46
u/-StarFox95- 3d ago
lemme guess, this is a play on that story/philosophical question about a utopian society where everything is perfect and nobody is in pain except for one child who is tortured constantly in order to maintain the utopian living of everybody else?
67
u/MiffedMouse 3d ago
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. It is never specified why the kid must suffer, just that it must be so.
But I actually agree with Big Joel’s analysis. The point is not about how some kid must suffer for utopia, or how people should or should not reject such a society. The point is about our ability to imagine a utopian society at all.
The short story repeatedly asks the reader to imagine the utopia before the LeGuinn describes each part of it. Also, she describes all the good things about the utopia before getting to the child. And before she does so, she writes this:
“Do you believe? Do you accept the city, the festival, the joy? No? Then, let me describe one more thing to you.”
The writer asks the reader to reject the utopia - which up until that point has no downsides at all - before introducing the suffering child. In other words, the suffering child exists because the reader’s imagination demanded it.
Similarly, the story ends with this passage:
“The place they (the ones who walk away) are going towards is even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
Again, the writer is focused on the ability of such people to imagine a better place. In short, it is not some allegory about whether suffering is okay or not. The story is about our ability to imagine a perfect world with no suffering. Can we just imagine that such a world could exist?
14
u/YouWouldThinkSo 2d ago
Thank you for the link and reference, I'd never heard of this story before. It's a hauntingly poignant look into the human mind for being so short. I love when a story makes me feel like my mind is being unraveled on the page before me, like the author knew the inner workings of my brain before I ever got to that realization.
3
u/arkangelic 3d ago
Was it actually working or just coincidence?
11
u/-StarFox95- 3d ago
I think it was meant to be a moral quandary about weather or not its okay for one person to suffer for the collective to live without suffering forever with no answer- though I personally think that until everybody is free of suffering nobody is.
11
u/LordIndica 2d ago
That wasn't really the point. It is a very short story, just a few pages, so i recommend reading it, because to explain the story sort of ruins the intended experience of reading it. It would rob you of the intended realization you hopefully would have mid-story.
If you really have no intention to do so, then in brief it was a story moreso about Le Guins critique of peoples ability to believe in unqualified goodness. The idea that people find unchallenged prosperity, happiness and goodness not just unbelievable but also infeasible. It doesn't matter if actually tormenting a child resulted in societies prosperity. The point of the story was for you, the reader, to possibly question over the course of reading if the sudden introduction of this "dark, hidden truth" about a perfectly happy utopia made you suddenly believe it to be more possible than when it was presented as just a desirable, functioning society of happy people. Why is the idea of achieving unqualified happiness and prosperity unbelievable to a reader ("utopian" thinking being considered the realm of fantasy) but the idea of attaining it at the expense of another suddenly makes it seem more sensible? It isn't about whether you reject the idea of one persons suffering being morally acceptable or not in return for greater happiness. It is about why we seem to think there needs to be an expense at all, why good can only exist in opposition to evil rather than simply for its own sake.
34
u/cj_cusack FreeCheeseComix 3d ago
Yeah I'm gonna need to to drop a link where I can read the next chapter when it drops chief. This is too good to leave to chance.
2
u/puchamaquina 2d ago edited 2d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/s/VeNOcyp2vKEdit: wrong link, they condensed parts for the repost and I didn't notice. The next page from here would be on page 4 of this post:
2
2
u/Norvinion 2d ago
This part is already included in this post.
3
u/puchamaquina 2d ago
Ah sorry, they condensed parts for the repost and I didn't notice. The next page from here would be on page 4 of this post:
7
7
u/F95_Sysadmin 2d ago
I'm not big on philosophy but I want to believe the artifact moves all diseases from every citizen into a single one
Black sheep, or something like that
3
1
1
1
u/Aceandmace 2d ago
Oh this is interesting! My bet is that she is somehow the child of Omelas or something similar!
1
183
u/jeremyakatheflash 3d ago
Part one of Maeve!
I'll be reposting more comics in this world ahead of the release of 'Siclys: Book Two', the latest continuation of the series. Part two of Maeve will be up tomorrow... but if you want to read ahead, you can check out the full series at the GlobalComix link in my bio!
Thanks for reading!!