When I first started this class, I had a very broad definition of a dystopia. I thought a dystopia was a world or society that is not perfect. A world that had many flaws and needed work to be better. Before the class, I was only introduced to the ideas of dystopia when I was in middle school and it was a very broad idea. After this class, I have a better understanding of what exactly a dystopia is.
I would define a dystopia as a place that the world is looked poorly upon. In a dystopian society, the civilians are oppressed and controlled by conditions that are put upon them by people in power. They most often always end up being a catastrophic event, like war, natural disaster, or even a social event. In a dystopian society, the people in power are usually someone in the government and in a high rolling power, that they use their power to mistreat others that are beneath them.
When we started this semester, we looked into Young’s Five Faces of Oppression, and she gives us a detailed response as to how people are oppressed in society. A dystopian society falls under most if not all the Five Faces of Oppression. Civilians are mistreated by many factors in a dystopian society. They have no freedom to do what they please. Another idea that was movie that we watched as a class. The Purge, showed us how the government target the people that were poor or lived in poverty. These ideas back up the claim as to what is a dystopian society.
Overall, I would say a dystopia is a society that is mostly characterized by oppression and controlling conditions of those in power. It gives us warnings against the dangers of the ideas of totalitarianism, and the importance of maintaining a balance between the civilians and those in power. Dystopians are more talked about in filmmaking, but there are some real-life dystopian events that have happened, just not as drastic as how filmmakers make it.
