#i think she's just trying to replicate the wording of omelas

[sparrowlucero]

What's the problems with N.K. Jemisin's story apart from not being a good response to Omelas?

largely that jemisin frames the story around people who gain access to Bad Media that corrupts their minds and causes them to become sinful:

the titular "ones who stay and fight" are these government workers who murder the people who have been exposed to said bad media from our real world, something the story seems to agree with and frames as a call to action. it's really weird and i think meant to be a lot less metaphorical than the story pretends it is, especially with the context of her comments on Isabel fall (a trans author who was harassed primarily over the satirical title of her story, I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter, to the point of detransitioning and giving up writing):

(Omelas, in contrast, reads as a more general philosophical argument about our bias against the concept of utopia; I don't think it ever conflates making or consuming media that depicts bad things with this at all, so much as it just argues that we - certainly many of her contemporaries - often come from the false premise that suffering and exploitation is inherent to society)