#omelasposting

[rolameny]

riding the trolley out of omelas because i'm a little too shaken to walk rn and i just heard this weird thump from the tracks. probably nothing

[ravnervn]

I just had a really funny thought but I think I can potentially do something more with it, so I need to crowdsource something real quick.

What are some Omelas reaction hot takes? I've already got "In order to create a society free from suffering, we must let ourselves imagine a society free from suffering", "I would save the Omelas child", "wow damn that sucks" and "I would kill the Omelas child".

These do not have to be serious, they just have to be plausible as a takeaway. They can, in fact, be meme as hell.

[who-canceled-roger-rabbit]

A while back I saw a post about land acknowledgements and how Omelas would probably have "child acknowledgements"

Which got me thinking about how if we still had castrati, the performances might begin with acknowledgements like "sorry for the mutilation; anyway, on with the show"

[victusinveritas]

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole

by Isabel J. Kim

[vgsexual]

yeah it's nice here but what's fucked up is they never tell you about twomelas. it's just down the road. same direction that guy's going off to

[redrook]

I'm so confused on your work doing a charity bit thing, so like, you're upset that people didn't break you out of that cage? Even though it was all an act and a bit and even though you willingly did it and came back to do the bit every day

Am I missing something here? Like yeah it's weird but also, you volunteer for it 😭

I don't have the energy or the patience to explain to you how depending on a job works, but I'll just leave this by saying I never expected to get victim blamed for being regularly handcuffed into the teenager cage by my adult employers who would constantly reaffirm what a great job I was doing in the teenager cage.

because, and I can't stress this enough, I was a real minor locked inside a real metal cage for hours, at least once a week for over a year. the only thing that was an act was that I could be let out early.

and for those that did get horrified or upset seeing the teenager cage, rather than ever actually raising a complaint with the managers or the company about the teenager cage, they unquestioningly went along with the bit. they got upset, they gave me money, they felt better for having given me money, and so there was no reason for this to ever stop. placid outrage machine, that doubled for almost never caring about the actual charity

[eleanor-arroway]

to everyone who's looking for a good response to omelas (rather than another short story that misses the point), the answer is to read the dispossessed!

[dire-straits-fn8ic]

We’re all in this Omelas together 🩷🩷🩷

[reptilemodernism]

THE OMELAS CHILD is an anagram of HELLO! IT'S ME, CHAD.

[eleanor-arroway]

I've reblogged this before without reading the whole essay, and it's definitely worth reading in full.

"Ambiguity is the strength of Le Guin’s original, but it’s also this ambiguity that seems to frustrate so many modern readers. Contemporary takes on the story—including formal publications like the two we’ve discussed above, but also a thousand conversations dispersed across Twitter, LiveJournal, and the like—so often try to defeat it, either by imagining a solution or reading a specific, narrow meaning into the piece.

Some of this may be a result of the current trend in science fiction and fantasy to declare a story’s point of view right from the start: to grab the reader by the hand and say, “HEY, I’m about to deliver a parable… so listen up!” This is a tendency that now extends far beyond the text of the stories in question, having become part of the marketing as well; one need only browse Twitter or the website of a major publisher for a few minutes to find marketing copy to the effect of “Do you want to read a new story that grapples with the questions of class and climate change? Here it is!” Perhaps modern readers, expecting a clear signpost from Le Guin but finding none, have adopted a positively Omelian tendency to wander in search of meaning, certain that it is out there, somewhere, but not quite knowing the way.

In doing so, though, these readers are denying themselves the power and grace of Le Guin’s original story—because an Omelas without ambiguity is not an Omelas at all. Ambiguity breeds discomfort, and discomfort is ultimately in the mind of the reader, not within the text. We can be told that a world contains this problem or that problem, but none of that can compare to the horror of realizing our own moral inadequacy, as Le Guin’s original leads us to do. But her mastery is such that she does not seek to push us into such a realization—Le Guin merely digs the hole, and allows us to walk headlong into it entirely on our own."

"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

[noziromo]

omelas but it’s a Tgirl puppy being overstimmed.

RB if you agree

[eleanor-arroway]

Omelas is popular not just with readers but with artists, though whether as a touchstone or millstone, it’s hard to say. I’ve lost count of the novelists, screenwriters and musicians who riff on Ursula’s precedent, as she riffed on those before her. I sympathize with artists who feel a need to show us they’d walk away, or what they’re walking to, or how they’d wreak destruction on the city. These are natural reactions, but they displace and excuse the reader from the story’s conundrum, and risk self-righteousness to boot. I’m less sympathetic to writers who find Omelas too open-ended or poetical for our hard world, recasting it through a saturated filter, louder, angrier or with ironic humor. These remixes add nothing to the questions posed by Omelas. 

