So, we’re reached the halfway point by chapter count. Quite a bit farther by page count. And I really can’t stand another chapter of this at the moment, so break time.
Often these involve going over how to fix things and still keep the general plotline, but instead let’s go over how there are plenty of good stories you can tell with these elements and the author didn’t because he’s a bad person who prefers writing propaganda for kids.
The first and most obvious is to realize this is a rightwing theocratic dystopia.
You could get some good mileage from that. Just look at current events! Abortion rights are being steadily dismantled, gun nuts own Congress, creationism is spreading its tendrils through our schools… the fringe Christian cults are getting more and more power.
So our setting is a world where children are property. They can’t be outright murdered, but parents can choose to get rid of them through unwinding from any age up to eighteen, because that’s different than murder, which is to say, profitable.
It’s most common for teenagers, since that’s when kids start doing stuff their parents hate. The churches all preach that this is moral and the parents are noble for giving up their child for the good of others just like God sent down Jesus. There are no state homes. Religious charities raise orphans up as tithes, sacrificing them before they reach twelve so the age of majority won’t make them all sinful (besides, most of them come from loose women, so we all know they’d just grow up to be the same). Adults can probably also be unwound by choice, so in practice, if you screw up enough you might have to or you’ll be shunned forever. Certain crimes, like homosexuality, might also be punished that way.
Throw in all sorts of other stuff from the heartland real America cults – ritual snake murder, anointing with olive oil, beating children top death, random insane visions, faith healing – and you’ve got a really terrifying setting. Kids trying to escape unwinding have to dodge the rest of it at the same time!
(Missionaries in other countries operate free clinics for anyone who’ll accept the word of Jesus and be baptized. Conversion through organs is the current model, which creates an endless demand for more parts. Some countries ban this, but it’s such a seductive offer… Because really, anyone using the cults should never pass up an opportunity to point out they’re more satanic than Satanism.)
The next is to go for broke on the organ thing. Here, the focus is on an insatiable demand for them. Fresh organs allow Americans to party like the’ll die tomorrow and live forever anyway. Why not smoke if you can just get new lungs? Why not eat whatever you want if you can just get a new heart? Drink until your liver curls up and dies, there’s more where that came from! We render down all our prisoners for their spare parts and pay through the nose for anyone willing to sell their kid. There’s no time wasted on unwinding being different than murder. It’s murder and no one cares.
This is the closest fit to the setup. The kids still have to escape and find somewhere safe to hide, there would be people who tried to protect them, etc. This would also explain why there’s terrible punishment for anyone who tries to help them – you can always use more parts!
You could even take it farther and have it turn into an insane consumerist thing, where women buy fresh vaginas in the hopes their husband won’t cheat, men bid on the biggest dicks, pop stars get new lips every week to keep up with fashion…
Or you could focus on the absurdity of using every bit. Where do the appendixes go? Turn it into the reverse of buying organs from the homeless. People risking their lives carrying around a two dozen appendixes, paid a hundred bucks for each. Marketing campaigns to convince guys to trade in their old balls for some fresh young ones. Scandals when it turns out hospitals were stuffing extra things in people without telling them. Scandals when it turns out unwanted organs were smuggled into Mexico in organ mules to be distributed into the poor there. Scandals where it turns out they were just throwing the waste organs in the dumpster. A world where you get drunk and wake up in a tub of ice to find you have an extra kidney that’s HIV-positive.
For a more serious take that still keeps the everything conceit, you could make it not have to do with organ demand after all. Maybe the problem is population. Risa made it clear that there are far more children than the government can care for. So they banned abortion, which is the direction we’re already going in so you really don’t need any heartland war bullshit, and that’s part of why there’s so many spare kids around, and the general population stress is making adults crazy enough they’ll get rid of their own kids at times. The real compromise is about what they do with the unwanted children when life is so cheap, and the unwinding and bit about it not being death is a flimsy rationalization to make all this easier. The rule about no one under thirteen is another compromise, where they say at least the kids get to experience a childhood. Lots of parts are never used, of course, and just maintained forever in big vats – maybe work it so that the kids escape and run through a storage facility to be creeped out.
