is that most of them are very annoying because the original omelas story only barely suggests omelas is a real place. a huge chunk of it is spent interrogating what it would take to believe omelas is a real place. le guin spends graf after graf being like "there is as much sex or drug use or whatever in omelas as you, my reader, personally desire" because she's setting up the question of what it would take to convince the reader of the possibility of this utopia. the line that sets up the kid comes after the narrator describing the best festival ever and goes
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
i'm not suggesting omelas-the-story is totally unconcerned with what you do with or in omelas-the-place, because then it wouldn't end the way it does, but i think it goes understated that a big chunk of the story is the question whether the omelas that works without the kid is something you're willing to imagine at all.
i think isabel kim's "why don't we just kill the kid in the omelas hole" dodges most of this by playing with the abstract idea of omelas, rather than the omelas as presented in le guin's story. (literally it opens with the idea of omelas having capital-NH "Nice Houses," which strikes me as a much more concrete statement than le guin ever made about the place.) kim is writing as much about how people think about omelas, and to some degree about how "we" (modern people, & implicitly usamericans in particular) think about atrocities writ large, which makes her piece more interesting.
but almost every other omelas response i've ever seen is trying to solve omelas like it's a puzzle, as if there's a perfect solution. but it's like writing fiction about the person who's going to solve the trolley problem by knowing the secrets of how trains work, or rails, or being able to throw a knife really good so you can cut the ropes on the one person and they can run away. if you want to reject the premise of a hypothetical scenario, or even if you don't find it interesting, then great (i've never found the trolley problem to be tremendously interesting myself.) but like—don't mistake that for solving it.
