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That's quite a generous reading from memory but I have not read that last bit for a while so hmm. Will have to ponder and see if I can scare up a copy easily. Regardless, as you say, its a good call to action but a terrible response to Omelas
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Apr 10, 2021 06:17
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The story is free online if you want to check. From my reading, the point killer crane made “ stay and cause the right kind of suffering to the right kind of people, because trying to not cause suffering will end up with a world destroyed by complacency.” does seem to be the message but I’m still unclear if the world destroyed by complacency means the world where we need thought police, or if it means that the ones causing the suffering should be the thought police who are preventing actual huge conflicts. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/ Ccs fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Apr 10, 2021 |
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Apr 10, 2021 15:07
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Don't read NK Jemisin, do read Herodotus. (Herodotus was part of an oppressed minority--Greeks in Asia Minor, because it was dominated by the Achamenid Empire).
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Apr 10, 2021 20:16
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Im a bit more than halfway through Jemisin's short story collection, How Long Til Black Future Month. Overall it shows great range, and it varies between stories that feel complete in their own right and those than feel like they're functioning as pilots for what could become full series. Personally I prefer the ones that feel self-contained because they're all great fun to read and don't feel like they're rushing through to outline a possible book-length plot. The City Born Great is the biggest example of a story that feels it could be stretched to novel length, so I was befuddled when I learned that it actually serves as the prologue to The City We Became. I was going to write reactions to every story I've read but I'd end up just summarizing. For the most part I like them. In certain cases the characters some through much clearer than in others. Valedictorian is a highlight in terms of character work.
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Apr 21, 2021 14:48
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Question for the thread: I loved Fifth Season, it was easily one of my favorite books of the year, but Obelisk Gate just sort of fell flat for me. It felt like it was spinning it's wheels a lot, and I'm not connecting to Stone Sky as much either. Does Stone Sky eventually ramp up for a good end to the trilogy?
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Apr 21, 2021 16:36
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I think it depends on what you enjoyed in the first book. It expand on the world building and lore more thank the second book. I felt like the bunker in the second book was a slog, but the pacing in the third book goes from frantic to dead stop depending on which character is being followed, but in the end is more exciting of a story. Neither lives up to the first book.
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Apr 21, 2021 17:01
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I'd agree the first book is the strongest in the trilogy, but the third is better than the second IMO.
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Apr 22, 2021 19:26
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Whoa, looks like movies are in the works Really curious how dark they are going to go with this.
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Jun 5, 2021 06:29
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I wonder how they’ll manage the twist in the first book. Cast different actors for each stage of life? Makeup probably wouldn’t be enough to hide it.
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Jun 5, 2021 15:53
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Ccs posted:I wonder how they’ll manage the twist in the first book. Cast different actors for each stage of life? Makeup probably wouldn’t be enough to hide it. It'll be like Cloud Atlas. Every version of her is played by Tom Hanks in progressively preposterous prosthetics.