This one would really embrace how awful the state homes are. Risa would be a “lucky orphan”, a kid who was raised by her parents for a while, as opposed to the barely functional majority of children that started life as a ward of the state. She’ll still end up killed, of course, because it doesn’t matter how talented you are when there’s just too many people. Throw in some generational conflict – the adults blame the kids for being troublemakers and leeches on society, even though it’s the adults that make up most of the population, use most of the resources, and have most of the stuff.
And those are just the scifi options! Piehole suggested a different religious route, where the donations are entirely from tithes raised to be innocent and used to replace sinful adult parts to ensure the adult gets into heaven. With it now an entirely religious affair and involving kids promised from before birth, the idea people think unwinds don’t have souls makes a lot more sense. Kept safe under the wing of the church, they’re perfect, pure vessels ready to be filled with the souls of whoever gets them. Disobedient tithes, children who escape and beg not to be killed, are of course possessed by demons, due to the lack of a soul to prevent possession.
We can also go all the way into fantasy and embrace the idea the parts are possessed by the disembodied consciousness of the murdered kid, with the more of it you get, the more of you is “them” so the more force they can exert. There’s also issues of will, so a particularly strong willed or just plain angry kid has a better chance of overwhelming others.
It could even be combined with the previous option. The church’s official word is such anomalies are from errant demons getting in when actually it’s proof the kids have souls after all. The initial escape of some tithes eventually leads to them figuring this out and ultimately stopping the whole system by bringing it to light.
In terms of plot, the one that works with most of them is to focus on the kids’ journey. I still can’t believe the book just skipped over this as much as possible. The kids should be bouncing between the forest and suburb, knowing that being around people will get them caught but not having the knowledge to survive the forest. If the story starts in late summer/early fall, you could ramp up tension where they’re learning more and more about getting food from the woods but at the same time it’s turning into winter and getting harder to find anything. Each trip back into civilization serves to show another bit of their world, be it insane theocracy or runaway consumerism – or, in the case of the overpopulation setting, their inability to escape civilization at all, with the closest equivalent decaying slums. After all, why create a setting if you’re not going to explore it? Their surroundings should be the main source of obstacles.
Throw in the baby to further raise the stakes and also to show off how terrible the dystopia is even for non-teens, and their struggles to care for it serve to underline the hypocrisy of the adults willing to kill them for not being good enough.
Since the idea of a community of children inside America that’s somehow safe from the cops while being findable by kids is too much, and what sort of person would just write the adults doing all the work for them, their actual aim is to make it across the border. Mexico and Canada will grant asylum if they can get by the guards, and rumor has it if you steal a boat and get far enough out, other countries will pick you up.
There are so many good stories you could tell with these elements.
yeah those are all better. I’d read most of those quicker than I picked up Unwind. :/
I want to read all of those things T_T especially the last ones you mentioned. WHY IS THIS NOT THOSE BOOKS?
Probably because it takes actual effort.
Pretty sure it’s because none of those explain to you that the real problem is that girls are irresponsible.
I don’t really like Unwind, but the whole “compromise between pro-choice and pro-life sides” bit makes sense… if and only if you’re willing to realize that it’s not a compromise between the actual pro-choice and pro-life sides; it’s a compromise between the pro-choice and pro-life *strawmen*. That is, it’s a compromise between what pro-choicers think of pro-lifers and what pro-lifers think of pro-choicers. I know that you’re very intensely pro-choice yourself, but you have to think of pro-life people as actual people with a sincere position for this to make sense.
I disagree. Actual human pro-lifers would never agree to killing teenagers as a “compromise” for not killing embryos. The only way the compromise makes sense is if you agree with Neal’s assertion that there comes a point in disagreement over a polarizing issue that the argument is no longer about the issue and instead about simply opposing the other side. Which implies everyone is completely stupid. Which fortunately isn’t true, despite current Congressional evidence.
