Kids deliberately disabling themselves at 13 and after 18 just saving up and buying new parts would actually help to bridge the gap of "wait who is buying all of these ears that we have left over?". The demand for parts is high because it's induced demand, really feeding into the fucked-up cycle of unwinding.
@@HaapainenRouske this and getting pregnant. Much like anti-abortion laws try to get people to make more workers, it tracks in unwind that you would make it an incentive to get pregnant asap as a loophole out of being unwinded
The idea that ANY pro-choice person would think “oh I have to go through an unwilling pregnancy, the thing I’m against, and 13 YEARS of parenting, and THEN I can choose to *kill the kid I just raised*? Sounds like a deal!” is so baffling and uncomfortable
@@marocat4749 Except that like, what's being described at that point is disingenuous. It's suggesting that both sides are so crazy that one side is murdering abortion doctors, and the other side is getting pregnant just to sell the tissue. But one of those things is real! One of those things had happened multiple times in the 90s, before this book was published, and the man who was murdered in 2009 had in fact himself been shot previously in 1993 by an anti-abortion advocate who was TRYING to kill him. So he's completely invented a horrifying crazy pro-choice position, to pair with... the actual opinions and actions of real anti-abortion activists. So, um, yeah. That's why it doesn't work. You can't say that "both sides went crazy" because one side already was, before this was written.
Very funny that Connor avoids falling into the stock/cliche love triangle/jealousy/romance YA plots being laid infront of him because he's just Too Fucking Busy trying to run this revolution.
hey besties just wanna share my personal trauma with unwind. I read it in 11th grade English class and one day soon after I had to get my wisdom teeth taken out. I got put under and thought I was being unwound, and the dentists literally woke me up and said i was crying while I slept and they asked me what I had seen… I told them and then the hot male nurse held my hand as I got put under a second time, and the entire time I was half conscious telling myself i was not in fact being unwound and i would wake up shortly
So, I'm currently about 1 hour 35 minutes in, and I think I might have discovered a subtle hint of worldbuilding that went unaddressed but just lurks in the background. You mentioned that teen pregnancy is rampant, resulting in all these storked babies and remark that sex education must be nonexistent. But I don't think that's the case. The whole crux of this story rests on abortion being illegal, and so my thought is this: teenagers are deliberately getting pregnant in an attempt to save their own lives, or at least prolong them by 9 months. Abortion being illegal means they wouldn't be able to terminate the pregnancy in order to unwind the teen in question, right? And I find it really strange that contraception wouldn't be at least OFFERED to these teenagers by a government already hellbent on controlling their bodies. So therefore, unless proven otherwise later, I'm going to operate under the assumption that these desperate victims of the system are feeding it out of survival.
yeah, I was thinking this and someone else already mentioned self induced disability being really the only workable loopholes to avoid being unwinded as a teenager. There are kids out there playing the loophole game as hard as the adults that offered unwinding as a solution. It's really too bad we don't get a POV character who does ether of these things tbh.
That is the case for some background characters if I remember. There is a SA attempt scene where they offer to get her pregnant to keep her safe for a while longer
Not even an hour into the video but the passage of Tyler (a boy who only exists as 1/8 of Cy's brain) begging his parents not to be unwound, unable to realize that he already has been, is legitimately really sad and scary. Like, that's a horrifying concept right there.
God, having a character named Cyrus Finch and shortening it to Cy-fi is so good. In real life that kid would be the coolest person in his middle school
when I was in high school, my partner and I cut the unwinding chapter into a dramatic duet and performed it at speech tournaments together. They played Roland and I played the doctors that were doing the unwinding, we had synchronized choreography and everything. it was probably my favorite bit of dramatic acting I've ever done, I so wish someone had gotten a video of it! the look on the judges/fellow competitors faces when it was over is a memory I treasure. I never did read the rest of the series, so thanks for this video I finally get to figure out what the rest of this story is about!
On the firefighting suit! There was this GREAT body horror comic I read about a lost astronaut in a futuristic suit that optimizes survival. When the astronaut gets too weak to walk the suit makes him walk. It cuts off limbs and re-feeds them back to the body so that no matter What, the astronaut returns to base. It “eats” his extra organs, skin and muscle, and lastly his eyes so that by the end he is a skeleton and a brain shuffling along held in stasis in this suit. The firefighter suit reminds me of that comic, like it was trying to approximate that kind of body horror but it fell so short. The astronaut was terrifying because it had a certain rhyme/reason. The comic is “The Suit” by bad space comics
That's a great comic, and it reminds me of an equally horrifying Stephen King story called "Survivor Type" about a surgeon who self-cannibalizes on a desert island
The idea that this would satisfy the "pro-choice" crowd is so baffling. This is the exact opposite of what they are asking for. Honestly, the only way this could wind up this way is total victory by the pro life crowd. Fetus's have rights, but teen agers can be used however their parents want is basically the pro-life stance.
Between that and the gay marriage thing, I think it's more plausible that the pro life crowd DID win in the book's universe. I don't think it's a stretch to start with a violent right-wing uprising mollified by a conservative military forcing the government to capitulate to their demands and jump forward to a future where that history has been painted over as a "there was violence on both sides" compromise.
Right?? What did the pro choice side even got out this deal? Sounds like a parody of what pro life people would want. Cause after the child is born they have no rights, Cause it all about the parental rights...
Pro-life people already support the death penalty and enlisting 18 yos into the military. They also vote consistently to remove social support for children, the disabled, and the elderly. Is this really even that much of a stretch? I don't think so.
@@luizabianco right? Bc apart from raising a child with all its emotional struggles, it's the pregnancy I want to avoid the most, if that wasn't a big deal id just say let's go, have the baby and give it up for adoption 😭
Regarding the "souls" - I always thought the book left it vague, despite the party scene. Despite being in-universe propaganda, the world-building agrees that unwound kids aren't really dead, at least not in the same way as normal dead people. Unlike normal organ donation, every part of them was used, and there was never a moment where they "died". I believe it's implied that the fantasy "unwinding" procedure is the reason why memory/personally transfer is so common in this world. You aren't receiving the organ of a dead person - you are receiving a fragment of a person who is neither alive nor dead. If you accept that unwound kids *are* truly stuck between life and death, it could explain why the Admiral's son briefly "speaks" when all his parts are together. It also heightens the horror significantly.
I wish that concept was in a good book. Horrifying states of un-death are one of the most fascinating things to explore in fiction, and I hate that this one is in the _"They_ want to be able to abort teenagers!!2!1" book.
It's also like, an implication about how there was no autonomy in the action of donating those parts. The reason why these kids are haunting/haunted by them is because the kids themselves never gave permission for that exchange.
The sad thing about "people of chance" is that it genuinely is a great term for an oppressed minority group kicked from their homes into the diaspora. Like, they had to take their chances elsewhere. It's extremely evocative. As a Jewish person I wouldn't be upset if this was a goyish term for us in a sci-fi novel, or a term for a counterpart culture in a fantasy novel, provided the rest of the depiction was respectful, of course. And then Shusterman has to ruin it by giving it to the one minority group who is largely known for running casinos. Great effing job, dude.
Slight side tangent: You can totally land an airplane without a landing gear. You just slide down the runway. You can’t take off without one though (which makes me think it should be called a take-off gear)
It's pretty telling that when pro-choice and anti-choice stances are put against each other and stretched to extremes to illustrate how bad the conflict was in this universe that a whole civil war broke out, the pro-choice extreme side has to be comically evil (getting pregnant on purpose just to abort??? Huh???) when anti-choice is just... what that side is actually advocating for (as in forcing people to give birth but not giving a shit about helping these children afterwards). Arguing against pro-choice advocates seems to always come down to misunderstanding what pro-choice even is about and what abortion even means and when it is used. Like how many times I've heard a person say "I would be pro-choice but... I don't know if I would ever be able to abort my own baby...". Honey, pro-choice means you can _choose_. You do not have to get an abortion to be pro-choice. I wish no-one ever would need an abortion, that's not an easy decision to make and sometimes you literally have no other option like if the fetus suddenly dies due to no fault of your own and you have to get an abortion or you will get sepsis or you risk infertility or dying. I truly wish people didn't have go through these painful things, but the world is complicated and sometimes really cruel. Not to mention all of the long waited pregnancies where there is a miscarriage or the fetus is so malformed that it wont survive no matter what, or there is a serious complication and it comes down to saving the mother or letting both the mother and baby to die unless they can get an abortion. My heart also breaks for those people who have been pressured into abortion and it really wasn't their choice. I hope I never end up in a situation where I would have to have an abortion, but I want that to be an option on the table in case it is needed to safe my life or to end an unviable pregnancy so I could try again for a healthy one. I want all of the children in this world to have the best life possible, and giving parents ability to choose when to reproduce through sex education, contraceptives, abortion and crucially - robust support systems after birth and later in life - gives people the best starting point to grow up unneglected and healthy. To be kind of harsh, pro-choice advocacy recognizes the realities of pregnancy, birth and all of the medical and social risks tied to it. Anti-choice rhetoric willingly closes its eyes and spins tall tales of morality and responsibility, without engaging with the reality of medical necessity of abortion, how many pregnancies are concieved through rape or incest or the fact that withholding sex education ("abstinence only" is not education) takes away teens ability to even be "responsible" or "moral". If they don't know how sex or conception works, how would they know how to avoid it? Anti-choice rhetoric lives in a fantasy, while pro-choice is operating in the real world and tackling all of its messiness with empathy. This series would have been even better if it would have gone full theocracy, not having unwinding to be a "compromise" but a control mechanism after the anti-choice side has won the civil war. Pro-choice side could be pushed into compliance by force. You could have the parents who are happy to get rid of their troubled teens and parents who would be desperate to "save" them from this society by prematurely ending (but not really) their life through unwinding. But that's just a nitpick. But it's kind of surprising how little the series deals with pregnancy and abortion, when bodily autonomy is such a big theme. What an interesting series.
What’s comically evil about getting pregnant just to have an abortion? Honestly it seems like what would be the first step in the natural evolution towards unwinding.
Absolutely you nailed it. On one hand, we have the actual reality of what some people are arguing (which is that fetusus should be protected, but the second they're born? You're on your own, bucko) and on the other hand we have. What looks like A Modest Proposal if you squint??? These two things are not the same.
@@SlimeMcfly That's a good point. I just feel that would be unplausible, unless getting pregnant and then going through abortion over and over again isn't as taxing on the body in UnWind universe as it is in our world. Pregnancy does a lot of things like raises hormone levels, causes nausea (morning sickness is no joke), makes you tired or erratic... Even if the pregnancy is ended super early, it affects the body it happens to. Of course there is variety of experiences, for some being pregnant has a little effect on them and for some -pregnancy is lethal. Even when the risks are low, every pregnancy is always a risk. So to go through that --presumably multiple times - just for profit and/or protest seems not worth it. But it would make sense that if people just could go through getting pregnant, then aborting and getting pregnant over and over, and there were no material consequences of any kind from it, then doing that for profit and/or protest would probably be the next logical step.
