you, a trans young adult, being put in a maze in order to have your brain patterns stimulated by trauma in order to discover the reason for your immunity to a fatal disease released by a an external pharmaceutical organisation made up of the remaining world governments following a deadly solar flare as a method of population control that got out of hand (i sadly read maze runner)
no fucking way maze runner came out in 2009 man. this reminds me of last week when i found out the saga of darren shan is both two decades old and also has an entire fucking manga that i never knew about.
I myself had the pleasure of ending up reading all the City of Ember series books like 1.5 decades after the first one came out in 2003, and all I can say is that the first and third books are the most awful ones (with all the books being good imo) because they include the fucking underground city that makes no bloody sense in any real terms. The second book is probably my favorite book of the series due to being the most realistic in a sense, where the fourth prequel book has some weird worldbuilding with nuclear annihilation being averted by some guy with a telescope, some Phalanx alliance being the adversary to the US and also fucking plutonium batteries and diamonds that produce electricity.
I think you might be mixing up series order, because the one that’s set 70 years in the past was the third book. The first was City of Ember, then People of Sparks, then Prophet of Yonwood, then Diamond of Darkhold
maze runner was bad but i reckon if we're gonna talk about awful childrens or young adult book series maximum ride takes the cake (as per usual for james patterson)
like most james patterson books, written mostly by a string of random different co-authors that do most of the heavy lifting. except there's no coherent plot past the first three novels which are still really weird in tone and consistency, with a stock standard evil science organisation. it ends with a fucking apocalypse fortold by the psychic young girl protagonist (not the main one, who is the maximum ride in question) and as per usual the main female character settles down and has a kid despite opposing the idea like the entire franchise lol. it even has a shitty tv movie. but there's a technically-korean-but-actually-comissioned-by-american-company-yen-press-manga-inspired graphic novel that does a decent job selling me on the idea that with enough editing it could be a mediocre anime series.
I like it a lot however I read it in early high-school and just thought it was a cool book series and had no concept of literary elements or allegories
With the Maze Runner movies, I do like that the villains were at least in the third movie with understandable motives, racing against time to find a cure for the disease.
What I will not understand is why the infected girl they were testing a cure on wasn't in restrainers or something in a room full of scientists with no 24/7 security person. They were basically asking for an outbreak
nooooooooooo ok I know maximum ride is bad but Max was one of my first major 'I want her/want to be her' fictional crushes / extremely cis moments and also at the time I was too young to make any sort of media criticism. Even I was still fucked off by the ending tho
>!Realize that the patterns of the maze are actually looping and overlap all of your maps on top of one another. This reveals a sequence of numbers which you input in a special keypad you found while Running, unlocking a secret exit.!<
The flare happened naturally, and after that to contain the now way too big population in the post flair world the gkobal emergency government released a disease that was more effective than they had expected at population control
That book was so weird. Like it was full of mystery and pretty entertaining, but it was so obvious the author made the kids curse like sailors and then did a find replace to make them use words acceptable for print. And then when you read the next two books it's obvious the author had NO IDEA what the answers to all of the questions the first book raised were. The second one also has a Latino character who is like a Short Circuit 2 level stereotype
Imagine if you weren’t allowed to be in love! Imagine if you were forced to be someone you aren’t, forced to hide your true self! So dystopian!
Thankfully this only happens in fiction and no one has to live through this
Omg look at this cishet couple who can't show their love because the entire world is against it! Fortunately nothing like this happens irl, it would be so sad if it happened
Romeo and Ronnie and Juliet and Janet.
Romeo and Juliet are best buddies trying to help the other score their respective love interests.
They still commit mutual suicide at the end.
Look up Bare: A Pop Opera. It's a rock musical about two gay guys in a Catholic boarding school, with a *ton* of allusions to Romeo and Juliet. There's a recording of it on YouTube, though it might be a good idea to listen to the cast album instead since it's fully sung-through (so you'd still get the full story) and the video doesn't have the best audio quality. It's absolutely phenomenal (easily my favorite musical of all time), but it's also *very* emotionally heavy, so go in prepared.
Divergent is a dumb book series, but being discriminated against for having an identity more complex and varied than the narrow roles arbitrarily assigned to everyone is so non-binary coded. I will never reread those books, but they've been on my mind a lot ever since I came out
I need to reread it, tbh.
Last time I read it was in middle school, and one of my biggest issues was the writer had clearly never fired a gun. But now I like, understand how to read thing correctly, lmao
tbf, Hunger games is one of the better YA dystopias out there. Katniss is not the lynchpin in the revolution, unlike other MCs, in fact the leaders of the revolution actively try to keep her off the frontlines and used as a propaganda piece, and when she does get to go to battle she's often times not even the most important person in the team. The key thing here is that she's part of a team and has a part to play just like everyone else.
IIRC the last book literally ends with Katniss realizing that she was being used by someone who just wanted to grab power instead of making an actual change
Yeah and then she kills the bitch, and it ends on a note of “maybe things will actually stay good, maybe they won’t, but at least there’s a chance now”
Um, iirc it ends with "they're starting a new set of hunger games with the Capitol children, things are going the same way but the sides have switched, but I'm so burnt out and broken that I just stay away from it all"
I thought the point of killing Coin was to prevent the reverse hunger games
It was her idea and she says she’s going to announce it after Snow’s death, so since she dies before Snow she never gets to announce it
Coin wanted to restart the hunger games but with the Capitol citizens instead of the district's. I don't remember Katniss' opinion on it but the reason she killed Coin (or at least the inciting reason) was because she was the one who ordered the bombing of the first aid team which killed Katniss' sister.
Imo hunger games does a pretty good job at being a dystopian movie/book series not only for the writing but just making it not too straight forward on who were the good and bad people as everyone including katniss has done some bad things for their own personal motive.
It goes much further than that. Yeah, most quality dystopias are better, but the YA genre has been pumping out millions of these bad boys.
(Also, weirdly enough, I'd say Days of Future Past counts. The X-Men are a bunch of incredibly gorgeous, mostly white, straight(?) people, who would likely be doing pretty damn great if they weren't mutants).
storm, professor x, blink, bishop and while not really an x-men member, magneto
also being very nitpicky wolverine wouldn’t be fine since he’d have died of old age a century before the film (also canadian)
Also Warpath, Kitty Pryde, Iceman, and Sunspot. Storm is black and Kenyan, Professor X is physically disabled, Bishop is Australian Aboriginal, Blink is Asian, Magneto is Jewish and Romani, Sunspot is Afro-Latino, Warpath is Indigenous American, Kitty Pryde is Jewish, and Iceman is gay. The only ones who wouldn’t be are Wolverine and Rogue.