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Jun 7, 2021 05:47
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I read "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" a few weeks ago after it was posted on another forum as part of an argument against free speech absolutism and it hasn't left my mind since then. I've honestly got a lot of questions regarding the world of Um-Helat, its past, and implications regarding its society. I was looking online last night for reactions to the story and discovered this thread, so I figured it would be as good a place as any to ask the questions that have been in my head for the last few weeks. Concerning Um-Helat Itself - How did Um-Helat come about? If its society is currently okay with social workers killing "gleaners", does that indicate that the current state of the city was preceded by a period in which people designated as threats to the society that Um-Helat aspired to be were systematically purged? Or was there some kind of disaster and the survivors founded Um-Helat? - Is Um-Helat the only civilization in this world, or are there other cities with identical values? - If there are other civilizations with incompatible values, how does Um-Helat keep them at bay? Are they isolationist and have an outcast military caste set at its borders to enable the culture of the city within? Concerning the "Gleaners" and the Possibility of Leaving Um-Helat - What is stopping the gleaners from leaving the city to continue their actions while also escaping death at the hands of the social workers? Is leaving Um-Helat not allowed, or are the people who would leave suspected of being gleaners and/or contaminated and disposed of? - If leaving Um-Helat is allowed, are there splinter-societies of gleaners that have left Um-Helat to hide in the wilderness to escape death? Does Um-Helat have a caste like the social workers that seeks out and destroys gleaners hiding in the wilderness lest they eventually return and contaminate the people of Um-Helat? On the Social Workers and Being "Contaminated" - How do the social workers ensure that "contaminated" children don't spread what they've learned from their dead gleaner parents to other children? Are these children kept in separate enclaves to train them in becoming social workers while also keeping them from uncontaminated children? - What's the grace period for a contaminated child before they're executed by the social workers as a threat to society? - Do Um-Helatians as a rule not experience negative emotions because they are apparently learned behaviors and not something humans naturally possess? Does no one ever get angry over something petty or hold a grudge? If so, do the social workers eliminate these people as well, possibly operating under the assumption that these people must have been contaminated at some point? - If being contaminated is worthy of death, wouldn’t people be suspicious and paranoid about others contaminating them? Could this not lead to false accusations that someone must be a gleaner or otherwise contaminated? - As people who were contaminated as children, wouldn’t there be prejudice against the social workers for fear one could go rogue and contaminate others? Upon reading the story I was immediately reminded of Psycho-Pass, which prominently features a group similar to the social workers called the enforcers. In both Those Who Stay and Fight and Psycho-Pass the idea is that certain individuals must be executed before they can cause other people to become contaminated and worthy for execution. A major difference is that, in Psycho-Pass, the enforcers are also accompanied by an inspector that is tasked with executing any enforcers who exhibit signs of becoming too dangerous to let live lest they corrupt society. The enforcers also handle aspects of an operation that could lead to contamination of the inspector, though inspectors sometimes become contaminated enough that they are demoted to the rank of enforcer themselves. I'd honestly expect a setting like what is described in Those Who Stay and Fight to have an analogue to Psycho-Pass's inspectors devoted to making sure that social workers themselves don't backslide and become a threat worthy of neutralization. I can imagine the possibility of a social worker such as the girl in the story to secretly harbor a grudge against Um-Helat for the death of her father, leading to social workers who secretly use their position to further contamination of the populace. One villain in Psycho-Pass had such a goal, looking to contaminate as many people as possible to force the enforcers into committing mass slaughter of the unwittingly contaminated. I realize the author probably doesn't expect to ever revisit the Um-Helat setting and didn't flesh it out more because of that, but the world building implications and questions about how that society came to be and how it works have captured my imagination off-and-on for weeks now. Hexmage-SA fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jun 24, 2021 |
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Jun 24, 2021 20:18
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I think the answer to all those questions is that it’s more a metaphor and thought experiment than a place to be fleshed out and depicted as a convincing secondary world. I imagine it would be very difficult to write a full length novel about because of that.
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Jun 24, 2021 23:43
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OP you ever read the Ursula LeGuin short story that this riffs off of?
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Jun 25, 2021 03:28
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I just finished reading through the thread and the arguments about the ‘oppressed wizards’. I have a different reading than a few of you, and I’m curious about something: how many of you are women or AFAB (and raised female even if that wasn’t what you identify as)? I know it’s a weird question but I swear it has a purpose.
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Aug 12, 2021 03:33
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DreamingofRoses posted:I just finished reading through the thread and the arguments about the ‘oppressed wizards’. I have a different reading than a few of you, and I’m curious about something: how many of you are women or AFAB (and raised female even if that wasn’t what you identify as)? I'm not. Curious as to what your reading is.
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Aug 12, 2021 15:07
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Yeah that's very dangerous ground to tread because of how often some version of that question been used to troll people on these forums that fit that description. It's one of the few times that moderators have rightly banned people for doing it (when they've done anything at all about it).
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Aug 12, 2021 19:26
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By the way something that didn't crop up in this thread was that the books in question are being made into a film series with Jemisin writing them. https://www.tor.com/2021/06/07/n-k-jemisin-is-adapting-her-broken-earth-trilogy-for-film/ Now considering the length of time between the annoucements of other fantasy series and when they actually appeared on screen I don't expect to see the first film hitting the theaters for at least 5 years, and its very likely it gets tied up in creative differences like many of these projects do. But it is something that a more recent series is actually making its way in development as opposed to all the other recent fantasy adaptions which are all based on source material from the 90s or earlier.
