#Rjalker writes a Summary of Flatland | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rjalker · 5 months ago

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the summary for Flatland so far once again. this is the work in progress. it's not done.

feel free to list out what I missed for the section about Flatland since I know I'm forgetting stuff and unlike the translation it's a lot harder to check.

i am not taking the time to add the images in. it will say "image" because I have placeholders in the document for the image decriptions but there's no actual images in this post.

it is pretty much guarenteed that whatever I forgot is really, really obvious.

it's like 6k words long so far.

This is a summary of the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbot Abbot, published in 1884.

The goal is to summarize everything from the original novel to make it easier for people to understand, if they don’t want to read the original novel, or would like a reminder.

Part 0: About the Narrator of Flatland

The Narrator of the original book does not have any confirmed name that we know, because he chose to hide his identity with the fake name of “A. Square”, the same way that people will call themselves “J. Doe” or ��M. Smith” when they don’t want to reveal their true identity.

Many fans enjoy calling him “Abbot Square”, affectionately naming him after the author, Edwin Abbot Abbot, or give him other names that start with A, and base their original characters’ last names on their shape in a similar style. Ex: “Bee Line”

But his name is not actually A. Square, so you can call him anything you want, and you won’t be wrong. The Sphere who visited him also has no confirmed name, and can again be called anything. We do not know what kind of surnames exist in Flatland.

The only character from the book whose name we know for certain was Pantocyclus, a historical dictator Circle. Another historical figure is usually called Chromatistes, but there is some debate by historians about whether or not that’s accurate. Both of them lived thousands of years before the story takes places, so the only things we know about them is what the Circles decided to tell people afterward.

The narrator himself has a wife, and they have had at least six children together: 5 Pentagons, and 1 Straight Line.

We do not know any of their names, or their personalities. We do know that one of the adult Pentagon sons died, presumably along with his wife, leaving behind two orphaned Hexagons, the narrator’s grandsons, who now live with the narrator and the rest of his sons and daughter. They live in a surprisingly rich neighborhood near a large theater. We know that the roof of their house was recently repaired, though we do not know how it was damaged.

Part 1: About Flatland, and the people and societies that the Narrator was familiar with

People in Flatland don't actually call their world “Flatland” among themselves, it's just what the narrator called his world to make what it's like more obvious for the audience. (Because you can tell from the name that Flatland...is gonna be flat.)

We do not know the names of any countries in Flatland, or what any of them call their world. We do not know how many countries there are, or how big or small they are, or where they are in relation to one another. We just know that there are multiple countries that are ruled by a council of Circles, which is then ruled by the supreme Chief Circle.

It might be helpful to think of them as structured similarly to the United States of America, but we don’t know for sure.

There are almost certainly countries outside of this arrangement, but none were spoken of.

Flatlanders refer to themselves as human beings. Nothing is told to us about any other specific species in Flatland, though the narrator does take the time to assure us that just because he doesn’t mention something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

We know that vegetables and trees exist in Flatland, but we don’t know the details, besides that tree trunks somehow aid in determining North and South.

You should imagine the inhabitants of Flatland as very thin shapes that swim through the top layer of a large ocean. They can't leave this single layer, either by going up or down, and they’re not aware of anything outside it. They’re not even aware that they’re inside a liquid at all, or aware of any movement of this liquid. They cannot look up or down. They have no inherent concept of up or down at all.

They categorize the directions as North, South, East, and West, and are able to tell where South is because there is a southern pull, like gravity, noticeable in most parts of Flatland. The strength of this pull is increased the further South you go, and weakens the further North you travel.

We do not know for sure what causes it, because the narrator did not know, but it could be some sort of magnet, or a dense core of some sort creating a kind of gravity.

Houses in Flatland are shaped like pentagons, because it was decided that the angle of a pentagon was the sharpest angle that should be allowed on a building for the sake of public safety, because running into the sharp corner of a building could be very dangerous.

The pentagonal houses face north so that rain, which always comes from the north on a predictable schedule, does not come in either of the doors, which are on lower sides that are angled inward. On the western side is a large door for men, on the east a much smaller door for women.

