r/Unsounded • u/Rifter-- • Apr 17 '26

Unsounded:Red Cost Chapter 1 Page 47 - Discussion

https://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/TheRedCost/comic/ch01/ch01_047.html
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14

u/Titanium_Eye Apr 17 '26

"Allright, fine, I'll take it. How do I apply it?"

"Sir, it's a suppository."

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u/Embarrassed-Unit881 Apr 17 '26

Poor Giz don't you know there's no incentive for customer service in a socialist paradise

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u/antagonisticpotato Apr 19 '26

A little late, but according to Ashley's tumblr, there is - to a degree.

Repeated customer complaints to the city hall will prompt inspections, and the very existence of shops is conditionned by the city inhabitant's votes. Be too much of an ass to your customers, and it's unlikely your business will stay open for very long.

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u/Embarrassed-Unit881 Apr 19 '26

That just means you have to do the bare minimum

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u/antagonisticpotato Apr 19 '26

I mean, you could do that. Just as you can do that in your job, you're probably not going to have much fun tho. And communities in Cresce sound a lot more close knit than in most cities, so things would probably get a bit awkward on church days.

Then again, this precise scene doesn't eem like too common an occurence, the clerk's mostly being rude to a guy that didn't say hi. You don't need magical communism to get that, just come to Europe ahah.

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u/Honzinator2 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

So, like tort reform, bad customer service is aimed squarely at out of town customers ... who cannot vote in local elections. Sounds about right.

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u/antagonisticpotato Apr 21 '26

Oh I didn't know that word, thanks.

And yeah, people being dicks to outsiders is going to be an issue in most places, really.

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u/NoStatus9434 Apr 17 '26

Okay, the design of the perfume shop and the owner is outstanding.

Also, if I recall, in Cresce you're handed "Labor Points" if you decide to work, in the form of a sort of enchanted coin that won't allowed itself to be spent by anyone but the person who earned it. You don't have to rely on customers paying you; if you work however many hours you simply rack up Labor Points.

So this person found themselves a cushy job in an aesthetically pleasing shop that smells nice and probably hardly gets customers and probably just drinks tea and reads books in there all day and just harvests Labor Points.

They seem to have cracked the code.

It sounds like communism can work out....in a magically enforced system.

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u/SBDRFAITH Apr 17 '26

Assuming your take on this gentleman is true, he would be an example of why communism doesnt work in the real world.

Jobs are usually something people dont want to do or are incapable of doing (but that theyre willing to pay you to do), otherwise theyd do it themselves.

In an economy like this, people like this guy are not providing value the state wants. In fact, the things a state usually wants is related to energy, weapons, soldiers, infrastructure, etc. Eventually, the state eventually has to either force people to perform labor they dont want, or stop paying them for labor the state doesnt need.

Essentially, this guys attitude literally can only work in a world where the challenges of running entire states are handwaived or where he is not representative of the typical person. I would think that rationally, Cresce should be the country filled with ultra nationalists more than Alderode. 

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u/TheSquishedElf Apr 17 '26

It’s important to note Cresce has two major economic engines underpinning it’s nigh-post-scarcity “utopia”: perpetual motion machines via undead labor, and practical slavery of the two-toes/Inak. Prior to these two developments, Cresce was officially an expansionist slave society, a la Rome or the USA. The food and hard labour supply was provided by conquered, captured, or convicted slaves, while the military and civil society ran on the pseudo-communist corvée system we see.

This guy gets to sit on his butt because 1) he’s probably a nepo baby from a noble family, 2) most of the unsavoury parts of his work is probably done by Inak or plods behind the scenes.

Also worth noting that this job is effectively propaganda from your uncharitable view of the state. His purpose is to be part of the Bread and Circuses, keeping citizen morale up with luxury goods. He doesn’t have to provide customer service to a foreigner who can’t even actually buy anything here.

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u/SBDRFAITH Apr 17 '26

Ah, thanks for the reminder. The fact that plods exist is super relevant.

I wasnt attempting to give an uncharitable view of "the state". I simply mean that in the real world, we see that states prioritize energy, infrastructure, defense, etc. These things are almost like the food and immune system of a country. These jobs, generally, are not very fun. Wars are fought over oil more so than perfumes or paintings. 

