Tina's Groove, 1/24/25

A thing about being a monarch is that nobody can stop you from doing all sorts of awful sicko stuff, and usually this takes the form of wars or religious persecution or what have you, but sometimes it just means they get to play out their sadistic whims. A particularly sadistic one is "raising a baby that nobody ever speaks to in the hopes that it will talk and we'll learn what God's original language is," and there really must be something to this because supposedly four different rulers -- Pharaoh Psamtik I, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, King James IV of Scotland, and the Mughal Emperor Akbar -- supposedly tried it. There's some doubt that any of these experiments really took place, although the recorded end of Frederick's -- "But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments" -- seems grimly plausible.

Anyway, it doesn't sound like Greg's upbringing was that extreme, but still, it does seem like he's the subject of some kind of experiment? Maybe to see if, never having met another soul outside his family in his whole sad sack life, he'd fall in love with the anxious, depressive protagonist of Tina's Groove? She had a boyfriend a a couple weeks ago, but she's on the prowl for hot (?) friends' cousins now, apparently!