“How Could You?” “I Can Expla-“ “No, I Don’t Mean Morally. Logistically How Could You Even

Thank you for this wonderful addition to our silly little thread. Similar things will probably happen in future.

Itchy veins.

Hey, unpopular opinion, apparently. But people don’t just “have pain for no reason” doctors say this all the time (especially to women and chronically ill people) and the truth is, Thats literally not possible. Even if your pains are psychosomatic (a word I hesitate to even use because of the way its used so often) there is a reason you are having those pains whether its mental illness, abuse, etc. If your doctor consistently tells you that “well some people just have pain for no reason” get a new doctor. That’s a doctor who is not going to give a shit what your actual symptoms or experiences are.

We Need to Talk About The Giver

In the past couple of years, I’ve seen a resurgence of discussion about The Hunger Games online, but I rarely, if ever, see anything about Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

If you’re in your 20s or 30s, you’ve very likely read it. For a little while it was a popular school assignment, until “concerns” about a scene describing a very chaste dream indicating the protagonist was developing sexual feelings for a girl in his class made it equally popular to ban from school reading lists. The stage play adaptation was good. The movie, despite its star-studded cast, was awful. (That might be why nobody talks about it.)

Lois Lowry published The Giver in 1993, when the popular thought was that avoiding ever talking about race, disability, gender, or sexuality was the way to mark progress. Discussions of these things were (and are) uncomfortable, and isn’t discomfort the same thing as pain? Isn’t making someone uncomfortable the same as hurting them? Isn’t hurting someone the same as doing something wrong?

In this way, “leveling the playing field” for marginalized people began to look like pretending everyone was the same. “Colorblind” ideologies, as well as euphemistic terms like “differently-abled”, grew in popularity as people found ways to avoid acknowledging the ways in which other people’s lives were different from, and sometimes more difficult than, their own. At best, it was an effort at politeness. At worst, it was intentional suppression. Often, it ended up being condescending and muddled either way. Afaik Lowry didn't really talk about the philosophy of the book in interviews, wanting it to stand on its own, but the book totally skewers that whole ideology in a way that's still relevant today.

The book's society, the Community, emphasizes "precision of language", which ends up meaning the total opposite. The society constantly uses euphemisms ("Release" for euthanasia and death, for example) and through "precision" has eradicated big concepts like love that are simple, but become complicated when intellectualized.

The Community insists on ritualized constant apologies with ritualized mandatory acceptance. These are, of course, meaningless apologies that result in equation of big/intentional harm with small mistakes. Consequences for infractions are frequently too great, from constant, ritualistic public apologies for lateness and other small mistakes to Release – death – for a pilot who flies too low.

The Community has no fictional stories, only dictionaries and books of facts directly related to everyday life in the Community. There are no arts or history classes in schools, and there is no Storyteller (possibly not in living memory). In fact, there's little or no education not directly relating to a person’s vocation after age 12. All these things make it easier for the Community to deny the reality of Release and make it very, very difficult to feel true empathy, if not impossible.

The Community has literal colorblindness – nobody except the Giver and the Receiver can see color in anything or anyone. All skin tones and hair colors look the same to most people, and most people look the same thanks to genetic engineering. The only physical variation Lowry ever describes is the “pale eyes” of the characters with “the Capacity to See Beyond”: the Giver, Jonas, Gabriel, and a child named Katharine who the Giver mentions as a potential replacement Receiver for after Jonas runs away.

Sexual feelings are intentionally medically suppressed. It is illegal to be naked in front of another person (unless the naked person is an infant or an elderly person who needs assistance with bathing) because nudity is believed to be inherently sexual. Marriage is exclusively man/woman, and purely for raising children, not sexual or romantic at all. Adults apply for spouses who are chosen for them, apply for children supplied by Birthmothers, raise 1 or 2 children to adulthood, then split up and live among the Childless Adults until they are too old to take care of themselves. While the gender binary doesn’t determine vocation (unless you’re a Birthmother), it’s still strictly enforced in the ways that coming-of-age ceremonies happen and the ways that family units are built. One man, one woman, one boy, one girl.

Birthmothers have “no honor” in their vocational assignment, even though they create other humans that allow the Community to continue to function. They are highly valued during their three childbearing years (it’s implied that these years come very early, possibly while the Birthmothers are still teenagers), but they are put into difficult manual labor jobs after a maximum of three births. Other members of the Community look down on both Birthmothers and Laborers as “unskilled”, unintelligent workers, even though their labor is essential.

And then we come to the eugenics. Birthmothers are chosen for their strong bodies. All human embryos are genetically engineered to eliminate all possible differences in skin tone, hair color, and ability. Old people are killed shortly after they are no longer able to work. Babies are killed for not meeting development milestones at the established times, or in cases of identical twins, because they have the lower birth weight. The Giver is not an anti-abortion novel, as it's frequently interpreted, but an excellent case for the idea that when we eliminate disability in chasing a “perfectly healthy” species, we eliminate disabled people.

