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.
we feel qualified to say this because for five years, we had a job that amounted to dealing with a new trolley problem every fucking week: the real answer to the trolley problem is that almost everyone who you ask to solve a trolley problem will refuse to do it. they'll quit their job, they'll break down, they will convince themselves the five people were going to die anyway, they'll spout rhetoric about how trolleys are inevitable and people on tracks need to adapt. in one way or another they will refuse to bear that weight for any appreciable length of time.
trolley problems are different than political problems, but they have this in common: we think that the important things about Omelas are the parable of it, about what it tells us about the real world, about what we can DO about the injustice that our actual society is very much founded on.
we read isabel kim's piece with great interest, and we enjoyed it and got positive things out of it. it has some obvious applications to ongoing political situations in the real world, but it does feel like it will be a more general lens than that, one that we'll come back to in future to see what it lets us see about new topics. kudos for that.
with that said, um, the children are the wrong targets and pursuing that path is just clearly wrong? when you're opposing injustice you don't get to take shortcuts like picking the convenient target, you have to actually do the moral thinking and minimize harm and all that. we don't know whether this was an intended point of the piece, but the piece does make a great framework for thinking about it.
we do see a really truly upsetting quantity of real-life activism efforts that fall victim to the politician's fallacy: "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it!"
any form of activism is both a political action and a Trolley-problem-style moral action. you don't get to dodge that burden; if you're volunteering for it you have to do all of it.
one of the interesting subtext things of the show is that there is essentially no distinction between protagonists and antagonists. they're all trying to change the world to what they think it should be, or have done so at some point in their lives. they do things like training people who they know may someday oppose them, which then happens, and they're fine with that - which in our experience is very realistic.
we're only partway through the show so we can't vouch for everything in it, or anything, but it's a fun way to get into that headspace at the very least
edit to add: we have been informed of disturbing stuff regarding the mangaka. that... hm. it's going to take us a long time to come to terms with how we feel about that. we don't know that we can uncritically recommend the work, in that light.
