Line #9 YMMV/EarthAbides


1	* BaseBreakingCharacter: Ish has become this for many more recent readers, partly because of ValuesDissonance in his common attitudes. Some readers claim that Ish is an InsufferableGenius who views everyone else in the tribe as below him on the intelligence scale. Others, while acknowledging his condescending attitudes, see him as a JerkassHasAPoint as he is the only one that seems concerned with rebuilding civilization and preserving information that will enable future generations to survive.
2	* DiagnosedByTheAudience: The nature of Evie's mental disability is a mystery even to the characters. Ish seems to think Evie had been born like this, but the children suggest that her handicap resulted from lack of nurturing after her family died in the plague. As none of them had known Evie before the apocalypse, they cannot be sure either way.
3	* SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments: Once Ish wises up to what things he needs to teach, his first lesson is to teach the kids how to make and shoot a bow and arrow. Several generations later, the tribe crafts arrowheads from pennies. That lesson had stuck with Ish's students, and they went on to teach it to the next generation and so on.
4	* FairForItsDay: While traveling across the newly depopulated United States, Ish meets some black sharecroppers who survived the pandemic while their white bosses perished. He has some mildly insensitive thoughts about them but they're not portrayed in a mean or stereotypical way. He ultimately sees their newfound freedom from the wage slavery of sharecropping as a positive development and commends them for liberating themselves. He reflects that he could take advantage of his whiteness by ordering them to obey his commands but concludes that it'd be cruel and unfair to do that ([[WhatYouAreInTheDark even though there'd be no one to hold him accountable for it]]). He also observes that they're much better prepared to survive the apocalypse than any of the white survivors he meets because they're familiar with agriculture and can grow their own food (which Ish and his tribe have trouble figuring out decades later). [[spoiler: The tribe of black southerners briefly shown at the end of the book are implied to be the post-apocalyptic descendants of these sharecroppers, meaning they did alright for themselves at the end of the day.]]
5	* {{Squick}}: Shortly after the plague come population explosions of insects and vermin. And they get into the food supplies.
6	* ValuesDissonance:
7	** The "horrible secret" that Ish's love interest has been hiding is that she's mixed race, specifically that she has black ancestry. To his and his [[FairForItsDay creator's credit]], Ish isn't bothered by this revelation at all. He chuckles and tells her not to worry about it, privately reflecting that the old racist fears over miscegenation are even more unreasonable and illogical now that so few people are left.
8	** There's a bit of ValuesDissonance in the moment where Ish suddenly adds up all the clues about Em's ethnicity: "brunette complexion, dark liquid eyes, full lips, white teeth, rich voice, ''accepting temperament'' ... "

Context YMMV / EarthAbides