> > > Dude, it was the best message forum post ever *anyway.* Besides, I liked the additional cloying, saccharine irony that I acheived by calling those annoying, oddly-coloured photographs of two children holding hands "pictures of love."
> >
> > I think I make a crack about those pictures in How To Be Romantic. I remember using the words "unnatural affection." I suppose I could look it up to be sure, but no matter. The point is, I don't have anything against those pictures, but I can't figure out WHY. Think about them for any length of time, and it's downright creepy.
>
> I, for one, have something against those pictures, even if I don't think about them long enough for them to be creepy. They drip with distended sentimentality. I simply cannot get over the fact that these are children dressed up like adults and acting like adults. To my thinking, romantic or sentimental things need to seem at least a little bit real, or at least a little bit inspired by reality. But those cards are just totally alien. They reflect nothing of the world, and everything of what a studio finds to be endearing.

But wait! They're not dressed up like *any* adults. They're dressed up like adults FROM THE 1930s. Or sometimes the '20s, the '40s, the '50s, or the 1890s. To the people who make or buy these cards, toddlers dressed as adults from a sufficiently bygone era can sit on vintage car bumpers kissing or giving each other hideously colourised roses, and it's *romantic* instead of being utterly freaking terrifying in at least ten completely separate ways.

And what are we teaching our impressionable youth with these abominations? Before we know it, there will be a whole generation thinking the age of consent in 1930 was four, the legal driving age was six, and flowers give off special rays that make them immune to black and white film.

Brunnen-"and let's not get started on the Costumed Babies in Flowerpots type of card"G