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Aug 12, 2021 19:34
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No, but I'm curious about the reading.
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Aug 12, 2021 20:49
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DreamingofRoses posted:I just finished reading through the thread and the arguments about the ‘oppressed wizards’. I have a different reading than a few of you, and I’m curious about something: how many of you are women or AFAB (and raised female even if that wasn’t what you identify as)? Women on this forum are regularly harassed, so don't ask this. If people choose to self identify that's up to them.
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Aug 12, 2021 21:22
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Jaxyon posted:Women on this forum are regularly harassed, so don't ask this. I’m asking because I’m a woman, and AFAB, and I’m trying to see if it’s maybe a socialization thing as to why I disagree with the idea that ‘oppressed wizards is a trope that doesn’t work’ especially in the context of the orogenes. On mobile, so I’ll type up the dissertation when I get a minute, but I feel like there’s a crucial psychological/social component missing to the argument of “oppression flows from the powerful to the weak”. Edit: Like, I can see where y’all are coming from, but it literally never strained my credulity that orogenes or the mages in Dragon Age don’t revolt against their oppression en masse. DreamingofRoses fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Aug 12, 2021 |
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Aug 12, 2021 21:52
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DreamingofRoses posted:I’m asking because I’m a woman, and AFAB, and I’m trying to see if it’s maybe a socialization thing as to why I disagree with the idea that ‘oppressed wizards is a trope that doesn’t work’ especially in the context of the orogenes. On mobile, so I’ll type up the dissertation when I get a minute, but I feel like there’s a crucial psychological/social component missing to the argument of “oppression flows from the powerful to the weak”. I agree with you and I think a lot of the posters do not understand how this story reads to women, or WoC. FWIW I've vocally disagreed with most of the posters in this thread.
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Aug 12, 2021 21:59
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DreamingofRoses posted:I’m asking because I’m a woman, and AFAB, and I’m trying to see if it’s maybe a socialization thing as to why I disagree with the idea that ‘oppressed wizards is a trope that doesn’t work’ especially in the context of the orogenes. On mobile, so I’ll type up the dissertation when I get a minute, but I feel like there’s a crucial psychological/social component missing to the argument of “oppression flows from the powerful to the weak”. I don't dislike the "oppressed wizards" thing because of oppression flowing from strong to weak, I dislike it because all too often they end up presenting good reasons to oppress people. Take the orogenes, for example. If they lose control of their emotions for a second, they unstoppably murder everybody around them. Very early in the first book, an orogene schoolgirl almost kills a boy over a playground scuffle. She gets pushed, lands in the mud, and suddenly he's frozen half to death. This is literally a reason why you would want to segregate them into different schools, and it's why you might not want to be their neighbors, either. The orogene who lives in the other side of the duplex just found out that their spouse is cheating on them and they lost it for a second. If they were a non-orogene they'd have just screamed or had a crying jag, but they were an orogene and now your entire family is dead. In Dragon Age, a little mage boy gets possessed by a demon and causes a village wide disaster with a double digit death toll. Zombies rise and attack, people get mind controlled, poo poo is horrible. I wouldn't want them living near me, either. The reason oppressed wizards is bad isn't because oppression flows from strength to weakness or because the wizards would revolt. It's because they keep giving good reasons why people would want to separate wizards out of non-wizard society.
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Aug 12, 2021 22:59
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Khizan posted:I don't dislike the "oppressed wizards" thing because of oppression flowing from strong to weak, I dislike it because all too often they end up presenting good reasons to oppress people. So basically if the oppressed have the agency to fight back then the oppression is justified? I mean that's a hell of a take. Keep in mind, in the first book there is an example of an irate spouse being overcome with emotion and murdering a family member. But they're not an orogene.
