When I hear of the term dystopia, the idea that forms in my mind is of a society where everything that can go wrong goes wrong; it is usually the antithesis of what I believe a utopia is. Through my experience with books, film, and television the definition I have also come to conflate with my own is that it is a society where the majority of people are disaffected, to their knowledge or not, while only the very few and fortunate are able to benefit from the structure of the society, and they work hard to maintain the status quo.
One example that comes to mind of a book and film I have watched is the Divergent series created by Veronica Roth. The story follows a character who grows up in a city where she is born into a faction that assesses behavior traits and categorizes them into five factions. Their only chance/false hope of change is when they become of a certain age and take an aptitude test to see whether they remain in their current faction or qualify for another one. What the citizens of this society do not know, and more importantly was kept from them, is that they are part of an experiment, and they are one of many designed to produce more genetically complete people. Unsurprisingly, those powerful inside of the experiment prevent this knowledge from being common and punish those who show traits of being more genetically complete or Divergent.
