A dystopia is a nonexistent place or society where people’s ideas or freedoms are restricted for the purpose of maintaining extreme order, usually in a post-traumatic event time period that eventually falls apart.
This definition was based on a very limited understanding of dystopian societies based on the early 2010s literature and movie adaptations. In these movies, people are restricted in some sort. In Hunger Games, people were restricted to districts. In Divergent, people were restricted to factions. In The Giver, people were restricted to not being able to see color.
All of these restrictions were for a specific reason that the government created. The reasoning behind the restrictions was used to create a more orderly world. Or so they thought. In every one of these pieces of literature, there was some sort of uprising or rebellion started by one person that did not agree or fit within the cut-and-dry boundaries that the government deemed every single person to fit into. The type of order that the governing body in these societies was to the extreme. Mostly they restricted creativity and deviated from the norm. The issue with attempting to do this is that people are rebellious creatures. There are too many different types of people in the world to be able to categorize into a few simple dumbed-down categories.
Restriction is a recipe for rebellion. This is the reason why dystopian worlds never last. In these books, this new way of living was created because the old way of living (freedom lol) wasn’t working after the traumatic event, and the government had an opportunity to swoop in and change the norm easily. It seems that the dystopian way of life was not the intention of the government. The government believed that they were on the way to creating a utopia, a perfect world, and the extreme categorization created the opposite.