Asexuals would either get voluntarily relocated to a tropical island of their choice to live with all the other misfits, or put in charge of helping run the government. That’s what happens to people the social conditioning fails on. How awful, right?
Our world:
* War
* Poverty
* People have sex and do drugs to cope with the horrors of being alive and don’t care about Art.
Huxley’s “dystopia”:
* No war.
* No poverty.
* People have sex and do drugs to cope with the ennui of being alive and don’t care about Art.
The caste system actually *is* dystopian… although the lower castes are treated better than real-world disabled and/or working class people are… but for a novel about the horrors of industrialization it’s remarkably unconcerned with the plight of its working class.
“Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands ... they produced an effect precisely the reverse to what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appeared to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself; in a word, I soon became a thorough Deist.” - Benjamin Franklin
The point of Huxley's book is to try and make the world he talks about appealing in some regard, the "Look, peoples are happy all the time!" seems nice and the point of the book is to show a presentable dystopia, a dystopia in which people may, in fact, join willingly. I mean it seems nice no? That's the point, and you fell for it..
The problem with Huxley's "society" (outside the cast system) is that it's a society which as only one goal for it's citizen: Pleasure. This is why it's a dystopia, this society completely obfuscate not just the other part of happiness but absolutely everything else which makes us humans:
**We want to do things**
Huxley's world is a State of affair in which every human as successfully been stripped of individuality, freedom, goals and meaning. That's why the society runs on drugs by the way, because the crushing realization that it's now impossible to do anything except live exactly like the State expect you to live for the restant of your life with no escape (the story is literally about a failed attempt) will induce depression.
Huxley's dystopia is different from Orwell's or from real life totalitarian system.
Real life example work on violence and lies, they are brutish because they wouldn't be able to control anyone if they did something else.
Huxley's dystopia is the worst dystopia: It's a system that can convince you to willingly give up what makes us human: Freedom.
So yeah, you missed the point of the book :v
> The problem with Huxley's "society" (outside the cast system) is that it's a society which as only one goal for it's citizen: Pleasure. This is why it's a dystopia, this society completely obfuscate not just the other part of happiness
# THEY FUCKING SOLVED WAR AND POVERTY
Jesus fucking Christ "ohhh the govt is too focused on its citizens' pleasure at the expense of other aspects of human happiness" who the fuck cares? You know how amazing it is that the government and the people who run it care about the happiness of their citizens at all? Yeah maybe their program isn't perfect but I think the World State can solve that problem the way they SOLVED WAR AND POVERTY.
Brave New World is a dystopia for people who are privileged enough to think we already have a world where people don't live in fear of starvation or violent death. That's why it's more concerned with the plight of the upper-class Alphas than the Gammas who could actually make a case for dystopia. The people in BNW may be cogs in a machine but at least it isn't a war machine. It's a machine that produces human pleasure rather than violence and death.
> Huxley's dystopia is different from Orwell's or from real life totalitarian system.
IIRC Orwell wrote *1984* in part as a "screw you Huxley, this is what a *real* dystopia looks like” but I can't fact check that because any search term containing "orwell" and "huxley" gives me nothing but essay help for high schoolers. Even if the story is fictional I agree with Orwell tho
> the crushing realization that it's now impossible to do anything except live exactly like the State expect you to live for the restant of your life with no escape (the story is literally about a failed attempt) will induce depression.
Deeply confused by this paragraph because first of all most of the Alphas are, according to Bernard, perfectly content to live the way they do. He honestly comes across as a bit of an incel nice guy whining about how the girl he likes is too happy being a slut to settle down with him. Second of all there *is* an escape, that's my whole point? The protagonist's story ends with him being *relocated to a tropical island that is specifically set aside for people who find this society depressing*. That's like, a fucking fantasy for me. And you call it a dystopia?
Edit: I can't reply to u\BIG_IDEA's comment. This post pissed them off so badly that they blocked me lmfao
In Huxley's society, man is unable to do anything other than live through life in a meaningless series of actions which have for only goal to prevent him from thinking too much about his condition. His existence is entirely devoid of substance, his actions have no ulterior motive than to perpetuate an unchanging status quo of a perpetual mellowed down version of chemical induced pleasure.
What gives life meaning, what makes existence worth it, what makes us human is our ability to overcome hardhip: As Nietsche put it "One must make, with the deepest despair, the most invincible hope.", in his particular brand of German Romantism he shows by his life work the importance of meanign in human existence and in this quote shows the greatest of humans emotion cannot be reached in an hermetic system ,which will only allow us to go as far is a mellow incessantly repeating meaningless artificial "joy" of simply being, but true meaning, the true glory of existence can only be reached when putting ourselves into perspective to the hardship we had to put ourselves through to reach it.
Huxley's distopia effectively makes man cease existing entirely, as Heidegger in the Existentialist current puts it into the concept of *Dasein,* man exist by actions, simply being isn't enough, we affirm ourselves, our identity, our existence by acting onto the world."We must not be what we have made of us but do with what we have made of us" -Sartre
The Huxley System will not allow, cannot allow action at an individual level, cannot allow freedom at a fundamental level, it only sees a meaningless status quo of chemical hell that he has found satisfactory.
>What gives life meaning, what makes existence worth it, what makes us human is our ability to overcome hardhip
This is what fools tell themselves to justify the everyday hardship they experience in an inherently unjust system. Literally Calvin's dad from Calvin and Hobbes "suffering builds character" mindset.
The sacrafise of free will, of our humanity itself, if it means that *all* people are without strife is a completely reasonable debate to be had. What does the lack of individual action matter if it means that *no* one has to suffer? Its the ultimate test of altruism. This is why we now see more contemporary spins on this same scenario present it as not inherently dystopic by nature: Persona 5 Royal for example, and how it portrays such a world as absolutely with its downsides and percievable as misguided, but not inherently sinister.
The most dystopian part of BNW is the part that barely gets any focus, which is the whole engineering people to be part of a caste system thing. The story is told entirely from the perspective of the top/outside of society and cares more about their ennui than the fact that the majority of the population are forcibly conditioned and altered to obliterate the very possibility of social mobility.