The only buildings allowed to have sharper corners are amunition warehouses and other military and governemnt buildings that are not meant to be approached by just any random person. It can be safely assumed that jails and asylums also have sharp corners to keep people away.

If not for the fascist society they live in, it can be assumed that Flatlanders would naturally come to theorize about other mathematical dimensions just like we have.

When seen from above or below, the internal organs of Flatlanders are clearly visible.

They are not aware that their insides are visible from another angle, because, and I cannot stress this enough, they have no idea that the directions of “up” or “down” exist at all.

They exist only in two dimensions. As far as they are concerned, they’re completely solid, just like you and me.

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What exactly their insides look like is up for you and I to speculate on, because the narrator didn’t feel like giving a lecture on anatomy. (Imagine if you were suddenly called upon by aliens to give a lesson on the anatomy of the human body. How helpful do you think you’d be?)

Flatlanders each have a single eye, which, in some way that is never explained to us, doubles as their mouth. This eye-mouth will always found on one of the Flatlander’s angles or points, where two sides meet.

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You do not have to stick to this, you can do whatever you want. But you should at least do so knowing that it’s not how they work in the book. Knowing the rules and breaking them with purpose is better than just not knowing how things are supposed to work at all.

For Isosceles triangles, we know that their eye-mouth is on one of the points of their base, rather than their longer sharp point. For Straight Lines, just pick an end. For other Irregular Figures, go wild, pick whatever angle you want. There is no such thing as a true Circle in Flatland, only Figures with many small sides, so you can just pick any part of a Circilar character to put their eye, even if you’re just simplying them as a Circle. (I doubt anyone wants to sit there and figure out how to draw a shape with 600+ perfectly equal sides)

When inside Flatland, their natural habitat, a Flatlander only ever sees anything they are looking at from its side, so that everything appears as a straight line, just at different sizes, levels of brightness, and distances.

You can see how this would work yourself, by taking a coin, or a shape cut out in cardboard or paper, and putting it on a table.

When you look down on it from above, you see the shape it really is. But if you put your eye on the level with the table it sits on, it will appear as a straight line.

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That straight line is how Flatlanders see everything when they are inside Flatland.

When someone or something is closer to them, the line appears longer from side to side, and when further away, it is smaller from side to side.

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This is why their eye-mouths are on their edges, which they refer to as “solids”, because that is the only direction they can ever look, and everything looks solid from that angle.

If they had an eye-mouth on their upper or lower side, they wouldn’t be able to see or eat anything inside Flatland, and they would only see what is above or below them.

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As above, you can break this rule for stylization purposes, or you could do a story where a character is born with their eye out of the usual place, and is considered Irregular because of it. But when speaking of the original novel, this is how it works.

We do not have any details of what above and below Flatland look like, so it is up for any interpretation.

Despite everything they look at appearing as a straight line, Flatlanders are still able to navigate and recognize one another by sight, because the edges of Flatlanders and other living things glow with automatic bioluminescence, and because in many places there is usually a dense "fog" in the air.

This means that when one Flatlander looks at another in an area with fog, the areas that are closer to them appear brighter, and the parts that are further away are darker.

Three Figures will help us demonstrate this so you can understand: Billie the Straight Line, Bob the Circle, and Joe the Hexagon.

If Bob the Circle looks at Joe the Hexagon so that one of Joe’s flat sides is facing him, Bob the Circle will see a bright line in the center of his vision, with a darker gradient on either side.

The bright line is the flat side of Joe that is closest to Bob. The gradient on either side is what is visible of Joe’s other sides from this perspective.

And if Billie the Straight Line looks at Joe from another angle, so that one of Joe’s points is facing her instead of one of his flat sides, then Billie will see a small point of light, with a slower fade to dark around it, because the closest thing to Billie is one of Joe’s points.

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By using the different levels of brightness and darkness when looking at one another, Flatlanders whose families are rich enough to send them to specialized private rich kid schools can learn to recognize different shapes from sight alone.

This is known as The Art of Sight Recognition, and it is very difficult to master, so difficult in fact that most Flatlanders rely instead upon The Art of Feeling – where Flatlanders gently and carefully feel along the angles of one another to figure out what shape they are. This is treated as a formal introduction.