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Aug 12, 2021 23:37
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If someone had the power to literally cause earthquakes with their mind and also calm down natural ones I'd make it the #1 priority of my society to make sure they had all the help possible. But I guess "child torture" might also be justified? OK
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Aug 12, 2021 23:39
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Khizan posted:I don't dislike the "oppressed wizards" thing because of oppression flowing from strong to weak, I dislike it because all too often they end up presenting good reasons to oppress people. I'm typing up my main response right now, but this becomes eugenics if you boil it down to the bone. "This person's existence The kid in Dragon Age literally had that problem because admitting his powers would have broken up his family/destroyed the succession of the line. That whole thing could have been avoided if the community around him had the means and ability to openly support his growth and teach him about his abilities. DreamingofRoses fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Aug 12, 2021 |
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Aug 12, 2021 23:39
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If I can bully a kid and face no consequences, OK, but if they can actually hurt me back we should segregate society. Just in case. Also mentally and physically torture the kids I'm bullying.
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Aug 12, 2021 23:51
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So, I tried to write a big, long essay about my reading of it, but it's getting wordy and I'm not a great writer so I'll boil it down to two things. 1) It's about getting 'em young. If you raise a person to hold a certain belief system/station/caste within the status quo, the instinct is to stay with it if you're benefitting from it in any way. Other people within your social strata will police this, even if they don't/can't do anything physically about it. Breaking out of the status quo is hard, even if the status quo sucks rear end. It's hard to get up the personal momentum to tear the system apart, especially if you know there's no way to do it that won't hurt others who don't have any more control over the situation than you do. An earthquake isn't subtle, or discriminatory about who gets got. Orogenes are raised to be scared of themselves and their abilities and to be careful. The level of untraining it takes to be willing to do the kind of damage they'd need to be able to rebel effectively isn't given to them (there's a reason why armies have to break down their recruits before they're trusted to reliably shoot at other human beings). The problem isn't that orogenes as whole think of themselves as an 'us' and non-orogenes as a 'them', it's that they still feel that 'us'-ness with non-orogenes, while non-orogenes do not feel the same. 2) See above but now apply group dynamics that generally prevent organization (even moreso than in the Dragon Age games, at least the Circles were able to form philosophical sects), constant overwatch and policing both by people within their ranks rightfully scared about getting slaughtered again and also by an outside force that is able to take advantage of the psychological blinders they're raised with and occasionally able to overpower them, and a general fear of the unknown. It's hard to reach the zeitgeist/social critical mass you need to actually spark a revolution in those conditions. Especially if they want to maintain ties to the outside world. Social dynamics are complicated and rarely do we work as solitary creatures. Alabaster was able to destroy so much, but think about how far he had to be pushed to do that.
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Aug 13, 2021 00:13
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DreamingofRoses posted:So, I tried to write a big, long essay about my reading of it, but it's getting wordy and I'm not a great writer so I'll boil it down to two things. I'll disagree with you on both of these. I'll start with 2, because the Dragon Age games have the mages rebel every Tuesday - the first game has the kid you mentioned but also the entire Tower turning into demons/blood mages, the second game doesn't let you go two feet without tripping over blood mage prostitutes and mage 9/11, and the third game begins with an open war between the mages fighting for their rights and the religious nutters. It does not help that the mages are characterized by their ability to literally enslave others with blood magic and that the rest of their magic is largely about killing people. However, if we look at the actual history of real world slavery this is nonsense. The American South became an armed camp precisely because that was what was needed to keep the slaves down, because given the opportunity people like Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Toussaint Louverture repeatedly put slave rebellions together any time they thought they had a chance in hell at working. We don't even need to confine this to the American South, both Spartacus and the many, many helot revolts of ancient Sparta point out that people can and will revolt against this sort of poo poo. You're right that there's a lot of self policing in these sorts of societies, but the Spartans, the Romans, and the Southern slavemasters all took care to ensure that they were armed enough to win a physical fight - because eventually the slaves got organized and rebelled. This, of course, all collapses when we get to orogenes, because it's an incoherent metaphor more akin to Atlas Shrugged. DreamingofRoses posted:Orogenes are raised to be scared of themselves and their abilities and to be careful. The