That’s pretty much exactly what I was arguing for – that this is not in any way an attempt at a compromise between the REAL pro-choice and pro-life sides. It’s a compromise between the strawman pro-choice side (“I demand that children are killed and human life is disrespected”) and the strawman pro-life side (“I demand that women have no ability to get an abortion because that would make everything too easy”).
Oh, you’re right. Sorry–I misread your comment and focused on the last sentence and got all defensive. Apologies. :)
EXCEPT NO ONE WANTS MORE ABORTIONS YOU STUPID FUCK.
WHILE THE PROLIFE PEOPLE DO IN FACT WANT TO BAN ABORTION.
Nope! Went over this when the book was first brought up.
It is a caricature of prolifers, in that the vast majority of them oppose kids being killed at parental whim or because the government can’t afford them but their current position prioritizes fetal wellbeing over actual babies, children, teens and adults. The compromise presented in the books, of protecting pregnancies at the cost of mass murdering kids, is a grossly exaggerated version of the path they’re already on.
But it bears no resemblance whatsoever to what the prochoice side wants, because the motivating force behind the prochoice lobby is that women should be able to choose if they want to bear a child not that we demand dead children for evil science but can compromise over it being teens if you’re so fussed about it being babies.
Ah, yes, I agree that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to what the pro-choice side wants. But it’s exactly the kind of thing that the pro-life side would caricature the pro-choice side as wanting. The only thing I’m asking of you, ideologically speaking, is that you acknowledge that “the only thing wrong with abortion is that it’s convenient for dirty whores who enjoy sex” is just as much a pro-choice caricature of the pro-life position.
(My point is, I don’t see Unwinding as a valid compromise between actual pro-life people and actual pro-choice people – I just see it as a valid compromise between actual pro-life people’s impressions of pro-choice people and actual pro-choice people’s impressions of pro-life people.)
Denying women legal abortions kills them.
If the prolife side wants to prevent abortions instead of punish women for sex, they can start by funding actual sex ed as opposed to gutting it. Because that actually lowers abortions, yet somehow the prolife machine is in favor of abstinence-only education. Next, they can stop opposing women getting birth control through their health care insurance, another great way to lower abortions.
But both allow women to have sex without getting pregnant, and somehow that seems to be a lot more important.
Oh, yeah, there are certainly a lot of retarded things deeply associated with the pro-life side, and I’m not going to do that false equivalence thing and say “but there are also retarded things deeply associated with the pro-choice side” (although there are some pro-choice arguments I find to be similarly questionably motivated, but that’s a topic for an entirely different discussion and I said I’m not going to try to draw a false equivalence so fuck this parenthetical statement), but that doesn’t change the fact that giving parents the ability to kill their teenagers is not remotely compatible with any normal pro-life view. The pro-life view of the pro-choice side and the pro-choice view of the pro-life side are the things being compromised between here – not the actual pro-life and pro-choice views. The critical difference between our positions is that you seem to view it as a compromise between the actual pro-life side and the pro-life view of the pro-choice side, while I hold that the actual pro-life side is not represented either. I strongly suspect that the author thought he was making a compromise between the actual views, which is retarded.
Did you read the last section Farla posted? Remember this part? “On one side, people were murdering abortion doctors to protect the
right to life, while on the other side people were getting pregnant just
to sell their fetal tissue.”
Know the big difference here? The former actually happens. Abortion
doctors right now get death threats and some have been killed. In some
places women getting abortions need escorts to get to the clinic safely
because of protestors. The latter? Doesn’t really happen. No one gets
pregnant for fun or just to donate the baby to science, that’s not based in reality. So – the pro-life is represented by things the pro-life side has actually done but the pro-choice side isn’t.
Yes, it is. I can quote the scripture. The liberal side of things does not publish books advocating severely abusing your child. They do not have forums trading tips on how to beat your child so it won’t leave marks. The majority of people do not want the right to murder their kids because basic human decency, but the prolife agenda itself does not believe anyone other than adult men have rights.
[But both allow women to have sex without getting pregnant, and somehow that seems to be a lot more important.]