This can be dangerous if you’re not careful, because some shapes have very sharp angles that can cut, stab, or even outright kill someone if hit with enough force.

The Narrator tells us that one of his ancestors, who was an Isosceles triangle, accidentally killed a man while he was being felt, by accidentally moving suddenly due to pain from arthritis, and ended up cutting the man who’d been feeling in half.

We are told that the “moral shock” of this action degraded their family’s angle for generations, but it is more likely that the people doing the measuring simply lied about their angles to punish them.

Higher class citizens look down on the art of Feeling, and instead spend a whole lot of money and time learning to use Sight Recognition alone, so they can feel special and more intelligent than the poor people.

The male children of noblemen are not allowed to learn the art of Feeling at all, and must rely on Sight Recognition forever. If, when they go to one of their fancy rich people collages, they’re caught using the art of Feeling, they will be given a warning the first time, along with some sort of punishment, and expelled completely the second time.

Any noble who fails to learn the art of Sight Recognition even after years in university being taught it is completely shunned from the society of their fellow rich people, and no longer has the right to get married, for fear that they’d pass their inability to learn Sight Recognition down to their kids. Because fascism and eugenics go hand in hand.

Since these “trash of the rich” as the narrator calls them don’t know how to use Sight Recognition or the Art of Feeling, they’re unable to interact with larger society at all, and lead miserable lives.

It can be safely assumed that those who are unable to learn Sight Recognition despite access to plenty of highly skilled teachers are failing due to some sort of disability – either vision problems, or some sort of neurodiversity.

There is another kind of recognition used to tell people’s classes apart, and it is done simply by listening to someone speak, and judging what class they’re from based on their accent.

This isn’t very helpful, though, because poor people are able to mimic the accents of rich people, while rich people, who only ever hang out with other rich people, cannot do the same for poor people, since they, presumably, have no idea what they actually sound like.

And since all the rich people hang out together, and more importantly are desperate to fit in with one another and not stand out, they all speak in the same general way, so you can’t tell from their Rich Person Accent alone whether they’re an eight-sided Octagon, or a twenty-sided Icosagon.

When A Square wrote his autobiography, Flatland's known societies accepted only specific shapes as worthy of being called human beings with basic civil rights, insisting that humans could only be "Regular" Figures, meaning that all of their angles and sides had to match.

This meant that when the Art of Feeling or Sight Recognition were used for identification, only a single angle needed to be felt or looked at to know the whole shape.

The societies of Flatland the original narrator was aware of also considered all “Straight Lines” to be female, and every Figure not a “Straight Line” to be male.

Because Joe and Bob are “shapes” with multiple angles, they would be considered Men, or Male, and Billie, being a “Straight Line”, and having “no angles” would be considered a Woman, or Female.

But despite the fact that they are referred to as “Straight Lines”, educated Flatlanders are in fact aware that so-called “Straight Lines” are actually all very thin parallelograms, a term that includes squares, rectangles, diamonds, and more.

Straight Lines are shapes too, with their own angles, just like everyone else, they just happen to be much thinner.

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This fact did nothing to alter the narrator’s society’s insistence that Straight Lines lacked angles, and therefore literally lacked brains.

Actual facts don’t actually convince bigots to change their minds, because bigotry isn’t logical, it just claims to be for a false sense of legitimacy.

Irregular Figures and the Systems of Oppression in Flatland

The lowest status members of Flatland society at the time the narrator was alive were “Irregulars”, which were shapes whose angles and sides did not all match, and, we can assume, Lines that were not straight, though the original book does not actually mention Irregular Lines.

It can be assumed that Irregular Lines existed just as much as other Irregular Figures, and they would be categorized as Lines depending on how thin they are compared to other figures.

The very obvious implication of Women being called “Straight Lines” in particular very clearly implies the existance of non-straight or Irregular Lines.

Irregular figures were not considered human at all in the countries the narrator knew of, and, in these countries, most of them were killed as soon as they were born if doctors decided that medical intervention couldn’t “fix” the Irregularity.

