Thinking of how specifically 1993 was that bit in The Giver where when adult roles are assigned some of the girls are to be relatively pampered while they bear a few pregnancies and then go in the general labor pool

One, in that the measured, proscribed regularity is a sideways reference to contemporary Chinese “one-child” policy

And two, how it casts reproduction as a matter exclusively for lower-class women, who are seen from the narration’s point of view as kind of pathetic for being okay with this life purpose.

This was the decade of the Ricki Lake/Sally Jessie Raphael/Jerry Springer “daytime talk” freak shows, remember

Off the Top of My Head: The Giver

The kids and the Kid are ready for their lifetime role assignments! Some of them get middling stuff, or laborers. A bunch of girls are laborers but they birth two kids each and get pampered first.

The Kid is gifted so he’s going to be the new Giver, who bears and transmits community knowledge! So he apprentices with the current, old one

Whose role involves to… weigh the babies when one of the girls has twins, then throw the lighter one down a garbage chute?

And they’re both like “oh woe, this sounds like The Holocaust, which I remember from Lois Lowry’s last award-bait YA novel, Number the Stars”

And like, The Kid toboggans down a slope to escape and I just realized this was the same ending as Calvin and Hobbes?

also me: the reason The Giver was so well-awarded in the trade press and esteemed by your teachers even though it seemed kinda poncy to you EVEN AS a chosen one

me: yeah?

also me: the real payload was the emotional resonance of someone who knew he couldn’t save his generation but maybe could save the next

me: oh. thanks

also me: yeah?

me: yeah