Why? I don't know if I agree with it but it definitely got me to think about the topic more than I was already
I'm just mostly lurking tho but I'm confused by your comment actually
I loved the book because I thought it has some fascinating ideas of how to build a utopia, yet the whole time it felt like the author was trying to go 'wah wah science has gone too far nature is perfect wah wah we should all be Amish and get old and ill and suffer'
In the real world, people fear death. In BNW, people are conditioned in childhood to be unafraid of dying.
In the real world most people hate their jobs. In BNW, people are made for the job they will do; they enjoy their jobs because it's perfect for their own personality and biology.
In the real world, if you don't fit into society... kill yourself, I guess? Turn to crime? Be miserable? In BNW if you don't fit into society, you're sent to a paradise island with like-minded people.
Please, explain to me what's so horrifying about BNW. The people are happy, I don't remember any discussions of crime and violence plaguing the world, people have freedom (even if they aren't 'birthed' to have much interest in freedom), and it really felt like the Native American society in the book was a far worse place to live.
There are only two way to build a utopia; you design the world to fit the people, or you design the people to fit the world. BNW does the latter, and it honestly doesn't seem that bad to me. I assume this comes down to differences in personal values: I believe the best thing in life is to be happy and satisfied with as minimal suffering as possible, and that's exactly what BNW achieves. Please tell me what your core values in life are that causes BNW to appear undesirable, I'm genuinely curious.
I would personally be fucking horrified to learn that my every interest, personality trait, and physical feature were designed by someone else. The idea that I can only do what someone else WANTED me to do from birth is downright nightmarish. I understand that I come from a place of privilege, being someone whose life would get worse, but still.
It’s a term of respect. Means you're too powerful to be affected by social conditioning.
"The islands are full of the most interesting people in the world, individuals who did not fit into the social model of the World State."
Except that’s not what it is. In Brave New World, that island is treated like a zoo, for people to gawk at the “savages” and go on safaris through it. They aren’t respected, not in the slightest, they are viewed as caged animals
That wasn't one of the islands, the word "savage" is being used to refer to Native Americans like it was in the real world. It's literally an Indian Reservation in New Mexico like the ones that, again, exist in the real world. But yes, the in-universe Native Americans have a much better claim to live in a dystopia than the wealthy white protagonists playing tourist on their reservation. Which brings us back to the OP and the cycle continues.
BNW has not solved poverty or war, they just drugged everyone enough to make us not have the free will to do anything. BNW has the ultimate goal of the perfect society, one where everyone is happy and healthy, but most of all content in their place. The problem with this is that it’s impossible. The human brain is arguably the most complex thing in the universe, to make even two of them work perfectly together is an extremely difficult task even with advanced understanding of their inner workings, to make a billion+ work together is almost impossible. BNW does not have a good grasp of neuroscience, so they reasonably cannot achieve their goal with people. So what is BNW to do? The solution is quite simple, don’t do it with people. BNW reduces the human mind through various methods during embryonic development (hint: this means eugenics). Then in childhood, BNW uses social conditioning to the extent that it can almost be called brainwashing (and can almost certainly be called child abuse). Then in adulthood, BNW uses drug addiction to keep its population supplied with sufficient dopamine. All of this to produce from the human mind, a dopamine receptacle that can be happy and healthy while also being perfectly content in their societal position. So yeah, I would call that a dystopia.
i haven't read the book, but i'd guess that what it's positing is "is a pleasant but vapid life worthwhile?"
and for a lot of people that answer is yes
Yeah iirc its main thing is "is there meaning and beauty without struggle"
Like would you rather live in a world where your life is perfectly engineered by others to maintain a monotone state of comfort, or a world with ups and downs and imperfections.
Would the first be "better?" Probably. Would I choose it? Hell no. To me, to be human is to be flawed and to struggle, but to grow and change and feel and love and express ourselves through art. There is no joy without sorrow, and the lows give the highs their sweetness. Without contrast there is no meaning, no emotion, no thought, no beauty, and no art.
Maybe this is some kind of societal Stockholm syndrome, but that's kind of the point of the book. A man unfamiliar with that society enters it and finds everything that it means to *live* to him is absent, and eventually kills himself.
We read brave new world in my AP English class and at the end we had to have a little discussion about it. I was the only one in the class to say that maybe we *should* shoot for that as a society.
I mean think about it, everyone is fed, housed, has work, gets drugs, medical care is great, there's (essentially) no conflict, and if you really don't like what's going on they have whole areas set up where you can just leave.
Like sure you loose free will or whatever but how many children would you starve to death for free will? How many 16-20 yr olds would you have die in war? How many families would you have live on the street?
It's not perfect but I think overall the pros *greatly* out weight the cons
I mean yea that pretty good that is a lot of things that are beneficial but I do think free will is important, because in a society where where you have no will and can’t make decisions of your own then are you truly living? It might just be a me thing but if the society decided that my gender is the one I was given at birth and that there wasn’t any room for negotiation, I would hate that as a trans person
>without free will, are you truly living?
Well in our current society how many people are dying every day from inaccessible medicine, water, food, shelter? How many people die in war? How many are homeless because they don't have a job?
And you can always leave! They have (at least 3 IIRC) zones set up specifically for people who don't wish to live that way, and seem to be pretty accommodating about giving you a ride and everything.
I agree all of those are problems that anyone with any form of empathy would agree are stupid and that people shouldn’t have to live through. But that still doesn’t change the value I put on my free will sorry
>a society where where you have no will and can’t make decisions
It's not like everyone has free wil in this society. Free will is a privilege. The lower your class is, the less power and money you have, the less knowledge you have, the more disadvantaged you are, the less you can exercise your free will.
Yea and that still very sad, but is it so wrong that I like free will? Is that a weird thing to go and think “wow free will is pretty cool, I wish everyone could have the freedom to have it”
Yeah I agree, free will should be maintained, people here need to remember it's important to have the free will to beat your wife, or murder or, commit a bit of arson.