In the original novel, Irregularity is used as a metaphor for oppressed people of all kinds in many scenarios, including intersex people, disabled people, people of color, Queer people, and more, depending on the situation.

The act of surgically altering infants who are considered “Irregular” is a very clear parallel to the hardships intersex people face in reality, along with some disabled people.

This system of Regular-Superiority meant that Equilateral or Equal-sided Triangles were the lowest class of Figures acknowledged to be human, and because they have the lowest number of equal sides and angles possible, which is three.

These societies had a very strict caste system, where your shape determined everything about your life, including the kind of jobs you would be allowed to work, who you could marry, and where you could live.

Isosceles are triangles who have exactly two angles and sides that do match, with a third side and angle that are not matching.

These are not to be confused with Scalene triangles, who have no matching angles at all.

Neither Isosceles, or Scalene triangles were considered human, and they had no civil rights at all, though Scalene triangles were not explicitly mentioned.

Isosceles were the lowest class of Figure allowed to exist within society without being murdered on sight in most cases, because, while they were still Irregular, they were the least amount of Irregular as you could get, with only a single side/angle not being equal.

Triangles with no matching sides at all, meaning Scalene triangles, were not tolerated within any of the societies the narrator was familiar with, and would presumably be murdered on sight, or as soon as they were born, if their Irregularity could not be surgically “fixed” to make them either an Isosceles or an Equal-sided triangle.

To reiterate again, Isosceles triangles were not considered human beings, due to being Irregular.

They were considered property, and were bought and sold as such.

They were forced to perform all of the most dangerous, difficult, degrading, and tedious jobs, and also served as expendable soldiers for the military, and private armies.

They were were also used as cleaning and serving staff for middle and upper-class families, serving as butlers, errand-boys, dishwashers, and more, and would probably be inherited along with the house they were attached to.

Also known as, they were enslaved.

The measurement of an Isosceles’ unequal angle would determine their social status among other Isosceles. The closer your third angle was to 60 degrees, the higher your status, which would give you access to better and safer work assignments.

Instead of being used to clean the disease-ridden, clogged sewer for example, you might instead be washing dishes in a rich guy’s mansion.

Isosceles with very small angles were, among other things, regularly used as expendable executioners, being brought in to kill prisoners who were involved with state secrets, only to them be killed themselves to avoid being able to reveal those secrets to others, even if they hadn’t actually heard the prisoner say anything.

Isosceles were treated as completely disposable non-human things barely worthy of being considered people.

In these fascist societies, Irregularity was conflated with moral bankruptcy, meaning anyone who was born anything except perfectly Regular was considered to be inherently evil, which was the excuse given for murdering these people at every opportunity.

But even during the narrator’s lifetime, there were people trying to fight back against this idea, spreading pamphlets pointing out that if a child is born Irregular, and he has to face abuse, hatred, and bullying from his nurse, siblings, and even parents for as long as he can remember, and is constantly told that he’s inherently a bad person no matter what he does, and then is shoved out into the world where he is constantly followed by the police under the assumption that he’s going to commit a crime, and he is not allowed to have a job or get married, and has no friends to speak of.

If you deny someone literally every opportunity to do good, what other choice do you give him except to be bad?

If you will not let him honestly work for his food, where do you expect him to get it besides from stealing?

In other words, treating people like criminals and refusing to let them have any opportunities for “honest work”...literally means they have no choice but to become the criminals you’ve told them they are since they were born.

The narrator was not convinced by these pamphlets, even though he admits they are “very plausible”, because he insists that he’s never met an Irregular who wasn’t a horrible person who deserved everything he got.

He admits that the lives of Irregulars do suck, but says that’s just too bad, because their lives just have to suck to make sure everyone else’s don’t.

We do not know any details about any specific Irregular characters, because they were only ever mentioned as hypothetical.

Any shape that does not have all equal sides and angles would be considered Irregular, regardless of any other equality or symetry about the shape.

A perfectly symmetrical five-pointed star, for example, would still be considered Irregular even though it’s symmetrical, because the wider angles on the inside do not match the sharper angles on the five points.

