Deconstructing YA Dystopias

If you're going to deconstruct young adult fiction, I don't think you should ignore the love triangles. Look at Hunger Games. At times Katniss seems more interested in Peeta or Gale than in overthrowing the Capitol. This goes along with the idea of the rebels being teenagers, motivated by their own immature reasons. What if you had one of the rebels motivated not by a genuine belief in the cause, but because they have a crush on another rebel. Alternatively, the restless teenagers could be [You Need to Get Laid sexually frustrated] and use the rebellion as an outlet.

And it would be called The Force Awakens, where thirty years after the evil emperor's death, things are pretty much the same as they were during his reign, which in turn was about as bad as before his reign, his direct religious and political opponents notwithstanding. As the bounty hunters personally indicate, the Empire has freedom of passage, the right to bear arms, and better equal opportunity policies than half the modern world. Blowing up the hypocritical hippie planet (that professes pacifism while planning assaults) is small price to pay for that level of social progress.

I'd say going for natural talent is both an appeal to laziness - as being brilliant but lazy is every teen boy's self-image fantasy while being inherently special is every teen girl's dream - and also a display of writer laziness, in that it spares them from having to come up with logical magical systems or build up personal reasons for characters to join the fight. It also serves to set up wise mentor training plots... if the basic "you're special, kill those guys" routine counts as training anyway.

Essentially, it removes choice out of the entire equation. Some people are just bound to be heroes, so all they have to do is sit around until Morpheus comes with the pills, and then follow instructions in order to get their predestined victory. Ironically, this is a perfect mirror match for living in a system that supposedly takes away your choices. It's a rather realistic deconstruction to present such struggles as the wannabe heroes not really desiring a free system, so much as an oppressive system where they get a cushier spot.

Mind you, love triangles fit into this logic quite nicely, since they're basically displays of indecisiveness - unless the prophecy of destiny has also taken pains to select a love interest for the chosen one, you can bet the silly sod will be totally clueless. Then there's the frequent sexist plot development where the hero meets a girl in the resistance that's much better than him at everything else, but unfortunately, she doesn't have the right stuff to be the chosen one, so she'll dwindle into being a satellite character for the remainder of the story.

Essentially, if I were to deconstruct a dystopia, I'd start by making a basic perspective flip, trying to see how the same events would look in the eyes of civilians or even the actual regime personnel. And if giving those people some actual agency would shatter the premise, then that's the way to go. There's a reason every superhero story denigrates the police and the military - with modern defense technology being more advanced than what most superheroes started with, that's a level of competition they simply can't tolerate.

edited 16th Oct '16 11:55:17 PM by indiana404

I'm not sure if you can deconstruct this since it's more a meta observation, but something I thought of today is that the things being challenged in most YA dystopias tend to be a Captain Obvious Aesop. Who's going to argue that sending kids to a death arena or separating society into groups based on arbitrary personality traits (and ignoring that many people have more than one) is a good thing?

It really does underline that a lot of these books are more power fantasies than questioning or challenging anything. While encouraging self-esteem in doubtful teens approaching adulthood isn't a bad thing by any means, I do think it would be much better for said teens to have something more substantial then "you're special because you're special".

Also, I remembered that someone in the Tropes You Always Wanted To Subvert or Avert thread posted this article about fiction's tendency to make organizations and societies in general complete idiots.

Indeed. A dystopia built on oppression for the sake of oppression is not only a dead giveaway that the story will be a garden variety power fantasy, but - per the old Star Wars expanded universe - a surefire way to get more people rooting for the villains if less biased writers give them a logical framework for their actions. For the Empire, it was the threat of extra-galactic aliens with gigantic world-ships - exactly the kind of foe a Death Star would be useful against. For, say, "The Lord of the Rings", something like The Last Ringbearer changed the narrative outright, gleefully filling the socio-economic holes in Middle Earth politics by merely extrapolating from the terrain (that's why you don't draw fantasy maps on a whim), so it takes quite some effort to unsee Mordorians as a technologically advanced civilization with multiple allies, besieged by barbarians and warmongering religious zealots.

At its core, a dystopian government has to sound like a good idea. In real life, oppressive measures are frequently justified by the overexposure of external enemies, often not without some truth to it. Other times, it's merely a cultural dissonance that makes certain social aspects look horrifying from outside, while the locals would barely bat an eye. Matters like gun culture, the death penalty or civil rights are divisive in real life, so either side getting total dominance would seem oppressive to supporters of the other - and the fewer they get, the more extreme their views and methods become.