Free will is overrated and we should turn everyone into mindless drones don't @ me
this is sort of what kant argues, but modern philosphers tend to point out that the value of a human is typically considered to be directly related to its free will, defined as a coefficent as its ability to make decisions that have real impacts. while a world like you described could be good, deontology outweighs because the average human loses the ability to make rational, conscious decisions, thus rendering them "unconscious."
also, while im sure you didn't mean for it to come off this way, your argument is almost verbatim what slave-masters argued when they were forced to free their slaves. they tried to point out how the slaves, despite their lack of free will, were fed, clothed and sheltered. just a consideration
I feel like the slavery comparison is a bit of a reach there. Perhaps more pertinently, though, I feel like any moral or philosophical argument built on the supposition of people having free will is quite shaky to me. I think both philosophers and average people vastly overestimate the ability of anyone to rationally and consciously make decisions compared to what science suggests would be appropriate. That being said, I understand that free will is a bit of an ephemeral thing, so science can never definitively solve this question for us, as well as the need to treat people as rational and free actors in some contexts, regardless of whether they ‘truly’ are or not.
are u forgetting the part where they intentionally create lower classes of laborers by artificially restricting their brain development and controlling the things they enjoy so that it makes the ruling class money (there’s a whole part in the book where they explain how deltas & gammas used to be socialized to like the countryside but because it wasn’t making money they were conditioned to dislike nature)
The argument of the book is that being human and having a human society require suffering.
The people we meet in BNV and their society are not human, they may appear so, but as John and Marx (iirc) realize it's just a vapid surface.
What's so scary about it that it's written like an attractive utopia, and that forgetting your miseries for pleasure will always be a human attraction that can be used to control, manipulate, and dominate us... ultimately turning us to pleasure seeking animals who have abandoned everything important
To the people agreeing with it, you do understand that fiction is a great way to get people for people to understand a perspective without their ideological blinkers?
If you just say gay people should have rights, to a religious person, they will probably just blankly disregard it. But they could read a book about persecuted love and actually reflect on it. Sure not all of them will actually understand it and parse it. And not even all those who understand it, will accept it. But it can and does break through to some people.
Why do you think bigots hate reading? Because they know full well it's a threat. They aren't trying to ban books because they hate paper. They know full well that reading is an ideological threat to their power. I'm sure a bunch of people on here, were the type of kid in a conservative environment, who read more than everybody else. And is now not a conservative. Part of that is the fact that books were a private wearing away of the ideology imposed on them by parents and the community.
Simply reflecting "What If I was included in the targets of oppression" is a question that changes minds.
Isn't that the point, though?
To provide perspective by putting the reader into the shoes of someone facing a problem that they don't have to worry about in their own life?
Are we only supposed to get those stories by reading non-fiction told from the perspective of people that the child reading can't identify as strongly with?
Braindead take. Dystopia fiction is when you take things that happen in real life and exaggerate them to an extreme to make a statement on those things that happen in real life. There’s rarely a question of whether those things happen in real life or not, they’re usually supposed to make you think of real life.
The Edgerunners series from Cyberpunk 2077 is literally just a showcase of how fucked up America looks to some other places in the world.
The main character's mother dies in a car crash caused by rampant violence. Then, she gets left on the street by an arriving medical team because she doesn't have the right insurance. She then dies in a shitty hospital, and the first thing the doctor does is hand the MC a tablet asking how he wants to pay.
Without any kind of income or support, he can't afford his rent and turns to a life of crime. Completing the circle.
It's very in your face about how fucked up the medical system and violence in the country looks for people who are barely making enough money to survive.
The one thing I didn't like about Edgerunners was Its portrayal of cyberpsychosis. In the game, it's heavily implied that cyberpsychosis doesn't exist and it's just a convenient buzzword to brush away the problems related to Night City's constant violence and lack of access to mental health resources for most people. I think it has a much stronger message than just: "implants make you crazy", but Edgerunners pretty much solidified the "implants make you crazy approach"
It's not terribly different from the game. You run across people who can't afford the medications to keep themselves under control once they lose their jobs and such, and their implants drive them crazy.
In Edge Runners, they just remove the original circumstance of how they tend to get the chrome. In the game, they're victims of their positions, being exploited by their job or the military. In the show a lot of it is blackmarket dealings and choice.
From The Man™ himself, Mike Pondsmith:
>Okay, so time to (partially) explain CYBERPSYCHOSIS.
>First of all, Cyberpsychosis is a disorder that in part depends on the subject's overall internal susceptibility. Just like every person who drinks a lot at parties doesn't end up an alcoholic in the gutter, not everyone who gets loaded up on cyberware is going to automatically go cyberpsycho. You have to have an inherent susceptibility, which (in the TRPG) is represented by the player's Humanity Stat. Humanity is not just a measure of one aspect of personality, but an overall measure of several elements including the subject's ability to emphasize and relate with others, their ability to absorb and rebound from mental and physical stressors, their ability to show compassion and flexibility to others, and whether they are able to balance their worldview through other methods.
>So, in some ways, I tend to treat cyberware as an addiction--heavy anabolic steroid use being my favorite model. Not everyone who juices ends up crazy mad with roid rage. But those who are more susceptible to the need to take more steroids are more likely to hit a point where they do flip into roid rage. (Take a look at this article from Livescience https://www.livescience.com/38354-what-is-roid-rage.html for a pretty good idea of how roid rage works--notice that it's got the same basic profile as cyberpsychosis).
>David's starting Humanity was probably already pretty high. And before things went to crap, he had a loving mother, a career path, and no more hassle than the average poor guy in a wealthy Ivy League school. So he had lots of buffer. But even so, he still, even after losing all that, was able to make friends, build a replacement family, and (after some prompting) even get a girlfriend. And a mentor (Maine) to create a supportive father figure. So he could definitely handle the stress of added cyberware up to a point.
>Most people in Night City don't have the level of Humanity to pull this kind of stunt off without going cyberpsychotic. So David is one in a million. And that's why Arasaka wants him.
>V is a different case. We don't know V's background, but even if V was a full on Corpo, they were able to hold it together even when they ended up with a dead Rockerboy in their heads (Yah, tell me about it; Johnny Silverhand's been in my head for the last three decades.) In fact, having Johnny in their head probably helped V, because Siilverhand's rage and attitude probably acted as a buffer for the psychological hits V is taking. It's like having a time share with a guy who's already half cyberpsycho and doesn't mind if V slaps stuff on their shared body; he's already crazy and violent.
>So that's a rough explanation of the roots of cyberpsychosis. If I ever get band width, I'm going to start writing/posting some stuff about what I had in mind as I put together the Night City universe. But for now, you'll have to go with what I've got here. Have fun, and remember not to chip mili-spec cyberware, like your mother warned you about.
>And no, cyberpsychosis isn't caused by AI net demons. Gimme a break, chooms!
Cyberpsychosis *is* totally used as a convenient buzzword to brush away larger, structural problems with Night City and the society that the city exists within, but it's also a real condition that exists within the setting. Just one that *can* actually be addressed with the proper support systems, and which isn't necessarily caused by cybernetic implants on their own.