Most interesting to me are artists who imagine staying but opposing the bargain on which Omelas exists. This respects the story’s allegorical and open-ended nature, rather than trying to fix or co-opt it. But we should not assume that Ursula didn’t herself think about including a stay-and-oppose option in Omelas. She dedicated much of her life to non-violent protest, and many of her other writings (The Dispossessed as one example) attempt to articulate such choices through detailed political and social world-building. I believe she excluded “stay and fight” because more choices simplify, rather than complicate, readers’ moral dilemma…and that was not her intent with Omelas. In any case, for me, the story doesn’t require reinterpretation by other artists. The earnest grappling of generations of students first encountering Omelas are the best responses I can imagine.

My Omelas Response Story, Theo Downes-Le Guin, 2024

[thegreateyeofsauron]

Down the highway from Omelas there's a shithole called Salemo where thousands of adults live in filth and shit (literal) so one kid can have a pretty mediocre time playing Call of Duty.

Sometimes the kid will get bored and walk away from Salemo, when that happens a new kid enters the basement and logs onto the previous kid's Xbox Live account .

But before that can happen the kid is toured around Salemo to look at all the poors and laugh at them.

[biffable]

did people actually read jemisin's short story and engage with it or are you guys just dogpiling

EDITED TO ADD: i didn't realize the omelasposting was prompted by a resurgence of interest in the public harassment of isabel fall and jemisin's participation thereof. everything i wrote here still stands but i would like to clarify that I thought I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter was awesome as a work of speculative fiction and no attacks on the author's person were justified even before it became public knowledge that she was trans. i didn't know jemisin was involved in that BUT it's a separate issue to what i'm talking about here. if you're gonna dunk on jemisin, dunk on her for that, not for the false claim that she didn't understand le guin's story

Quote from Jemisin in this interview about The Ones Who Stay and Fight: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/03/a-true-utopia-an-interview-with-n-k-jemisin/

"That is the exercise that Le Guin is engaging in. Can you have a utopian society without somebody somewhere suffering? What would that life be like if no one suffered? And the only way that I could do it was to basically point out that the flaw is ideological. The idea that you have to have someone suffering is the flaw. So, this is a society that is utopian as long as they keep at bay the idea that somebody’s got to suffer. As long as they manage to fight off people who immediately assume that some people are less important than others and those people can be exploited. That is the danger. That is the toxicity. It’s not meant to be a society that’s perfect in every way. Obviously, people suffer in it. But the people who suffer are those who bring the contagion of suffering to others."

She's building on a concept that was introduced, not refuting Le Guin's central thesis. 🙄 Just because she's not trying to answer the main question Le Guin asked doesn't mean she didn't understand the story. "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" refers to a death squad who kills people who have heard of the concept of systemic inequality from Earth's past. It's not necessarily suggesting that you should go and storm Omelas, or whatever, although the tone she takes is somewhat facetious by design and if you only read the first 2 sentences you might get the wrong impression. To this I say: why the hell wouldn't you read the whole work before mocking its author for not engaging with another writer's work in good faith? Stones and glass houses, etc.

Jemisin is doing sci fi writer shit -- it's called speculative fiction for a reason. You see a concept or idea from somewhere, then explore and expand upon it. She's not beefing with Le Guin. I feel like the people memeing about this either did not read her story or engaged with it in the worst faith possible because they were clutching their pearls at the mere idea that someone might want to challenge Le Guin on something.

I'm not even very familiar with either of these people's works except by reputation. I just saw the memes and decided to actually read them for myself before mocking someone.

[crabanarchy]

imagine public discourse when they try to move the Omelas power grid from Child Suffering to Nuclear

[frostedheavens]

Also re: just saving the kid or whatever..... omelas is a metaphor and the walking away is also a metaphor. literally all it is at its heart is "if you learned some deep unpleasant truth about the society you inhabit would you ignore it or would you let it change you"

i have to say i think its kind of baffling when omelas is taken as a very literal trolley problem about a tortured kid instead of, like, pointedly making fun of the common idea that a positive world, social change, pleasure itself, must come with some sort of painful caveat in order for that happiness to hold meaning or exist in the first place... so many interpretations treat the idea of people walking away from a (very obviously hypothetical) utopia with an even more hypothetical evil underbelly as them lazily giving up on reforming the Omelas the Real City, rather than them philosophically abandoning the idea that the entirely theoretical Omelas represents (that pleasure cannot exist without pain).

what is even the relevance of this to the "I would save the kid instead of abandoning it because I actually believe in changing the world" interpretations.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. (...) Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.