YMMV / The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

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• Applicability: The story can be considered a commentary on everything from sweatshops to the bystander effect.
• Broken Base: There's a school that believes the story is a masterpiece of commentary on art, and a school that believes it's self-important schlock that wastes massive amounts of space insulting the reader for thoughts they almost certainly don't actually have. These schools are irreconcilable.
• Fridge Brilliance: The idea that a town could become a perfect utopia just by torturing a single child is more implausible than the town just being a happy place... and yet, as the narrator points out, people treat it as "more credible" than the alternative simply because it's more pessimistic.
• Fridge Horror: A careful reading of the story reveals that it is never explicitly stated that there is only ONE neglected child within Omelas. Each person knows about and tolerates the existence of a tormented child but not necessarily the same child, even if they act like it.
• It Was His Sled: The fact that the town is kept happy because a child is forced to take in all misery is very well known.
• Misaimed Fandom: Many discussions, in schools and otherwise, discuss the Powered by a Forsaken Child and The Needs of the Many aspects at face value, as if it were the point of the work. The work itself heavily implies that the tortured child was made up by the narrator for the sake of the reader, and the real point of the work is to question the reader for pessimistically believing that a truly happy society is impossible without it hiding a dark secret.
• Sliding Scale of Social Satisfaction: Since the book is Meta Fiction, it actually questions the reader whether the utopian Omelas is "Heaven on Earth" or a case of "Too Happy to Care". Especially, since the revelation that it's all only possible due to a child's suffering is just thrown out to satisfy the overly cynical reader that thinks "Heaven on Earth" can never be attained without a catch.
• Squick: The child has festering sores all over its legs from sitting in its own excrement so long, for starters.

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