Current medical school student here - you are absolutely correct that sepsis is NOT treated by amputation except in the event that a limb that originates the infection is beyond repair due to necrosis or gangrene, and also cauterizing the wound like she does wouldn't 'burn the infection out' (???) at all, it's only used to stop active bleeding. In fact, what she did would actually make her skin more susceptible to having even MORE bacteria pour in because burned skin is weaker and loses its innate defenses. The only real treatment for sepsis is to take blood for cultures and send those off to the lab to be grown, and since that takes a while, treat the patient with broad-spectrum antibiotics intravenously until more information is available about the specific bacteria causing the infection. It also just seems like the author is using "sepsis" when they really mean "bacteremia", which is the term for having bacteria in your blood traveling around your body? Sepsis is the response of your body TO bacteremia, and involves things like fever/fast heartbeat/low blood pressure/organ failure/etc, which I don't think are considered here, since only the 'tainted blood' is referred to??? idk that entire short story was really bizarre and immediately made me raise an eyebrow. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for some of the science but clearly no research was done for that particular portion at all lol Wonderful video as always!!
I was wondering if they initially thought of an open wound that could get infected if left untreated/open. If you had to use emergency measures, I think searing the wound is the right choice? (correct me here if I'm wrong) I have no idea why they decided to include sepsis. Maybe because it sounds cool? Especially with the chapter name being "Unclean" and calling it "tainted blood".
@@cooraaYes! If it's an open wound and you have no other safe way to stop bleeding and contamination, cauterizing can be done as a last ditch effort. It's not recommended though, as most people don't do it correctly and end up causing more damage to themselves.
I know these were less known about at the time and not the main theme of the series, but I can't help but see the parallels to the troubled teen industry. Troubled teen schools or camps ads sound exactly like the newspaper ad for the unwinding camps. Going to a troubled teen camp is often thrown at teens as an alternative to jail. These camps are often such terrible situations and many children die to fund the scam, and kids are a mix of kids who's parents just trusted someone they shouldn't, and parents who know what they are getting into but think it's best.
Oh no its very deliberate and alluded to in book! Not in fiction but in one of the section breaks where there's excerpts of real articles. Troubled teen industry was very very deliberately invoked
@@Crowcaller that makes me like the books more, because the problems of foster care systems, group homes, the school to prison pipeline, and the troubled teen industry are all also part of the conservative anti choice movement
This is in regards to UnStrung: I'm also not a member of any North American indigenous tribe, but I am Native Hawaiian. I am more than well acquainted with the idea of non-native people taking a large group of indigenous folks and trying to amalgamate us into a monolith to "avoid misrepresentation 🥺," or to "make sure every person in this general category of human feels seen 🥰," which literally makes no sense whatsoever. (I'm lookin' at you, Moana...! Disney literally pulled a Pocahontas/Brother Bear YET AGAIN. 😒) For them to write an indigenous girl who tells the non-native central character of the book, "Oh, it's okay you called me a slur, teehee!" makes my hackles raise. Sure, there are people who are fine with people calling them a slur as long as they end up immediately apologizing for it, but it is only for someone of that group to decide they're okay with it. Non-native folks writing a character that says they're fine being called a slur, and renaming the broad group they're in to yet another *extremely similar slur* is just so ignorant and makes me so damn uncomfortable. It's like saying "Calling Blue Ai a coconut muncher is offensive. Call her a grass skirt, instead!" Screw off with that nonsense. Also, Shusterman is Jewish. I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate that part of who he is being renamed to any number of offensive antisemetic stereotypes. And that's not even getting into the pseudomystisism blunders of Vision Quests and Spirit Animals. Yes, those exist to some extent in certain tribes/bands in real life, but as Crow stated, they are so misrepresented and stereotyped to death by people outside of these groups. Will undoing his girlfriend's hair is also not cute at all. It's not the same as brushing her emo-girl fringe out of her eyes; it's more akin to chopping her hair off because he likes it shorter. It's gross and I hate it. Neal's statement in response to a woman who both has lived experience as an indiginous woman and whose job is literally to talk about representation also felt incredibly self-important and had an air of, "Sorry if *YOU* interpreted it as harmful." It rang hollow, especially with him bafflingly claiming that political correctness is as harmful as stereotyping, *while* stereotyping??? Wild, my dude. Also, what does he mean by "political correctness?" Asking for feedback from indigenous folks? WHAT DID YOU MEAN, NEAL? I could go on a much longer tirade, but I don't have the mental energy to do so. So, thanks, Crow Caller for this video on a series I've never actually heard of that is equal parts interesting and baffling. Sorry if this is rant-y and hard to follow, lmao. Editing to add: HOW DID HE GET NEURODIVERGENCE REP SO RIGHT BUT THE NATIVE AMERICAN REP IS SO BAD?!
Only mom is native (Cree/Blackfoot) so I'm pretty mixed, but omg I was FLOORED. ANIMAL ORGAN TRANSPLANTS????? PEOPLE OF CHANCE? It almost circled back around to being funny it was so ridiculous. I feel like this could have been avoided by talking to like, one Native person ever.
I do love the horrifying little details Shusterman adds to the world building (when they’re done well). He has another series called Skinjackers about kids’ souls stuck in purgatory. It expands on the “rule” that’s ghosts can pass through walls, asking well wouldn’t they fall through the ground too? So the ghosts have to be sure to walk on “dead ground” (I think spots where tragedy/a lot of death happened) or else they just… sink slowly through the earth, conscious the entire time. The idea freaked me out enough when I first read it that I still remember it 10 years later!
I think this guy is just really into writing horrible things happening to children. he wrote a trilogy where two teenagers living in a world of immortals got assigned to be the people who killed others once and for all and the whole time they had to battle mass murderers in the group who found joy in permanently killing as many people as possible in a violent manner and one of them was named after Ayn Rand which should explain everything
I'm halfway through and I have a note: Mai is another canonical woman of color in the book, being referred to as Asian multiple times. I don't think there's any acknowledgement as to how killing herself and others for a political point is similar to being a kamikaze, though
Crow is back! Crow is back! All hail our lord Crow! Hi! Thank you for the nearly 5 hours of serotonin! (Turning Humpty Dumpty into a scary story about a kid named Humphrey Dunfee is so genius. I keep coming back to it omg.)
I mean they never say Humpty Dumpty is an egg so in reality it would be terrifying. I'm surprised more grim dark fairy retellings haven't done it more often
So for the Belgium and Netherlands being some of the first countries being ok with the whole unwinding thing , I think it may be because both countries have legalized euthanasia (under very stricts criteria) since the 2000's. So it creates a weird comparison between being ok with helping the conscious choice of people to pass away earlier in case of incurable and very life altering illness and killing teen to harvest their organs.
This could make more sense if the history avoids clarifying who used unwinding for what. It could be that Belgium and the Netherlands offered unwinding as an option for euthanasia without any teen murder.
The bit that gets me most from moment one is the fact that unwinding as a concept and a process most resembles the particular type of physical abortion (as opposed to chemical abortion) that pro-lifers put on bilboards to scare people over to their side. "Doctors are dismembering babies! That's awful!" So UnWind comes along and says "Doctors are dismembering teenagers! That's awful! Also this is a deliberate metaphor for abortion!" The quickest implication to see is that if unwinding is wrong then those pro-lifers are right. I know there is way more to the books than just the basic setup, but between the first impressions and the "both sides" treatment the books give to issues that really don't have both sides... It's just really messy as a metaphor. I want a series where the concept of unwinding is centered on a plague or eugenics or something other than abortion, so the concept of unwinding can still be explored but the metaphor can be more clear.
idk if that's the conclusion. when I read this book in 8th grade, my takeaway was that denying abortion rights leads to much more horrific and convoluted "equivalent solutions" like unwinding. and also that the loss of bodily autonomy spirals way out of hand pretty immediately.
@@humanname99that’s the reality of the argument and really any argument regarding bans on things in America. Personally I’ve always seen the gun debate and abortion as the same thing from two different sides because ultimately they come down to some form of autonomy and ultimate those against both try to use “the children” as a way to make the point. And ultimately banning either just means that people will find alternate avenues for these actions.
i literally sat down and watched this entire video in one sitting and came away with a better understanding of revolutionary politics than before. the world of unwound is so gutwrenchingly heartbreaking that i felt like crying at times with how real it was. i remember reading the first book years ago and vaguely recall the unwinding scene, though it didn't stick with me like others, but hearing the entire series summarized really makes me wish for better YA (and to be a better writer myself even though i write adult) that actually recognizes it's target is meant to be the teens depicted NOT adults who can barely understand nuance
As a russian person I would definitely say that this series doesn't understand our politics lol. They would publicly denounce unwinding because it's "the awful thing they do in the West", 'work' on our own prototype of the thing that is DEFINITELY NOT UNWINDING YOU GUYS, then go and push the half-baked not-unwinding technology which won't even work properly 10 years late, when America has better tech already, to use it on political prisoners or smth. Great video about the series I have never heard about and will never read. Thanks very much, Crow.
i was so prepared to listen to you tear into something bad, but holy hell, this sounds super interesting and amazing. The hivemind of the dead child?? Thats FASCINATING. My audio of choice while getting an iron infusion and i had to avoid flapping my impaled arm in excitement
I wanted to keep it indeterminate if I liked or didn't like the series, but ultimately I REALLY do fck with unwind hard. It has a lot of really fun ideas and overall shusterman nails it. I'm pitching that new short story collection idea like maybe it'll get me included in the authors involved. I got story ideasss
Neal shusterman is really good at delivering that moment of catharsis as the world, plot and characters come together in the end and you suddenly understand what everything was leading to. Also random side note- as a kid I had a theory that one of his other series, scythe, was set in the far future of this same world (can’t remember my evidence but scythe was about a world in which death has been “cured” except from an organisation of hooded executioners culling the population and everything is run by a sentient ai god called the thunderdome)
I had the same theory lol. Think my evidence was that one guy who stayed alive by sewing his head onto another kids body and that was stated to be horrible and taboo it didn't seem unprecedented so I figured that it was a world that had unwinding.
Oh my god I didn’t realize he wrote that too. I thought that book was a bit…darker than some other YA books I’ve read (that part in the church stuck in my mind for weeks) I guess he’s always written stuff like that
the fact that the proposal "satisfied both sides" makes me think bro doesn't understand what pro-choice people want. like... the problem is the pregnancy. it's not really about not wanting children. once the child exists (and is 13???) the logic is that the pro-choice stance would be "get rid of this thing"??
I don’t understand how this would satisfy either side, really. As you’ve said, for pro-choice people, the problem is being pregnant, and such a solution would probably infuriate pro-choice people given that it would still be forcing people to carry pregnancies they don’t want, and committing unquestionable murder on top of it. I cannot fathom a world where someone would be against a fetus being aborted because they consider it to be murder, but be over the moon about a child watching their own vivisection. While yes, fiction does not have to be entirely realistic, if a book is going to address social issues it should… have a somewhat competent grasp of said social issues.