FWIW, as someone who empathizes with both sides (ie, women shouldn’t be forced to carry out a pregnancy, but also… you shouldn’t just be able to terminate the life of a person (though I certainly think there’s a valid argument that in the first trimester, it’s not really “alive” yet)), this is what baffles me. The solution here is fucking BIRTH CONTROL. You can’t say you want to lower the abortion rate BUT ALSO NO BIRTH CONTROL. It doesn’t make sense! It’s not that hard to prevent unwanted pregnancy *if you allow people the necessary tools.*
Mildly related– read a really interesting article about Elizabeth Smart (who is Mormon) and the way her culture made her feel after she was raped, and the problems with the fetishizing of virginity. She campaigns for healthy sex ed now. And really, all this is an extension of the virginity obsession, isn’t it? It’s like we’re still in the middle ages. If we stopped treating sex as EEEEVIL, a lot of these issues would go away… including the need for abortions, except in those extreme cases (rape, life-threatening pregnancy) that a lot of pro-lifers already agree on.
I see the pro-life side of not wanting dead kids, but for me at least being pro-choice is all about the woman, and abortion is just about getting the baby out of her. If it so happens that s/he can’t survive outside her, then too bad, I guess.
I think a good solution would be inventing a way to get the fetus out with as little trauma to both sides as possible and sticking it in an artificial womb! Well, that and sex ed + birth control I suppose.
I support this steel-uterus future.
Though, now that I think about it, a rather balanced solution could be to make abortion legal, but require doctors to submit viable fetuses to hospital “safe haven” programs. That way you don’t have a baby that would otherwise survive outside the uterus being terminated, and the woman is free of the pregnancy. This is something I would gladly give my tax dollars to, though I have no idea how practical it would actually be.
Edit: It would also be wonderful if these comments would nest a bit further…
The viability thing is really sticky in practice, though.
There isn’t a clear point when the baby will survive, so viability is defined as a 50% chance. And that’s not 50% if you just pop it out and see what it does, but with enormously expensive medical intervention. (Painful medical intervention at that – you can stick a respirator on them and they’ll get air, but you can’t change the fact that their lungs aren’t meant to be moving so early so you’re tearing them by doing this.) And it’s not like we’re currently lacking in kids who need medical care. Or just plain food. And the resulting kid is going to have a whole host of issues, many of which are permanent, and those just get worse the younger you go. So we’re now facing the question of if it’s right for a woman to cripple a baby to get it out faster. The side effects are worst early on and they need a lot more support than the average baby to turn out okay, but disabled babies already have trouble finding people who want to adopt them, so these kids who will need particularly good parents are also the most likely to get neglected and abused.
So basically, we really need those steel wombs. Or some way of sticking them into cows, maybe. In the meantime, everyone with balls should get a vasectomy.
(Some sort of drug that prevents hormonal craziness after birth would also be great, since it’d make giving birth and giving it up for adoption not be so suicide-causing, for people who don’t mind pregnancy so much but don’t want the baby.)
“the only thing wrong with abortion is that it’s convenient for dirty whores who enjoy sex” is just as much a pro-choice caricature of the pro-life position
But it’s not. If you poke around at pro-lifers a bit, especially the ones who think that exceptions can be made for rape victims, you’ll find that that is actually true. The only difference between pregnancies through rape and pregnancies through consensual sex is that the woman didn’t want it in the former; if people think it’s okay for rape victims to not have abortions, then they literally view pregnancy and babies as punishment.
Here, have an analogy. It’d be like if the compromise on gay marriage was FLDS-style compulsory polygamy, with anybody queer burned at the stake. After all, that nasty pro-gay-rights side wants to destroy the American family and lower the age of consent, and that nasty anti-gay-rights side wants to force patriarchy on everybody and burn gays, so if both sides just want to make different people miserable, why can’t you compromise by making EVERYBODY miserable? Of course, that example also doesn’t work as a real compromise between the real positions, because they’re both just caricatures of the real positions by their fierce opponents. But it works perfectly well if you’re coming at things from a cartoonish, naive rhetorical position.
(The fact that you automatically see “a cartoonish, naive rhetorical position” as “a pro-life position” really says more for your intensity of disdain for that position, I think.)