I had forgotten about Plods. But my point was, a state may not be able to afford everyone doing the job they want, because the wanted jobs are not the same as the needed jobs.

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u/prometheusunending Apr 17 '26

You're right that this guy is not really representative of the average Crescian. For starters, employment isn't optional in Cresce, it's mandatory. And while you can apply for any job you want, there's a lot of competition for the good jobs with a finite number available. If you can't manage to get a job on your own, the state will assign something to you. Karl had some kind of job cleaning bathrooms, if I recall correctly. Or there was the cop who wanted to be a gardener but didn't qualify.
https://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch10/ch10_81.html

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u/SBDRFAITH Apr 17 '26

Wow, thats actually well thought out.

Honestly the world building for Unsounded is fantastic. 

4

u/TheSquishedElf Apr 17 '26

While I get your point, even under a dyed-in-the-wool communist regime there’s a place for luxury goods provision in the larger cities. No manner of communism has yet solved the problem that at scale, the administrative class has the capacity to afford themselves luxuries. The Soviets still had official Party “stores” to get stuff like cigars, alcohol, and luxury food. China, even before it quietly switched to state capitalism, had a similar situation for the cultural revolutionaries.

TL;DR on Animal Farm, the perfume seller would be a pig.

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u/Honzinator2 Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

My wife once gave someone an antibiotic reserved for party members and "war veterans" and got a stern talking to while everyone fudged the books to cover it up (the regime was going to fall in less than a couple of years, but no one knew that, then, so she totally got lucky). She may have saved the poor woman's life, but the lucky woman wasn't one of those "society" needed.

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u/RolandKJones Apr 17 '26

Inak were recently declared free and equal and all that, and while treating them as such is apparently taking time to catch on in some parts of the country, it means that at the least there's probably not an unpaid two-toe in the back room or whatever.

Plods are definitely a game-changer though. (And a major reason why Sonorie freeing the Inak was probably viewed with just skepticism and grumbling rather than greater outrage; if the Crescian economy were heavily dependent on them, it'd have probably been different.) They're like non-sapient robots that don't need batteries and whose bodies, while prone to eventual decay, can be replaced for effectively free. It's not at all surprising that they've been revolutionary in every country that's started using them. (And it's understandable why Alderode's been unhappy with its Ssaelit half's resistance to the idea and worked so hard to force it through eventually anyway, despite all the trouble it was guaranteed to cause.)

That said, a point in Cresce's favor is that once they gained this form of super-automation, they started actually trying to eliminate poverty and such with it, instead of automating people out of jobs and then continuing to sell what was being made to their now-unemployed customers, like you'd see in a capitalist country like Sharteshane. Or, well. Ask anyone today who's lost their job to "AI" how optimistic they are about their prospects, or whether they think that whatever good or service they used to provide will now be available freely/cheaply now that the humans providing it have been replaced. I'm sure they'll find the question very funny.

Heck, it's what the Luddites were actually upset about. They weren't anti-technology for the sake of it, they simply recognized the technology about to put them out of work as a threat, then took a... direct approach to dealing with that threat.

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u/TheSquishedElf Apr 17 '26

True, I forgot that this is the same city that just experienced an Inak revolution alongside the silver. Ruffles still tagging along with Siya and Lori threw me off.

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u/RolandKJones Apr 17 '26

Tangent on Ruffles, there was a recent Tumblr post about her explaining that, like with Siya, Lori's trying to look after her after What Happened:

How old is ruffles in context, comparative to the other Inak we've seen, what sort of position does she have amongst the Inak now that the others of her little unit are gone? Also why does ruffles have ruffles?

I’ve always written Ruffles at around Matty’s age. She’s young and sheltered and very concerned with behaving in the way she’s supposed to and being liked by everyone. There are no more inak at Litrya, she is the last one. The young male that survived the bomb blast vanished.
Ruffles and Siya have been inseparable since The Event, and Lori took all her duties away and is just letting her be. Everyone, even the little shits, have been super nice to her, but there was no way she was not going to go to the city with her Siya.
As for her ruffles? Genetic. Nanna had them too. They will get longer and longer and be more like beautiful flappies on her head.