@@blackbirdssinginginthedead764I mean, what is the unwinding but a scifi version of stoning rebellious children from the Bible? We've had a pro-life politician imply they would drown their kids if they turned out gay, and pro-life activists get abortions themselves(or for family), and the pro-life terrorist group "the army of God" actually murder people and bomb clinics... so honestly between those things this doesn't seem that implausable that _some_ pro-life people would be fine with it(others genuinely care, but they arent the ones at the forfront unfortunately). In general the pro-life movement's concern for children seems to end with birth, as pro-life politicians tend to vote against measures that would help the children they wish to force to be born and only after they repealed RoeVWade did anyone ask "... wait what are we going to do to take care of them?" when the pro-choice side had been trying to implement those kinds of measures for decades by that point.
This'd also likely piss off pro life folks considering that the option to do something to said child that is *way* closer to murder than an abortion is still exists, just slightly further down the line
@@blackbirdssinginginthedead764the admiral did say by the end of the war nobody was really fighting for what they started out with, that’s not unheard of and pretty much is how every ideologically driven movment ultimate ends. Besides, the idea of what makes a person is central to the idea of this story and I could see him seeing the idea that if life doesn’t start at conception then why would it stop at unwinding?
@@creed8712 my problem is less with the Watsonian reasonings and more the Doylist ones. The concept of unwinding makes for a great dystopia, but invoking the issue of pro-choice versus pro-life and positing unwinding as a solution to that conflict - while explained in-universe - is not a concept I find holds much water as a vehicle for social commentary, which is ultimately what a lot of the Unwind series is about. You can write a story where the solution to a child custody dispute involves the children being baked into cupcakes and fed to stray animals, and no matter how well you explain the logic and reasoning behind it in-story, it doesn’t really work as a vehicle for commentary on the subject. I’ve read the books and the whole time I felt like Shusterman didn’t really understand the social issues he was bringing up- the story was enjoyable, the base concept of (often the execution of) unwinding made for an excellent dystopia, but the social commentary (unwinding as a replacement for abortion, issues regarding Native Americans, etc.) felt very surface-level and like Shusterman hadn’t really delved all that deeply into them while doing his preliminary research for the series.
i only ever read book one but the chapter that everyone talks about absolutely stuck with me. and also that last part with harlan coming together. it like. it lives with me
Oh fuck yes! I love this series! My English teacher read us the first book in middle school. Holy shit the scene of the kid actually going through the process of getting Unwound... It was haunting! It wasn't until I was in late high school when I learned it was a series
i was convinced this was an intentional reference to the infamous funky town mexical cartel video, where a man is partially flayed alive as various songs can be heard in the background, including funky town. but researching it the timelines don't add up. undivided was released in late 2014 and according to most sources funky town didn't appear online until 2015 at earliest. insane coincidence. i think it adds another layer of horror to the scene even if it was a complete fluke
Hayden’s story just kills me. It’s not a major point of focus in any of the books, but the idea that two parents could do that to their child out of spite really put words to the feelings I had a a teenager that parents often see their children as extensions of themselves rather than as autonomous people.
I feel compelled to read this series just so I could write fanfiction about how unwinding takes a hold in Europe. As annoying as USA-centrism is, USA does have a great influence over European markets and trends in many different ways (like how 2008 market crash affected us... I remember getting a lecture in school that we were heading towards depression for *some reason* and to be kind towards each other because a lot of parents might lose their jobs and struggle with bills. Imagine my surprise when I learned that all of this was caused by some assholes in wallstreet gambling the whole economy down the drain...). USA is fucking scary when it comes to markets and cultural influence. Uber managed to crawl its way into our streets and even when it didn't achieve monopoly, their representatives managed to _fucking change our taxi laws_ by their promises of how "opening the market is super good and profitable", crashing the whole industry. Now our taxis are less safe, cost more and the drivers have worse job security. I will never stop seething over that, thanks fpr asking. Yet, we really depend on having good relations with USA, especially if you're smaller European country and happen to be neighbours with Russia. USA's elections don't just affect USA, they directly affect _our markets_ due to multiple different incentives from different sides. How friendly USA is with Russia directly affect the security of whole nations inside Europe. It's a shitty situation to be in but what can you do. I just beg that you yankees *fucking vote* in your elections and take it seriously. It's so hard to really emphasize how much sway you guys have in really weird ways. Anyway, even though unwinding is a wild concept, how it would adapt into European mindset and priorities would be really interesting to explore. There would also be super juicy political conflict when it comes to EU and "unwinding" getting adopted in different countries at different times. God that would require so much research to get right but there is so much potential.
The term “yin family” for gay couples is……..very interesting. Yin (as in yin/yang) is meant to represent feminine energy, & given that gay men are often stereotyped as overly feminine (ESPECIALLY back when this was written)……bit of a red flag imo
Yeah ive read some of shustermans other books, including one of his more recent ones called game changer, which is about alternate universe stuff. I always just think of it as the book where the main character becomes 1/8th gay…
@@grant9637 yeah I think the 1/8 gay one was supposed to be about changing people's perspective "what if YOU were gay" but it just comes off as kinda homophobic and biphobic. I think shusterman could stand to do a little more research when talking about groups he is not familiar with and accept that there are probably some stories he shouldn't tell.
Listen, the Heat Suit is clearly ingenius way to get all those extra limbs waiting in all those warehouses across America off the shelves! Would replacing the razors with bigger airtank make sense? Sure. But it would not sell murdered-teenager-arms and -legs!
hello, thai person here! hearing you read that excerpt describing thailand (the market and the lychee thing) feels like i'm hearing a TTRPG DM describing a setup for Something, not thai markets, but Something. maybe an urban fantasy campaign? goofy as hell, i'm obsessed honestly.
I have spent years of my life describing these books in graphic detail to people. You are a hero for creating a reference point to make me sound less batshit
This series had me in a GRIP in high school, first time I physically ran to the library to get the next book The one fucked up scene in the first book was WILD and I remember staring at the wall for a minute after I finished it. I honestly want to reread the series since I have all of it but it’s SO heavy and I have to be in a mentally to be able to read it. 10/10 would suffer through the chapter tm again Also I haven’t watched the whole video, but my favorite piece trivia is that the characters had twitter accounts, Roland had one and my favorite tweet of his was along the lines of “hey Connor can you PLEASE remember that that’s my arm too???”
It’s not really child murder if they all live on through their body parts. Also. Roland’s unwinding is the best bit of body horror I’ve ever seen that has yet to be topped, and it’s from a kids book.
I *did* read this as a teen! And it was heartbreaking and scary and I have never felt grief over an 'irredeemable' character like Roland before or since! As for my two cents, I think the point of "this would make kids more afraid of organ donation" is fair but also I feel like it pushes one (or at least myself) towards our current form of organ donation. You can't be Schrödinger's Cat'd if you're donating after death or with your consent alone. Edit to continue my rambling and two more of my cents: I forgot a lot about Lev’s fostering via Native Americans arc so it was a slap in the face to hear it again with a more mature mind. Neal put so much thought into this universe and then just… stereotyped Native Americans to death while making Lev a little White Savior.
Thank you for addressing and explaining the ableism in this book. Also thank you for tackling the really vague and flawed “disabled enough” factor in unwinding. So many dystopian books leave disability out completely, so I was glad Shusterman included it, but I’m looking forward to a book that does a better job with it.
The parents don't seem human with the premise. Like, I can see a system where teens who don't achieve certain standards or who violate certain societal morals might be condemned to unwinding, and how people might submit to such an unfeeling system, but to actually volunteer their own kids? Who they've been made to raise for near on 13 years? Maybe the orphans and foster kids, maybe a few dysfunctional families, but by and large, it'd probably be beyond the average parent to be able to detach their emotional bonds and toss away the 'problem child' just like that. But it's certainly an interesting narrative.
Wait till you hear the stories of LGBT+ children who ran away for their safety. Like, there's a reason why there's a Bible verse dedicated to giving the ok to stone rebellious children, and it's not because people are incapable of that level of hatred towards their own children.
To me, this whole thing feels more like an allegory for the Troubled Teen Industry. If everyone is convinced that Unwound aren’t “dead”, simply in a “Divided State”… Well, convincing a parent that their teen hasn’t been traumatized into compliance, but that they’ve actually gotten better- that happens. Obviously, traumatized does not equal DEAD, however I can see the exaggeration.
I think Neil might have been attempting to reference Adolphus Huxley's A Brave New World with some of the Native American stuff, given he's also named characters after prominent authors and literary figures, but I think he lacked the self awareness to realize that portrayal was ALSO problematic and that yknow, those are real life groups and not literary devices?
thank you for bringing this series to your audience's attention. my life was not complete until i learned that one of the main characters of unwind almost dies while listening to funkytown. i had to pause the video and laugh for a full minute. shusterman you silly goose also, love the loud shirt! i also have a morning witch button down; it's the one with corvid skulls :)
Imagine going Through It, unsure if your ship will theseus or if this is your last moment as yourself... All while Funkytown plays in the background. 💀💀💀
I'm only a few minutes into the video, but I'm stopping it now so i can go read the series myself first. I read the Scythe series by ol' Mr. Neal, and I loved it so much. I'm hoping this series is anywhere near as good as Scythe. idk how long it'll take, but I'll be back to this video once I'm done. I'll see y'all sometime
sorry, i just wanted to leave another comment on how much i really liked this review for how much it left me floating afterwards due to how enraptured i was within the world of your words and unwound. even now as i've finished watching i need to remind myself that the world of unwound is not real because i felt for a moment as if i was transported into the nightmare that was their universe, and frankly i'm still a little freaked out by the utter terror of the characters
god i LOVED this series in middle school, it's haunted me for years now. my friend even wrote an unwind/glee crossover fanfic back in the day. b/c 2011 was just Like That.
i have been waiting for someone to talk about this series for AGES!!! I read it in middle school and then remembered it years later and was totally baffled
She should not have touched that wall!!! It's so wild to me THAT is where the story goes. It'll live on inside me forever as one of the dumbest things I've read
@@Crowcallerwhen stories do stuff that dumb like touching the lava cave wall or not knowing how sepsis works it kind of cures my imposter syndrome with writing lol
As someone who works around medical stuff and terminology, the UnClean section was making me scream internally. None of this works like that! If limbs don't move, their oxygen demand is fairly low in the grand scheme of things - your heart and brain are probably the most demanding, and I doubt the suit is going terminate those vital organs. You can heal naturally from sepsis - if you die, you don't have it any more! Hooray! I'm sure I'm not the first person to say all this, but oof. That section was giving me such major psychic damage jfc
Unbelievably that’s way less fucked up then what Bill did to Preston Northwest during the Gravity Falls finale 😅 (keep in mind GF ran on the fucking Disney Chanel)
I have watched this video over the course of the week and it has made my week better. I am fascinated by this series, and what really caught me by surprise is how it seems to handle Grace really well, and then totally drops the ball with Dirk in his epilogue, but I suppose that is realistic in that acceptance and understanding of developmental disabilities depends on how socially acceptable their behaviors are.
When I was in middle school I saw a fan video about someone going through the unwinding surgery and it gave me nighmares for weeks. I already have a phobia of hospitals and surgery. While it fascinates me, it also terrifies me viscerally, and that fan film crystallized all my fears. I've always been curious about the series but too terrified to actually read it, so thank you for this breakdown.
