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killer crane posted:"My oppression is the right kind of oppression cause it oppresses the right people," is a stupid response to the Omelas story. The story just wedges itself as agreeing that society exists on the backs of the oppressed, whether a child in a closet, or a "bad guy" getting killed by the secret police. It doesn't say anything different, in fact its manifesto is to stay and continue the suffering of others. I dunno, this defence kind of strikes me as a “Heh, you’re bigoted against my bigotry” kind of defence. Violence in self defence is not morally the same as someone just committing regular violence for kicks or what have you. Causing suffering only to people who want to cause suffering to others is not the same as torturing a random innocent person. While it is still not perfect, as a perfect utopia wouldn’t have need for this kind of action, it is a different take. If you still feel it’s not morally acceptable then that’s fine - but you also need to have a think about how society distributes suffering at the moment and whether that’s any fairer.
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Apr 4, 2021 08:25
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:The violence in the story is not in self-defense. It was an example of how the morality of an action changes based on the context around that action and why I therefore disagreed with the take I was responding too, not meant to describe the story.
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Apr 4, 2021 09:21
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killer crane posted:If that's the case, Jemisin is saying there's no reason to even try not to act in the suffering of others for our own benefit. While the story is a response to Omelas, it’s also a response to real life too. You can’t walk away from all of society in real life and you can’t avoid involvement by yourself in systems which produce suffering in real life. Even in theoretical luxury gay space communism societies we may set up I the future, no-one is seriously insisting that suffering won’t exist in some form. Criticising it for not allowing people to walk away or for having suffering seems to therefore be missing half the point. Of course you can’t! As a theoretical exercise that’s not being taken too literally, I don’t have much problem with the power of the state being solely used against nazi fucks or to prevent people from turning into nazi fucks. In the real world that doesn’t literally mean assassination squads to murder people if they act selfishly and it’s certainly better than what we have now.
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Apr 5, 2021 07:58
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killer crane posted:. It's not staying and fighting, it's just rationalizing staying. Staying and fighting involves causing suffering. You can’t say her response doesn’t work because it involves accepting suffering, while actually what she should have done is embrace a response which involves accepting a different kind of suffering.
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Apr 6, 2021 02:24
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You also have to remember that the series posits that they have been saving the world countless times over by stopping further cataclysmic events from happening. If we’re looking at it from a logical perspective, they’ve stopped human society from being wiped out multiple times which is certainly something that can’t be said for guns and a reason why that analogy breaks down.
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Apr 9, 2021 08:23
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
Viewed as a whole, I don’t think you can say it’s about revenge. I’d say the focus is on trauma and the after effects, which for some characters in some parts of their process can involve revenge but not always. Nassun drops into nihilism before he final change of mind but she isn’t trying to get revenge on anyone, she’s just sick of the world and the trauma it’s caused her. Essun’s initial drive when we meet her at the start of book 1 is to rescue her daughter and get revenge, but we see that throughout most of her life she’s either struggled for acceptance as a child and young adult or tried to hide and make do as she approaches middle age. As we follow her journey there is an element of revenge to this but she ultimately ends up not being in a position to follow through with it and focusing on both protecting her daughter and working to make a coexisting community of stills and progenies. She does hosed up things throughout her journey from icing the town she’s in at the start of book 1 to the abusive training of her daughter to her knee jerk reaction to killing someone in book 2 when they’re going to hit a child, but these seem to be more based around trauma begetting more trauma (e.g. the beaten child reminds her of her child getting beaten to death for being orogenetic, abusive training is how she was trained). Essun doesn’t end up victorious and gloating over all the people who have done her wrong and harmed her, so it doesn’t strike me as a revenge fantasy.
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May 3, 2022 21:32
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killer crane posted:Alabaster commits genocide and doing so is necessary to save the world. Alabaster was definitely driven by revenge but this isn’t his story, so although it contains revenge I wouldn’t call it a revenge fantasy story any more than I’d call it a love story due to Zhou’s fixation on Essun. Alabaster isn’t one of the main POV characters (As much as there is a POV character when we’re talking about the focus of a second person narration) and the two main POV characters spend most of the first three books suffering from the effects of that revenge. Essun chews Albaster out for setting off the rift and I don’t think there’s a single instance of anyone in the books supporting Alabastar’s actions as good or even necessary. From what Inrecall from a recent reread the Yumanese rift specifically is never presented as necessary and just. They needed a large amount of energy released which involved some kind of massive tectonic event, but his decision to do it in a way which destroyed as much of the largely populated empire that oppressed him as possible and very specifically focusing on the facility where he lived rather than doing it, say, in some barely populated corner of Antarctica is never implied to be anything but personal anger from Alabaster. team overhead smash fucked around with this message at 23:37 on May 3, 2022 |
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May 3, 2022 23:32
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Eh, it kinda is? Like, ok, he's deuteragonist or tritagonist but still, he's a big part of the story and he's overall portrayed as heroic and positive if embittered. He's the gandalf of the story, not the Saruman. I'll admit it's been a long time since I read the series (I read it all in 2017 when Stone Sky came out) and parts are kinda vague and muddled in my head in retrospect, though. He’s part of the story, just like every character, but he’s part of Essun’s story and as mentioned before with the protagonist specifically chewing him out and saying she has no sympathy for him dying due to the massive deaths he’s caused, I don’t think he’s presented as a hero. We do understand why he did it and can empathise with him because it goes into his past traumas, but I don’t think anything in the text supports condoning him; in the same way you might understand with and empathise the suffering of a Ukrainian committing war crimes against Russian soldiers or the bullied kid who brings a knife into school, but still understand those actions are wrong. Also I think you may be misremembering the ending as it’s been to long. Nassun raises with Hou that with the seasons ended orogenes are no longer needed and fears a genocide of orogenes by stills. Hou counters with the possibility that orogenes could likewise genocide the stills and rule the world, but focuses on the fact that everyone is going to cooperate for the time being to survive and that there will be a whole range range of choices available so if a Essun cares about how things end up it’s up to her to change people’s mind. If that wasn’t explicit enough there’s the coda where stone Essun awake and says she wants to make the the world a better place. The ending isn’t magical overlords in charge and that’s cool, it’s “You can’t magically kill racism, so become an activist”. Also for me the way that there is no clear real life parallels to Alabaster’s opening of the rift just sets it up for me as part of the fantasy conceit to set up the mid-apocalyptic setting rather than Jemisin trying to go “genocide is good actually” especially when that flies in the face of the rest of her message.