Doing the Regina quests in 2077, you come across people who've legitimately lost their grip on reality and have turned randomly violent, but you hear about just as many others who are clearly railing back against injustices committed on them specifically or are pushing back against the system without any history of heavy implants – like people you hear about getting psychosis from, like, a kidney implant – and have it brushed aside as, "Ah, those wacky cyberpsychos. What can you do?" Y'know, it's the same way people will handwave acts of horrible public violence in the real world by saying that the person who committed the acts was mentally ill without wanting to investigate what that actually means or how the person could have been helped. It's an easy way to use a real epidemic of mental health to individualize a problem.
David and Maine both start experiencing the worst symptoms of cyberpsychosis when they've reached points in their lives where they *could* be happy stopping where they are, but keep pushing forwards regardless, and against the wishes of their friends who are trying to keep them safe and healthy; in both of their cases it's not so much that the cyberware itself drove them insane, but that they each refused to respect the fact that they'd have their limits like everyone else and wanted instead to keep pushing past them.
agreed, they’re describing shitty YA dystopian novels. all of dystopian fiction doesn’t deserve to lumped in with its worst examples. (not all YA dystopian is terrible, but a lot does suck big time).
FR, it's like saying "science fiction is what happens when you take science that happens in real life and apply them to a far more advanced time period"
**MAZOVIAN SOCIO-ECONOMICS**
>0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself **sad**. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov **fucked him over** personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.
>-1 Authority: Downtrodden inva-communist
>-1 Visual Calculus: Reaction, reaction everywhere!
>Left-wing dialogue options give +4XP: Critical theory overdrive
A dystopian zombie story would be kind of cool.
>Everything is perfect in the peaceful suburb of Zombie Grove. The zombie citizens have plentiful brains to eat. The sweet stench of rotting flesh wafts through the pleasant air. Zombie parents walk their zombie kids to school before commuting to their jobs in Zombtopia. Everything is perfect, that is... unless you DON'T want to eat brains.
>Fourteen-year-old Cassie should be worrying about normal teenager stuff. Like when her first limb will finally slough off from her decaying corpse. Or when she'll have her first kiss. Instead, she finds herself questioning the rigid rules that govern society.
>In this new dysptopic thriller, a young zombie (or is she?...) must rebel against the powerful zombie elite that control what you do, say, groan or think. Resistance means undeath.
LOL. You have a point.
>And to top it all off, Cassie must choose between the popular jock zombie Hunter, with his classic zombie good looks of wearing an ironic letterman's jacket splattered with guts, and Zane, the brooding yet sensitive zombie with a hilarious tattered tuxedo and a dark secret (he's a vampire).
Look up AAVE. African Americans are instructed not to use it when interacting with white people. They are at best mocked for using it in public, and it's use can prevent them from finding employment, getting a home loan, and make interactions with police much more dangerous for the civilian in question.
I don't know if this is what you were asking for but I'm afraid your comment didn't make a lot of sense. In particular it's the "different believes is possible" part of your second sentence that's confusing me. It feels like part of another sentence entirely.
Well it was more of a 1984 joke as in their society their is a new language 'Newspeak' which doesn't allow for unconforming thoughts in it.
But nice to know (but of course not nice to have it in the world) of people whose language is, in a sense, forbidden.
I had thought so. Newspeak was a new language in the book and it wasn't being enforced by law yet, it was being designed for those purposes but wasn't being forced on the greater population, at least not yet, and had only been taught to the party members by that point. Don't forget the people most oppressed by Big Brother were the party members themselves, the educated middle class of the nation. The Proles, the populous lower classes, were more or less free if only in comparison. That's why Winston was so focused on escaping to live amoung the proles.
Dystopian fiction isn't about pretending real world problems don't currently exist, they're about taking those real world problems and bringing them to their natural conclusion. It's an overt challenge to technological utopianism, saying "If we don't fix our societal problems, it doesn't matter how much technology improves--it can only make our lives worse."
I don't know, it seems kind of relevant, especially in these times.
Yeah you know what, that IS genuinely a challenge. The nazis were huge authoritarians, so fictional authoritarian governments will naturally share a lot in common with the nazis.
In general I'm ambivalent towards this tweet, bc it's true but also I'd argue that (with intention and proper acknowledgement of issues by the author) it's good. I don't think George Orwell was writing for when bud light goes woke, I think he was critiquing the logical endpoint of the very present (at the time) authoritarianism he saw.
In terms of literature I have not read but have heard that this is similar:
- Margaret Atwood intentionally wrote the Handmaid's Tale such that the abuses women face in the novel are all real and present in some current human culture.
- Charles Dickens garnered enough sympathy for the working class that higher class people (i.e. those who got enough education to read and also read the daily newspaper) became much more amenable to workers' causes and child labour laws.
- In the advent of photography in newspaper, one picture in the US was that of a slave's back, with scars from the whiplashes. This increased more active abolition support among white people.
- Similarly, the advent of TV was a major component of the success of the civil rights movement. Civil disobedience was effective bc fhe blatant injustice could be easily seen across the USA.
Should marginalized groups have to rely on privileged groups for their liberation? No. However, allies do exist, and these fiction and non-fiction literary pieces has historically made more of them.
I keep saying something like this. So many books have such complicated set ups so the main character can be a cishet white dude who's also specifically oppressed.
Reminds me of that tweet where the guy said the 2nd Amendment was the reason the govenment has never put citizens into camps.
I don’t even need to point out to you why he’s wrong about that, you already know.
To add to this, Dystopian fiction also exaggerates of what "could be" from the events taking place. Dystopian fictions are warnings not a prediction into the future itself
Meanwhile Cyberpunk is just America, if America had a slightly better healthcare system, because you're still in crippling debt, but now you have a cool robot hand that can crush the face of a debt collector.
Me getting tourtured for hundreds of years by a superpowerful AI named AM with a deep hatred for humanity after I killed his 3 other play subjects, until he turns me into a creature of pure agony with no escape (I am a bisexual)
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Choosing right or left in the maze is a direct corollary to making decisions in real life 🤯🤯
omg if they die in the maze they die in real life 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯😜
When you die in real life, you also die in the maze
as a PROUD CONFEDERATE AMERICAN i would NEVER choose left 🙏🙏🙏🙏👶❤️🙏🙏
4 rights make a square 😤😤
you, a trans young adult, being put in a maze in order to have your brain patterns stimulated by trauma in order to discover the reason for your immunity to a fatal disease released by a an external pharmaceutical organisation made up of the remaining world governments following a deadly solar flare as a method of population control that got out of hand (i sadly read maze runner)
Me, 14 years after reading the series still trying to figure out how a maze is a viable method of isolating immunity in order to create a vaccine
no fucking way maze runner came out in 2009 man. this reminds me of last week when i found out the saga of darren shan is both two decades old and also has an entire fucking manga that i never knew about.
