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BananaNutkins posted:Having the oppressed class be the only ones with super powers was such an unbelievably dumb plot/world building hole that I thought it would be addressed by the end of the first book, or that the book would go deep into metaphor territory. Maybe the oppressed were systematically brainwashed to obey and be submissive, but that didn't seem to be the case. Did we read the same series? It's very clear that the point at which we enter the story builds on thousands and thousands of years of slavery and oppression, which has completely shaped the mindsets of every person on the Stillness to believe that Orogenes are useful pets at best and inhuman monsters at worst. Systematically brainwashing an entire people rarely looks like strapping them to the Clockwork Orange torture machine one at a time. I don't think the Broken Earth Trilogy is without flaws but I'm kind of surprised at the specific criticisms here ITT so far. The 2nd person narrative throws me off each time I read it, albeit less each time, but it feels mostly effective not only in forcing the reader to inhabit what happens to the protagonists rather than passively observing until there's something specifically connects to the reader's background, identity, perspective, etc. The whole point is to upend our assumptions that people with magical abilities who can instinctively kill at a thought (which is not actually true on the whole, as is demonstrated literally in the second chapter of book one) could ever be enslaved or sufficiently cowed that they would rather hide their abilities than attempt to rebel or rule their lessers. Jemisin is attempting to show how the rhetoric of biological essentialism, eugenics, and supposed racial superiority are forces that work outward as well as inward. Most orogenes believe themselves to worthy of nothing more than the thinly veiled slavery imposed on them by the Fulcrim and the Guardians. The ones who think otherwise are eliminated. Even Alabaster went on with the whole thing until the slightly less antagonistic Stone Eaters faction conscripted him into their schemes. Syenite smothers her own infant son rather than allow him to live as another Orogene slave to the Guardians and years later Essun comes home to find her son dead at his father's hands because he couldn't stand to let his child live as an Orogene. The beyond tragic symmetry there would drive most people insane. What kind of person could reconcile those experiences and still believe in the concept of goodness, or family, or even justice? How would you live with that, continue on to try and find some sort of meaning or refuge in the world? I don't think all of the 2nd person narration lands perfectly but I don't think it's meant to - you're supposed to feel uneasy and disconcerted at what you're vicariously experiencing as a way of demonstrating how ontological anti-Blackness and systemic racism breaks people over and over while also forcing them to continue on working, producing, reaping whatever the world decides it needs or wants to take from them in order to perpetuate itself. It's not meant to be a comfortable read. You're not meant to like the protagonists, because people surviving slow and fast moving apocalypses are rarely likeable and because the subtext of the books is that most of us would go along with the sort of society that oppresses and exploits Orogenes as long as we were comfortable enough and had a "job" or role to play in our own little communities. It's an indictment. On the more technical points about magical people not being enslavable, Orogenes are wizards yes but they are not all powerful and there's at least two other castes that we know of that can easily kill them - Guardians and Stone Eaters. The origins are the Guardians are not explicitly made clear aside from the silver shard thing, but from what I recall they were first created sometime after the Moondrift event possibly in response to the ascendency of Orogenes as the planet became increasingly unstable. Stone Eaters obviously predate Guardians but I can't remember specifically if Orogenes existed at the time of their creation. Either way both groups are devastatingly effective at finding and killing Orogenes. Further more, we know from the first book that most Orogenes manifest abilities as young children, especially if they are strong. Despite that, most of them are murdered by their parents or communities, with loss of life minimal enough (at least in comparison to whatever the Guardians will do if they find out you spared an Orogene and didn't alert them) to make the practice very, very common. So on top of the structural and psychological oppression that Orogenes face, there are very real threats that could keep them in check and even Alabaster is not some ultimate badass - someone almost takes him out in book 1 and his entire strategy when the Guardians are attempting to reach the hidden island in book 1 is "don't let them step foot on land", which suggests that he knows he got lucky in killing his first Guardian and a sufficient number of them could probably kill him. My sense throughout the whole series was less "oh wow wouldn't it be cool to be an Orogene" and more "oh my god these people are marked from birth and there's no escape short of literally blowing up the whole world". The most effective sequence in the whole series is when Nassun is in the southern Fulcrum waiting for Schaffa and another young Orogene asks her "Did he break your hand too?", which causes Nassun to have a disassociative psychotic break with serious consequences. What you're reading there is a child realizing the scope of just how extensively her wonderful magical abilities, the ones her father killed her baby brother for having and her mother abused her into hiding, have warped and corrupted not just her life but the life of every person like her who has ever existed and might ever exist...unless someone stops it. No more compromises, no more pleading, no more hiding. Just end it. You don't need to be a protagonist in a fantasy novel to have that sort of realization, albeit without coming to the same conclusions. Focusing on the magic misses the point. Anyway thanks for making this thread Jaxyon. I'm a big fan of Jemisin's work; 100K Kingdoms is probably one of my favorite series of all time. What did folks think of The City We Became? I haven't gotten around to it yet, although I read the short story that eventually became the novel and liked it. Urban fantasy that most explicitly focuses on the lived environment and personas of cities is a nifty framing but I'm a geographer so I might be biased to like that sort of thing. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 20:10
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Oh man I remember that story. I got yelled at in my writing group for having similar criticisms, that was an interesting couple of days. No one gets them all right, not even your favorites.
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Apr 3, 2021 20:36
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Where is this thing about Fifth Season being a retelling of Atlas Shrugged coming from? Did Jemisin suggest that somewhere?
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Apr 5, 2021 04:06
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I'm at work right now so I have to be brief but I think some of what Jemisin's version tries to get at is that in the real world there's no binary choice of being in society versus not being in society - which I get but it's kind of lame to take someone else's story and change the rules so you can make your own point. A person can choose to ethically consume or volunteer with a worthy cause or whatever but at the end of the day there's no way to exist without complicity in brutal exploitation and suffering - and anyone who can sufficiently divest from society on a "walking away" level is probably able to do so as a result of wealth or power built on the legacies of those same oppression. The only real ethical choice is to fight and push back against those forces, understanding that the violence of the oppressed is not the same as violent done to oppress people. From what I remember of the story the idea is proactively killing someone attempting to undermine the peace or revive an oppressive system is a bit of a controversy but the larger thing is the idea of complicity and morality. I agree that the story would've been fine if she didn't explicitly push the Omelas connection and I genuinely wonder what Le Guin would've made of it. She could be pretty incisive in her criticism.
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Apr 5, 2021 15:39
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