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YMMV / The Season to Be Wary

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  • Despair Event Horizon: If the minister in "Color Scheme" wasn't over it when his daughter was burned alive by a white mob stirred up by Connacher, he's far over it after his brief transformation into a white man gives him the power to throw the now-black Connacher to the same mob.
    ... for one hour out of his eternity, he had been allowed to join the white world as a privileged member. But, he thought further— that one hour had been quite sufficient. It had been sufficient for him to renounce his God, to disqualify himself from ever again feeling a part of the race of men, and to doom himself to whatever was the afterlife debt one paid in hell or in limbo or in whatever perdition there existed.
  • Moral Event Horizon: ("Eyes"): Petrozella glides right over it when he sets up Indian Charlie to be forced to sign over his eyes to Miss Menlo.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: While evil is thoroughly punished in all three stories, the good characters are either broken before the story starts (Zamorski in "The Escape Route", Indian Charlie in "Eyes"), broken over the course of the story (the minister in "Color Scheme"), are fairly useless (the white Unitarian minister in "Color Scheme"), or tainted enough to make things Black-and-Gray Morality at best (pretty much everyone in "Eyes" who isn't Miss Menlo or Petrozella). It's bitter stuff to be sure.
  • Values Dissonance: Some readers may find themselves less sympathetic to Indian Charlie ("Eyes") when they find out about his conviction for statutory rape— the trauma stemming from said conviction is used to terrorize him into signing over his eyes, but the narration suggests that Charlie may honestly have not known the girl's age (or was desperate enough for companionship not to care). The reader is also led to infer that the cops may have roughed Charlie up because he was a non-white man arrested for the rape of a white girl.
  • The Woobie:
    • Zamorski in "The Escape Route".
    • The minister in "Color Scheme."
    • Indian Charlie in "Eyes".

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