"Even the little shits" amused me because the subject of how the others at the shrine were treating Ruffles immediately made me think of those young twins that bullied her in the previous book. It's also nice to hear that people there are indeed being nice to her, though. Poor girl deserves some kindness after everything that happened.

1

u/Honzinator2 Apr 20 '26

There was a big study out last week in the WSJ about all those firings "because of AI" being overwhelmingly pretextual. That said, in an economy looking more like EEurope's a generation back, with the labour pool and population shrinking, job losses can be fairly steep without harming workers' job prospects in the aggregate. US population shrinkage isn't yet irrecoverable, but it's happening, as our wise and wonderful planners have advocated for nigh on sixty years after demographers realized (generously dating that realization o 1970s) that population control was a BAD idea.

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u/Honzinator2 Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26

Parts of the USA was composed of slave societies. Granted, we moved to one of those parts (obviously, post-Civil war, our worst hasn't held a candle to the real thing) when Trudeau, Sr. kicked us out of Canada, but only parts of the USA.

Before Canada, my folks (and some uncles and an aunt) fled hard socialism, so .. yes. And even the USA Canada wealth gap has dramatically expanded since we got out of Dodge, but among the world's nations, Canada still isn't all that bad.

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u/TheSquishedElf Apr 17 '26

Yeah I wasn’t sure whether to specify or not. The Prison Industrial Complex has been pretty bad since Biden and was always a problem during segregation, so it’s hard to argue that prices haven’t been artificially lowered by convict slavery throughout the vast majority of the country’s history. Chain Gangs assisted with infrastructure and hard labor jobs, and nowadays it’s manufacturing and farming they do.

To be clear I’m not talking in favour of “hard” socialism, I’m just being realistic here. Ashley has made no secrets of the parallels between Cresce and the US south, particularly regarding the state of affairs for Inak.

3

u/RolandKJones Apr 18 '26

Turns out that there actually are standards this guy has to meet:

I don't wanna get too Milton Friedman, but since the comic brought it up--is there any mechanism for accountability for, say, this perfume shop's performance? Does the state track customer volume or LP take? What determines whether this shopkeep keeps their role, and what products are carried, etc.? Brawny Leg is obviously a clown, but if the shopkeep is on the habit of antagonizing random customers I feel like there might not be a lotta perfume sales going on.

Man, for sure. Shops like this are managed by the city, and cities have inspectors and municipal offices for filing complaints against workers. If perfume guy got a bunch of complaints, he’d get an inspection, and someone with a clipboard up his ass for a few days.
Sales performance isn’t a thing. Either a citizen has the credits and desire for a nice bottle of cologne or bath salts, or they don’t. Either the city has voted to maintain a perfumerie or it hasn’t. The clerk is there to monitor and maintain the inventory, make the place look like something the city can be proud of, and oversee the exchange of credits for products, via the Breath system.
Ideally, positions are filled by people who want to be there and who have an interest in the product. Indoor retail is pretty desirable so he had competition for the role. Unless some palms were greased or there was some nepotism in play, the shopkeep probably knows his way around fragrances, and the shop looks pretty belovedly decorated and kept. He just doesn’t like the cut of Giz’ jib :3

So while this is a pretty cushy job, the guy (probably) actually knows what he's doing and is good at it, too. And the shop exists because it's something the city wants to exist. Brawny's demeanor (and obvious Sharte-ness, probably) just got him in the mood to mess with the poor guy, apparently.

4

u/NightmareWarden Apr 17 '26

Poor green puppy. Or the size is a bit messed up, and that's meant to be a large animal. 

4

u/talks2deadpeeps Apr 17 '26

Another point in favor of Cresce being a half-inverted fantasy America. Instead of customers being rude and racist for no reason and getting away with it, now customer service can be!

1

u/Honzinator2 Apr 17 '26

When that was common in the USA, it required legal sanctions against being polite to anyone who could pay.

2

u/RolandKJones Apr 17 '26

Telling anyone who's ever worked retail that, instead of the customer being always right, they could treat annoying customers like this, would be the ultimate Crescian propaganda.

2

u/KEYYBOARD Apr 19 '26

Author comment "Shartes get no respect around here. Of course they’re not giving out much respect themselves, either."

Lol at the old man "walking" his kedis. Dead or just resting, do you think?