….you do realize that a lot of gay people have in fact been killed for being gay right? You know, hate crimes? And gay kids (and adults) being driven to suicide? That’s not some strawman/cartoonish position. That’s actually what the anti-gay right’s side has done. In real life.
Defining the world around what right-wing monsters believe does not mean it’s balanced.
Actually, you might be right here, because unlike the pro-life movement, it is legitimately pretty hard to argue that the anti-gay movement ISN’T based on personal hatred and malice Sorry for the bad example. :(
It would kind of make sense as something both sides could go “Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?!” at… but that doesn’t explain how in the world that would have actually emerged as a compromise, because the whole point of “Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?!” is to point out how awful it is that /they/ could possibly want it while /we’re/ people with basic morals who can see how sick that is.
The compromise makes some kind of sense from the point of view of a pro-life person who thinks pro-choice people are strawmen: “There was no way to convince them to give up killing kids, but at least we managed to make sure all babies will get to have a childhood.” But it doesn’t even begin to make any sense whatsoever from the point of view of a pro-choice person who despises pro-lifers: “There was no way to convince them to give up punishing women for sex with pregnancies or forcing people to raise unwanted kids, but at least we… uh… get forced organ donations?”
This is probably because the author himself is pro-life and has no real idea what the pro-choice ideology is about – also made pretty clear by the fact he has the third-person narrator in the young mother’s POV talk about how great it is that she can throw away her responsibility. His idea of writing the other POV is to say “Well, she thinks it’s just dandy to throw away your responsibility”, without any comprehension that the other side actually doesn’t think she should have a sacred responsibility to take care of a child because she had unprotected sex at all.
By the way, thought you’d get a kick out of this – I remember a while ago seeing some pro-lifers criticize Unwind from the opposite perspective, and they suggested, rather like you do here, that it would make more sense if it had simply been the other side that won the war. To be specific, they suggested that the plot of the book would make more sense if abortion was still legal, but the latest age when “abortion” could take place was 18. Obviously, this is absurd, but I’m not sure if it’s that much more absurd than what you’re suggesting here – or, for that matter, the book itself.
No, I wouldn’t, because as I already said, that’s the entire problem with this pretending to be balanced. Prolife people actually want to ban abortion. Prochoice people are not actually motivated by how many kids they get to kill. They are motivated by the fact it is wrong to force women to bear children and that doing so kills women.
Yes, pro-life people do inherently want to ban abortion, but, just as the pro-choice logic, ideally, does not mesh with unwinding being acceptable, pro-life logic, ideally, also doesn’t mesh with unwinding being acceptable. Now, we can argue about whether or not pro-life people live up to the ideal form of their logic, but that’s a different argument. I could point to pro-choice people who don’t live up to the ideal form of their logic, but I’m not going to take the conversation down that road because I know that there are FAR less of those people than there are non-ideal pro-lifers.
http://www.salon.com/2011/05/26/abortion_saved_my_life/
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/11/13/woman-dies-after-being-refused-medically-necessary-abortion/
The prolife camp will let people die if it means there are no abortions.
I thought I just said I wasn’t trying to get into an argument on whether or not pro-lifers actually lived up to their ideals?
So the fact they have, over and over, allowed women to die rather than have an abortion has no bearing on whether they’d allow people to die if it means banning abortion? Because you are the sole decider of what their “ideals” actually mean, apparently.
You have a strong point.
This is where I bring in Margaret Sanger’s eugenics-related motives and their leakage into the modern pro-choice movement, no?
If you want to confirm for everyone else exactly where your own position lies, go nuts.
I like your complete failure to address the point about this currently killing women. The actual stakes don’t matter compared to you explaining how reasonable you are to see that both sides are being misrepresented.
To be honest, I’m not very informed on this issue. I didn’t even know that abortion rights in America were currently on the decline.
I am.
And yet you felt it was vitally important you lecture me about how I didn’t understand.
I’m sorry. :(
So you’re basically a mini-Neal Stephenson then.