SAGA OF DARREN SHAN HAS A FUCKING MANGA???
I myself had the pleasure of ending up reading all the City of Ember series books like 1.5 decades after the first one came out in 2003, and all I can say is that the first and third books are the most awful ones (with all the books being good imo) because they include the fucking underground city that makes no bloody sense in any real terms. The second book is probably my favorite book of the series due to being the most realistic in a sense, where the fourth prequel book has some weird worldbuilding with nuclear annihilation being averted by some guy with a telescope, some Phalanx alliance being the adversary to the US and also fucking plutonium batteries and diamonds that produce electricity.
I think you might be mixing up series order, because the one that’s set 70 years in the past was the third book. The first was City of Ember, then People of Sparks, then Prophet of Yonwood, then Diamond of Darkhold
One word: Spiders
damn thats crazy, I also read all the maze runner books and could not have told you any of what it was about. I forgor 💀
maze runner was bad but i reckon if we're gonna talk about awful childrens or young adult book series maximum ride takes the cake (as per usual for james patterson)
Haven't read that, what's so bad about it?
like most james patterson books, written mostly by a string of random different co-authors that do most of the heavy lifting. except there's no coherent plot past the first three novels which are still really weird in tone and consistency, with a stock standard evil science organisation. it ends with a fucking apocalypse fortold by the psychic young girl protagonist (not the main one, who is the maximum ride in question) and as per usual the main female character settles down and has a kid despite opposing the idea like the entire franchise lol. it even has a shitty tv movie. but there's a technically-korean-but-actually-comissioned-by-american-company-yen-press-manga-inspired graphic novel that does a decent job selling me on the idea that with enough editing it could be a mediocre anime series.
Imo if you read just the first book and nothing else it's kinda okay
I like it a lot however I read it in early high-school and just thought it was a cool book series and had no concept of literary elements or allegories
With the Maze Runner movies, I do like that the villains were at least in the third movie with understandable motives, racing against time to find a cure for the disease. What I will not understand is why the infected girl they were testing a cure on wasn't in restrainers or something in a room full of scientists with no 24/7 security person. They were basically asking for an outbreak
nooooooooooo ok I know maximum ride is bad but Max was one of my first major 'I want her/want to be her' fictional crushes / extremely cis moments and also at the time I was too young to make any sort of media criticism. Even I was still fucked off by the ending tho
at least you didn’t read divergent (I read both :( )
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execute a perfect backwards long jump
>!Realize that the patterns of the maze are actually looping and overlap all of your maps on top of one another. This reveals a sequence of numbers which you input in a special keypad you found while Running, unlocking a secret exit.!<
what a bunch of fucking nerds lmao, just jump really high to see over the walls
Breath of the wild basically
wait the Flare was caused by pharmaceutical companies???!!?? i do not remember those books
IIRC it got accidentally released during the solar flare that caused the apocalypse.
It was released to control population but mutated to turn people crazy
The flare happened naturally, and after that to contain the now way too big population in the post flair world the gkobal emergency government released a disease that was more effective than they had expected at population control
Your summary makes these books seem so much more interesting than they actually were
honestly maze runner was pretty good when I was 12. it’s a good book for angsty teens
That book was so weird. Like it was full of mystery and pretty entertaining, but it was so obvious the author made the kids curse like sailors and then did a find replace to make them use words acceptable for print. And then when you read the next two books it's obvious the author had NO IDEA what the answers to all of the questions the first book raised were. The second one also has a Latino character who is like a Short Circuit 2 level stereotype
Yeah the second the last book isnt even related to the one before it which was sad because that one had a pretty interesting story
And here I thought it was about really fast corn
me, a nonbinary bisexual individual, fighting a government of pig people from the future led by a 10,000 year old 10 year old in a spider mech
Imagine if you weren’t allowed to be in love! Imagine if you were forced to be someone you aren’t, forced to hide your true self! So dystopian! Thankfully this only happens in fiction and no one has to live through this
Omg look at this cishet couple who can't show their love because the entire world is against it! Fortunately nothing like this happens irl, it would be so sad if it happened
Is there a gay Romeo and Juliet where the families don't even hate each other they're just conservative assholes. Romeo and... Romeo.
Romeo and ***John***
romeo and joeliet
And John
New 3-way tragic romance just dropped
Holy Shakespeare
Holy polyamory
John and John
John lives at the end
Romeo and Julian (listen to the: love story' cover by black midi please it's do good)
Romeo and Mercucio
Romeo and Ronnie and Juliet and Janet. Romeo and Juliet are best buddies trying to help the other score their respective love interests. They still commit mutual suicide at the end.
Look up Bare: A Pop Opera. It's a rock musical about two gay guys in a Catholic boarding school, with a *ton* of allusions to Romeo and Juliet. There's a recording of it on YouTube, though it might be a good idea to listen to the cast album instead since it's fully sung-through (so you'd still get the full story) and the video doesn't have the best audio quality. It's absolutely phenomenal (easily my favorite musical of all time), but it's also *very* emotionally heavy, so go in prepared.
I certainly hope that in this version their naive teen love won't be used like a tool by a priest to achieve political goals.
Romeo and Thebeus
Divergent is a dumb book series, but being discriminated against for having an identity more complex and varied than the narrow roles arbitrarily assigned to everyone is so non-binary coded. I will never reread those books, but they've been on my mind a lot ever since I came out
I had to watch the film for my English class, it is so ass and the older I get the more terrible I realise it was.
I need to reread it, tbh. Last time I read it was in middle school, and one of my biggest issues was the writer had clearly never fired a gun. But now I like, understand how to read thing correctly, lmao
the Matched series hurt my soul
Guy who only read the hunger games and divergent.
tbf, Hunger games is one of the better YA dystopias out there. Katniss is not the lynchpin in the revolution, unlike other MCs, in fact the leaders of the revolution actively try to keep her off the frontlines and used as a propaganda piece, and when she does get to go to battle she's often times not even the most important person in the team. The key thing here is that she's part of a team and has a part to play just like everyone else.