The world of The Giver looks like adulthood looked in the bleakest stress dreams of my childhood. A vocational track is chosen for you, you’re not allowed to deviate from it, and you’re expected not to have outside interests or time for fun. Marriage is only for the purposes of having children. Sexual feelings are a natural phenomenon of adulthood, but one to be treated with medicine, like period cramps. However, marriage is still considered the only way to have an “exciting” life – a woman in the House of the Old complains that a Ceremony of Release (read: pre-funeral) she went to was boring because the dying person “never even had a family unit”. It makes sense. In a world where there is no fictional content to consume, no creative education, and no travel, life without marriage and kids is just… work. After a short childhood, mostly for the purposes of analyzing what kind of job you’ll be best at, you work until you become old and die.

The Community is not a capitalist society – nobody owns wealth, and Sameness has eliminated class as well as race. However, The Giver’s greatest horrors are pretty damn capitalist. Early on, Jonas’s mother warns him that his life will change dramatically after the Ceremony of Twelve: his friends and his play time will become less important to him as his vocational training ramps up. Adults are expected to work and make families (so that they can raise other adults who will be expected to work). Everybody is measured in terms of whether and how they’ll be useful workers. This is not to create wealth for an oligarchic few, but to create riskless, joyless stability for themselves and everyone else in the Community. The Community, and other Communities, were established after some great event in the past – while we don’t get into specifics, it’s implied that hunger and poverty were part of it. Sameness and the shallow, emotionless placidity that come with it are a reaction to a scarcity of resources from a long-ago catastrophe. It’s heavily implied in The Giver, and outright stated in later books, that other Communities have moved on from that reactionary thinking.

The Giver asserts that depth of feeling and empathy come from three places: ability to feel pain, experiencing real choice and the proportional consequences of those choices, and from stories (memories) of others’ experiences. The Community eliminates pain, choice, and story, totally eliminating depth of feeling from life in the name of exaggerated safety and comfort.

That said, The Giver doesn't shy away from the reality that living with traumatic memories is hard. The narrative insists that Rosemary, who applied for medical assisted suicide during her Receiver training, was not a coward. The Giver and the Community didn’t adequately prepare her for what she would experience as the Receiver of Memory. Jonas and the Giver only find their memories bearable through being able to relate to one another – once they know they’ve each experienced a memory of something similar, they’re able to discuss it on the same level with one another.

This is a story about purity culture. This is a story about eugenics. This is a story about what happens when we take avoidance of pain too far - and like all science fiction, it's a story of where our real society was then and where it is now.

i am shrunken down and brought to the gnome world and when i attempt to assimilate to their culture I use an acorn cap as a hat and they all laugh cheerfully at my silly mistake of wearing what they use as a bowl like a cap and though this is a transgression that would have humiliated me in my human life I am instead laughing alongside them at my humorous misunderstanding

WE JUST MET UP IRL SHES EATING A RAW ONION

The new Life Series is canon to me.

Just ate an entire spoonful of Nutella. Feeling good.

Hello!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your hair is purple. You know what else is purple? Red and blue mixed together. Yknow who are red and blue? Grian and someone else Uhhhh LDshadowlady in empires one. Ok. Grian and empires one LDshadowlady. Yknow who else is grian and ldshadowlady? No one because they are ✨ unique ✨ at this point I would be relatively surprised if you didn’t at least have a guess towards who I am. But. That’s not the question at hand right now. Your hair. It is also made out of keratin, just like rhinoceros horns. What else has horns? That’s right, dragons. Now, based on your description, I can conclude that you like dragons BUT I will now in investigate your possible dragonesque identity. Just like dragons, we have established that you both have keratin growing out of your heads. Similarly, dragons are rumored to be unnaturally colored, just like your hair. We also know that grian and LDshadowlady have both at some point in their careers worn an elytra. Elytra have wings - dragons have wings. I don’t think I need to explain this one. Now, as I have been told to go to sleep, I rest (haha get it) my case.

Alright. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure this post is just telling me I am a dragon? In a very roundabout way that appeals to quite a few of my interests. Now to address the rest of your post? Ask? Not sure what the terminology is, but anyway. You said that my hair was purple and that purple was a combination of red and blue. Both statements are correct, to my knowledge. You then gave examples of both a red and a blue character. I fully agree with both Grian as red and LDShadowlady (ESMP1) as blue, and would also like to offer other characters associated with these colours. I offer up TangoTek as red, due to his skin’s red eyes and outfit, and red being frequently depicted on him in various forms. For blue I give Smajor1995, for reasons I deem obvious. You then bring up that my hair is made of keratin, which is the same material as typical animal horns. This is also fully true (I think). You then bring up my love of dragons. This is true. I like dragons, and think they are very cool. You then bring up a list of evidence pointing towards me being a dragon, which is well formatted and logical, though the evidence is somewhat flimsy. Even so, this has shown that I need to do a better job blending in with the humans if I wish to fit in better in society and not at all to collect more information on the humans. Also, unless you are Tvvigjuice, I have no guesses as to your identity. Now as I reach the end of your message, and thus the end of my own, I wish you a good night and a peaceful rest. Goodbye and goodnight! -Tsippi, totally not a dragon spying on the human race.

Writing mcyt fanfic feels so silly because the names are on a spectrum from "normal human name" to "semi-plausible" to "Sausage"