A dystopia is an imagined society where there is an immense amount of maltreatment following a cataclysmic event. The cataclysmic event doesn’t always have to be apocalyptic, but that is what is usually depicted in books and movies today. In the recent examples of fictional dystopias, the government doesn’t think that the society can’t handle the burden of the truth. Which results in people being clueless and separated from each other, only knowing the history that the people in power share. The majority of people then just follow what they are told and a few divergent go against the ones in power. History is always going to be told by the victors and those are the people that end up living in abundance.
The maltreatment is what most likely spurs the few divergent into wanting to make a change. Dystopian societies are often classist, an example could be the few people that have power choosing the lifestyle of the rest simply because of one’s attributes. Another example is the few people in power leaving majority of society to barely scrape by, while a small fraction is living in luxury. In the teen fiction books that I have read there is always a good person and a small group of people that believe in them that changes the tide for many. They expose some unknown truth to the masses, and it makes the society born out of the cataclysmic event question everything they have ever known. Then people start coming together so that everyone can have a better future. These are examples from books and movies that follow a post-apocalyptic world. In any dystopia the people are suppressed, personalities muffled because they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. The repercussions of standing out are always worst than not getting to live the way one wants to.