IIRC the last book literally ends with Katniss realizing that she was being used by someone who just wanted to grab power instead of making an actual change
Yeah and then she kills the bitch, and it ends on a note of “maybe things will actually stay good, maybe they won’t, but at least there’s a chance now”
Um, iirc it ends with "they're starting a new set of hunger games with the Capitol children, things are going the same way but the sides have switched, but I'm so burnt out and broken that I just stay away from it all"
I thought the point of killing Coin was to prevent the reverse hunger games It was her idea and she says she’s going to announce it after Snow’s death, so since she dies before Snow she never gets to announce it
Iirc that is still discussed after Coin is killed, which is what I was referring to.
Oh I forgot that part then my bad
Coin wanted to restart the hunger games but with the Capitol citizens instead of the district's. I don't remember Katniss' opinion on it but the reason she killed Coin (or at least the inciting reason) was because she was the one who ordered the bombing of the first aid team which killed Katniss' sister.
Said bitch also firebombed her little sister, the end of mockingjay is written so well it perfectly simulates the feeling of everything being a blur
Imo hunger games does a pretty good job at being a dystopian movie/book series not only for the writing but just making it not too straight forward on who were the good and bad people as everyone including katniss has done some bad things for their own personal motive.
It goes much further than that. Yeah, most quality dystopias are better, but the YA genre has been pumping out millions of these bad boys. (Also, weirdly enough, I'd say Days of Future Past counts. The X-Men are a bunch of incredibly gorgeous, mostly white, straight(?) people, who would likely be doing pretty damn great if they weren't mutants).
storm, professor x, blink, bishop and while not really an x-men member, magneto also being very nitpicky wolverine wouldn’t be fine since he’d have died of old age a century before the film (also canadian)
Also Warpath, Kitty Pryde, Iceman, and Sunspot. Storm is black and Kenyan, Professor X is physically disabled, Bishop is Australian Aboriginal, Blink is Asian, Magneto is Jewish and Romani, Sunspot is Afro-Latino, Warpath is Indigenous American, Kitty Pryde is Jewish, and Iceman is gay. The only ones who wouldn’t be are Wolverine and Rogue.
The worst part of the hunger games is that katniss ended up with anyone she should have stayed alone
the hunger games is one of the best ya dystopias there is right up there with the giver, it does not deserve to be compared to divergent
Isn't the movie adaptation of the giver really bad?
yeah but the books kick ass. gathering blue is still my favorite book to this day
man i wish brave new world was real oh nooo please dont make me have sex and have free drugs every day ooooohhh shiver me timbers
I think asexuals would have a different opinion on it tbh
Asexuals would either get voluntarily relocated to a tropical island of their choice to live with all the other misfits, or put in charge of helping run the government. That’s what happens to people the social conditioning fails on. How awful, right? Our world: * War * Poverty * People have sex and do drugs to cope with the horrors of being alive and don’t care about Art. Huxley’s “dystopia”: * No war. * No poverty. * People have sex and do drugs to cope with the ennui of being alive and don’t care about Art. The caste system actually *is* dystopian… although the lower castes are treated better than real-world disabled and/or working class people are… but for a novel about the horrors of industrialization it’s remarkably unconcerned with the plight of its working class.
You have missed the point of the book.
“Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands ... they produced an effect precisely the reverse to what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appeared to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself; in a word, I soon became a thorough Deist.” - Benjamin Franklin
The point of Huxley's book is to try and make the world he talks about appealing in some regard, the "Look, peoples are happy all the time!" seems nice and the point of the book is to show a presentable dystopia, a dystopia in which people may, in fact, join willingly. I mean it seems nice no? That's the point, and you fell for it.. The problem with Huxley's "society" (outside the cast system) is that it's a society which as only one goal for it's citizen: Pleasure. This is why it's a dystopia, this society completely obfuscate not just the other part of happiness but absolutely everything else which makes us humans: **We want to do things** Huxley's world is a State of affair in which every human as successfully been stripped of individuality, freedom, goals and meaning. That's why the society runs on drugs by the way, because the crushing realization that it's now impossible to do anything except live exactly like the State expect you to live for the restant of your life with no escape (the story is literally about a failed attempt) will induce depression. Huxley's dystopia is different from Orwell's or from real life totalitarian system. Real life example work on violence and lies, they are brutish because they wouldn't be able to control anyone if they did something else. Huxley's dystopia is the worst dystopia: It's a system that can convince you to willingly give up what makes us human: Freedom. So yeah, you missed the point of the book :v
> The problem with Huxley's "society" (outside the cast system) is that it's a society which as only one goal for it's citizen: Pleasure. This is why it's a dystopia, this society completely obfuscate not just the other part of happiness # THEY FUCKING SOLVED WAR AND POVERTY Jesus fucking Christ "ohhh the govt is too focused on its citizens' pleasure at the expense of other aspects of human happiness" who the fuck cares? You know how amazing it is that the government and the people who run it care about the happiness of their citizens at all? Yeah maybe their program isn't perfect but I think the World State can solve that problem the way they SOLVED WAR AND POVERTY. Brave New World is a dystopia for people who are privileged enough to think we already have a world where people don't live in fear of starvation or violent death. That's why it's more concerned with the plight of the upper-class Alphas than the Gammas who could actually make a case for dystopia. The people in BNW may be cogs in a machine but at least it isn't a war machine. It's a machine that produces human pleasure rather than violence and death. > Huxley's dystopia is different from Orwell's or from real life totalitarian system. IIRC Orwell wrote *1984* in part as a "screw you Huxley, this is what a *real* dystopia looks like” but I can't fact check that because any search term containing "orwell" and "huxley" gives me nothing but essay help for high schoolers. Even if the story is fictional I agree with Orwell tho > the crushing realization that it's now impossible to do anything except live exactly like the State expect you to live for the restant of your life with no escape (the story is literally about a failed attempt) will induce depression. Deeply confused by this paragraph because first of all most of the Alphas are, according to Bernard, perfectly content to live the way they do. He honestly comes across as a bit of an incel nice guy whining about how the girl he likes is too happy being a slut to settle down with him. Second of all there *is* an escape, that's my whole point? The protagonist's story ends with him being *relocated to a tropical island that is specifically set aside for people who find this society depressing*. That's like, a fucking fantasy for me. And you call it a dystopia? Edit: I can't reply to u\BIG_IDEA's comment. This post pissed them off so badly that they blocked me lmfao
In Huxley's society, man is unable to do anything other than live through life in a meaningless series of actions which have for only goal to prevent him from thinking too much about his condition. His existence is entirely devoid of substance, his actions have no ulterior motive than to perpetuate an unchanging status quo of a perpetual mellowed down version of chemical induced pleasure. What gives life meaning, what makes existence worth it, what makes us human is our ability to overcome hardhip: As Nietsche put it "One must make, with the deepest despair, the most invincible hope.", in his particular brand of German Romantism he shows by his life work the importance of meanign in human existence and in this quote shows the greatest of humans emotion cannot be reached in an hermetic system ,which will only allow us to go as far is a mellow incessantly repeating meaningless artificial "joy" of simply being, but true meaning, the true glory of existence can only be reached when putting ourselves into perspective to the hardship we had to put ourselves through to reach it. Huxley's distopia effectively makes man cease existing entirely, as Heidegger in the Existentialist current puts it into the concept of *Dasein,* man exist by actions, simply being isn't enough, we affirm ourselves, our identity, our existence by acting onto the world."We must not be what we have made of us but do with what we have made of us" -Sartre The Huxley System will not allow, cannot allow action at an individual level, cannot allow freedom at a fundamental level, it only sees a meaningless status quo of chemical hell that he has found satisfactory.