To that effect, deconstructing a poorly-written dystopia would mean taking an actually sensible framework, and initially focusing only on the few people displeased with it, before revealing that they have no greater support whatsoever. Beyond the ego-deflating blow of nobody caring about your petty tween problems, an even further nightmare is for people to be quite happy having views diametrically opposing yours on ostensibly important issues... and for society to, *gasp*, not collapse over it.

edited 17th Oct '16 11:59:24 PM by indiana404

....can I just say something?

MIA

Sure? This is the internet it's straight up impossible to cut someone off.

On my own thoughts, Hunger Games sort of turns into a deconstruction of itself after a certain amount of time. Though some aspects of its plot (12 districts + Capitol) are stupidly simplified, other parts are slightly more thought out. Like how Katniss ultimately IS a pawn in the greater scheme of things, more set up to do things than actually doing things. She only has one major impact in the events of Mockingjay at the very end, and by that point she's been so traumatized that it's unsure if Katniss was even aware of what she was doing before she did it. And we do ultimately see a little bit of the plannings both behind the rebellion itself and behind the rebuilding of the nation.

Panem is, imo, a more well thought out dystopia than most. It has some major pitfalls, but the idea of a death arena where children fight to the death in spectacular ways is, well, it's not the least awful thing that humans have done to each other.

has anyone thought about making the resistance group in question a terrorist group of sorts. i had an idea about a group called the red wings who want bring back tradition (not the good kind).

MIA

Sounds good to me. Even too good, perhaps - unless it's revealed slowly, it's closer to an outright inversion rather than a deconstruction. Not that I'd mind, really - anti-establishment power fantasies tend to cause a profound sense of glurge in me, and not just because I've seen the actual results firsthand. What annoys me most is the dehumanization of the punch-clock paper pushers and law enforcement officials just trying to keep things in order and have the trains run on time.

Consequently, a great alternative approach would be for the protagonist faction to be acting like terrorists from the start, but the naive newcomer, and hence the audience, don't realize it, due to copious use of standard dehumanization tropes like having the cops wear face-concealing masks and refer to one another by number while on duty. And then some stray family picture flies out, putting a much darker shade on all the previous heroic strikes in retrospect.

@Terrorists: I've never been fond of Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters. Partially because I think it has Unfortunate Implications when you start associating the two (Jihadists, for example, are in no way freedom fighters except in the sense that a person who puts out fires is a fire fighter).

I do like the idea of having the rebels turn out to be evil. Most stories do the opposite where the protagonist serves the state and switches teams to the rebels.

Personally, in the RPG I'm working on I have it so the protagonist is a law enforcement agent who uncovers a plot by insurgents (they're never called terrorists) and has to stop it. Part of its deconstruction of dystopian fiction is a sort of inversion of Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters. The antagonists are Wrong Genre Savvy and view themselves as being rebels in a cyberpunk story. They view the protagonist as being Agent Smith, essentially. They...are incorrect to say the least.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Terrorists and freedom fighters overlap chiefly in cases of foreign dominance, as in Deep Space Nine. When you defend your homeland from invaders and occupiers, pretty much everything seems justified.

Speaking of which, it would be nice to clarify the different ways dystopian governments come into power in the first place. Before the Star Wars prequels came out, I actually thought the Empire was a hostile invasion force fielding clones . Even AOTC had me suspect a military coup of some sort. But nope - in the galaxy far, far away, democracy is bad all the way. And this is where most dystopias tend to lose me. The moment a story goes with the sheeple logic, I automatically reverse and translate it as the protagonist being a sanctimonious special snowflake that probably should be brought down a peg or two.

Revolutions are only bad in the second and third person. In the first person, they're beautiful and great.

As mentioned, most YA Dystopia's are so poorly structured that it's a wonder how any of them lasted more than a decade. Having the big bad government go down not from the actions of some random white cis teenager, but by their own incompetence would be a good way to highlight this. The special chosen one hero would just so happen to be at the right place at the right time.

Considering we live in an age where a man like Donald Trump is dangerously close to coming into power, I can't fault writers for using the "sheeple and evil government logic", society is partially to blame for its own problems after all.

"I'll show you fear, there is no hell, only darkness." My twitter

That sounds like the populism fallacy though, i.e. if the majority feel a certain way they must be right, appeal to the masses, etc.

Although I think that many fictional dystopias, like the Star Wars one, don't really address what most people think.

Yeah, you know you have a problem when a whole planet blowing up is only portrayed in light of how it makes a couple of characters feel. Though with Star Wars, the greater problem is that there's never a hint of actual malicious policy as opposed to random violence. So the Emperor dissolved the Senate - how I weep for the poor overfed bureaucrats that were useless even in the old days, Obi-Wan's gilded reminiscing notwithstanding. Legally, the only thing that seems to have changed is the place of the Jedi and a few oligarchs... through the eyes of which we see most of the story.