level of untraining it takes to be willing to do the kind of damage they'd need to be able to rebel effectively isn't given to them This is immediately belied by the schoolyard fight at the beginning of the book where Damaya nearly kills another child by freezing them to death. We know this magic is extremely dangerous because she later wastes an entire village indiscriminately with it, and this is belied by the constant physical abuse common to these sorts of systems - abuse which is likely to lead people to become more violent, not less, as soon as they think they can win. Of course, a common theme is that starting a slave revolt requires organization and planning, which is immediately ignored in Jemisin's works in favor of the hereditary ubermench standing against the people who would oppress them, which at its heart is just a power fantasy. You've cited Dragon Age, and the power fantasy there is simple: 1) Play a mage 2) Wallow in bathos as you're oppressed for being a lightning throwing wizard 3) Use this moral justification to slaughter your enemies and maybe hook up with that hot Morrigan lady It's the same thing as X-Men or Harry Potter or even Richard Rahl. You have inherited great power through your aristocratic bloodline. Evil enemies want to stop you because they want to oppress you for/are jealous of your great power.. Here is carte blanche, go kill them. Now, this isn't just a Jemisin problem, it's a problem with the genre as a whole which is currently struggling with the cognitive dissonance of being based off ancient myths about how kings and bloodline made people special but also wanting to espouse modern progressive viewpoints about equality, and the result is absolute incoherence.
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Aug 13, 2021 01:29
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I'll disagree with you on both of these. I'll start with 2, because the Dragon Age games have the mages rebel every Tuesday - the first game has the kid you mentioned but also the entire Tower turning into demons/blood mages, the second game doesn't let you go two feet without tripping over blood mage prostitutes and mage 9/11, and the third game begins with an open war between the mages fighting for their rights and the religious nutters. It does not help that the mages are characterized by their ability to literally enslave others with blood magic and that the rest of their magic is largely about killing people. However, if we look at the actual history of real world slavery this is nonsense. The American South became an armed camp precisely because that was what was needed to keep the slaves down, because given the opportunity people like Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Toussaint Louverture repeatedly put slave rebellions together any time they thought they had a chance in hell at working. We don't even need to confine this to the American South, both Spartacus and the many, many helot revolts of ancient Sparta point out that people can and will revolt against this sort of poo poo. You're right that there's a lot of self policing in these sorts of societies, but the Spartans, the Romans, and the Southern slavemasters all took care to ensure that they were armed enough to win a physical fight - because eventually the slaves got organized and rebelled. See, you keep saying hereditary ubermensch, but the problem with that association is great they’re not. A not-insignificant part of all of these populations (and all of them in X-Men classic) do not come from families that possess power, wealth, or status. They aren’t marked by their community as ‘special’, they’re marked as ‘dangerous’ and it’s the external treatment of the community that incites the extremism in the other direction. They don’t come from mage families that can trace their lineage back to the mists of time and their families and friends are the very same people who will be hurt if they lose their poo poo altogether. And for all of those rebellions in Sparta, when did the slavery actually end? The South? How many tries did it take to win Haiti? That was when the slaves were spread out over a good chunk of land, too. DreamingofRoses fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Aug 13, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 01:40
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DreamingofRoses posted:See, you keep saying hereditary ubermensch, but the problem with that association is great they’re not. A not-insignificant part of all of these populations (and all of them in X-Men classic) do not come from families that possess power, wealth, or status. They don’t come from mage families that can trace their lineage back to the mists of time and their families and friends are the very same people who will be hurt if they lose their poo poo altogether. But they are. They have magical powers to hurt and kill that come entirely by dint of birthright, and Jemisin spends words and words telling us that the power is hereditary and passed down from parent to child. If you can blow up a city just by being angry enough, who cares how much money you have, and what madman is going to claim you don't have power? I will concede X-Men, it was pointed out to me that power isn't hereditary and is just random. DreamingofRoses posted:And for all of those rebellions in Sparta, when did the slavery actually end? The South? How many tries did it take to win Haiti? That was when the slaves were spread out over a good chunk of land, too. Again, you're making our point that real life slavery is not comparable to being a magical oppressed wizard who can singlehandedly shatter Slavemaster City by being mad enough because they have inherited power. These regimes are all distinguished by being better equipped and trained than the slaves they're seeking to keep down, while the Fulcrum basically collapses when Essun and Alabaster start throwing magic at it (with the triumphal scene being the execution of all the Guardians). The reason these regimes succeeded is because they had the physical power to keep the slaves in line, and even given that and the attempts at conditioning people to believe slavery was their rightful place people revolted en masse anyway. TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Aug 13, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 01:42
