Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Trending News
What is the definition of a dystopian work?
The whole dystopian genre was kind of kickstarted by George Orwell's 1984. It wasn't intended primarily as a pleasant fictional novel, but as a work attacking the principles behind the USSR and was basically the book equivalent of a man standing on the corner and screaming "RUSSIA IS MESSED UP". This sparked a wave of novels that did the same thing with other human vices, like Brave New World with hedonism and Fahrenheit 451 with anti-intellectualism.The characters of these works all got bad endings- dead, with the government still in power and unlikely to ever change.
Flash forward a couple decades, and we have The Hunger Games.The setting of The Hunger Games was crap, there's no denying that. There's constant despair and a hilarious level of pay inequity. But that's where things start going weird.The Hunger Games is, in part, a romance. While there were romantic plotlines in all three of the other books, 1984 was not filled with pages of Julia bashfully stealing a glance of Winston's sleeping form, or whatever. Furthermore (spoilers), Katniss wins. The government topples and she and her family live in peace. While victory was costly, it was possible unlike in the other works. The Hunger Games is just the near-future version of the classic tale of the chosen hero slaying the evil king.
The Hunger Games sparked a wave of copycats that are called dystopian without even lip service to the classics that created that label. That said, what is the new meaning of "dystopia"?
Addressing the obvious bias: Yes, I read The Hunger Games, no, I did not enjoy it. Yes, I've read 1984, A Brave New World, and Farenheit 451, and yes, I enjoyed them. I did not, however, find the setting of A Brave New World to be thoroughly intolerable. Not perfect, of course, but not bad either.
I meant with that that the /setting/ was crap, as in I would rather cut off my all fingers than live there, although it was worded ambiguously so woops? I actually merely dislike the hunger games only because it's not quite my cup of tea. Its copycats are what I reserve my vitrol for. I don't even mean the published works, but the teenie boppers who constantly say "I'm writing a dystopia it's about a teenager with attitude tearing down the government!"
Hunger Games wasn't that, really. It was a standard dystopia that illustrated pay inequity, but it had certain uncommon elements that were parroted while the important stuff was forgotten to the point where teenagers literally believe that a dystopia is "a teenager takes down a corrupt government" when it's not that at all. Tangent: I know Orwell didn't invent the dystopian genre. He popularized it and defined it. There was sci-fi before Welles, but nobody called it that at the time.
1 Answer
- ?Lv 57 years ago
Dystopian was not kickstarted by Orwell, it was only made recognized by him. But other's have been doing it before him...
dys·to·pi·a
[dis-toh-pee-uh]
noun
a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.
A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia, kakotopia, cackotopia, or anti-utopia) is a community or society that is in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is the opposite of a utopia. Such societies appear in many artistic works, particularly in stories set in a future. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are often used to draw attention to real-world issues regarding society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology, ethics, science, and/or technology, which if unaddressed could potentially lead to such a dystopia-like condition.
Now that you have the definition, you know correctly that The Hunger Games is indeed a dystopian novel and no new definition has been created for the word. It is still the same as it has always been and forever will be.
You have your own opinion, that is a fact. You can say that you dislike the Hunger Games, but attacking it and saying that it's "crap" is absolute defamation and is wrong.
Have a good day.