It was a short book that served little purpose, but at least it did show what I wanted to see -- Miyako and Haruto got together. There were lots of lewd pretty drawings in the book too, which is a staple of this series. It was as good a conclusion to the franchise as any other, there really wasn't much left to write about, which is why it added on a short story and stuff to fill out the pages.
The author of the book in the afterword complained that all her characters had romances but she didn't have any. If true this is rather ridiculous, since she/he (nobody knows the author is just a penname) is one of the greatest writers of all time, responsible not just for this hit but also Haganai and probably other series too by now. Rich and famous isn't enough? What the hell?
A recent Pew survey discovered that 63% of 20-30 year old men aren't in any romantic relationship at all, much less married. Meanwhile for 20-30 year old women the number is 34%. The discrepancy is explained via girls dating each other (all girls are bisexual if the culture allows them to be) and dating older men. This is clearly a systemic failure that young men shouldn't abide. Why try hard, why do anything, if you only have a 37% chance to so much as date a girl, much less marry or have kids with one? This isn't even including what kind of girl you're dating -- whether she's fat, stupid, crazy, depressed, or whatever. So it's not like the 37% are huge winners either. Most of them probably regret dating whoever they're dating and will soon be dumped anyway.
I've offered a solution -- all girls must marry a member of the opposite sex by age 20 and have two children by the age of 25. In addition, people are required to maintain healthy bodies and minds so getting a girl is an actual prize and not a burden. This is the only solution. As we can see, 'trying harder' or 'manning up' isn't going to cut it. It hasn't worked for the overwhelming majority of men in the current dating market. Not just the 63% who are single, all the men stuck with fat whores as consolation prizes aren't feeling any better. A society who cannot offer a basic minimum floor of wellbeing, below what you could expect in the era of the British Empire or the Roman Empire, should not abide. Nor is there any reason for the young men, who can win any war they want to start, to put up with it. Not only is there no moral reason to let this situation continue, there is no physical reason why it couldn't be immediately ended tomorrow. The people being shafted are the very people who, if they wish to, could shaft anyone they wanted. This is the most bizarre oppression ever, requiring the consent of the victims.
In the past most men could marry young, thin, healthy women and have at least two children. (Generally a lot more.) This was the norm for millennia. So to say men just have to accept this new, lower quality of life is absurd. Why? What's in it for them to accept this? Why don't they overturn the tables and demand a new deal? Because they don't have the majority of the vote? What do votes matter once men stand up and say they aren't going to do this anymore?
Not long ago, in the 1950's, American women married on average by the age of 20 and had more than two kids. I am not asking anything impossible or draconian from them. I am asking a bare minimum norm that had been the case for all of human history. If you consider this an undue hardship on women well explain to me why 30 year old men should, 63%, never get kissed in their life instead. Explain why that isn't an undue hardship. Explain to me why males suffering from an unnatural isolation from the normal life course is better than women suffering from the normal adoption of the life course of all their ancestors. Also explain to me why women in the 1950's polled as so much happier than women today, and why those polls are backed up by lower rates of mental illness, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, suicides, etc., as though the happiness really has changed. I do not believe that requiring women to marry and have children is a worse fate than requiring men to stay single for life. It just isn't. This is obviously a worse system.
Saying that women have a right to choose whatever world they like, including one where both they and men suffer far more, makes sense from a libertarian point of view, but not from a utilitarian point of view. Why are we libertarians on this issue but not on others? If everyone has a right to choose whatever they want, regardless of its social impact on others, why we do we have laws about so many other things? Why do we have taxes and spending programs? Why do we have societies or cultures or morals at all? Women have no more right to leave 63% of men hanging than billionaires have the right to watch street urchins starve to death for lack of bread. We have already decided that rights don't trump human suffering. We had this debate, this war, centuries ago, and the libertarians already lost. I don't have to win this debate again. Whenever the free market clearly fails to deliver a society-wide desirable result then government intervention is a moral necessity to set things straight. We have agreed about this in every other field but dating and encourage government intervention against injustice in every other place we see it.
When all people, men and women both, report being far less happy than before, and when you go from 4/5 of men reproducing down to 1/10 or whatever, that's an injustice. It's an injustice with an easy government intervention we know works because it worked before that could fix everything instantly. This is precisely the time to rely on utilitarian instead of libertarian principles, much more so than health care, social security, or federal deposit insurance. Or subsidies for farms, or windmills, or whatever other government program that currently already exists. Most health care goes to old people in their last year of life. Do you think they wouldn't have preferred a wife and kids starting at age 20 as a government benefit instead of your stupid hospice care at age 76? Do you think single men without a wife or kid gives a shit about receiving Social Security upon reaching the age of 70? The government's purpose is to make the people who sign up for it, the social contract, happy that they live under this government, this law code, and no other. If there is an obviously better way society can be set up (and there is, it's been around for millennia, it's still within living memory), it is morally incumbent upon the people who make up society to abolish the current government and institute a new one. The declaration of independence explained all of this centuries ago.
Everyone deserves a wife and kids, a normal family life. Everyone deserves food and water and shelter. Everyone deserves literacy, electricity, internet, and the ability to get from here to there. This is stuff the Roman Empire managed, in our technological era where machines do all the labor it is absolutely unacceptable for anyone to not reach this basic level. If your government isn't delivering, if your quality of life is below B.C. levels, you are not morally obligated to go along with it. You aren't just obliged to suffer. The declaration of independence said the opposite, you are in fact obliged to throw off the shackles that are making you suffer. And if you say it's fine since we're martyrs for female happiness, at least can we have a law code that actually makes women happy, instead of the saddest they've ever been? At least if you're going to martyr yourself for women, can we not have a 57% teenage girl depression rate? Can we at least fulfill the one goal you say it's worth sacrificing all men for and actually have a law code that makes women happy? Which clearly isn't this one? You're a hypocrite and a fraud if you say modernity is acceptable whether you're pro-men or pro-women. This is not the solution, according to polls tracking both sides.
I have the solution. It's staring us in the face. It's worked before. And it's the only solution.
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