And now, Connor. Fucking Connor.

The best part of these missions is the look on the parents’ faces when they realize that the tables have been turned. How their eyes dart down toward the tranq gun aimed at them, suddenly realizing that their unwind order is now nothing but a piece of paper.

And we see how we have now officially left any hope of decent characterization behind. It is Connor. They are adults.They tell the kid they’re here to rescue him.

“He’s lying, right?”
Connor doesn’t let the parents answer. “The truth—you owe him that much.”
“You have no right to do this!” the mother yells.

Not only are the parents now extra clearly evil, but they somehow care deeply about the kid they were getting rid of being gotten rid of by a slightly different method, because they really want their kid murdered that badly.

And yet I’m sure it can’t be because money, because it’s impossible for the book to have not thrown it in their faces. They just hate him.

Anyway, the father manages to admit the truth because he is the patriarch. The kid asks if they’ll be hurt and Connor is all “you’ll be happy one day we didn’t” and the kid says bullshit and I’m on his side here – there should be valid reasons why parents do this, but parents who are upset a non-murder option just appeared? His real parents must’ve been replaced by aliens some time ago.

But Connor doesn’t care, he wants to grandstand.

Connor hands a pad and pen to the father.

Because women exist only to whine. It’s for the dad to write down why they did it.

“I’m sure they’re stupid; I’m sure they’re selfish and seriously screwed up, but they’re still reasons. If nothing else, it’ll help us to know what kind of pain in the ass Noah is, so maybe we can deal with him better than you did.”

Connor is fair and balancing it up. It’s all bullshit, but sure, let’s have your reasons.

I just wonder what they do when they get “we found out he’s the one killing all the neighborhood pets” or “he raped his little sister”.

It’s probably wrong to say even those people are irredeemable – there’s some hope from therapists that it’s even possible to refocus sociopaths’ brains so they can care about things at which point they feel emotions other than boredom and hatred and stop with all the torture murder, and there’s a lot of reasons disturbed kids do awful things that are easier to deal with than that.

But it’s definitely true that right now even trained adults working in ideal environments can’t promise to be able to fix people. Is a group of stressed kids going to do better in every single case? Stressed kids in a miserable, stressful environment? There’s no sign of any mental health treatment in this world beyond brainspackling if you get your head caved in. All we know about their stance on drugs is that all drugs are evil. We know the kleptomaniac ghost kid had zero memories of therapy and we know even regular doctors barely remember how to treat things without organs, so therapists are probably completely gone.

And that’s actually another issue with getting kids right at the start. To make it to the safehouses may well be weeding out the more unbalanced kids.

I’m not quite sure how this would shake out – being paranoid or hyperaggressive might have advantages. You’ve got to assume most of the kids never even manage to run in the first place, and we’ve also seen that violence can get you loose afterward. But the fact the kids we see don’t seem to have much in the way of personality problems suggests that somehow the whole “AWOL” thing isn’t survivable for those kids (or at least they aren’t usually taken to the main area – maybe they’re so mistrustful that if they do make it to a safehouse they take off again).

Point is, they should have way more problem kids than they do, so it’s likely the existing safehouse system is somehow getting them the best behaved kids and that getting kids by a different method is going to screw up whatever that is. And given they have absolutely no way of dealing with problem kids beyond some tough love bullshit in a miserable pressure cooker, they can’t afford further instability. They just had a coup attempt that almost wiped out the entire group.

(And come to think of it, Connor 2, who is evil, is getting brought in because they have this whole tase kids system now. That might, again, be removing one of the selection pressures against picking up more messed up kids. It’s like feral cats. Feral cats are hyper social cats because the cats that aren’t hyper social just flat out die. The safehouse method should favor kids who are willing to trust adults, like Connor and Risa.)

Anyway, back to this kid who probably isn’t anything particularly horrible:

“I hate you!” he yells back at them. “I never meant it when I said it before, but now I do.”
Connor can tell it cuts deeply into these parents, but not as deeply as the scalpels of a Chop Shop.
“Someday, if he makes it to seventeen, he may give you a shot at forgiveness. If he does, don’t throw that chance away.”

What the fuck Connor.

I guess this is more of how no one is allowed strong opinions, but no, they tried to kill him, this isn’t something you forgive people for, it’s not even something you get over, you should never ever go near these people again. If the kid makes the mistake of wanting to go back and forgive them, you say that no, cut all ties and burn all bridges.

While the mom just stands around being useless, the father writes stuff down.

Rather than a manifesto, the man has written down his excuses in efficient bullet points.

What, people normally do manifestos and not lists when asked to list their problems with a kid? I think this is meant to be emphasizing that his reasons are dumb but seriously, who would write manifestos under these circumstances?

Anyway, the list.