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May 4, 2022 09:10
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biracial bear for uncut posted:"The City We Became" seems to be significantly less of that. The sequel to this is being released in a month. Seems like it’ll be more overtly political which I’m happy with as NK seems to have a decent view of things albeit being a little bit naive about some politicians.
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Sep 30, 2022 13:55
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The World We Make came out and I’d say it’s fine but one of N k’s worse works. The bits dealing with inter dimensional horror worked, but the dealing with Trump/right wingers bits fell a bit flat for me a lot of the time sue to a mixture of it wanting to veer into wish fulfilment territory and other times just seemed to be trying to get across how horrible right-wingers are and it’s like “I know that, tell me an actual story!”. The ICE scene worked well as it brought about a horror and terror of what this faceless malicious organisation could do, but others like the proud boys getting owned by a LGBQT+ crowd just felt empty. Also couldn’t remember almost any of the characters from the original which probably says a bit about how well she fleshed them out.
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Nov 20, 2022 21:28
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Syphilicious! posted:How do the proud boys get owned by an LBGTQ+ crowd? They chase a side character who manages to run into a crowd of LBGTQ+ crowd. The proud boys and square off and the LBGTQ+ crowd basically verbally dunk on the proud boys, make them look stupid and the proud boys scurry off with their tails between their legs at the threat of too many people videoing what they’re doing. Here’s another paragraph from earlier in the book with people reacting to a convoy of right wingers: Then a caravanner rolls down his passenger-side window to yell back at a young woman who’s stepped into the street to deliver her insults up close and personal. She apparently strikes a nerve, because the guy gets even redder-faced and reaches behind him, pulling out a gun. It’s only a paintball gun, at least; that pellet hopper on top is distinctive. The young woman recognizes it, too. It’s not clear whether the guy is just brandishing it to scare her or if he means to use it, but while he’s fumbling with it, she laughs in his face and swings her purse to knock the gun out of his hands. He curses and actually tries to scramble through the window after her, but the window isn’t open all the way; he gets briefly stuck. She rolls her eyes and walks off. By the time the guy manages to get out of the car to retrieve his gun—delayed further because a child has run forward to grab it with a finders-keepers gleam in his eye; the guy snatches it back, but it takes some yanking—she’s gone. I’m all for dunking on fascists but IRL it serves a purpose, here it just undermines the danger they represent without having anything meaningful to say and seems more like NK is venting over the last 6 years or so. There were just a few places like that where I felt NK was writing something to get some shots in, not to serve the story. The ICE scene is more effective as although the character manages to ward them off (Like the convoy and like the proud boys) they aren’t set up as incompetent but as a real threat that lingers even after they’re gone, a continuing systematic evil.
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Nov 25, 2022 12:25
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To be fair the follow up is that he starts shooting the crowd and it turns out the paintballs are frozen so they can make people bleed and break bones, so she does present them as dangerous incompetents but it still takes me out the story.MartingaleJack posted:It's such blatant wish fulfillment. I am biased against Jemisin since she spoke at my school and scolded all the white males in the room. She said Trump was sending goons to kill her, then talked ad nauseum about how the industry was sexist and run by the patriarchy because she didnt make enough money from Broken Earth to live in a nice place in New York purely on her book sales, she had to do things like speak at universities for money and have a Patreon, woe is me. Can’t speak for the scolding white males bit, but can’t really say she’s wrong about the rest of it.
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Nov 25, 2022 19:23
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ChubbyChecker posted:sa goons have threatened to kill me, but if i said that sa goons have tried to kill me i'd be lying I mean I definitely think there could be a valid point behind a person of colour making a point that Trump was enabling a culture where they can be killed with relative impunity and far right groups are given a fairly free reign to do so, but really guessing at what could have been meant by someone’s vague summary of an old speech is just going to be futile and lean into people’s preconceptions rather than any basis in reality.
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Nov 26, 2022 19:00
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