This is exactly how I felt. There is always a response that “it’s intentional. Unreliable narrator…blah blah blah.” Which doesn’t make it better. It’s that “jokes on them I was only pretending” meme, but in literary form.

Wat

Communism is literally not dictated by the few. Communism is anarchist in that there are literal no leaders. What you are thinking of is leninism, where a group of few used the ideas of socialism and communism to hoard power and money, spread misinformation, and destroy education. Because educated people don’t like authoritarian leadership.

Like how in the USA, education has been villianized by the right in their propaganda. They cut funding to public education. They remove what books can be found in libraries. They can keep people ignorant of ideas they find threatening to their power structures. Such as socialist and communism ideals. Any book that talks of breaking down the hierarchy is considered a threat.

I completely understand where you are coming from, but you got to realize that that concept of communism has been warped by western propaganda and selective education.

People hungry for power will use what ever ideology appeals to the people to gain power. Look at Donald Trump. He was historically a Democrat from New York uninterested in politics. He ran as a Democrat the first time but made no headlines. He switched parties and started talking pro-christian rhetoric. He is very obvious no Christian.

You see it with “Protect the children” anti-abortion groups. Who have no interest in actually protecting children. Groups that target trans people with the same stance have no interest in actually protecting children. Groups who are say they want to stamp out pedophilia use it to target privacy laws.

And you have groups like Nazis and Lenist who used socialism and communism as a means to an end. Those groups used those movements to consolidate power and wealth to the 1%, and used violence against others as a way to ensure their continued control, they were neither communist or socialist in practice, only in their speech.

As Llamapacolypse said, it has it’s dark moments. What I wrote above is some of the darkest. It never goes into too much detail when it involves some of the more triggering things. Just a fade to black.

That said it’s such an intensely human series. So much love and compassion litered throughout the whole thing.

It’s also such a unique experience. Most fantasy books have huge massive reveals that shock and take you by surprise. Malazan has these things. But it also does it in reverse. You’ll read something and then a book or two later it changes context entirely, completely blowing your mind.

The Crippled God from Mazalan Book of the Fallen. I should probably spoiler this. And trigger warning.

Zombies aren’t real. And will take on any qualities the writer wants. Some people write zombies as brain eating mindless undead. Others are super fast group thinking infected humans. It’s all up to your imagination.

Things are bad at a federal level. That isn’t something you can avoid by moving to a Good place, as you call it. Yes, I said state by state but that was only half the concept. It’s state by state for now. With federal protections being stripped that means we are one election from going the complete opposite direction. That is not a Good place to be.

This is entirely dependent on who you are. My wife just had the highest court of the land tell her she has no medical privacy. Sure, right now it 's on state by state basis, but that can change. Every member of the supreme Court said under oath they wouldn’t overturn precident and yet here we are. I have no worries that anything bad will happen to me due to legislation, but I am a white cis male. My wife isn’t. My best friend is a POC. My inner circle is filled with nonbinary and poc. All these people are actually being affected by the “culture wars” in very real and tangible ways. Feeling like it’s all okay right now must be coming from a very privileged and secluded position. Having held multiple people that I love dearly while they cry because their rights were stripped changes your perspective on a lot of things.

Electric vehicles aren’t meant to save humanity. They are meant to save the car. If we removed all gas vehicles off the road right that wouldn’t even stop 30 percent of emissions. The only way to save humanity at this point is to stop capitalism. As long as we continue to expect the market to find a solution to a problem that has no profit motivator we will never save humanity. Elon included.

It appears you havent read your own link there.