Betraying that they’ve never had a friend

Everyone once in a while the benighted YouTube algorithm serves up a winner. Here’s an excellent short video essay that was recommended to me this afternoon. I watched it based on the thumbnail alone. The subject: the deep friendships of great literary characters being interpreted as sexual relationships, a terminal cultural cancer that never fails to annoy me.

The host, of the channel Geeky Stoics, a channel I’ve never previously come across, invokes several examples of this internet-fueled trend* but mostly focuses on two: Frog and Toad,** heroes of Arnold Lobel’s warm, gentle, very funny children’s stories, and Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee of Lord of the Rings. These are apposite choices, since both are great favorites in the Poss household and both have been subjected to this perverted eisegesis for some time now.

From there he advances to latter-day male loneliness and the generally sorry state of friendship in the modern West, topics I care deeply about and that he treats with extraordinary concision and care. It’s a solidly presented, thought-provoking little video, and I strongly recommend it.

But what made this video especially good was the use of CS Lewis’s book The Four Loves to frame the discussion. Just last week on Substack I made the case for The Four Loves as an underrated Lewis book, a late work brimming with his mature thought on the different aspects of love—its forms, objects, and enactments as affection, friendship, eros, and the theological virtue of charity. The video essay begins with a line from the chapter on friendship that I’ve thought about many, many, many times, especially when some smug terminally online type starts not so much insinuating as narrating the imaginary deviance of characters like Frodo and Sam:

“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”

— CS Lewis

As I said, I have plenty of occasions to remember this line, but never as a gotcha—what it reveals is too sad for that.

The one point where I think the video misses a potentially fruitful nuance relates to class: while Frog and Toad are quite obviously peers, similarly situated in life, Frodo and Sam are a master and servant—Tolkien explicitly compared them to a British officer of the First World War and his batman. This does not preclude deep genuine friendship, something moderns struggle to understand and that the Peter Jackson movies mostly obscure. Just as we moderns have lost much with our condemnation of exclusivity or discrimination in relationships, so our suspicion of rank, hierarchy, or any other form of “inequality” has closed off whole dimensions of human experience to us.

But that’s a relatively minor point. There’s much more to the video, including more of Lewis’s discussion of the distinctions between friendship—a side-by-sideness oriented toward a common interest or mission—and other forms of love. Check out both Geeky Stoics’ video and The Four Loves, which is even available in a shorter, earlier version narrated by Lewis himself.

* Related: See this recent long video by Hilary Layne on the widespread deleterious effects of fanfic, not the least of which is the “shipping” of often inappropriate combinations of characters. Layne has a companion piece on Substack here.

** Often described by people on social media with the strangely specific phrase “canonically gay.” There is no mention of Frog and Toad being anything other than friends in the stories, the first collection of which is called Frog and Toad are Friends, making me wonder what these illiterates think the adverb canonically means.

YouTube plagiarism

I occasionally dip into the more earnest side of YouTube film criticism through video essays by channels like The Discarded Image, CinemaStix, Thomas Flight—recently recommended by Alan Jacobs here—and Like Stories of Old.

The latter posted an essay earlier this month called “This YouTuber Won’t Stop Plagiarizing,” with an enticing thumbnail of the Dude. After a week or so of YouTube’s algorithm pushing it to the top of my recommendations every day, I finally gave in and watched it.

It’s well put-together and presents damning evidence that a YouTuber calling himself Archer Green has been stealing everything from specific lines of narration to montages from other channels, and it approaches this vexing topic in the most charitable way possible. Certainly more charitably than I would.

While Like Stories of Old does a good job outlining the specific sins of the plagiarist and makes a strong case against such actions, there is one point that deserves more thought but was lost amidst the detail. To judge from the case made against him, Archer Green’s research for his videos consisted entirely of watching other YouTubers’ videos and taking notes on them. I don’t know how deeply Like Stories of Old or Thomas Flight dig when preparing a video, but I’m guessing it’s deeper than that.

Even if Archer Green hadn’t ended up stealing the words and ideas of other people, such a limited, circular, self-referential environment could only end up being intellectually inbred.

Indeed, this is certainly true of other parts of YouTube, where bad ideas or false information are endlessly recycled because, in pursuit of clicks, YouTubers copy and regurgitate sensationalistic material, which other YouTubers copy and regurgitate, which other YouTubers copy and regurgitate, and on and on. Witness this commercial pilot’s frustrated attempt to debunk aviation myths that have been repeated over and over by YouTubers and TikTokers. And that’s not his only video in this vein. Watch this, this, and this as well, and note how often the same misconceptions or outright lies come up.

This is not, of course, limited to YouTube. Check out this recent video—which I’ve already shown students—about a hoax Wikipedia article that was cited by a newspaper, whose citation then became supporting documentation for the fake Wikipedia page’s bibliography. The fake went undetected for over a decade.

If all governments naturally turn into monarchies over time, all online information environments turn into echo chambers or bubbles. Break out. Maybe start by reading a book on a topic rather than clicking the next video the algorithm feeds you.

YouTube readings of Griswoldville

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve created a YouTube channel, where I’ve uploaded two readings from Griswoldville. I don’t plan to become a YouTuber—at least not on the level of some of the more active ones—but you can subscribe to the channel for readings from my books and other reading and writing related videos. I am working on short recordings from each of my novels and hope to have some more up in the following weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve embedded my first two in the post below. They come from parts I and II of Griswoldville, including scenes from the homefront while Georgie’s father is away fighting in Virginia and in the rear of the Confederate army in Georgia itself once Georgie and his grandfather and cousins Wes and Cal have been called up to the militia. I hope y’all enjoy.

Here’s a longish passage from Part II:

And here’s a couple of chapters I have read several times at public events, passages covering Georgie’s grim, dusty summer on the road with the militia during the battles for Atlanta:

As always, thanks for listening—or, in this case, watching—and please check Griswoldville out if you like what you’ve seen. You can find out more at the book’s page on my website or at Amazon.com, where you can purchase it in both paperback and Kindle formats.