Appealing to mass opinion is a fallacy with regard to scientific facts, but it's only proper for government, else we might as well go back to divinely anointed royalty... which is what the average YA protagonist frequently evokes. It's one thing to say society doesn't always know best - but the deconstructive counterpoint is that the rebels might be even more clueless, hence the reliance of obvious moral flaws in the government that nobody in their right mind would support. As I mentioned, using an actual controversial issue risks tipping the scales too much against the traditional heroic narrative. In a world of sheeple, the most demeaning thing to imagine is merely being a lamb of a different color.

I guess some stories want to address broad social issues like whether justice is best protected by democracy or whether hedonism will ruin intellectualism or whatever... and others would rather focus on this orphan kid and what he has to confront about his family's past, while having extremely improbable fantasy/sci-fi battles on alien planets

I agree that a lot of dystopic fiction tends to focus on a very small number of characters, but I think a story that addresses broad society comprehensively would be a different type of narrative rather than a deconstruction. It also might not be considered YA because of its subject matter.

Not so. Human rights are not dependent on popular opinion, nor is the rule of law. Throw both of those concepts out in favour of populism and all you have left is mob rule, which without any checks and balances can easily turn into dictatorship.

edited 19th Oct '16 5:56:48 AM by editerguy

And how are human rights decided if not by mutual agreement of majority parties? For that matter, the concept itself is considerably younger than structures built on religious morality, where social order consisted of arbitrary rules propped by supernatural claims and enforced by fear of violence by the ruling class. Mob rule's got nothing on that.

As I mentioned before, cultural perspectives play a considerable role in what can be deemed a dystopia. Even back in the Cold War, Americans may have balked at the restrictions in a typical socialist state, but the opposite was just as valid, with there being nothing comparable to the institutionalized racism and sexism of mid-20th century US, never mind the crime and unemployment rates or the overpriced yet underdeveloped healthcare and education systems. The value of positive as opposed to negative freedoms is worth volumes of contemplation on its own.

The "sheep of a different color" thing is something I'd play with. In my story part of the problem with the villain's ideology is that while they tell people to "think freely" and "don't trust the system" they dismiss everyone who disagrees with them to be either brainwashed or shills. So really, what they mean when they tell people to think for themselves is "agree with me". At the end of the day, they're far worse than the regime they oppose, but are unable to see it becauses they're the revolution.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

The best way to deconstruct something is to look at real life history and see how we've done it in the past. As George R. R. Martin did, you can exaggerate and include fantastic elements (magic, advance technology, etc) and still keep it believable if not outright realistic.

Now, one of the important things to keep in mind when attempting a deconstruction is to figure out what are the consequences of the characters' actions if we applied real life logic to the work in question. What are the consequences of oppressing millions of people? What are the consequences of using a WMD on a foreign nation/planet/city? What are the consequences of forcefully removing those in charge of the dystopia? Etc.

To give an example: some time ago there was a young man who was the son of poor farmers. They were abused by their landlord (a rich foreigner from a neighbouring Empire) who took what little money they had, and also by their own also-poor neighbours because of their beliefs. When said young man became a teenager, he joined a rebellious group who only wanted to liberate their country from an Empire that was both evil (its treatment of the people on its conquered regions was atrocious) and incompetent (the Emperor was one of the worst during that era).

Anyway, this young man joined this rebellion despite being turned away initially for being too small and "weak" by proving his heart was in the right place. He believed his people had suffered enough under the empire and he wanted to do anything, even give up his own life, to oppose his oppressors. When he was 19 years old, by virtue of a sries of coincidences that some would call a Deus ex Machina if it wasn't an actual historical moment, he got to kill the heir of the evil emperor, kickstarting the events that would lead to the fall of the empire and the eventual liberation of his people.

Today, some people remember this man as a hero, a symbol of liberation ideas, tyrant murderer, idea-holder of liberation from slavery, etc.

Others remember him as the man who triggered World War One, one of humanity's worst nightmares.

I'd say that's a good inspiration for a YA deconstruction, and I'm sure there are many more examples like that one.

Another thing I do in my rpg's setting: nearly all successful rebellions are astroturfed by other empires who eventually take de facto control of the liberated area. Mind you, this is not necessarily always a bad thing per say (at least some of these empire's treat "liberated" areas fairly well), but it tends to undermine the whole "independence" thing. The PC is an agent of one of these empires who's taken it upon himself to prevent a newly liberated planet from counter-revolting and returning to their previous owners (who are particularly evil).