Same. I find these books utterly fascinating, but I know my limits for medical horror, and these would 100% give fuel to my phobias. That film also messed me up.
WOO this is rad. my group chat literally was like “new crow video!! five hours!!!!” also just a clarification, with no judgement at all-many tribes in the US have Pueblo in their names, and it looks like Dr. Debbie Reese is from Nambé Pueblo! I’m glad you highlighted her voice
I’m just listening on and oh NO not the spirit animals 😭 “THE” intertribal authority?? sir where 😭😭 yeah I’m glad you touched on this, even in the midst of a pretty glowing review. I always really appreciate your honesty
Oh my god, you just uncovered a deep dark childhood memory! I read this book! I think I was about ten and the moment where you think the rich dad guy is going to kill all of them and put his son back together traumatized me so much I never finished the series xD
I've never read the series, but I do remember when we had to write short stories in High school and a classmate of mine ripped off the concept and I only found out a year later when I saw a TikTok about the series and I was like "Oh, she just stole the idea." And also the Selection, as the MC was named after America as an act of rebellion by her parents. Wild
Oh, forgot, when I read Scythe that chapter Crow talks about at the start with the piano orphan, was at the end of the book as a bonus chapter, which I didn't get at all So for years I just thought that was Scythe lore and was extremely confused
I'm so glad that someone else didnt like 'tender is the flesh'. Along with the blood libel shenanigans it also had really weird anti science vines that were in particularly bad taste given its release during covid. Hate seeing it still highlighted in bookstores. Thanks for your efforts here your voice is a perfect mix of soothing without being sleep inducing. I would have never been exposed to this series if you didnt bring it up. Looking forward to working through the rest of this video over the next few weeks!
"Is everyone who drinks Fanta doomed to hell" is such a banger of a line Edit: oh my god trying to fix sepsis with fire is so delulu. The only thing I will say is in the hells of capitalism I CAN see the heat suit created. They probably charged the government a boatload for these stupid bells and whistles.
Wow I see myself a lot in the Rewinds. Their speech and Dirk's inner thoughts remind me so much of myself and especially what happens to me when I dissociate or have breakdowns. Even their concept itself I relate to in a way, especially as an autistic person. How you try to be a "good human" and piece together yourself from other bits of people and social expectations, to the extent where you don't truly know who you are anymore. And what I went through as a teenager, repressing myself instead of being "cringe" or "too much", made it so much worse, and only as an adult did I begin to unlearn that. And even now I still barely have an actual distinct personality, or at least awareness of one, the real one, the eccentric child I was, still hidden deep inside me and only rarely peaking through. The concept of this series really interests me, for all the series' flaws, I'll probably pick up at least the first book! I wish that the exploration of what wild body horror experiments someone might do in this world we see in UnNatural Selection was given a better chance and not wrapped up in racism, I think it could be really interesting.
the whole cyfi thing + harlan + "parts have a small consciousness" implies that everyone who: - has a brain transplant/brain part transplant - has a transplant and meets others who have parts of the same body is some sort of plural , and it also heavily implies brain transplants cause something similar to some presentations of osdd/did. which as a concept...has flaws, but its VERY interesting. does this mean someone who has several brain transplants has a system that has a physical medical cause?
There are a LOT of things to discuss about this series, but the thing that captured my brain was the firefighter heat suit. It’s like something out of Five Nights At Freddy’s. Also, I know Neal Shusterman from another series: the Skinjacker Trilogy (commonly called the Everlost Series). It’s about dead children and the premise of, “What if everyone between 5 and 18 (estimation) was sent to purgatory instead of an afterlife?” Oh yeah, and another question, “What if a trait that you defined yourself by slowly consumed you until you became unrecognizable and forgot your old self?” I was a teen when I first read the series and loved it. Currently skimming through it to re-experience my favorite parts, and from what I’ve read, it still holds up!
The Cam..? Moo..? Camera? Milk? moment that was comedy of errors’d into _OMG he’s a genius he knows Camus!_ whilst naming Cam has lived rent free in my brain for the last five years😂
i read just the first book and immediately came to the conclusion that the souls were only trapped because of unwinding; that regular organ donation just involved organs from corpses whose souls were already gone. it never made me afraid or organ donations; mostly it just was one of the first coming-to-consciousness moments of how much control malicious adults could/did/do have over the lives of kids
I think it's maybe a safe guess that the weird trapped soul stuff only happens because of the process of unwinding, but I wish it'd been explored or addressed more
I listened to this in one sitting and it took me till literally the end of the video to realise that the books were not called Unholy and UnSold and y'know what that's my punishment for putting it on in the background.
2:42:34 "Good body horror is often not about the wrongness of the body so much as the wrongness of the self. Often it's a wrongness of the self that is then expressed through the body." 😲😲😲😲😲😲😲😲
Thank you SO MUCH for talking about this series, nobody else ever seems to have heard of it. I read it in middle school while my mom was going through kidney failure and eventually waiting for and receiving a transplant. The portrayal of organ transplantation in fiction is universally negative and ghoulish and these books filled me with so much shame and fear and I couldn't put them down and couldn't stop thinking about them. I almost forgot they were supposed to be about abortion. How do you even unpack that SKDGLDHS?
One thing that’s really interesting to me, is that transplants seem to be this worlds version of body modification. Like a mix of the systems in Cinder, Uglies, Hunger Games(the capitol), and Cyberpunk 2077 with the body stealing of Get Out. They’re selling the body parts, not just using them randomly. People could select certain parts for their traits. You want your kid to be an athlete, just give them the lungs or heart of one. You want to be a musician, take the hands off of one. You want blue eyes… Isn’t that eugenics in its own way? People could have children just to sell their traits off to the highest bidder. Fuck don’t even do that, pay someone to be artificially inseminated and then raise them to sell once they’re 18. At least natal care would probably be better in a world like this. They probably auction of celebrity body parts after they die, or i wonder if you could leave them to someone in your will. You could even make an argument that it’s a net good thing for the world. They’ve probably advanced so much medically, all sorts of ailments could be cured by having free bodies. Governments would be more incentivized to take care of people considering that they’d get double the value. It’s horrifying, but could be almost utopian. I feel like you could explore so many technological science fiction questions with this universe. OHH MY GODDDD. This is the perfect scenario for human experimentation
Omg I read this series in middle school! I don’t remember the dismemberment scene-but I grew up to be a big horror/gore fan so may/e it didn’t scare me as much as other people? Idk Tysm for making this video essay!
same and same! I don't love gore but I looove psychological and body horror. I think it's well done enough to be really unsettling but not genuinely damaging to the target audience. at least in my experience
I was always kinda on the fence about Unwind. I LOVED the body horror, but i hated all the characters 😅 One of his short stories has always stuck with me though, the one about the grandma who starts to see events before they happen (
I just yesterday saw this series suggested in another comment section (maybe Cari Can Read's Uglies video ?) and thought, hey, that sounds like something Crow would cover! Lo and behold! Excited for this one.
I know the sepsis was more important but can i just point out that the burn is bad enough she also would not of felt any pain. The nerves would have been damaged to the point that she couldnt. Then again the hand should have exploded so it doesn't really matter.
Only 13 min in, but I gotta say this premise doesn’t sound nearly as insane as it would have 10 years ago, argh. It just feels like the entire world is losing their minds!
I was having a massive anxiety attack when you released this and listening to you talk was distracting/calming enough for me to come down and sleep. Kind of an odd series to feel calm over but it helped lol. Thank you!!!
Kids deliberately disabling themselves at 13 and after 18 just saving up and buying new parts would actually help to bridge the gap of "wait who is buying all of these ears that we have left over?". The demand for parts is high because it's induced demand, really feeding into the fucked-up cycle of unwinding.
@@HaapainenRouske this and getting pregnant. Much like anti-abortion laws try to get people to make more workers, it tracks in unwind that you would make it an incentive to get pregnant asap as a loophole out of being unwinded
@@addoworkman2173 Teen pregnancy would have been a perfect over-arching tie-in.
Reading the comments before watching much of the video is a real ride for this one.
@@addoworkman2173that is actually mentioned in the book as happening
The idea that ANY pro-choice person would think “oh I have to go through an unwilling pregnancy, the thing I’m against, and 13 YEARS of parenting, and THEN I can choose to *kill the kid I just raised*? Sounds like a deal!” is so baffling and uncomfortable
yeah, no, Neal Shusterman is definitely world-building in bad faith, which makes it hard to take any of the commentary seriously
I think the idea is that any reason bacame so lost that it was accepted?
@@marocat4749 Except that like, what's being described at that point is disingenuous. It's suggesting that both sides are so crazy that one side is murdering abortion doctors, and the other side is getting pregnant just to sell the tissue. But one of those things is real! One of those things had happened multiple times in the 90s, before this book was published, and the man who was murdered in 2009 had in fact himself been shot previously in 1993 by an anti-abortion advocate who was TRYING to kill him. So he's completely invented a horrifying crazy pro-choice position, to pair with... the actual opinions and actions of real anti-abortion activists.
So, um, yeah. That's why it doesn't work. You can't say that "both sides went crazy" because one side already was, before this was written.
RIGHT!?
It does not make any sense!
yeah wtf the entire point of pro choice is that you get to CHOOSE to not have a child... this is still FORCING people to have kids. like??????????
Very funny that Connor avoids falling into the stock/cliche love triangle/jealousy/romance YA plots being laid infront of him because he's just Too Fucking Busy trying to run this revolution.
Connor really said no time for romance i got a world to save💀
He’s trying so hard lol
Bro's work/life balance is screwed
hey besties just wanna share my personal trauma with unwind. I read it in 11th grade English class and one day soon after I had to get my wisdom teeth taken out. I got put under and thought I was being unwound, and the dentists literally woke me up and said i was crying while I slept and they asked me what I had seen… I told them and then the hot male nurse held my hand as I got put under a second time, and the entire time I was half conscious telling myself i was not in fact being unwound and i would wake up shortly
I genuinely love how you put in the detail that the male nurse was hot
@@E.K.Bravemanit is a vital part of the story
@@E.K.Braveman it was very important (unironically)
@@E.K.Bravemanno bc i wouldn’t have been able to get my teeth out otherwise 😭
Oh my gosh thank you for sharing
So, I'm currently about 1 hour 35 minutes in, and I think I might have discovered a subtle hint of worldbuilding that went unaddressed but just lurks in the background. You mentioned that teen pregnancy is rampant, resulting in all these storked babies and remark that sex education must be nonexistent. But I don't think that's the case. The whole crux of this story rests on abortion being illegal, and so my thought is this: teenagers are deliberately getting pregnant in an attempt to save their own lives, or at least prolong them by 9 months. Abortion being illegal means they wouldn't be able to terminate the pregnancy in order to unwind the teen in question, right? And I find it really strange that contraception wouldn't be at least OFFERED to these teenagers by a government already hellbent on controlling their bodies. So therefore, unless proven otherwise later, I'm going to operate under the assumption that these desperate victims of the system are feeding it out of survival.
Replying to myself now that I'm later in, I was correct 😔
I didn’t even consider it in that way, that’s so awful
yeah, I was thinking this and someone else already mentioned self induced disability being really the only workable loopholes to avoid being unwinded as a teenager. There are kids out there playing the loophole game as hard as the adults that offered unwinding as a solution. It's really too bad we don't get a POV character who does ether of these things tbh.