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The same would be true of many other shapes as well. The eugenicist goals of Flatland were incredibly specific and restrictive.

If all three of your angles were measured at 60 degrees, you weren’t considered an Isosceles, but an Equal-sided triangle, and you would have basic human rights.

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Isosceles with angles approaching 60 were regularly put into arranged marriages by Circles in an attempt to “breed” children who would be born Equilateral triangles.

If an Equilateral triangle were born to any Isosceles family, whether through the explicit eugenicist program run by the Circles, or by random chance, the infant would be immediately taken away from their Isosceles family, and given to an Equilateral family that does not have any children.

The adoptive parents are then sworn to never reveal the child’s true birth parents, and never to let the child anywhere near them, with the fear that their Irregularity might be contagious and infect the child with proximity.

The birth of an Equilateral triangles from the Isosceles class is celebrated for miles around, because it is used as “proof” to the Isosceles slaves that if they just work hard enough, they can win a better future for their children. They are told that hard work, frugality, and self-control will increase their chances of having Equilateral children.

This is patently not true, but it is a helpful lie for the Circles to spread, because it means their force of free labor works harder and doesn’t complain as much when they don’t have enough to eat. It is the same myth that is spread today, of the “self-made millionaire”.

The rich will always tell you that simply working hard and being a good person is what got them where they are today. The truth is that they were just born to rich parents, and maintain that wealth through exploitation of the working classes, just like the Isosceles of Flatland are exploited for the benefit of the higher classes.

Because the angles of Isosceles were categorized in a range from 0.5 to 59.5 degrees.

This meant that their angles could be useful for learning the Art of Feeling, to learn to tell shapes apart by touch by learning how to tell angles apart.

Because of this, a huge number of Isosceles, especially those with smaller angles and thus lower status, were sold to elementary schools for middle and upper class children to learn the Art of Feeling.

The children would Feel the Isosceles, using them as a human guinea pig. Yes, this is exactly as horrifying as it sounds.

More expensive schools with higher budgets would allow the Isosceles prisoners to literally starve to death while being Felt every day by probably hundreds of children.

A Flatlander going without food or water could survive for around a month, which meant these prisoners spent their last month of life being tortured to death not only from starvation and dehydration, but constant poking, prodding, and, since kids also have sharp angles, probably also many cuts and bruises.

When they died, the rich school would simply buy a new enslaved person to replace them with.

We do not know how they disposed of the bodies, or what exactly happens when a Flatlander dies.

Schools that could not afford to keep buying new enslaved people every month would provide the ones they did have with food and water, keeping them alive for years on end, before eventually replacing them with “fresh specimens”, to quote the narrator, when they eventually died, or became too scarred from constant feeling to be “useful” anymore.

The narrator of the book originally advocated for allowing these enslaved people to starve, specifically in the hopes of “thinning their numbers”.

After being imprisoned for seven years and thinking about what the Sphere had said to him, the last we’d heard, he’d become much more progressive in regards to the treatment of Women and Isosceles, within the story’s perspective.

From an out of universe perspective, the entire point of him being such a blatant bigot in the first place is, I feel the need to remind people, specifically done to make the bigotry absolutely clear and make people think of how reprehensible it is.

You are supposed to look at the narrator casually and happily advocating to let people starve to death while being tortured and think “holy crap what is wrong with this guy and the rest of his society?”. And then you’re supposed to take that idea and look at what is going on in the world around you and see if that outrage has a target in the real world, because it probably does.

In the United States, slavery is still, literally legal, as long as it’s imposed as a punishment for a crime. That’s literally what’s written in the constitution in 2024, and has been since slavery was supposedly “abolished”.

Prisoners in the United States in 2024 are literally, by law, enslaved. They are forced to fight wildfires. They are forced to labor without pay, or for just pennies an hour doing difficult and dangerous work. And this is literally slavery as defined by the Constitution of the United States, which say it’s fine actually, because slavery as punishment for a crime is good.

Flatland was written to criticize the systems of oppression in Victorian England, but the criticisms themselves are timeless.

Back to the summary.

