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More on Windup Girl
Jul. 2nd, 2015 12:39 amThe story won me over. I found myself caring very much about the power struggle between Future!Thailand's Ministry of Trade, which is eager to dance with the devil--the devil being the calorie companies, multinational Future!Monsantos that hold the world's perpetually famine-ready population hostage with their sterile seeds and their genetically engineered plagues--and the "white shirts" of Ministry of the Environment, which is sworn to protect the country from the same. In particular, I became a fan of Jaidee, an idealistic white-shirt captain, and his protégé Kanya. As Little Springtime pointed out, those two were the ones whose moral dilemmas were most complex.
( Read more... )
In the end, I was won over by the worldbuilding, the intricate and (for me) satisfying plotting, and Jaidee and Kanya's storyline. The stereotyping that had incensed me at first seemed to grow less as time went on and we moved from generalizations about characters to particulars, but it's also true that I was willing to put up with Jaidee's name-checking kamma and Emiko saying "Anderson-sama" and the many many ways of saying "foreign devil" because I was so absorbed in the plot. I'm definitely not trying to change people's opinions of it; all I'm doing here is explaining how it came to pass that I ended up feeling differently.
( Read more... )
In the end, I was won over by the worldbuilding, the intricate and (for me) satisfying plotting, and Jaidee and Kanya's storyline. The stereotyping that had incensed me at first seemed to grow less as time went on and we moved from generalizations about characters to particulars, but it's also true that I was willing to put up with Jaidee's name-checking kamma and Emiko saying "Anderson-sama" and the many many ways of saying "foreign devil" because I was so absorbed in the plot. I'm definitely not trying to change people's opinions of it; all I'm doing here is explaining how it came to pass that I ended up feeling differently.