“ ‘Disrespect and disobedience.’ ”
Those are always the first reasons. If every parent unwound a kid due to disrespect, the human race would go extinct in a single generation.

Well, no. I mean, you can point out that adults have always had a “kids today…” attitude that probably dates back to the first time humans worked out a word for both “kids” and “today”, and that teenagers are naturally going to be more disrespectful by nature, but also consider the actual fact that killing kids for being disrespectful and disobedient was a-okay for much of human history and yet we’re still here. Sorry teens, some of you actually are more obnoxious than others. You shouldn’t have to be cowed sheep before age eighteen or die, but some few people can manage it even without the actual threat of death, so I’m sure a reasonable number would successfully control their behavior. Lots of kids even today live in actual oppressive conform-or-die circumstances and not HOW DARE YOU YELL AT ME FOR SKIPPING CLASS and they generally survive it. This gets back to the general problem that these books are written to pander to teens so the characters have to act just like regular teens and then be shocked and outraged when they’re reminded they live in a world where your parents can murder you for no reason at all.

(Also, note  drops off the disobedience aspect entirely while grandstanding.)

“ ‘Destructive behavior to self and property.’ ”
Connor knows a bit about self-destructive behavior and did his share of vandalizing in times of frustration. But most kids get over that, don’t they?

A) How the fuck would Connor even know that?
B) Actually the age of maturity to be more in the thirty range. (This is why three strikes laws are so particularly terrible – statistically, you end up giving the life sentences to the people who were just about done with crime.) People in our world aren’t willing to wait that long and we don’t even have other options!

It never ceases to amaze him how everything— even unwinding—is geared toward the quick fix.

You live in America there is nothing amazing about quick fixes.

“ ‘Lack of personal hygiene’?”

paaaaandeeeeeeer

“Ooh, I like this one!” Connor says. “ ‘Diminished prospects for future.’ Sounds like a stock report!”

Right, so this would be getting back to the whole age thirty problem. If you don’t get your head working right until age thirty, you’re going to struggle a lot in life even after that. (Plus the possibility of getting knifed in an alley at twenty-eight.) And you can say that’s partly because of people being prejudiced and not getting that someone can change…but whether or not everyone else is wrong doesn’t change the fact they’re still prejudiced and won’t want to hire someone who’s been to jail or even just doesn’t have the usual work experience.

This gets back to the fiction that’s also apparently sort of supposedly true that a “divided state” isn’t death. If you see a long life ahead of crippling poverty for the kid, and you can instead break them up so they experience 1/6th of six different great lives, that would be doing what you thought was best.

The parents being all “fuck the leech” here requires everyone to be on board with the fact unwinding is murder and the only reason to do this is you’re mad they’re not going to become a super rich whatever and give you all the moneys. There are people who will abuse or kill their kids for not living up to a standard without needing any confusion over if it was actually for the kid’s good.

Connor then explains he always reads and wonders if it’s what his parents would say, cementing the idea this is really just about Connor.

The final reason trips him up for a second:

“ ‘Our own failure as parents.’ ”
And then he gets mad at himself. These parents haven’t earned his sympathy. If it’s their failure, then why should their son have to pay for it?

BECAUSE IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE TO HELP HIM, NOT PUNISH HIM.

Sometimes kids smash their heads against walls for hours. People try to stop them and the kids fight back.

There is precedent in our culture for looking at someone and saying this person is sick and part of their sickness is thinking they don’t need treatment.

There’s even precedent in our culture for being horribly wrong when applying this.

In Unwind’s world, it makes absolute sense for parents to say, “We have failed this child, he will lead a life of prison and poverty unless we act now to save him from himself.” Maybe they’ll even do so knowing they’ll miss him and mourn not having him in their life, because it was the right thing for him. It’s possible to be selfless and wrong at the same time.

And if it wasn’t supposed to, then maybe having a dozen ads sprinkled into the book about how this is the standard issue propaganda everyone believes was a stupid choice.

But that’s not how morality works in these books. Everyone secretly knows what’s really right and wrong and it’s just some people act on it and other people let Satan cloud their judgement and then lie about how they had no way of knowing otherwise.

Sympathy firmly crushed because Connor is one of the Just Knows elite, he tells them that they’re to tell the real cops that their son ran away and they have no idea, OR ELSE.

“And if we don’t comply?” the father asks, showing the same kind of disobedience he condemned his son for.

Apparently Connor can also Just Know that the kid’s disobedience was solely in response to a bunch of armed thugs showing up in your house and telling you to lie to the police for them or they’d get you back.

Connor then claims that they have an “identity cocktail” and bingo, your names become linked to a dozen known clapper cells. Your digital footprint will be so tangled in terrorism, you’ll spend years trying to get Homeland Security off your collective asses.”

