Is me

we were just as smart then as we are now

let me explain: in america at least, the lower class have significantly worse health outcomes, even when accounting for other factors. just being poor is enough to make your overall health worse. we don’t know that being fat makes your health directly worse, like the data just isn’t there, but for a moment, pretend it does.

imagine going to the doctor with a health problem and the doctor looking at your chart and saying well, this problem will be less severe if you go up an income bracket. have you thought about becoming rich? it would really help. start by saving a little money every month.

ridiculous, right?? very few people successfully go from working class to rich, it just doesn’t happen on a large scale in society. maybe for a time you pick up some overtime hours, spend a little beyond your means, and appear rich. but eventually you burn out, your car needs to be repaired, and you return to being working class.

we do have this data: only some people can successfully lose large amounts of weight, and only a tiny fraction of people who lose that weight actually keep it off for more than a year. telling people to lose weight for their health is just absurd because they almost certainly can’t do it any more than they can double their income for their health.

In the same way the series will play episodes of ha-ha spy themed hijinks and antics and will then turn around and look you dead in the eye and say with no humor whatsoever "war is a hell that degrades bodies and spirits of everyone it touches," they will play many episodes of happy home life and teasing tension between the ML and FL and then hit you with "amatonormativity is a tool of the fascist state, actually."

The entire reason this household comes to exist in the first place is that neither Loid nor Yor can exist freely in Ostanian society without checking all the socially expected boxes of being in a married heterosexual relationship with child. The ways that the authoritative Ostanian state demands this conformity, this biological labor, are markers of its oppressiveness as much as their paranoia and their secret police. Yor in particular was drawing so much hostility and suspicion from her coworkers just for being a single woman in her twenties that they were on the verge of reporting her for subversive behavior until she casually mentioned that she had met someone and was getting married soon.

Marriage and parenthood are, explicitly, the camouflage and cover that allow Yor and Loid to continue living their lives unimpeded, as they could never do openly. Having established that unequivocally, this unconventional household -- parenthood without biology, partnership without sex -- continues to be a successful place of stability and happiness for all three of them, despite lacking the elements that their amatonormative society insists are non-negotiable.