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dolorosa_12I've always had a lot of oddly specific scenarios that I'm desperate to see in works of fiction, and which I'm always seeking and never quite finding. Some of them I'd be unable to explain ('vampires, but not like that,' 'angels and demons and the war with heaven and the Fall and Christian-ish cosmology, but not like that,' 'an Iliad retelling, but not like that,' 'dark academia but not like that'), I just read books in the hope they might give me what I want and then find they haven't done so. Sometimes I encounter a new piece of media and it gives me a new-to-me oddly specific scenario that I didn't even know I was seeking (the first season of Peaky Blinders, Novik's Spinning Silver, Kate Elliott's Crossroads trilogy).
The oddly specific scenario that's taken hold of my mind for the past two days is a rarity — something I can explain in a (hopefully) comprehensible manner. I will preface this by saying I'm certain that works of fiction exploring it exist (because I find it exasperating when someone online goes, 'why has no one written X?' or 'where are all the X works of fiction?' and I'm aware of myriad books/films/etc that fulfill those those specifications), but so far they've been hard for me to find.
There is a lot of genre fiction concerned in one way or another with revolution — overthrowing an unjust regime, defeating some great oppressive evil, getting rid of bad political leaders and replacing them with good. Like every speculative fiction fan, I enjoy reading this kind of stuff. But what I really want to read/watch are stories that start after the revolution has already happened, and look at how peoples, communities, nations have to deal with the fallout. Not revolution, but justice, reconciliation, and community building.
I have additional oddly specific requirements here: it needs to be a specific type of revolution. I'm not particularly interested in the aftermath of e.g. a bad monarch being replaced by a supposedly good one. I'm more interested in seeing people, communities, or whole nations grappling with how to live in the aftermath of some monumental, society-wide injustice (colonisation, genocide, a political regime that oppressed some but not others) that has been recognised as such, and both the oppressors and oppressed, the wrongdoers and the wronged (and the bystanders and passive beneficiaries) have to find a way to a) honestly admit and confront the past injustices, b) agree on what justice, reparations and reconciliation would look like in the wake of that, and c) live among each other as neighbours and fellow citizens. I want to see the messiness of that — the outrage and guilt and grief and distrust — from a variety of different characters' perspectives.
As I say, I'm sure such fiction exists — I'm probably just bad at finding it, or the social circles from within which I get the majority of media recommendations don't seek it out so I don't get recommendations. But I also suspect it's less common because creators have fewer real-world examples from which to draw. I'm not saying that there are no real-world revolutions or endings of injustices, but they don't tend to lead to the scenario that I've outlined above, with oppressors and oppressed living together and messily working out what justice and trust would look like. Instead, oppressors leave (as in postcolonial countries which gain political independence), or oppressed minorities emigrate if they can, or (as in the case of my country of origin) one form of oppression is replaced with another, and any attempts at having an honest conversation about either past or current oppression is shouted down ('why are you still so upset about what happened in the past?' or 'we're not doing the bad things that were done to you in the past so what do you have to complain about?'). And in general, a lot of real world injustice simply gets replaced with another form of injustice (often at the hands of the same group of oppressors), and a lot of denial about the gravity of what happened before. So I guess if this kind of scenario is difficult and rare in the real world, it's not surprising it would be hard to get right in fiction.
This is a meandering and weird post, but I guess all that is building up to two questions:
1. If anyone has recommendations for this extremely specific scenario in fiction, could you share them with me? (Please no video games, podcasts, or comics that require reading vast numbers of back issues for things to make sense — books, TV shows or films only.)
2. Do any of you have similarly specific fictional scenarios that you also find nearly impossible to find?
Somehow this has turned into a recs post, I suppose?
Edited to add an update with the recommendations I've been given so far (because a lot of you are recommending the same things):
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (recommended twice)
Bitterblue — Kristin Cashore (recommended three times; I've already read it)
Winterkeep — Kristin Cashore
Holdfast Chronicles — Suzy McKee Charnas
Nostalgia de la luz
Papirosen
Logic series — Laurie Marks (recommended twice)
Tir Tanagiri series — Jo Walton (I've already read it)
Commonweal series — Graydon Saunders
The oddly specific scenario that's taken hold of my mind for the past two days is a rarity — something I can explain in a (hopefully) comprehensible manner. I will preface this by saying I'm certain that works of fiction exploring it exist (because I find it exasperating when someone online goes, 'why has no one written X?' or 'where are all the X works of fiction?' and I'm aware of myriad books/films/etc that fulfill those those specifications), but so far they've been hard for me to find.
There is a lot of genre fiction concerned in one way or another with revolution — overthrowing an unjust regime, defeating some great oppressive evil, getting rid of bad political leaders and replacing them with good. Like every speculative fiction fan, I enjoy reading this kind of stuff. But what I really want to read/watch are stories that start after the revolution has already happened, and look at how peoples, communities, nations have to deal with the fallout. Not revolution, but justice, reconciliation, and community building.
I have additional oddly specific requirements here: it needs to be a specific type of revolution. I'm not particularly interested in the aftermath of e.g. a bad monarch being replaced by a supposedly good one. I'm more interested in seeing people, communities, or whole nations grappling with how to live in the aftermath of some monumental, society-wide injustice (colonisation, genocide, a political regime that oppressed some but not others) that has been recognised as such, and both the oppressors and oppressed, the wrongdoers and the wronged (and the bystanders and passive beneficiaries) have to find a way to a) honestly admit and confront the past injustices, b) agree on what justice, reparations and reconciliation would look like in the wake of that, and c) live among each other as neighbours and fellow citizens. I want to see the messiness of that — the outrage and guilt and grief and distrust — from a variety of different characters' perspectives.
As I say, I'm sure such fiction exists — I'm probably just bad at finding it, or the social circles from within which I get the majority of media recommendations don't seek it out so I don't get recommendations. But I also suspect it's less common because creators have fewer real-world examples from which to draw. I'm not saying that there are no real-world revolutions or endings of injustices, but they don't tend to lead to the scenario that I've outlined above, with oppressors and oppressed living together and messily working out what justice and trust would look like. Instead, oppressors leave (as in postcolonial countries which gain political independence), or oppressed minorities emigrate if they can, or (as in the case of my country of origin) one form of oppression is replaced with another, and any attempts at having an honest conversation about either past or current oppression is shouted down ('why are you still so upset about what happened in the past?' or 'we're not doing the bad things that were done to you in the past so what do you have to complain about?'). And in general, a lot of real world injustice simply gets replaced with another form of injustice (often at the hands of the same group of oppressors), and a lot of denial about the gravity of what happened before. So I guess if this kind of scenario is difficult and rare in the real world, it's not surprising it would be hard to get right in fiction.
This is a meandering and weird post, but I guess all that is building up to two questions:
1. If anyone has recommendations for this extremely specific scenario in fiction, could you share them with me? (Please no video games, podcasts, or comics that require reading vast numbers of back issues for things to make sense — books, TV shows or films only.)
2. Do any of you have similarly specific fictional scenarios that you also find nearly impossible to find?
Somehow this has turned into a recs post, I suppose?
Edited to add an update with the recommendations I've been given so far (because a lot of you are recommending the same things):
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (recommended twice)
Bitterblue — Kristin Cashore (recommended three times; I've already read it)
Winterkeep — Kristin Cashore
Holdfast Chronicles — Suzy McKee Charnas
Nostalgia de la luz
Papirosen
Logic series — Laurie Marks (recommended twice)
Tir Tanagiri series — Jo Walton (I've already read it)
Commonweal series — Graydon Saunders