That is the case for some background characters if I remember. There is a SA attempt scene where they offer to get her pregnant to keep her safe for a while longer
I will say, many institutions who want to control peoples bodies are anti birth control (think Christian nationalists in the US)
‘highly toxic, anti-found family, evil road trip’ is my new favorite thing.
Absolutely amazing.
Not even an hour into the video but the passage of Tyler (a boy who only exists as 1/8 of Cy's brain) begging his parents not to be unwound, unable to realize that he already has been, is legitimately really sad and scary.
Like, that's a horrifying concept right there.
God, having a character named Cyrus Finch and shortening it to Cy-fi is so good. In real life that kid would be the coolest person in his middle school
@@alicethemad1613 realizing his name is “finch” like a bird and essentially becomes the canary of the possessed body parts is kind of wild tbh.
when I was in high school, my partner and I cut the unwinding chapter into a dramatic duet and performed it at speech tournaments together. They played Roland and I played the doctors that were doing the unwinding, we had synchronized choreography and everything. it was probably my favorite bit of dramatic acting I've ever done, I so wish someone had gotten a video of it! the look on the judges/fellow competitors faces when it was over is a memory I treasure. I never did read the rest of the series, so thanks for this video I finally get to figure out what the rest of this story is about!
That's SUPER cool!
That's WILD but imao sick as hell
Heyo fellow interp nerd!
that is incredibly cool and also bizarre in the best way
no way that’s amazing! wish i could see smth like this at tournaments
On the firefighting suit!
There was this GREAT body horror comic I read about a lost astronaut in a futuristic suit that optimizes survival. When the astronaut gets too weak to walk the suit makes him walk. It cuts off limbs and re-feeds them back to the body so that no matter What, the astronaut returns to base. It “eats” his extra organs, skin and muscle, and lastly his eyes so that by the end he is a skeleton and a brain shuffling along held in stasis in this suit. The firefighter suit reminds me of that comic, like it was trying to approximate that kind of body horror but it fell so short. The astronaut was terrifying because it had a certain rhyme/reason.
The comic is “The Suit” by bad space comics
YES I also thought of that comic as soon as the suit was mentioned!
Hey thanks, this guy's comics are insane
That's a great comic, and it reminds me of an equally horrifying Stephen King story called "Survivor Type" about a surgeon who self-cannibalizes on a desert island
5 HOURS OF TEARING APPART A RANDOM BOOK I’VE NEVER HEARD OF YIPPEEEEEEE
Me: "What? Five hours?" ... Looks at runtime. "Holy hell!"
Tearing apart... pun intended?
@@ww3196 Yes :)
Honestly I live for these videos
The idea that this would satisfy the "pro-choice" crowd is so baffling. This is the exact opposite of what they are asking for.
Honestly, the only way this could wind up this way is total victory by the pro life crowd. Fetus's have rights, but teen agers can be used however their parents want is basically the pro-life stance.
Between that and the gay marriage thing, I think it's more plausible that the pro life crowd DID win in the book's universe. I don't think it's a stretch to start with a violent right-wing uprising mollified by a conservative military forcing the government to capitulate to their demands and jump forward to a future where that history has been painted over as a "there was violence on both sides" compromise.
@@kappaross6124 Exactly what happened with the first civil war tbh.
Right?? What did the pro choice side even got out this deal? Sounds like a parody of what pro life people would want. Cause after the child is born they have no rights, Cause it all about the parental rights...
Pro-life people already support the death penalty and enlisting 18 yos into the military. They also vote consistently to remove social support for children, the disabled, and the elderly. Is this really even that much of a stretch? I don't think so.
@@luizabianco right? Bc apart from raising a child with all its emotional struggles, it's the pregnancy I want to avoid the most, if that wasn't a big deal id just say let's go, have the baby and give it up for adoption 😭
Regarding the "souls" - I always thought the book left it vague, despite the party scene. Despite being in-universe propaganda, the world-building agrees that unwound kids aren't really dead, at least not in the same way as normal dead people. Unlike normal organ donation, every part of them was used, and there was never a moment where they "died". I believe it's implied that the fantasy "unwinding" procedure is the reason why memory/personally transfer is so common in this world. You aren't receiving the organ of a dead person - you are receiving a fragment of a person who is neither alive nor dead.
If you accept that unwound kids *are* truly stuck between life and death, it could explain why the Admiral's son briefly "speaks" when all his parts are together. It also heightens the horror significantly.
It’s like being in a coma but also in a million bodies. It’s mortifying.
I wish that concept was in a good book. Horrifying states of un-death are one of the most fascinating things to explore in fiction, and I hate that this one is in the _"They_ want to be able to abort teenagers!!2!1" book.
@@lalas181 the books are good though! Except for the short stories about the Rerounds that was terrible.
schroedinger's boy fr
It's also like, an implication about how there was no autonomy in the action of donating those parts. The reason why these kids are haunting/haunted by them is because the kids themselves never gave permission for that exchange.
The sad thing about "people of chance" is that it genuinely is a great term for an oppressed minority group kicked from their homes into the diaspora. Like, they had to take their chances elsewhere. It's extremely evocative. As a Jewish person I wouldn't be upset if this was a goyish term for us in a sci-fi novel, or a term for a counterpart culture in a fantasy novel, provided the rest of the depiction was respectful, of course. And then Shusterman has to ruin it by giving it to the one minority group who is largely known for running casinos. Great effing job, dude.
+
Slight side tangent: You can totally land an airplane without a landing gear. You just slide down the runway. You can’t take off without one though (which makes me think it should be called a take-off gear)
It's pretty telling that when pro-choice and anti-choice stances are put against each other and stretched to extremes to illustrate how bad the conflict was in this universe that a whole civil war broke out, the pro-choice extreme side has to be comically evil (getting pregnant on purpose just to abort??? Huh???) when anti-choice is just... what that side is actually advocating for (as in forcing people to give birth but not giving a shit about helping these children afterwards).
Arguing against pro-choice advocates seems to always come down to misunderstanding what pro-choice even is about and what abortion even means and when it is used. Like how many times I've heard a person say "I would be pro-choice but... I don't know if I would ever be able to abort my own baby...". Honey, pro-choice means you can _choose_. You do not have to get an abortion to be pro-choice. I wish no-one ever would need an abortion, that's not an easy decision to make and sometimes you literally have no other option like if the fetus suddenly dies due to no fault of your own and you have to get an abortion or you will get sepsis or you risk infertility or dying. I truly wish people didn't have go through these painful things, but the world is complicated and sometimes really cruel.
Not to mention all of the long waited pregnancies where there is a miscarriage or the fetus is so malformed that it wont survive no matter what, or there is a serious complication and it comes down to saving the mother or letting both the mother and baby to die unless they can get an abortion.
My heart also breaks for those people who have been pressured into abortion and it really wasn't their choice.
I hope I never end up in a situation where I would have to have an abortion, but I want that to be an option on the table in case it is needed to safe my life or to end an unviable pregnancy so I could try again for a healthy one.
I want all of the children in this world to have the best life possible, and giving parents ability to choose when to reproduce through sex education, contraceptives, abortion and crucially - robust support systems after birth and later in life - gives people the best starting point to grow up unneglected and healthy.
To be kind of harsh, pro-choice advocacy recognizes the realities of pregnancy, birth and all of the medical and social risks tied to it. Anti-choice rhetoric willingly closes its eyes and spins tall tales of morality and responsibility, without engaging with the reality of medical necessity of abortion, how many pregnancies are concieved through rape or incest or the fact that withholding sex education ("abstinence only" is not education) takes away teens ability to even be "responsible" or "moral". If they don't know how sex or conception works, how would they know how to avoid it? Anti-choice rhetoric lives in a fantasy, while pro-choice is operating in the real world and tackling all of its messiness with empathy.
This series would have been even better if it would have gone full theocracy, not having unwinding to be a "compromise" but a control mechanism after the anti-choice side has won the civil war. Pro-choice side could be pushed into compliance by force. You could have the parents who are happy to get rid of their troubled teens and parents who would be desperate to "save" them from this society by prematurely ending (but not really) their life through unwinding.
But that's just a nitpick. But it's kind of surprising how little the series deals with pregnancy and abortion, when bodily autonomy is such a big theme. What an interesting series.
Agreed - i totally agree with crow when they mention how only the anti choice side really wins in this war and the pro choice side gets nothing
What’s comically evil about getting pregnant just to have an abortion? Honestly it seems like what would be the first step in the natural evolution towards unwinding.
YES YES YES EXACTLY
Absolutely you nailed it. On one hand, we have the actual reality of what some people are arguing (which is that fetusus should be protected, but the second they're born? You're on your own, bucko) and on the other hand we have. What looks like A Modest Proposal if you squint??? These two things are not the same.
@@SlimeMcfly That's a good point. I just feel that would be unplausible, unless getting pregnant and then going through abortion over and over again isn't as taxing on the body in UnWind universe as it is in our world.
Pregnancy does a lot of things like raises hormone levels, causes nausea (morning sickness is no joke), makes you tired or erratic... Even if the pregnancy is ended super early, it affects the body it happens to.
Of course there is variety of experiences, for some being pregnant has a little effect on them and for some -pregnancy is lethal. Even when the risks are low, every pregnancy is always a risk. So to go through that --presumably multiple times - just for profit and/or protest seems not worth it.
But it would make sense that if people just could go through getting pregnant, then aborting and getting pregnant over and over, and there were no material consequences of any kind from it, then doing that for profit and/or protest would probably be the next logical step.
Current medical school student here - you are absolutely correct that sepsis is NOT treated by amputation except in the event that a limb that originates the infection is beyond repair due to necrosis or gangrene, and also cauterizing the wound like she does wouldn't 'burn the infection out' (???) at all, it's only used to stop active bleeding. In fact, what she did would actually make her skin more susceptible to having even MORE bacteria pour in because burned skin is weaker and loses its innate defenses. The only real treatment for sepsis is to take blood for cultures and send those off to the lab to be grown, and since that takes a while, treat the patient with broad-spectrum antibiotics intravenously until more information is available about the specific bacteria causing the infection.
It also just seems like the author is using "sepsis" when they really mean "bacteremia", which is the term for having bacteria in your blood traveling around your body? Sepsis is the response of your body TO bacteremia, and involves things like fever/fast heartbeat/low blood pressure/organ failure/etc, which I don't think are considered here, since only the 'tainted blood' is referred to???
idk that entire short story was really bizarre and immediately made me raise an eyebrow. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for some of the science but clearly no research was done for that particular portion at all lol
Wonderful video as always!!
THANK YOU!!! Sincerely, an EMT losing her mind at the sepsis / amputation-for-oxygen-conservation section
I was wondering if they initially thought of an open wound that could get infected if left untreated/open. If you had to use emergency measures, I think searing the wound is the right choice? (correct me here if I'm wrong)
I have no idea why they decided to include sepsis. Maybe because it sounds cool? Especially with the chapter name being "Unclean" and calling it "tainted blood".
