u/fortmeines

I've played at least one game from each generation/release and also the card game, so getting this game was a no-brainer for me. How about you guys?

Have religiously played every generation?

Have some level of familiarity/played some of the mainline games?

Limited experience with mainline games but familiar with the more popular pokemon?

Never played a pokemon game before but familiar with the IP?

Literally never touched this franchise before this and knew nothing about it?

I love the idea of building homes for your Pokemon and I hope one day the mainline games will give us some version of that for the Pokemon you're not using in your lineup. Like have a plot of land where we can let them live, kind of like the islands in Sun&Moon.

The Rent Collector by Camron Wright is a story of Sang Ly, a woman living in a garbage dump in Cambodia, and her journey in learning how to read.

The first problem is that it is about extreme poverty as experienced by a woman in Cambodia written by a white American Mormon man who has never been there. His characters were based on (and named after) real people featured in a documentary his son made. This was my first red flag, but I thought I'd give it a chance anyway because maybe he did give it the respect and research and effort a story like this deserved.

The second problem is that this story is THEEE prime example of what the internet calls "inspiration porn": a poor, illiterate woman living in a shanty house in a dump site learns how to read from her curmodgeonly rent collector then suddenly she is spreading the magic of literature to everyone she meets. >!There's a scene where she's on a bus going back to her province to seek the help of a healer for her son. She starts reading a fairy tale to her son in the bus. By the middle of it, the whole bus is listening to her speak and even talked the driver into waiting at her stop so she can finish reading them the story. Then they thank her for the privilege. Another scene at the end of the book starts with Sang Ly gathers her dump site neighbors and recites a fable to them mirroring the events of the story and they're all inspired and blah blah blah. In reality, most of these people would not give a shit what she's talking about.!<This book was trying so hard to be a Hallmark movie or a Chicken Soup for the Soul entry.

The third and biggest problem was that it did not feel Cambodian at all. Which, of course, is because it was NOT written by a Cambodian or someone who has spent any significant amount of time living there. It felt like an American feel-good movie ala Freedom Writer's Diary but set in Cambodia. Camron Wright could have written about any of the plentiful stories of poverty in his own backyard, but noooo, he wanted to have that "exotic" feel. He wanted to send his little "see how other people have it so much worse than you but they still keep going?" message.

The story itself focused so much on the importance of literacy and literature (which are, indeed, very important) that, at times, it seemed to put those two above other basic needs like food and shelter. In the story, yes, Sang Ly has learned to read >!and her now-dead rent collector teacher has given her a house!<but it has not addressed literally anything else. She and her family are still poor. They still make their living picking scraps to sell. Nobody in their family or community is physically or financially better for it. But hey, she can now dissect symbolism in fairy tales, so problem solved, right?

I do appreciate the fairly lengthy exposition on Cambodia's bloody military history and its lasting effects on the nation. And yeah I would say the depiction of the dump site itself and some aspects of living there felt genuine. I live in a nearby country that had a similar famous dump site where families used to live. Reading those parts was like watching the local news. Honestly, the story wasn't all bad. I would have just stopped reading if it was. But the underlying "ick" (sorry) I felt while reading it never went away.

Now it has me thinking if I'm just overthinking it. Have I become so chronically online that I just find problematic aspects in everything even if they were made with good intentions? I don't think it's absolutely wrong for authors to write outside their culture, but I expect them to put more effort and research into it. Am I just reacting so strongly because I live in a country very similar to Cambodia?

I did notice when reading through reviews, a majority of the very positive ones were from white people (based solely on their profile pictures) so maybe that's the intended audience here. And maybe it will inspire some of them in a good way, and who am I to deny them that? But it also pains me when people don't seem to see the problems with it.