@EndMaster, having some of the kids “educated” in how to be “productive” before they’re “adopted” for the right “funding” is Newspeak for training child sex slaves (as Neo put it more bluntly to Hermit). And if one of the story paths is to “embrace [the depravity and agony] and take it to new heights”… well, Neo’s been pretty clear (for Neo) that the story won’t flinch from the full range of available choices, including kiddy rape. Nothing Neo’s said makes me think it would be an implicit background detail – it will be a choice available to the protagonist, whether graphically described or not.
@Neo, I realize you’re still working this thing out. On the “human condition” I mostly just mean stories whose key characters are humans rather than objects. To rescue the key 'graf from a way overlong post I wrote a while ago:“Some of the most popular stories are those that simplify other people to objects of the main character’s choices. Like stories that treat women as objects to be screwed or rescued by men; or poor people as victims who need to be saved by kindly rich people; or our enemies as inhuman monsters who hate us without cause and must be killed if we are to survive. If we put ourselves in the shoes of the active, powerful character in those stories, they’re quite satisfying.” But they’re not about humans. They’re about me (the reader) and my world of puppets and/or demons.
I’ve been sending these comments from deep in Darfur, as it happens, where child soldier “recruitment” and child rape are ongoing. There are powerful, human stories to be written about these horrors and the people who both perpetrate and suffer them. Dystopian sci-fi isn’t necessarily a bad way to do it. But it would take quite a writer to do it in a “tactful, non-exploitative” way (as 13ventrm said). And trying to include a Choice of the Psycho path that allows the reader to indulge in the violence and abuse of a perpetrator makes the job virtually impossible.
Do you find any of the above non-questions thought-provoking?
