Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole
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I'm a Vietnamese cis woman born and currently living in the U.S. You may know me from Sandwich, from Twitter or Mastodon (same username), or on Twitch as Sharkaeopteryx. I do not have a Discord or Bluesky account.
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in reply to @hthrflwrs's post:
i'm a sucker for any sort of story which can deconstruct and play with a metaphor while also totally, 100% treating it literally
"load-bearing omelas child" is going to stick in my head for years, i can tell
...Somehow, it was this post that reminded me that Princess Emeraude, whom I referenced in my earlier comment, is literally called "The Pillar of Cephiro."
Fantastic short story. The line "You can’t kill me in any way that matters." had me howling because it's a Tumblr meme that makes perfect sense in context.
The gut reaction of "why don't they just take the kid out of the hole instead of killing them?" And the absolutely crushing dread because as a writer, I know why.
Because it doesn't even occur to them. I'm struggling to put it in words the right way, but it's a lot about what the story is digging at, as well. There's never a point where the children have any agency, they become abstracted away from being an individual living thing very quickly. Look at how quickly the cycle of killing accelerates towards a kind of normalcy.
Taking the kid out of the hole requires empathy, and requires facing up to the atrocity that's being done. If they kill the kid, sure the disasters happen, but maybe the cycle will break this time. There's two scenarios that taking the kid out of the hole could lead to, two major ones anyway. One: the disasters don't happen, the kid's alive, and every death that happened was not only unjust, but could have been triggering the disasters. It was all pointless. Two: you take the kid out of the hole, the disaster still happen, and now standing in front of you is someone whose suffering is your fault, and due to them not being in the hole, not serving some greater purpose. You could shove them back in the hole. Maybe it'd fix things. Maybe it wouldn't.
The shorter version of this answer is that it drives home the themes and points of the story. It is the thing that could do, but they never would. They won't. It's part of what drives this whole thing home for me.
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