Isosceles triangles made up the majority of non-Straight Line population in the narrator’s country.

Next in the social order of recognized classes in Flatland would be Straight Lines, who are considered Women.

Like Isosceles, they have no civil rights, but unlike Isosceles, they are not enslaved, nor are they casually tortured to death inside elementary schools. They are not allowed have a job outside the home, or get an education, but they are still much better off than any Isosceles, who is not only denied an education, but is also, and I cannot stress this enough, literally enslaved.

Many bigoted people read Flatland and pretend that Straight Lines are the most oppressed people in it, because they’ve decided to ignore the fact that Isosceles are literally enslaved and tortured to death in elementary schools.

You, my dear reader, will not ignore this, will you?

You will not make me or anyone else suffer through essays and fan-sequels that pretend it’s good the Isosceles are literally enslaved and tortured while you pretend that they are treated better than Straight Lines, will you? Because if you do I will be absolutely ashamed that you ever read this summary and still came away with such a horrible understanding of the systems of oppression in Flatland.

Look up White Feminism and why it’s bad. Ignoring the oppression of marginalized men to pretend that women are the only oppressed people who exist will always be racist, ableist, and more.

The Flatland version, you might say, could be called Straight Line Feminism. And I do not want to have to deal with any more people pretending it’s good and true.

Do not pretend that Straight Lines are the most oppressed people in Flatland. Just don’t do it. Do not brush the treatment of Isosceles and Irregulars under the rug because you don’t think anyone besides Women can really be oppressed or has rights worth fighting for.

Straight Lines are oppressed. But you cannot pretend they’re the most oppressed people in Flatland when the other oppressed people are literally being enslaved and regularly tortured to death, or just flat out murdered on sight.

If you are writing stories where the characters are fighting back against the injustice in Flatland, they need to be fighting back for the rights of everyone, not just Straight Lines.

Now let’s get back to the summary.

Straight Lines are in some countries of Flatland required by law to constantly move their back end from side to side to make them easily visible to anyone who might be standing behind them.

This is for two reasons: 1: to let Edwin Abbot Abbot reference the bustles on dresses that were in fashion during the era the book was written.

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2: To make them easier to see.

Flatlanders are bioluminescent on their their edges their eyemouths. The level of brightness from their eyemouth is even used to indicate mood.

From the sides, a Straight Line appears as a glowing line, which is easy to see. Billie, Bob, and Joe, will demonstrate again:

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From the front, they appear as a glowing point. This is harder to see than a full line, but still visible.

But from behind, their point does not glow as brightly, and because of this it’s hard to see, because of how tiny it is compared to everything else you might be looking at.

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By moving their rear end back and forth, that dim speck becomes a little easier to notice, so you’re less likely to run into them. Something which could be very dangerous if you were moving quickly, because of how sharp they are.

They are also expected to keep up a constant “Peace-Cry”, or a humming noise, so that anyone can hear when they are near.

It should also be noted that Straight Lines are also used to represent Women as another reference to ongoing social issues at the time the book was written.

At the time, fancy hats were very fashionable for women, and to keep them in place, people would use a long sharp pin to stick through the hat and through their hair, holding everything together.

This wasn’t a problem for anyone, until women who were harassed or attacked realized they could use these hat pins to defend themselves.

And then of course everyone got all up in arms – not because these women were being attacked, but because they dared to defend themselves and their boundaries.

Instead of punishing the men who were harassing women, the women were punished for defending themselves. Laws were passed to regulate the length that hat pins could be, and anyone wearing one longer than the limit would be, in some places, fined over a thousand dollars in 2024’s money.

Straight Lines are categorized as Women in Flatland because if they weren’t treated horribly, they’d have less reason to kill people.

Which they did, a lot, especially in areas where they were forced to endure harsher restrictions, like in some countries of Flatland, where they were not allowed to leave the house at all except during religious holidays, or have to be escorted by a male relative.

Men who abused their wives were likely to end up dead at the end of their sharp stingers, and this led to many laws being passed with the goal of preventing this.

Straight Line’s apartments within their home were required to be built very narrowly, so that they couldn’t get in or out quickly. This was explicitly done to prevent them from murdering anyone who upset them while they were in their room, which other Figures took full advantage of.

