You Owe Me

23 points by iieme 4 years ago | 8 comments
  • c22 4 years ago
    I kept waiting for the punchline but it just kept digging in the same vein. I'm not sure what else there is to gain from the text beyond the core gimmick.
    • yokaze 4 years ago
      As a man, I found it made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but that is maybe kind of the point. I like speculative fiction, when it makes you re-evaluate your preconceived notions, and it did that for me.

      From your choice of words and the fact that you wrote, I would gather that the story didn't leave you indifferent. So it achieved something.

      What do you understand as "gimmick" and how could a "punchline" for that story look like for you?

      • c22 4 years ago
        It didn't make me feel uncomfortable. It felt like it was trying to make me "think" but it ended up philosophically hollow. Not sure what punchline I'd have wanted, but I prefer to be surprised.

        I guess overall I have no complaints except that it could have been shorter. It seemed like it was building to a conclusion that never coalesced, which is okay for short fiction, but this one was sorta a slog.

      • hik 4 years ago
        Short stories tend to be a little more gimmicky than novels.
        • c22 4 years ago
          Yeah, I guess I prefer when the gimmick takes more than the first couple paragraphs to land.
          • courtf 4 years ago
            I think the system was revealed a little too early, and someone like me will try to decide what the system is right away, rather than patiently waiting for the author to fully explore the idea. So it does feel a little long, but I'm not sure it's a flaw. I have felt the same way about gimmicks in other well-regarded and much longer writing (400 page books that give away the whole thing in chapter 1), but here it seems balanced enough. Part of why it felt too long to me was just because the people in the story are boring, although I think that is also intentional.
      • courtf 4 years ago
        Clearly targeted at a certain class of Westerner (both men & women), I enjoyed the story and thought it was quite clever.

        Is the world depicted in the story any more absurd and implausible than the world we already experience? Is the system in the story all that different from systems we encounter in our lives? Perhaps a bit more explicit, but not really that different. Just a small tweak that makes things normally taken for granted feel alien and uncomfortable, great art!

        • nicebyte 4 years ago
          why is this on the front page?
          • afgasgbui 4 years ago
            The author clearly thinks they have something important to say, but I can't figure out of what it is. This story reads like it's name-dropping hot-button issues without actually dealing with any of them.

            Obviously a story doesn't need a moral, but this one does since it has nothing else going for it.