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:But they are. They have magical powers to hurt and kill that come entirely by dint of birthright, and Jemisin spends words and words telling us that the power is hereditary and passed down from parent to child. If you can blow up a city just by being angry enough, who cares how much money you have, and what madman is going to claim you don't have power? Some orogenes come from orogene families, there are babies born in Fulcrum, but who was the orogene who Damaya was descended from? I honestly don’t remember if that was discussed in the book, but I do remember the Guardian saying that he finds orogene children in many locations and you would assume that there would be a lot more parents or family members killed by the Guardians if they were all of orogene parentage. Having power is not the same thing as being superior, unless you think that by dint of being naturally stronger with less effort men are superior to women in general. You’re confusing the description of ‘people who are dangerous’ through ability with ‘people who are better’. And sure, you can blow up a city if you get mad, but if you do and survive the mob that will come after you, where will you live? How will you eat if you just destroyed the farms and stores? Who’s going to actually watch your back to protect you in your weak moments instead of looking for an entirely justified opportunity to stick a knife in it? DreamingofRoses fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Aug 13, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 01:50
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I completely agree she was going for representing oppression as not just as direct physical harm caused by the oppressor, but also mental/spiritual/generational harm that blinds the oppressed to their own power. It's definitely a major theme, and part of why I like the books, but I think the message is undermined because of the power disparity, which is why I find the books so disappointing.
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Aug 13, 2021 01:58
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DreamingofRoses posted:Some orogenes come from orogene families, there are babies born in Fulcrum, but who was the orogene who Damaya was descended from? I honestly don’t remember if that was discussed in the book, but I do remember the Guardian saying that he finds orogene children in many locations and you would assume that there would be a lot more parents or family members killed by the Guardians if they were all of orogene parentage. The Fifth Season posted:"No comm would adopt our child," he [Alabaster] says. The words are deliberate and slow. "The orogeny might skip a generation, maybe two or three, but it always comes back. Father Earth never forgets the debt we owe." There's also a lot of analysis of how orogeny is done by brain structures called sessapinae and whatnot, but I think I've made my point? You can't work to become an orogene. If you're a woman, you can work to become stronger and women are doing things like getting through ranger school but you can't do anything to become or learn orogeny if you're a regular dude. It's not like surviving an angry mob is that hard anyway, because if we go back to Essun destroying the town people try to fight back and she destroys their weapons in flight. You're just a lone wizard. You don't need farms and stores, you can go fishing or hunting or forage for food in the woods, and you're a lone person so you can, I dunno, hide in a cave. But this is all trappings on the superiority argument - the orogenes can do whatever a regular person can do, but also miraculous things like shaking the earth, freezing things, or pulling the moon back into orbit that no matter how hard they try a regular person will never be able to do no matter how hard they work at it. It's literally biological determinism due to the sessapinae and genetics.
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Aug 13, 2021 02:08
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killer crane posted:I completely agree she was going for representing oppression as not just as direct physical harm caused by the oppressor, but also mental/spiritual/generational harm that blinds the oppressed to their own power. It's definitely a major theme, and part of why I like the books, but I think the message is undermined because of the power disparity, which is why I find the books so disappointing. And I absolutely understand where you’re coming from, I think you’re reasoning’s fine. My biggest issue with it is the assumption that because they’re so powerful that it would be anything except a Pyrrhic victory that would end in their own death. It’s not like they’re earthbenders, if they’re close enough to cause a quake that takes out a city they are most likely going to die in one of three ways: 1) the resultant seismic event, 2) any survivors who will probably be going after any orogene they see, or 3) the Guardians/other orogenes. It’s not really a good “listen to me or die” threat unless you’re willing to go with them and the people you’re talking to already know you’re a monster, so there’s people already about go after you. How do you think scared orogene kids get beaten to death despite being at an elevated emotional state?
