To begin with, defining the concept of a dystopia, dystopia is wildly written and mostly used in movies and literature. To be completely honest, I’ve loved dystopian literature and movies for a very long time, but I never knew anything about dystopias. I’ve heard about utopia and I personally wouldn’t say that it is a”perfect world” or a “perfect political system” because I feel that it causes fewer generalizations of utopias. In reality, a utopia is what an individual’s specific desire for what they would want the world to be. Everyone’s “perfect world” can be different from others’ ideas of a “perfect world”. When thinking of a dystopia, it’s the exact opposite of a utopia in the sense of it not just being a bad world but what an individual would think is considered bad. I feel that dystopias are more generalized because they are more extreme causing there to be a wide range of approval in the world’s level of “badness”. For example, if a person imagines that their dystopia is a zombie apocalypse then no one will benefit from that because everyone will be running for their lives.
I still believe that dystopias can be less generalized but not as much as utopias because if a dystopian world is slavery, then African Americans wouldn’t benefit from slavery, but White slave owners would because they financially benefit from it. COVID-19 can be used as an example of a dystopian if it was written before COVID-19 actually happened. Some people were able to build businesses, trade, and have other financial rewards, but others lost their jobs, their homes, and other necessities needed to live.
My favorite dystopia that I just realized was a dystopia is the book “Fahrenheit 451”. I actually love that book so much, but the book follows a man who is a firefighter. He starts to realize that the world that they live in is miserable. No one has the ability to think or have their own emotions. The world is created to be dull, uninteresting, and censoring for all of its citizens. This realization that the firefighter has is triggered by a woman who comes to him, but she isn’t dull and miserable like the rest. She asks him if he is happy and immediately defends that he is until he realizes that he isn’t. His wife later overdoses on sleeping pills, which paramedics say is “normal” when they revive her. The firefighter then really accepts the idea that something is wrong. He watches the woman that triggers his thought process refuses to give up her books, which are banned in this world, and see the woman burn herself alive to keep the other firemen from taking her books. He goes on his journey wanting to read more, but society and the captain become suspicious of him. There’s more to the story and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone that wants to read it, but this book illustrates the concept of a dystopian world, and the outcome of the story is positive rather than sometimes negative.