@@cooraaYes! If it's an open wound and you have no other safe way to stop bleeding and contamination, cauterizing can be done as a last ditch effort. It's not recommended though, as most people don't do it correctly and end up causing more damage to themselves.
I assume the US government had to clear out their cheese warehouses to make room for the surplus body parts.
I know these were less known about at the time and not the main theme of the series, but I can't help but see the parallels to the troubled teen industry.
Troubled teen schools or camps ads sound exactly like the newspaper ad for the unwinding camps. Going to a troubled teen camp is often thrown at teens as an alternative to jail. These camps are often such terrible situations and many children die to fund the scam, and kids are a mix of kids who's parents just trusted someone they shouldn't, and parents who know what they are getting into but think it's best.
Oh no its very deliberate and alluded to in book! Not in fiction but in one of the section breaks where there's excerpts of real articles. Troubled teen industry was very very deliberately invoked
@@Crowcaller that makes me like the books more, because the problems of foster care systems, group homes, the school to prison pipeline, and the troubled teen industry are all also part of the conservative anti choice movement
This is in regards to UnStrung: I'm also not a member of any North American indigenous tribe, but I am Native Hawaiian. I am more than well acquainted with the idea of non-native people taking a large group of indigenous folks and trying to amalgamate us into a monolith to "avoid misrepresentation 🥺," or to "make sure every person in this general category of human feels seen 🥰," which literally makes no sense whatsoever. (I'm lookin' at you, Moana...! Disney literally pulled a Pocahontas/Brother Bear YET AGAIN. 😒)
For them to write an indigenous girl who tells the non-native central character of the book, "Oh, it's okay you called me a slur, teehee!" makes my hackles raise. Sure, there are people who are fine with people calling them a slur as long as they end up immediately apologizing for it, but it is only for someone of that group to decide they're okay with it. Non-native folks writing a character that says they're fine being called a slur, and renaming the broad group they're in to yet another *extremely similar slur* is just so ignorant and makes me so damn uncomfortable. It's like saying "Calling Blue Ai a coconut muncher is offensive. Call her a grass skirt, instead!" Screw off with that nonsense.
Also, Shusterman is Jewish. I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate that part of who he is being renamed to any number of offensive antisemetic stereotypes. And that's not even getting into the pseudomystisism blunders of Vision Quests and Spirit Animals. Yes, those exist to some extent in certain tribes/bands in real life, but as Crow stated, they are so misrepresented and stereotyped to death by people outside of these groups. Will undoing his girlfriend's hair is also not cute at all. It's not the same as brushing her emo-girl fringe out of her eyes; it's more akin to chopping her hair off because he likes it shorter. It's gross and I hate it.
Neal's statement in response to a woman who both has lived experience as an indiginous woman and whose job is literally to talk about representation also felt incredibly self-important and had an air of, "Sorry if *YOU* interpreted it as harmful." It rang hollow, especially with him bafflingly claiming that political correctness is as harmful as stereotyping, *while* stereotyping??? Wild, my dude. Also, what does he mean by "political correctness?" Asking for feedback from indigenous folks? WHAT DID YOU MEAN, NEAL?
I could go on a much longer tirade, but I don't have the mental energy to do so. So, thanks, Crow Caller for this video on a series I've never actually heard of that is equal parts interesting and baffling. Sorry if this is rant-y and hard to follow, lmao.
Editing to add: HOW DID HE GET NEURODIVERGENCE REP SO RIGHT BUT THE NATIVE AMERICAN REP IS SO BAD?!
Only mom is native (Cree/Blackfoot) so I'm pretty mixed, but omg I was FLOORED. ANIMAL ORGAN TRANSPLANTS????? PEOPLE OF CHANCE? It almost circled back around to being funny it was so ridiculous. I feel like this could have been avoided by talking to like, one Native person ever.
Oh my fucking gd, this guy is Jewish??? What tf happened that he would write such a Christian book series.
@@Lesyaaaaaaa Ugh, for real. I hope nowadays the author talks to people from communities he isn't a part of. It's so painful...😭
It’s possible that he is neurodivergent himself.
@@animeotaku307 So, I looked it up after reading this reply, and you're right: he has ADHD. Makes a lot of sense why neurodivergence was handled well.
I do love the horrifying little details Shusterman adds to the world building (when they’re done well). He has another series called Skinjackers about kids’ souls stuck in purgatory. It expands on the “rule” that’s ghosts can pass through walls, asking well wouldn’t they fall through the ground too? So the ghosts have to be sure to walk on “dead ground” (I think spots where tragedy/a lot of death happened) or else they just… sink slowly through the earth, conscious the entire time. The idea freaked me out enough when I first read it that I still remember it 10 years later!
I think this guy is just really into writing horrible things happening to children. he wrote a trilogy where two teenagers living in a world of immortals got assigned to be the people who killed others once and for all and the whole time they had to battle mass murderers in the group who found joy in permanently killing as many people as possible in a violent manner and one of them was named after Ayn Rand which should explain everything
Post-natal abortion is a joke within my friend group 😂 didn't realize there was a book series exploring the idea
I'm halfway through and I have a note: Mai is another canonical woman of color in the book, being referred to as Asian multiple times. I don't think there's any acknowledgement as to how killing herself and others for a political point is similar to being a kamikaze, though
(I added the last point because I find it strange that one of three clappers in the first book is repeatedly pointed out as being Asian)
Crow is back! Crow is back! All hail our lord Crow! Hi! Thank you for the nearly 5 hours of serotonin!
(Turning Humpty Dumpty into a scary story about a kid named Humphrey Dunfee is so genius. I keep coming back to it omg.)
I mean they never say Humpty Dumpty is an egg so in reality it would be terrifying. I'm surprised more grim dark fairy retellings haven't done it more often
I didn't even realize it was a humpty Dumpty reference 😭😭
Love how you go thru that emotional, touching scene around 49:30 of Harlan Dumphee, and end it with "chaoter 69. Nice."
So for the Belgium and Netherlands being some of the first countries being ok with the whole unwinding thing , I think it may be because both countries have legalized euthanasia (under very stricts criteria) since the 2000's. So it creates a weird comparison between being ok with helping the conscious choice of people to pass away earlier in case of incurable and very life altering illness and killing teen to harvest their organs.
I realized this afterwards! It was such a specific pull, many people know nothing about either country, but euthanasia probably was his lead in
@@Crowcaller Yes it's not well known outside the two countries and some neighbouring ones:)
That honestly a weird corocalatoin
This could make more sense if the history avoids clarifying who used unwinding for what. It could be that Belgium and the Netherlands offered unwinding as an option for euthanasia without any teen murder.
The bit that gets me most from moment one is the fact that unwinding as a concept and a process most resembles the particular type of physical abortion (as opposed to chemical abortion) that pro-lifers put on bilboards to scare people over to their side.
"Doctors are dismembering babies! That's awful!"
So UnWind comes along and says "Doctors are dismembering teenagers! That's awful! Also this is a deliberate metaphor for abortion!"
The quickest implication to see is that if unwinding is wrong then those pro-lifers are right.
I know there is way more to the books than just the basic setup, but between the first impressions and the "both sides" treatment the books give to issues that really don't have both sides...
It's just really messy as a metaphor. I want a series where the concept of unwinding is centered on a plague or eugenics or something other than abortion, so the concept of unwinding can still be explored but the metaphor can be more clear.
idk if that's the conclusion. when I read this book in 8th grade, my takeaway was that denying abortion rights leads to much more horrific and convoluted "equivalent solutions" like unwinding. and also that the loss of bodily autonomy spirals way out of hand pretty immediately.
@@humanname99that’s the reality of the argument and really any argument regarding bans on things in America. Personally I’ve always seen the gun debate and abortion as the same thing from two different sides because ultimately they come down to some form of autonomy and ultimate those against both try to use “the children” as a way to make the point. And ultimately banning either just means that people will find alternate avenues for these actions.
"I'd love to see some light cannibalism." Oh would you?
yes😏
What is thst though. A snack?
i literally sat down and watched this entire video in one sitting and came away with a better understanding of revolutionary politics than before. the world of unwound is so gutwrenchingly heartbreaking that i felt like crying at times with how real it was. i remember reading the first book years ago and vaguely recall the unwinding scene, though it didn't stick with me like others, but hearing the entire series summarized really makes me wish for better YA (and to be a better writer myself even though i write adult) that actually recognizes it's target is meant to be the teens depicted NOT adults who can barely understand nuance
As a russian person I would definitely say that this series doesn't understand our politics lol. They would publicly denounce unwinding because it's "the awful thing they do in the West", 'work' on our own prototype of the thing that is DEFINITELY NOT UNWINDING YOU GUYS, then go and push the half-baked not-unwinding technology which won't even work properly 10 years late, when America has better tech already, to use it on political prisoners or smth.
Great video about the series I have never heard about and will never read. Thanks very much, Crow.
i was so prepared to listen to you tear into something bad, but holy hell, this sounds super interesting and amazing. The hivemind of the dead child?? Thats FASCINATING. My audio of choice while getting an iron infusion and i had to avoid flapping my impaled arm in excitement
I wanted to keep it indeterminate if I liked or didn't like the series, but ultimately I REALLY do fck with unwind hard. It has a lot of really fun ideas and overall shusterman nails it. I'm pitching that new short story collection idea like maybe it'll get me included in the authors involved. I got story ideasss
The "Bothsidesism" is getting worse. Harmful racial stereotypes and political correctness are "equally offensive?"
Yeah this author really screamed enlightened centrist to me. (which means he favors conservative takes but is afraid to admit it publicly.)
Neal shusterman is really good at delivering that moment of catharsis as the world, plot and characters come together in the end and you suddenly understand what everything was leading to. Also random side note- as a kid I had a theory that one of his other series, scythe, was set in the far future of this same world (can’t remember my evidence but scythe was about a world in which death has been “cured” except from an organisation of hooded executioners culling the population and everything is run by a sentient ai god called the thunderdome)
I had the same theory lol. Think my evidence was that one guy who stayed alive by sewing his head onto another kids body and that was stated to be horrible and taboo it didn't seem unprecedented so I figured that it was a world that had unwinding.
Oh my god I didn’t realize he wrote that too. I thought that book was a bit…darker than some other YA books I’ve read (that part in the church stuck in my mind for weeks)
I guess he’s always written stuff like that
the fact that the proposal "satisfied both sides" makes me think bro doesn't understand what pro-choice people want. like... the problem is the pregnancy. it's not really about not wanting children. once the child exists (and is 13???) the logic is that the pro-choice stance would be "get rid of this thing"??
I don’t understand how this would satisfy either side, really. As you’ve said, for pro-choice people, the problem is being pregnant, and such a solution would probably infuriate pro-choice people given that it would still be forcing people to carry pregnancies they don’t want, and committing unquestionable murder on top of it. I cannot fathom a world where someone would be against a fetus being aborted because they consider it to be murder, but be over the moon about a child watching their own vivisection. While yes, fiction does not have to be entirely realistic, if a book is going to address social issues it should… have a somewhat competent grasp of said social issues.
@@blackbirdssinginginthedead764I mean, what is the unwinding but a scifi version of stoning rebellious children from the Bible?
