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The Traitor's Mercy by Iris Foxglove (The Starian Cycle #1)

In the court of Staria, mercy is rarely a blessing… Sabre de Valois is the last of his line. Saved from the gallows while his family hangs for treason, Sabre is given the chance to pay off their debt and clear his family name. To do so, he must serve as a courtesan in the pleasure district, but the only House willing to take him in and risk the disfavor of the king is the House of Onyx, which caters to the darker desires of the Starian noble elite. There, he finds his masochism is an asset, the courtesans are kinder than the nobles of the Starian court, and that he cannot help but be inexorably drawn to the owner of the House of Onyx, Laurent de Rue. Lord Laurent de Rue knows that love is dangerous. Abandoned in the pleasure district with no memory of his past, Laurent clawed his way to notoriety and earned his title through cunning and skill. He has seen love ruin the lives and ambitions of those he passed on his way to the top, and he has no intention of letting himself fall prey to ...
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The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin

Some inhabitants of a peaceful kingdom cannot tolerate the act of cruelty that underlies its happiness.

TITLE: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
PUBLISHER: Nelson Doubleday/SFBC
YEAR: 1973
LENGTH: 32 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: Highly

Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS is a brief story of complicity and abuse in a city where most have decided that the happiness of many is worth the abject misery of one.

This review contains spoilers.

This story is short with a simple but heartbreaking premise: that the happiness of an entire city depends on the abuse and misery of a small child, where the justification for the child's mistreatment is that its low intelligence and the abuse it has undergone until this point mean it wouldn't even know what to do if it were freed. Anyone who stays in the city past a certain age where they are shown the child does so with the knowledge that everything good for them is dependent on this child suffering. It's brief and well worth reading.

For me one of the most interesting parts of the story is the way that the abuse until the point is used to justify further abuse. The idea that only by thinking about one child suffering can these people be kind to the other children, and that now that the child has been abused they may as well stay that way because rescue and rehabilitation would be difficult and might never fully work... it's unfortunately (and clearly purposefully) close to the attitudes that are used in the real world to justify a whole host of ills.

CW for ableism, excrement, child abuse.

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