Clappers being the thing last book that no one knew anything whatsoever about beyond that sometimes kids explode seemingly at random.

And bear in mind this threat involves listening to police radios, so the parents can include the threat when they report this to the police and have everyone see that their names weren’t linked to any such cells until five minutes after the police do a test chat on the police frequency.

Connor then claims this is the best plan ever that works so super great, even though all it takes is one single person to talk and it’s wrecked.

and besides, whether these kids go with Connor or they’re unwound, the parents get what they want. Their unmanageable kid becomes somebody else’s problem.

Except the parents clearly do not want this and only having guns trained on them is enough to get the kid out.

Reporting Connor and his team would just make Noah their problem again.

Well, no, because then he’d just get unwound.

“You have to understand, we were desperate,” says the mother with a high quotient of self-righteousness. “Everyone told us that unwinding was the best thing to do. Everyone.”
Connor tears up the list of excuses and drops it on the floor, locking eyes with her. “So, in other words you decided to unwind your son because of peer pressure?”
Finally the two of them crumble, feeling the appropriate weight of shame. The father, who had started out so defiant, suddenly bursts into tears. It’s the mother who holds it together enough to offer Connor one last excuse.
“We tried to be good parents . . . but there’s a point at which you give up trying.”
“No, there’s not,” Connor tells her.

There totally is.

So yesterday, I talked about how good people have responsibilities.

In practice, I think you have a particular responsibility toward family members, but that’s because we live in a world where that’s the general attitude, so you can assume the person’s own family may help them, but that your own family members won’t have elsewhere to go. It’s not about sacred bonds of kinship, really, and you’ve got the same responsibility for stranger who’s cut off from family help.

There are families that institutionalize their children. There are lots of families that do basically the same thing to their elderly. Some of them do it because they’re selfish, but a lot of them would say they had no other choice. If someone is drowning, you should try to help them. But you aren’t obligated to be pulled down with them either, or let them pull down others along the way.

This is why absolutes are bad. We don’t know how hard they tried. We’re just told he was disobedient, disrespectful, harmed objects, harmed himself. This could mean he stayed out an hour past curfew, flipped his dad off one time, smashed a window on a condemned building, and likes to skateboard. It could also mean he’s a drug addict who’s stolen thousands of dollars from them already and drove their car into a tree twice.

The kid seems pretty normal, so it’s valid to say they, in particular, did not really try very hard. It’s less valid to say that you can never stop even if it bleeds you dry.

And there is the possibility that there was something worse here and they don’t feel like telling complete strangers with guns all about it.

Let’s get back to the really disturbed kid killing animals. Well, no more pets for you and little Suzy’s traumatized. And you either let the rest of the neighborhood suffer or quit your job to watch him 24/7, knowing it’s always possible he’ll graduate to killing people and also that he’s just a few good stabs away from getting rid of your watchful eye. Or again, he rapes his sister. What, exactly, are you supposed to do? Send her away? To where, whatever craphole of a boarding school is cheap enough that you can afford it despite already edging toward poverty from dealing with him?

What if the problem is he self-harms and needs 24/7 watch to prevent him from maiming or killing himself? What if he keeps lighting fires? What if he assaults you? What if he’s got one of the really fun mental illnesses where he’s actually dangerous and won’t take his meds?

Are you never allowed to give up? Really?

So yeah, in conclusion, the second series of characters are better, the attempts to flesh out the world is just making things worse. The author’s developing it while at the same time pushing Connor even more toward our baseline unwind=murder view and also still trying to claim this works as an allegory for our world.

Maybe what’s really going on is that the author agrees with the idea of babies as punishment even more than regular prolifers and finds the idea of anyone shirking their sacred responsibility at any point for any reason to be unacceptable.

Or maybe it’s just pandering to the teenage audience who’s supposed to be oblivious to the idea that there could ever be anything worse than telling your parents you hate them and then stomping out to go hang out with your friends.

Connor then smugs about how now he’s leaving them with the worst punishment of all: having to live with themselves.

Because they both don’t give a fuck about their kid, which is why they deserve no sympathy and should suffer, and do, so they can suffer as they should.

They drive off with Noah.

“Relax,” Connor tells him, “you’re among friends.”
“I got no friends,” says Noah. And for now, Connor lets him feel sorry for himself.

Really? Because holy shit I said he was normal and that is one hell of a red flag right there. You guys just risked your lives to rescue him and his only response is how nobody never did nothing for him?

We then go back to the Graveyard.

Kids are on watch patrol with tranq-loaded rifles

We know regular bullets exist, so why? Can they not get them? Do the adults supplying them refuse to give them real ammunition due to tensions? Are tranqs actually considered better because if you shoot someone anywhere they always go down? Did the kids all look at each other and agree they’re just not comfortable firing to kill, even on adults who want to kill them?