There were also specific, narrow doors that Straight Lines had to use at all times.

Straight Lines were not allowed to have an education, and were lied to almost every moment of every day by the other Figures around them, who would say one thing within their earshot, and then say something completely different when they left the room.

The narrator tells us that the way things are spoken among only “Men” versus in the range of “Women” are so different that they may as well be separate languages. They lie to Straight Lines and claim to love and care for them, and pretend they think they are the most beautiful and amazing things ever created. But really they think they are nothing more than mindless creatures who hardly even deserve the label of person.

This double-language becomes a problem for younger non-Straight Line Figures, who spend their first three years of their life being raised by their mother or nurse, learning the language of emotions and kindness, only to then suddenly be ripped away and told to forget all of that and think only in terms of calculation and efficiency, and to dispose and look down upon the very person who’s shaped their whole life so far.

The narrator was worried about the strain this sudden revelation puts on the minds of young male children, and is worried that one day one of them might reveal to their mother exactly what her husband and his friends thinks of her.

This concern has, surprisingly enough, made the narrator advocate for Straight Lines to be allowed to receive an education. He isn’t thinking of their welfare, of course, he frames it as concern for the male children, who aren’t being taught as much as they should be at younger ages, and who, he thinks, shouldn’t have to struggle to keep the truth of the world secret from his mother and sisters.

The family trees of all Figures are kept careful track of for the purpose of eugenics, and this includes Straight Lines.

Lower class Figures who are really into the whole eugenics thing will carefully pick out a Straight Line to marry who has no history of Irregularity for thousands of generations in her family tree.

Higher class shapes, though, are lazier with their commitment to the eugenics thing, since they think they’re already so far ahead, so they will be less careful to pick a wife with “good genes”.

The narrator mentions that a Circle has been known to marry a Straight Line whose grandfather was Irregular, simply because he liked her, and the narrator blames this for one of the reasons that higher classes tend to have fewer children.

Straight Lines who are diagnosed with any illness that causes sudden, uncontrollable movements like seizures, chronic cold, or other diseases, are killed immediately upon diagnosis.

After Straight Lines in the social classes of Flatland, we have the Equilateral triangles, who were the middle class, and were the owners and managers of shops and stores, overseeing a workforce of Isosceles slaves.

Above the Equal-sided triangles were the Squares with four equal sides, and the Pentagons with five sides. This was the only class made up of two different Configurations. They were considered “gentlemen”, and had jobs such as lawyers (like the narrator), doctors, and other high-class, well paying jobs.

Next came the Hexagons with six equal sides, who were the lowest sections of the nobility class. After this, the narrator stopped bothering to list out specific shape names, but the level of social status increased with the number of sides. When you reached some unnamed point, you were given the title of Polygon, or many-sided, and were part of the higher nobility.

The final and most powerful class were the Circles, shapes who had so many sides that it was no longer worth the effort of counting to keep track. This was also helped along by the fact that Circles would refuse to allow themselves to be properly measured, so there was no real telling how many sides they actually had.

The Chief Circle was supposedly chosen because he had the most number of sides in the country, and was assumed to have ten thousand sides to be polite.

The Chief Circle was the supreme leader of all the allied countries in Flatland that the narrator knew of. Also known as a dictator.

The Circles created this system to give themselves all of the power. They hold all of the political offices, and control everything. The “Circularchy” (rule by circles) is similar to both the “Patriarchy” (rule by men) of our own world, along with other systems of oppression, like white supremacy, racism, ableism, intersexism, queermisia, and more.

xxxAll about circular bullshit attend to your configuration blah blah blah

xxxThe Invention of Paint and the Color Revolt

xxxHow the Narrator went to Lineland

xxxHow the Narrator met the Sphere, and was brought to the Third Dimension

xxxWhat the narrator did after being returned to Flatland

#I literally always forget the most obvious things.#Rjalker writes a summary of Flatland #Rjalker reads Flatland a Romance of Many Dimensions #Flatland #Flatlandaromanceofmanydimensions #WIP

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