We've had a pro-life politician imply they would drown their kids if they turned out gay, and pro-life activists get abortions themselves(or for family), and the pro-life terrorist group "the army of God" actually murder people and bomb clinics... so honestly between those things this doesn't seem that implausable that _some_ pro-life people would be fine with it(others genuinely care, but they arent the ones at the forfront unfortunately). In general the pro-life movement's concern for children seems to end with birth, as pro-life politicians tend to vote against measures that would help the children they wish to force to be born and only after they repealed RoeVWade did anyone ask "... wait what are we going to do to take care of them?" when the pro-choice side had been trying to implement those kinds of measures for decades by that point.
This'd also likely piss off pro life folks considering that the option to do something to said child that is *way* closer to murder than an abortion is still exists, just slightly further down the line
@@blackbirdssinginginthedead764the admiral did say by the end of the war nobody was really fighting for what they started out with, that’s not unheard of and pretty much is how every ideologically driven movment ultimate ends.
Besides, the idea of what makes a person is central to the idea of this story and I could see him seeing the idea that if life doesn’t start at conception then why would it stop at unwinding?
@@creed8712 my problem is less with the Watsonian reasonings and more the Doylist ones. The concept of unwinding makes for a great dystopia, but invoking the issue of pro-choice versus pro-life and positing unwinding as a solution to that conflict - while explained in-universe - is not a concept I find holds much water as a vehicle for social commentary, which is ultimately what a lot of the Unwind series is about. You can write a story where the solution to a child custody dispute involves the children being baked into cupcakes and fed to stray animals, and no matter how well you explain the logic and reasoning behind it in-story, it doesn’t really work as a vehicle for commentary on the subject. I’ve read the books and the whole time I felt like Shusterman didn’t really understand the social issues he was bringing up- the story was enjoyable, the base concept of (often the execution of) unwinding made for an excellent dystopia, but the social commentary (unwinding as a replacement for abortion, issues regarding Native Americans, etc.) felt very surface-level and like Shusterman hadn’t really delved all that deeply into them while doing his preliminary research for the series.
Video: [opening sentence]
Me: [chuckles] I’m in danger.
i only ever read book one but the chapter that everyone talks about absolutely stuck with me. and also that last part with harlan coming together. it like. it lives with me
SAME
That part reminded me so much of the cluster in Steven Universe, and ngl kinda made me emotional 😭
Oh fuck yes! I love this series!
My English teacher read us the first book in middle school.
Holy shit the scene of the kid actually going through the process of getting Unwound... It was haunting!
It wasn't until I was in late high school when I learned it was a series
SPOILERS BELOW
4:10:42 CONNOR IS UNWOUND TO FUNKYTOWN ARE YOU KIDDING ME IM LOSING MY MIND WHAT A CHOICE TO MAKE OH MY GOD HELP
Damn, I was so sure there was no spoiler that could hurt me... My own damn fault 😂
i was convinced this was an intentional reference to the infamous funky town mexical cartel video, where a man is partially flayed alive as various songs can be heard in the background, including funky town. but researching it the timelines don't add up. undivided was released in late 2014 and according to most sources funky town didn't appear online until 2015 at earliest. insane coincidence. i think it adds another layer of horror to the scene even if it was a complete fluke
Hayden’s story just kills me. It’s not a major point of focus in any of the books, but the idea that two parents could do that to their child out of spite really put words to the feelings I had a a teenager that parents often see their children as extensions of themselves rather than as autonomous people.
I feel compelled to read this series just so I could write fanfiction about how unwinding takes a hold in Europe.
As annoying as USA-centrism is, USA does have a great influence over European markets and trends in many different ways (like how 2008 market crash affected us... I remember getting a lecture in school that we were heading towards depression for *some reason* and to be kind towards each other because a lot of parents might lose their jobs and struggle with bills. Imagine my surprise when I learned that all of this was caused by some assholes in wallstreet gambling the whole economy down the drain...).
USA is fucking scary when it comes to markets and cultural influence. Uber managed to crawl its way into our streets and even when it didn't achieve monopoly, their representatives managed to _fucking change our taxi laws_ by their promises of how "opening the market is super good and profitable", crashing the whole industry. Now our taxis are less safe, cost more and the drivers have worse job security. I will never stop seething over that, thanks fpr asking.
Yet, we really depend on having good relations with USA, especially if you're smaller European country and happen to be neighbours with Russia. USA's elections don't just affect USA, they directly affect _our markets_ due to multiple different incentives from different sides. How friendly USA is with Russia directly affect the security of whole nations inside Europe. It's a shitty situation to be in but what can you do. I just beg that you yankees *fucking vote* in your elections and take it seriously. It's so hard to really emphasize how much sway you guys have in really weird ways.
Anyway, even though unwinding is a wild concept, how it would adapt into European mindset and priorities would be really interesting to explore. There would also be super juicy political conflict when it comes to EU and "unwinding" getting adopted in different countries at different times. God that would require so much research to get right but there is so much potential.
Please. I beg you. Euro anon, *please make this fanfiction*!
@@Wired_User I better start reading then lol
AO3 account so that I can read it, please
Local European discovers imperialism for the first time.
I love Divan. Big "I'm not like other organ thieves" energy
I remember reading these in school in 5th grade. I loved it so much. I own them. To date, I still recommend them to people.
Honestly I’ve been waiting for someone to make a video about this series.
The term “yin family” for gay couples is……..very interesting. Yin (as in yin/yang) is meant to represent feminine energy, & given that gay men are often stereotyped as overly feminine (ESPECIALLY back when this was written)……bit of a red flag imo
yeah that's probably the point...gay men being stereotyped as feminine...how is that part of worldbuilding a red flag? a red flag for what?
Yeah ive read some of shustermans other books, including one of his more recent ones called game changer, which is about alternate universe stuff. I always just think of it as the book where the main character becomes 1/8th gay…
@@grant9637 yeah I think the 1/8 gay one was supposed to be about changing people's perspective "what if YOU were gay" but it just comes off as kinda homophobic and biphobic. I think shusterman could stand to do a little more research when talking about groups he is not familiar with and accept that there are probably some stories he shouldn't tell.
@@grant9637 Only 1/8th???? What does that even MEAN
I’m 1/8th panromanic. /jk
No really I thought I was panromanic/acesexual but I’m just aro/ace
Listen, the Heat Suit is clearly ingenius way to get all those extra limbs waiting in all those warehouses across America off the shelves! Would replacing the razors with bigger airtank make sense? Sure. But it would not sell murdered-teenager-arms and -legs!
woah... capitalism...
hello, thai person here! hearing you read that excerpt describing thailand (the market and the lychee thing) feels like i'm hearing a TTRPG DM describing a setup for Something, not thai markets, but Something. maybe an urban fantasy campaign? goofy as hell, i'm obsessed honestly.
I have spent years of my life describing these books in graphic detail to people. You are a hero for creating a reference point to make me sound less batshit
This series had me in a GRIP in high school, first time I physically ran to the library to get the next book
The one fucked up scene in the first book was WILD and I remember staring at the wall for a minute after I finished it. I honestly want to reread the series since I have all of it but it’s SO heavy and I have to be in a mentally to be able to read it.
10/10 would suffer through the chapter tm again
Also I haven’t watched the whole video, but my favorite piece trivia is that the characters had twitter accounts, Roland had one and my favorite tweet of his was along the lines of “hey Connor can you PLEASE remember that that’s my arm too???”
Omg the firefighters are wearing five nights at freddy's suits
I had to watch this. So you do too.
The file, while editing, was called "UnTitled.mp4" be proud of my pun
Jesus christo not even three minutes in and this is already the most nuts things ive seen all week
It’s not really child murder if they all live on through their body parts.
Also. Roland’s unwinding is the best bit of body horror I’ve ever seen that has yet to be topped, and it’s from a kids book.
Yep, it's worse.
Death would be a mercy compared to unwinding.
@@the_last_balladis it worse? What makes a person a person and at what point is that line drawn
I *did* read this as a teen!
And it was heartbreaking and scary and I have never felt grief over an 'irredeemable' character like Roland before or since!
As for my two cents, I think the point of "this would make kids more afraid of organ donation" is fair but also I feel like it pushes one (or at least myself) towards our current form of organ donation. You can't be Schrödinger's Cat'd if you're donating after death or with your consent alone.
Edit to continue my rambling and two more of my cents:
I forgot a lot about Lev’s fostering via Native Americans arc so it was a slap in the face to hear it again with a more mature mind. Neal put so much thought into this universe and then just… stereotyped Native Americans to death while making Lev a little White Savior.
Thank you for addressing and explaining the ableism in this book. Also thank you for tackling the really vague and flawed “disabled enough” factor in unwinding. So many dystopian books leave disability out completely, so I was glad Shusterman included it, but I’m looking forward to a book that does a better job with it.
The parents don't seem human with the premise. Like, I can see a system where teens who don't achieve certain standards or who violate certain societal morals might be condemned to unwinding, and how people might submit to such an unfeeling system, but to actually volunteer their own kids? Who they've been made to raise for near on 13 years? Maybe the orphans and foster kids, maybe a few dysfunctional families, but by and large, it'd probably be beyond the average parent to be able to detach their emotional bonds and toss away the 'problem child' just like that. But it's certainly an interesting narrative.
Wait till you hear the stories of LGBT+ children who ran away for their safety.
Like, there's a reason why there's a Bible verse dedicated to giving the ok to stone rebellious children, and it's not because people are incapable of that level of hatred towards their own children.
To me, this whole thing feels more like an allegory for the Troubled Teen Industry. If everyone is convinced that Unwound aren’t “dead”, simply in a “Divided State”…
Well, convincing a parent that their teen hasn’t been traumatized into compliance, but that they’ve actually gotten better- that happens.
Obviously, traumatized does not equal DEAD, however I can see the exaggeration.
Apparently, 60% of people are organ donors, so it is not clear how much getting more people to register for organ donation could prevent unwinding.