“I don’t know anything about this issue, or the basic tenets of either side, but I’m still going to write a lot of words pretending I do!”
Just want to point out that the monster that wrote this pile of drivel is Neal [i]Shusterman[/i]. Neal [i]Stephenson[/i] is a talented author whose works are actually enjoyable.
Dammit, I hate it when I use the italics flags from another forum instead of proper html…
Whoops, that’s what I get for commenting at 4am!
It’s absurd because the pro-choice movement gives not a fuck for what happens abortion-wise once the kid is out of the body, because the issue at hand is the bodily autonomy of the mother.
The pro-life movement, on the other hand, does actually advocate women dying in favour of their precious little fetuses, whom they also immediately stop caring about once it’s out of the woman.
Plus during all this unwinding abortion is still, you know. Banned.
You know, the one thing I realise with this book, and the dicsussions it leads to, like the one here, is how much of a difference there is between USA and (Northwestern) Europe. It’s. things really are bigger in America, and I can’t help wonder why. I mean, we do have both prolife and prochoice, but they never seem this extreme.
Because America is, literally, bigger.
The US is bigger than all of Europe. I drive more than 500 miles just to visit my parents sometimes, to say nothing of how far I have to travel to visit Boyfriend’s parents. That’s the difference between Paris and London– and think about how different those two relatively close cultures are. From where I am to California is *three thousand miles.* That’s FURTHER than driving from Paris to St. Petersburg, Russia… and yet, we’re both in the US. Can you imagine what would happen if suddenly the entirety of Europe was just one country?
My point is that the US is one country comprised of cultures so drastically different and isolated from one another that these kind of clashes are inevitable. The whole east coast/west coast rivalry is a great example– it’s not that I’m from NJ so I think people from CA are silly, it’s that we’re thousands of miles apart with completely different geographies and climates and culture so vastly different they’re barely comparable and I can’t imagine in my wildest dreams what being one of them is like. Hell, to me, California seems infinitely more foreign than Britain or Italy. It’s also probably harder to get to.
I’m not advocating secession or anything. I actually think it’s amazing and awesome that such differing people can function as a whole as well as we can. It’s fascinating. Just pointing out what, IMO, causes some of the tension that probably isn’t in, for example, the UK.
Sorry, that got rambly. Hopefully it made sense.
Sure it makes sense, and if I actually use my brains, I understand this. It is just so easy to fall into the mindset of your own culture (which I think is what happended to that John guy) it can be a tad shocking when you realise just how much of a difference there really is, especially when you come from a very homogenised culture.
Makes you kinda afraid of would happen is aliens ever landed.
No, pretty sure he’s American.
Anyway, don’t be too relaxed. This crops up in a lot of places you wouldn’t expect.
Hmm, Poland does sort of makes sense, in a horrible way. Catholicism is rather dominating there from what I know. Still horrible.
Hell, abortion is illegal in Ireland, except if the life of the mother is at stake and even that’s not a guarantee (debates over whether suicide counts as ‘life threatening’… don’t read about it unless you want to get angry.)
It’s half a political thing. When the courts said abortion for everyone, a lot of churches suddenly changed their position to abortion being evil, and then used that to drum up support for politicians, because it doesn’t matter what else the guy believes when the stakes are baby holocaust. Add in a hate of science leading to people saying stuff like that babies have a heartbeat from the moment of conception, and of course the many issues with virginity and sex that are all tied up in this…
Probably also some fallout from free speech laws, come to think of it, I like them but they do have the side effect of making it particularly hard to make people stop lying.
You point to the pro-life side as having extremists, but the pro-choice does too – Sanger and Gosnell spring to mind immediately. This crappy story is not about a compromise between real pro-life positions (which are, pro life) just as much as it is not about real pro choice positions (which generally are opposed to teen murder).
It’s just a dodgy set up for a typical lazy teen angst YA story that is trying to tie itself to real life issues to get publicity.
A man who displayed complete disregard for the wellbeing of women including forcing one to have an abortion when she changed her mind is absolutely a pro-choice extremist, because “choice” is Latin for “baby killing is fun”.
Fuck off and die.