“The Graveyard’s where you’ll live until you turn seventeen,” Connor tells Noah.
“Like hell I will,” the kid says. Typical. Connor just ignores him.

This really does suggest that there’s a big temperament difference between street kids who make it to safehouses and the average unwind. It may not even be an actual personality difference like I was suggesting earlier so much as a personality shift that happens after going through that.

Regardless, so many red flags. Total lack of gratitude, automatic rejection when we know the place isn’t even that great, and the fact he’s all but saying he plans to fuck right off which could get all of them in a lot of trouble.

“So what am I, a stinking AWOL now?” asks Noah.
“AWOLs is what they call us,” says Hayden. “We call ourselves Whollies. As to whether or not you stink, I think we all can agree that you need to visit our bathing facilities at your earliest possible convenience.”
The kid grunts like a mildly irritated bull

Bad hygiene being apparently such a big point of contention his dad was willing to include it on the murder list, but I’m sure taunting the angry bull will work out fine for Connor-sue, as he just drops the whole thing to smug about how Hayden is so clever for the whollies name.

We learn that Risa has girlpinions on the whole rescue mission thing.

he suspects she has already peered out at the sound of their approach, to make sure that Connor has arrived home safe and sound.
“I’m not sure if these missions of yours are noble or stupid,” Risa once told him.
“Why can’t they be both?” he responded. The fact is, saving individual kids is somehow far more satisfying for him than the daily ins and outs of running the Graveyard. These side trips keep him sane.

So she’s just worried about him but she knows it’s so noble how their leader regularly ditches his actual work of taking care of lots of kids in favor of playing hero to one and risking everyone’s lives in the process.

We’re told the adult anti-unwinding group originally meant to replace him with a good figureheady guy, but then they realized they already had a couple adult employees to deal with clients and as not being an adult is the only thing Connor who has to go on random hero missions to “stay sane” and clearly hates the job had as a point against him being in charge, he’s still in charge. Even though those same adult employees used to explain how they didn’t need to find someone new are already right there able to be in charge.

One of his flunkies reports back that the new kid is a real complainer. He says the blanket’s too rough.” Truly the rescue missions are the best idea ever.

His flunkey is actually interesting:

Trace Neuhauser is an air force boeuf who gave it up to join the resistance when his sister was unwound. He’s AWOL from his unit for six months now, but still a boeuf in every sense of the word. He’s all steroid bulk, with a tunnel-vision education in the martial sciences.

See, he actually does sound like a good person. But we should be suspicious, because adults are evil and adults working to help you are still evil because caring about stuff is the real problem.

Connor never liked boeufs. Maybe because they know their purpose in the world, and generally serve it well. Seeing them always made Connor feel useless.

Not “felt uncomfortable around”, “never liked”. Connor is the sort of person who hates out of jealousy. Truly the material of a great leader.

That a boeuf has become such a close friend proves that people change. Trace is twenty-three but seems to have no problem taking orders from a seventeen-year-old.
“Chain of command knows no age restrictions,” he once told Connor. “You could be six, but if you were my superior, I’d still do as I was told.”
Maybe that’s why Connor likes him; because if a guy like that can respect Connor ’s lead, maybe he’s not such a lousy leader after all.

Connor “changed” by not hating a guy who obeys his every order, truly the most noble and openminded thing imaginable, and also is too stupid to notice the guy explicitly said he’s ready and willing to obey lousy leaders.

If they’ve got a twenty-something with actual training around, why isn’t he leader? I bet he’d do better at following the adult group’s orders than Connor has, so why wouldn’t they prefer him?

We then go to Connor next morning getting complaints about everything that needs to be done, which he heroically leaderships at:

“I don’t know if you know this, but the fans in Crash Mama ain’t working no more, and it’s way too hot at night.”
“I’ll send someone to fix them,” Connor tells her.

He then whines that he needs so many more people to do all the work, and Trace points out that he has them and apparently isn’t delegating despite what we just saw being delegating, admittedly unnecessary delegating because they should just be able to put in a fix request with the fix people. Also, no idea who those people he isn’t using are. Also, he goes on to whine about it being a thankless job despite everyone being polite and the fan-girl gushing over him. He goes on to say he’s got an inner and outer circle. The inner circle deals with food and stuff and the outer circle ??? while Connor deals with keeping them all in one piece and has to meet with the resistance about that, presumably?

He finishes up whining about how incredibly hard being the person in charge is and he wishes he had no responsibilities.

Thanks to Lev, and his misguided clapper cell, Connor avoided being unwound, but he still doesn’t feel entirely whole.

Life is suffering.