I think Neil might have been attempting to reference Adolphus Huxley's A Brave New World with some of the Native American stuff, given he's also named characters after prominent authors and literary figures, but I think he lacked the self awareness to realize that portrayal was ALSO problematic and that yknow, those are real life groups and not literary devices?
thank you for bringing this series to your audience's attention. my life was not complete until i learned that one of the main characters of unwind almost dies while listening to funkytown. i had to pause the video and laugh for a full minute. shusterman you silly goose
also, love the loud shirt! i also have a morning witch button down; it's the one with corvid skulls :)
Imagine going Through It, unsure if your ship will theseus or if this is your last moment as yourself... All while Funkytown plays in the background. 💀💀💀
I'm only a few minutes into the video, but I'm stopping it now so i can go read the series myself first. I read the Scythe series by ol' Mr. Neal, and I loved it so much. I'm hoping this series is anywhere near as good as Scythe. idk how long it'll take, but I'll be back to this video once I'm done. I'll see y'all sometime
I read this series first and tbh i liked scythe more but only automatically bought the whole box set bc i loved the unwind series so much
I thought this was a fever dream I had in middle school. Can't wait to watch this!!
sorry, i just wanted to leave another comment on how much i really liked this review for how much it left me floating afterwards due to how enraptured i was within the world of your words and unwound. even now as i've finished watching i need to remind myself that the world of unwound is not real because i felt for a moment as if i was transported into the nightmare that was their universe, and frankly i'm still a little freaked out by the utter terror of the characters
god i LOVED this series in middle school, it's haunted me for years now. my friend even wrote an unwind/glee crossover fanfic back in the day. b/c 2011 was just Like That.
i have been waiting for someone to talk about this series for AGES!!! I read it in middle school and then remembered it years later and was totally baffled
Okay but that is a chilling premise and if the series sucks I am so ready to hear about how it could be done better
Lol that mine scene. Those morals made no sense they just wanted her to touch the wall 💀
She should not have touched that wall!!! It's so wild to me THAT is where the story goes. It'll live on inside me forever as one of the dumbest things I've read
@@Crowcallerwhen stories do stuff that dumb like touching the lava cave wall or not knowing how sepsis works it kind of cures my imposter syndrome with writing lol
As someone who works around medical stuff and terminology, the UnClean section was making me scream internally. None of this works like that! If limbs don't move, their oxygen demand is fairly low in the grand scheme of things - your heart and brain are probably the most demanding, and I doubt the suit is going terminate those vital organs. You can heal naturally from sepsis - if you die, you don't have it any more! Hooray!
I'm sure I'm not the first person to say all this, but oof. That section was giving me such major psychic damage jfc
“Oh no. Eye ears.” 😂😂
Unbelievably that’s way less fucked up then what Bill did to Preston Northwest during the Gravity Falls finale 😅 (keep in mind GF ran on the fucking Disney Chanel)
I have watched this video over the course of the week and it has made my week better. I am fascinated by this series, and what really caught me by surprise is how it seems to handle Grace really well, and then totally drops the ball with Dirk in his epilogue, but I suppose that is realistic in that acceptance and understanding of developmental disabilities depends on how socially acceptable their behaviors are.
so what i'm getting a few minutes in is that this is kazuo ishiguro's 'never let me go' for kids
When I was in middle school I saw a fan video about someone going through the unwinding surgery and it gave me nighmares for weeks. I already have a phobia of hospitals and surgery. While it fascinates me, it also terrifies me viscerally, and that fan film crystallized all my fears. I've always been curious about the series but too terrified to actually read it, so thank you for this breakdown.
Same. I find these books utterly fascinating, but I know my limits for medical horror, and these would 100% give fuel to my phobias. That film also messed me up.
WOO this is rad. my group chat literally was like “new crow video!! five hours!!!!”
also just a clarification, with no judgement at all-many tribes in the US have Pueblo in their names, and it looks like Dr. Debbie Reese is from Nambé Pueblo! I’m glad you highlighted her voice
I’m just listening on and oh NO not the spirit animals 😭 “THE” intertribal authority?? sir where 😭😭 yeah I’m glad you touched on this, even in the midst of a pretty glowing review. I always really appreciate your honesty
Oh my god, you just uncovered a deep dark childhood memory! I read this book! I think I was about ten and the moment where you think the rich dad guy is going to kill all of them and put his son back together traumatized me so much I never finished the series xD
crow, i love your videos so much. I'm only half an hour in but this discussion is already so thoughtful!!
thinking about the person who got a kidney (i believe) donation and unintentionally also recieved the donor's pee schedule
fell asleep during book two and woke up during book three, but i was fully certain i had not fallen asleep at all.
I’m so jazzed for your take on this! You are exactly the person I’ve wanted to hear talk about this ❤ Settling in for this long vid!
I’m so glad you like this series! It’s one of my favorites, especially for its world-building
I've never read the series, but I do remember when we had to write short stories in High school and a classmate of mine ripped off the concept and I only found out a year later when I saw a TikTok about the series and I was like "Oh, she just stole the idea." And also the Selection, as the MC was named after America as an act of rebellion by her parents.
Wild
Oh, forgot, when I read Scythe that chapter Crow talks about at the start with the piano orphan, was at the end of the book as a bonus chapter, which I didn't get at all
So for years I just thought that was Scythe lore and was extremely confused
I'm so glad that someone else didnt like 'tender is the flesh'. Along with the blood libel shenanigans it also had really weird anti science vines that were in particularly bad taste given its release during covid. Hate seeing it still highlighted in bookstores.
Thanks for your efforts here your voice is a perfect mix of soothing without being sleep inducing. I would have never been exposed to this series if you didnt bring it up. Looking forward to working through the rest of this video over the next few weeks!
"Is everyone who drinks Fanta doomed to hell" is such a banger of a line
Edit: oh my god trying to fix sepsis with fire is so delulu. The only thing I will say is in the hells of capitalism I CAN see the heat suit created. They probably charged the government a boatload for these stupid bells and whistles.
FIVE HOUR CROW CALLER VIDEO HELL YEAH
I know what I'm listening to at work tomorrow. Crow Caller don't miss.
Wow I see myself a lot in the Rewinds. Their speech and Dirk's inner thoughts remind me so much of myself and especially what happens to me when I dissociate or have breakdowns. Even their concept itself I relate to in a way, especially as an autistic person. How you try to be a "good human" and piece together yourself from other bits of people and social expectations, to the extent where you don't truly know who you are anymore. And what I went through as a teenager, repressing myself instead of being "cringe" or "too much", made it so much worse, and only as an adult did I begin to unlearn that. And even now I still barely have an actual distinct personality, or at least awareness of one, the real one, the eccentric child I was, still hidden deep inside me and only rarely peaking through.
The concept of this series really interests me, for all the series' flaws, I'll probably pick up at least the first book!
I wish that the exploration of what wild body horror experiments someone might do in this world we see in UnNatural Selection was given a better chance and not wrapped up in racism, I think it could be really interesting.
the whole cyfi thing + harlan + "parts have a small consciousness" implies that everyone who:
- has a brain transplant/brain part transplant
- has a transplant and meets others who have parts of the same body
is some sort of plural , and it also heavily implies brain transplants cause something similar to some presentations of osdd/did. which as a concept...has flaws, but its VERY interesting. does this mean someone who has several brain transplants has a system that has a physical medical cause?
There are a LOT of things to discuss about this series, but the thing that captured my brain was the firefighter heat suit. It’s like something out of Five Nights At Freddy’s.
Also, I know Neal Shusterman from another series: the Skinjacker Trilogy (commonly called the Everlost Series). It’s about dead children and the premise of, “What if everyone between 5 and 18 (estimation) was sent to purgatory instead of an afterlife?” Oh yeah, and another question, “What if a trait that you defined yourself by slowly consumed you until you became unrecognizable and forgot your old self?”
I was a teen when I first read the series and loved it. Currently skimming through it to re-experience my favorite parts, and from what I’ve read, it still holds up!
The Cam..? Moo..? Camera? Milk? moment that was comedy of errors’d into _OMG he’s a genius he knows Camus!_ whilst naming Cam has lived rent free in my brain for the last five years😂
i read just the first book and immediately came to the conclusion that the souls were only trapped because of unwinding; that regular organ donation just involved organs from corpses whose souls were already gone. it never made me afraid or organ donations; mostly it just was one of the first coming-to-consciousness moments of how much control malicious adults could/did/do have over the lives of kids
I think it's maybe a safe guess that the weird trapped soul stuff only happens because of the process of unwinding, but I wish it'd been explored or addressed more
I listened to this in one sitting and it took me till literally the end of the video to realise that the books were not called Unholy and UnSold and y'know what that's my punishment for putting it on in the background.
2:42:34 "Good body horror is often not about the wrongness of the body so much as the wrongness of the self. Often it's a wrongness of the self that is then expressed through the body." 😲😲😲😲😲😲😲😲
Thank you SO MUCH for talking about this series, nobody else ever seems to have heard of it. I read it in middle school while my mom was going through kidney failure and eventually waiting for and receiving a transplant. The portrayal of organ transplantation in fiction is universally negative and ghoulish and these books filled me with so much shame and fear and I couldn't put them down and couldn't stop thinking about them. I almost forgot they were supposed to be about abortion. How do you even unpack that SKDGLDHS?
Also abortion is still outright banned at the end and that's fine??
ngl my favorite quote is "Brendan Shusterman is the superior Shuster-son"
We are, all of us, in some way Shuster-sons
“Highly toxic anti-found-family evil roadtrip” LMFAO
One thing that’s really interesting to me, is that transplants seem to be this worlds version of body modification. Like a mix of the systems in Cinder, Uglies, Hunger Games(the capitol), and Cyberpunk 2077 with the body stealing of Get Out. They’re selling the body parts, not just using them randomly. People could select certain parts for their traits. You want your kid to be an athlete, just give them the lungs or heart of one. You want to be a musician, take the hands off of one. You want blue eyes… Isn’t that eugenics in its own way? People could have children just to sell their traits off to the highest bidder. Fuck don’t even do that, pay someone to be artificially inseminated and then raise them to sell once they’re 18. At least natal care would probably be better in a world like this. They probably auction of celebrity body parts after they die, or i wonder if you could leave them to someone in your will. You could even make an argument that it’s a net good thing for the world. They’ve probably advanced so much medically, all sorts of ailments could be cured by having free bodies. Governments would be more incentivized to take care of people considering that they’d get double the value. It’s horrifying, but could be almost utopian. I feel like you could explore so many technological science fiction questions with this universe. OHH MY GODDDD. This is the perfect scenario for human experimentation
Wait no and it’s actually really funny because it’s literally just expanding on the concept of gynecology. That guy would probably love this
This feels like someone wanted to make "A Modest Proposal" but making it pro life versus pro choice and i kinda love it
Omg I read this series in middle school! I don’t remember the dismemberment scene-but I grew up to be a big horror/gore fan so may/e it didn’t scare me as much as other people? Idk
Tysm for making this video essay!
same and same! I don't love gore but I looove psychological and body horror. I think it's well done enough to be really unsettling but not genuinely damaging to the target audience. at least in my experience
brilliant video as always 👏👏👏
Thank you!!
I can't explain how excited for this video! I've never heard of this series, but five hours of Crow is a true treat!
I was always kinda on the fence about Unwind. I LOVED the body horror, but i hated all the characters 😅
One of his short stories has always stuck with me though, the one about the grandma who starts to see events before they happen (
I just yesterday saw this series suggested in another comment section (maybe Cari Can Read's Uglies video ?) and thought, hey, that sounds like something Crow would cover! Lo and behold! Excited for this one.
This is exactly the length of my shift today. Thank you, o caller of crows!
I know the sepsis was more important but can i just point out that the burn is bad enough she also would not of felt any pain. The nerves would have been damaged to the point that she couldnt. Then again the hand should have exploded so it doesn't really matter.
*rubs my hands together* ive read all these books and I didnt see this video of yours yet somehow?! i am thrilled, this is gonna be good.
Only 13 min in, but I gotta say this premise doesn’t sound nearly as insane as it would have 10 years ago, argh. It just feels like the entire world is losing their minds!
I was having a massive anxiety attack when you released this and listening to you talk was distracting/calming enough for me to come down and sleep. Kind of an odd series to feel calm over but it helped lol. Thank you!!!