliché in its own right. Sometimes she's learning how to use a knife she doesn't actually learn to use. Sometimes she's really really smart and forward-thinking or whatever. Sometimes she can't actually do anything at all despite being in the exact same situation as when she was girlbossing all over those guys and learning how to use a knife to kill people or inventing capitalism or becoming Jesus Christ or whatever else she does in the story. It's a power fantasy that wants to hide that it's a power fantasy because the power fantasy inevitably gets in the way of the very patriarchal romance story that it's actually supposed to be, while also pretending it isn't patriarchal. To elaborate more on that last point, consider this: a county instates laws punishing domestic abuse very severely. That is, domestic abusers have their hands cut off Leopold-style and are sent to a monastery to live their days out in repentance. What do you think is gonna happen? I'll tell you what Marriage of Convenience thinks. The manhwa's line of reasoning is as follows: with these harsh laws against domestic abuse, women quickly came to dominate the county's workforce (through lace production, of all things). This set a precedent within the empire that paved the way for women to be acknowledged more in society, ultimately creating a foundation for the empire's first female ruler. Let's talk about this, then. What's wrong with cutting off all the domestic abusers' hands and sending them to monasteries? What's wrong with concluding that this leads to a woman-dominated workforce? It boils down to two ideas. First, the idea that a very large majority of working men are domestic abusers (also that only men are abusers). Second, the idea that every single person who is punished is a domestic abuser in the first place. Think about it. Suppose there is an interracial couple where the husband is not white, and someone is REALLY racist. The husband treats his family incredibly well and is a generally good person. What is stopping that person from reporting him to the authorities and just having his hands cut off? Nothing! Nothing is stopping anyone from doing that! It's really difficult to prove otherwise, too, because if the wife and kids dispute it, you could claim they were simply under duress. How are they gonna dispute that? And also, assuming you do cut off a significant portion of men's hands off like that, jobs won't be filled immediately. Fine, you could say that it happens gradually, so women gradually take over. But, in the real world, things don't ever go that smoothly. In actual cases of domestic violence, harsher punishments like these likely only serve to further mask the amount of violence going on. If the husband gets his hands cut off, who's gonna provide for the family? What about how cruel of a punishment it is? That's enough to guilt-trip a lot of people (ESPECIALLY kids). And even if they fill quickly, society won't change that easily. This is actually the same reason why I argue against the death penalty, even for rapists or pedophiles. What is stopping someone from just branding another person a rapist and then having them killed? The Jim Crow era was full of this stuff. Ever heard of Emmett Till? This is the type of reasoning behind his murder. There's a very famous book that's about similar subject matter. It's called To Kill a Mockingbird. The man Atticus Finch defends in court did not do the crime, and yet he's imprisoned regardless. Republicans call trans people pedophiles today. The gay panic defence is still valid in the United States, even now. It all has the same principle, and creating unreasonably cruel punishments like this just to posture as a morally good person is a VERY slippery slope that only leads to extreme hatred and bigotry. This is not feminism. It's not morally good. It's just stupid and juvenile. And you might be wondering where I'm going with this, because it might seem to you that this is just some hypothetical I made up. It's not. This punishment is actually instated in Arno during the events of the manhwa, and that explanation after it is also something stated in the manhwa. I didn't just make that up. On a somewhat similar note, you'd think Bianca's father would actually be called out and not redeemed that quickly or easily. You'd think Zachary would be called out for marrying a nine-year-old. And while Zachary is called out maybe twice, it's always by the villains of the story, and therefore the criticisms are rendered moot. Bianca's father is forgiven by saying "oh man, I REALLY didn't want to do this, and I REALLY regret it" and then crying a little. And Zachary, obviously, isn't in the wrong ever, despite basically saying "as her body grew, my feelings grew alongside it" about someone he married when she was NINE. EW! But, no. They're not the bad guys here. The main villain, the second prince, is REALLY bad, though. Genuinely, if the emperor just gave this guy a therapist, almost none of the plot would have happened at all. He meets Bianca, gets bewitched by her immediately for some reason, and then goes insane trying to pursue her obsessively or whatever. It's all bog-standard dogshit. Defies all logic, too. Without spoiling anything, it's difficult to discuss the extremely black-and-white morality this manhwa has. I wouldn't call any of the previous sections spoilers, by the way. But my point is, the so-called good guys in the story do quite a lot of reprehensible things that really do deserve to be called out, but aren't—simply because they're good. Meanwhile, the so-called bad guys not only are evil for purely contrived reasons, but also have all their words dismissed regardless of their truth—simply because they're evil. This is not good writing. It's stupid, it's shallow, it's naive, and it's just plain horrible. This black-and-white morality is also the origin of Arno's wrist-cutting shenanigans I mentioned earlier. About the patriarchy aspect, that's tied to how Bianca basically can't do anything for herself in the end anyway. She's pursued by a man, protected by a man, and treated as if she's independent and free the whole time. They're just fighting over her. She doesn't really get a choice in it either, when you think about it, except this isn't really seen as a bad thing. There's something similar in another manhwa, From a Knight to a Lady, except in that manhwa, THAT'S THE POINT! That's a social critique! Here it's just lovey-dovey sappy romance instead of the fucked-up situation it should be. And while I do admit that this review got *too* into discussing contemporary political issues, I'd argue that fiction is a reflection of reality. Fiction cannot exist without reality. This is why people say all art is political. Politics deals with real-world social issues. You can't escape it just by reading a banal rofan manhwa. Also, they have SO MUCH sex, and it's really trashy every time. The 19+ scenes aren't even hot, either. Zachary's anatomy is just so weird that the artist clearly has a hard time drawing him, and the scenes themselves are really boring and one-note. tl;dr reinforces patriarchal gender norms while pretending not to, and sports a remarkably shitty black-and-white sense of morality that overlooks things that really should be critiqued. also really icky age gap don't read this