I can't decide whether Melanie or Scarlett is the better-written character.

I can't believe I've read 800 pages of one book and I still have 200 pages to go. I think this cured my attention span

Rhett Butler is so aggressively a morally gray MMC from a white romantasy, I'm starting to get convinced he's the blueprint for them all. The things he says could be lifted verbatim from 2024.

I find the description of the KKK from the White Southern perspective after the Civil War interesting.

So white men in the South got brainwashed into dying/becoming poor for the "cause."

Then they lose the war. They subsequently get poor, disenfranchised by the Yankees by e.g. losing the right to vote. The Yankees appropriate the South's wealth by pretending they're giving it the newly freed slaves, but instead steal it to enrich themselves. But they do create an enemy in black people for the poor whites.

So we have this group of poor, young, white men who join a terrorist organisation in the form of KKK because they think they're growing resentment toward black people who have been positioned as beneficiares of stolen wealth by people in power.

So KKK is the first in the long line of terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS that the United States Government gave rise to through its policies to disenfranchise the local population. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

I was definitely expecting myself to question a lot of the book since I’m reading it from the perspective of the Lost Cause supporters, but I’m interested in how the Yankees aren’t the good guys here either.

Everyone is evil, just some with more political power than others and Scarlett as the racist diva she is, is girlbossing through it all.

This is such an emotional rollercoaster because on one page I'm reading one of the best flirting I've ever seen in a work of fiction, and on the next no one sees a problem with KKK doing lynching, save me

„All slaves had run away, frightened by the approach of the Yankees.”

Nah, they probably ran away to be free lol.

But then I appreciate that for a rich white woman in the South, the slavery was completely normal so that was probably their reading of the situation. I think this is a type of quote that people would use to criticise Gone With the Wind for the Confederacy propaganda, but I do think that the story is told from a very specific POV - that of Scarlet and what she says shouldn’t be taken at face value as the reality of the situation but rather her interpretation of the events. You definitely cannot go into the book, expecting an accurate historical portrayal of the Civil War, but rather how the war looked from the perspective of a rich white Southern woman