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Sounds interesting. Of course, you can always go with the outside empire being way worse than the local regime, with the protagonists being the useful idiots to effectively dig their own graves come the revolution.

I was thinking of another angle. In some cases, such as Aeon Flux, the evil regime remains in power due to the artificial threat of a natural disaster affecting the rest of the world - and if the disaster is real, it's invariably the government's own fault. You can also throw in a MegaCorp or two that profit from producing an ineffective or unnecessary cure, while brave rebels fight to expose the truth. So why not invert that? There is a disaster, it's not man-made, the companies are desperately looking for solutions - because let's face it, you can't enjoy your profits when you're dead - and the rebels are actually making things worse while unwittingly serving the interests of doomsday cults or the world's equivalent of pretentious anti-vaccers.

To an extent that does happen. The original local regime was feudalistic but the Enigma (the regime that conquered them) was way worse. Zion (another super power) "liberated" the area (in order to gain resources) before moving their own citizens in (and they're better than the Enigma and arguably better than the local regime). Some of the locals want to be independent and some of Zion's citizens want to give the planet back to the Enigma.

The rebels in this case are sort of Wrong Genre Savvy. Zion has some superficial resemblances to cyberpunk dystopias (megacorps, militarized police, mecha mooks, machine worship) but actually isn't one. The Enigma are revolutionaries who reject "dehumanizing technology", money, and the religion of Zion. In practice they're Evil Luddite Dirty Communists.

As for your idea: something I do note in a lot of stories is that there's a "security vs freedom" conflict, it's almost invariably caused by the security faction. This is a really annoying Debate and Switch much of the time.

edited 2nd Nov '16 12:27:39 PM by Protagonist506

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Tell me about it. The same thing happens every time superhero comics try and discuss vigilantism - anyone supporting proper checks and balances is literally blown to bits. I'm not even sure what's worse - the switch itself, or that the pro-freedom writers are so insecure as to feel the need for a switch altogether.

I was actually working on a story about a bug war with Blue-and-Orange Morality - neither humanity nor the insects can make sense of the other side, so even with next to no malice involved, it's still a bloody conflict. But within the human ranks, there's a bunch of bug-worshiping cultists that consider the war to be some kind of rapture and are trying to facilitate what they believe to be the will of the hive. So when the bugs finally find a way to communicate with humans, even they are utterly disgusted by the zealots. (There's also a race of proud warrior cyborgs generally working with humans, who laugh at the whole deal, but that's just icing.)

In a way, dystopias only ever work if one assumes only two sides to the conflict, even if they are split into barely allied factions. Going for a multilateral conflict, however, forces you to consider each side on its own terms, or at least as a lesser evil when compared to another. You can have an organized crime faction that supports the rebellion, only to take effective control after the revolution, making things way worse and causing most of the population to pine for the good old regime days. Personally being a patsy for your own revolutionary movement is one thing, but the revolutionary movement itself being a patsy for someone else - now that's disheartening.

With organized crime rings and dystopia, one thing to note is that they might very well support the dictatorship. Crime rings make money doing illegal things, so if what they do becomes legal, they lose a lot of money. Your smuggler for example is generally not going to love the rebels because he needs something to smuggle past.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Post-soc experiences point to the opposite - totalitarian regimes not only suppress organized crime, but the forced equality further disparages conspicuous consumption, so that even smuggling finds next to no demand. Meanwhile, everyone and their grandma brews their own moonshine, so there's abundant supply of such local luxuries already.

Speaking of conspicuous consumption, one way half-baked dystopias go wrong is to portray the ragged masses directly contrasted with the beautiful elites - something no lasting dictatorship ever allowed, at least not in public. The moment such social inequalities become a common sight is the moment people go for their Torches and Pitchforks en masse.

BTW: speaking of super heroes, something I do find funny is that while "pro-registration"-style types are usually portrayed as authoritarian, some of the implications would imply the reverse. Superheroes are self-appointed law enforcement, after all. A Knight Templar superhero could easily become a pseudo-dictator. Personally, I would argue that this is the "horseshoe effect" with authority and anarchy.

As for wealth inequality, I agree. This is another thing I have as an element of my story. The bad guys force relative wealth equality and have actually replaced money with a rental system (where items are rented from the public temporarily)-even the dictator herself doesn't truly own any property (she lives in relative opulence, but given her social status she's surprisingly ascetic-she was never in it for money). This is part of why their society appeals to some over Zion (which has a truly wealthy upper-class).

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"