ctrl-F "uyghurs" found
FUCK
"Those who grab the kid and shoot their way out of Omelas John Wick style"
One of the few posts on this site to make me laugh. I can imagine the Mission Impossible prologue where they have the crack team at a long illuminated table in a dimly lit room and a projection screen setting out the plan to free the Omelas child, codename: Operation Omlette - Egg Taker.
nah that's a fake mosque you go inside and it's a secret reeducation prisonalso those buildings are made of cardboard. they just cover the ruins
besides the chinese can't build anything anyways. they just copy german design or whatever (i actually saw this quote)
cultural genocide! cultural genocide!!
Lol frogs want to educate people on le oppression while they control the economies of three countries
Isabel J. Kim is a Korean-American speculative fiction writer based in New York City.
Occasionally a content creator will walk into Omelas and film a video while standing on one of the balconies of the Nice Houses or while sitting on one of Omelas’ beautiful beaches. They will talk about the history of Omelas in the same way that people talk about the Uyghurs situation in China, the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the comfort women imported from Korea by Japan, the Belgium Congo, the Atlantic Slave Trade in relation to the American South, and the refugees who sink in ships off the coast of Western Europe.
no mention of US bombing on NK for some reason ...Or the Texas border. Or Haiti. Or Jakarta. Or...
But its tangential in the end, because the whole point is that it IS just a thing we talk about obliquely. Not something we confront.
genuinely sus that she just skipped over the one that is dominating the news, ongoing, and actually real
The whole time reading it I was thinking that the kids dying was an explicit reference to Gaza and that Omelas was Israel, but I guess not.
Also nice holocaust relevatism, classic lib literary device.
Also wtf with the "Atlantic slave trade in relation to the American South" I assume Brazil is not real then.
I write incoherent slop that only I can understand, like a secret variable sub-language
I read about two paragraphs before I tapped out, I'm not letting this person ruin Omelas for me
I wouldn't call it incoherent, just unfocused. It's a liberal throwing things that happen on social media at the wall without having a conclusion or a point in mind.
what is the point this writer is even trying to make?
seriously? geez, it really is just handwringing about how they "feel so bad about all the exploitation they benefit from but alas there is no alternative"?
liberals delenda est
I would not be surprised to learn that this was lifted in its entirety from an r/writingprompts thread
Yeah, If I was in Omelas, I would be one of the redpilled sigma males who walk away.
Genuinely embarrassing Grasp Accuracy levels in this thread, you gxys. The story is cool and she's very good at writing.
What strikes me is how much less fun this is to read than the original.
Voicey, unevocative, social media obsessed prose. Omelas for the age of X. When I say voicey I mean voicey the way average YA books are described. A literary style meant to be informal and engaging, to encourage children to read, but even as a child I usually thought it sounded condescending. The literary equivalent of an adult talking down to a teenager. Of course, now that YA is mostly for adults I suppose it isn't condescension any more so much as it's something like self-infantalization.
I don't hate all voicey prose, far from it. I've read plenty of books where the style is used to great effect. Obviously the original Omelas story has a strong voice and an informality to it while being wonderfully written. But I didn't like the voice here, where it stands as a poor example next to Le Guin's original, and I don't like that it's become a sort of default for so much of popular literature. Modern voicey prose reads like something that was designed by ad-copy writers and publishing houses and cracked.com editors to sell the impression that what you're about to read will be easy.
Much better than the libertarian version of this story
the point is that an inherently exploitative society is not justifiable. Capitalism is not just Omelias, it is OmeliasX1000000