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Aug 13, 2021 02:08
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:There's also a lot of analysis of how orogeny is done by brain structures called sessapinae and whatnot, but I think I've made my point? You can't work to become an orogene. If you're a woman, you can work to become stronger and women are doing things like getting through ranger school but you can't do anything to become or learn orogeny if you're a regular dude. It's not like surviving an angry mob is that hard anyway, because if we go back to Essun destroying the town people try to fight back and she destroys their weapons in flight. You're just a lone wizard. You don't need farms and stores, you can go fishing or hunting or forage for food in the woods, and you're a lone person so you can, I dunno, hide in a cave. But this is all trappings on the superiority argument - the orogenes can do whatever a regular person can do, but also miraculous things like shaking the earth, freezing things, or pulling the moon back into orbit that no matter how hard they try a regular person will never be able to do no matter how hard they work at it. It's literally biological determinism due to the sessapinae and genetics. So people with synesthesia who are great artists because they perceive the world in a way literally no one else can are also biologically determined to be better artists than others?
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Aug 13, 2021 02:11
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DreamingofRoses posted:So people with synesthesia who are great artists because they perceive the world in a way literally no one else can are also biologically determined to be better artists than others? No, because you can still do art without it. You cannot stop an earthquake without orogeny.
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Aug 13, 2021 02:14
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:No, because you can still do art without it. You cannot stop an earthquake without orogeny. Are sighted people better than people who were born blind? Or hearing people better than those people born deaf who can’t get cochlear implants?
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Aug 13, 2021 02:15
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killer crane posted:I completely agree she was going for representing oppression as not just as direct physical harm caused by the oppressor, but also mental/spiritual/generational harm that blinds the oppressed to their own power. It's definitely a major theme, and part of why I like the books, but I think the message is undermined because of the power disparity, which is why I find the books so disappointing. How does it undermine it? Many people here are saying that segregation/racism/oppression is justified by the power disparity, but that's essentially "if I'm scared enough it's ok to be racist". Someone is born with the power to control earthquakes in a seismically unstable world? Awesome, do everything you can to help that special person.
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Aug 13, 2021 02:35
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DreamingofRoses posted:Are sighted people better than people who were born blind? Or hearing people better than those people born deaf who can’t get cochlear implants? You can get around most of this stuff, and from a human rights perspective of course blind people are not worth less than able people. But we're literally talking about a series where the author creates a world where eugenics actually works and you can breed people for magic then turning around and claiming it's antiracist. I keep comparing this to things like Slan and Odd John, where (to quote Bravest of the Lamps again) the masters aren't bad because they're masters, but because we would be better masters. In Slan the telepathic hereditary mutants are oppressed for their power, but they are the true future of humanity and rightful masters. We see this in her other works like the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms or the recently discussed story of the woke thought police. Hell, we haven't even gotten into the thing where the characters need to appease the Evil Earth even though it's ultimately running the entire Guardian oppression scheme.
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Aug 13, 2021 02:35
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:You can get around most of this stuff, and from a human rights perspective of course blind people are not worth less than able people. But we're literally talking about a series where the author creates a world where eugenics actually works and you can breed people for magic then turning around and claiming it's antiracist. I keep comparing this to things like Slan and Odd John, where (to quote Bravest of the Lamps again) the masters aren't bad because they're masters, but because we would be better masters. In Slan the telepathic hereditary mutants are oppressed for their power, but they are the true future of humanity and rightful masters. We see this in her other works like the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms or the recently discussed story of the woke thought police. I mean, I get where you’re coming from, I just find it as the application of the concepts of working towards justice and equality in a magic world specifically meant to mirror the caprice and inherent unfairness and hostility that exists in the real universe. We have different approaches to the text and that’s fine.
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Aug 13, 2021 03:02
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