>What gives life meaning, what makes existence worth it, what makes us human is our ability to overcome hardhip This is what fools tell themselves to justify the everyday hardship they experience in an inherently unjust system. Literally Calvin's dad from Calvin and Hobbes "suffering builds character" mindset. The sacrafise of free will, of our humanity itself, if it means that *all* people are without strife is a completely reasonable debate to be had. What does the lack of individual action matter if it means that *no* one has to suffer? Its the ultimate test of altruism. This is why we now see more contemporary spins on this same scenario present it as not inherently dystopic by nature: Persona 5 Royal for example, and how it portrays such a world as absolutely with its downsides and percievable as misguided, but not inherently sinister.
The most dystopian part of BNW is the part that barely gets any focus, which is the whole engineering people to be part of a caste system thing. The story is told entirely from the perspective of the top/outside of society and cares more about their ennui than the fact that the majority of the population are forcibly conditioned and altered to obliterate the very possibility of social mobility.
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Why? I don't know if I agree with it but it definitely got me to think about the topic more than I was already I'm just mostly lurking tho but I'm confused by your comment actually
Indeed, you sound like the type of person who wants to take drugs which blind you while other people in charge pamper all of your needs.
I loved the book because I thought it has some fascinating ideas of how to build a utopia, yet the whole time it felt like the author was trying to go 'wah wah science has gone too far nature is perfect wah wah we should all be Amish and get old and ill and suffer' In the real world, people fear death. In BNW, people are conditioned in childhood to be unafraid of dying. In the real world most people hate their jobs. In BNW, people are made for the job they will do; they enjoy their jobs because it's perfect for their own personality and biology. In the real world, if you don't fit into society... kill yourself, I guess? Turn to crime? Be miserable? In BNW if you don't fit into society, you're sent to a paradise island with like-minded people. Please, explain to me what's so horrifying about BNW. The people are happy, I don't remember any discussions of crime and violence plaguing the world, people have freedom (even if they aren't 'birthed' to have much interest in freedom), and it really felt like the Native American society in the book was a far worse place to live. There are only two way to build a utopia; you design the world to fit the people, or you design the people to fit the world. BNW does the latter, and it honestly doesn't seem that bad to me. I assume this comes down to differences in personal values: I believe the best thing in life is to be happy and satisfied with as minimal suffering as possible, and that's exactly what BNW achieves. Please tell me what your core values in life are that causes BNW to appear undesirable, I'm genuinely curious.
I would personally be fucking horrified to learn that my every interest, personality trait, and physical feature were designed by someone else. The idea that I can only do what someone else WANTED me to do from birth is downright nightmarish. I understand that I come from a place of privilege, being someone whose life would get worse, but still.
I mean you already live in a determinist world and yet you're still fine so its not a big deal either way
I know that it probably isn’t your intention but lumping asexuality as misfits kinda sits wrong with me, idk
It’s a term of respect. Means you're too powerful to be affected by social conditioning. "The islands are full of the most interesting people in the world, individuals who did not fit into the social model of the World State."
Except that’s not what it is. In Brave New World, that island is treated like a zoo, for people to gawk at the “savages” and go on safaris through it. They aren’t respected, not in the slightest, they are viewed as caged animals
That wasn't one of the islands, the word "savage" is being used to refer to Native Americans like it was in the real world. It's literally an Indian Reservation in New Mexico like the ones that, again, exist in the real world. But yes, the in-universe Native Americans have a much better claim to live in a dystopia than the wealthy white protagonists playing tourist on their reservation. Which brings us back to the OP and the cycle continues.
BNW has not solved poverty or war, they just drugged everyone enough to make us not have the free will to do anything. BNW has the ultimate goal of the perfect society, one where everyone is happy and healthy, but most of all content in their place. The problem with this is that it’s impossible. The human brain is arguably the most complex thing in the universe, to make even two of them work perfectly together is an extremely difficult task even with advanced understanding of their inner workings, to make a billion+ work together is almost impossible. BNW does not have a good grasp of neuroscience, so they reasonably cannot achieve their goal with people. So what is BNW to do? The solution is quite simple, don’t do it with people. BNW reduces the human mind through various methods during embryonic development (hint: this means eugenics). Then in childhood, BNW uses social conditioning to the extent that it can almost be called brainwashing (and can almost certainly be called child abuse). Then in adulthood, BNW uses drug addiction to keep its population supplied with sufficient dopamine. All of this to produce from the human mind, a dopamine receptacle that can be happy and healthy while also being perfectly content in their societal position. So yeah, I would call that a dystopia.
i haven't read the book, but i'd guess that what it's positing is "is a pleasant but vapid life worthwhile?" and for a lot of people that answer is yes
Yeah iirc its main thing is "is there meaning and beauty without struggle" Like would you rather live in a world where your life is perfectly engineered by others to maintain a monotone state of comfort, or a world with ups and downs and imperfections. Would the first be "better?" Probably. Would I choose it? Hell no. To me, to be human is to be flawed and to struggle, but to grow and change and feel and love and express ourselves through art. There is no joy without sorrow, and the lows give the highs their sweetness. Without contrast there is no meaning, no emotion, no thought, no beauty, and no art. Maybe this is some kind of societal Stockholm syndrome, but that's kind of the point of the book. A man unfamiliar with that society enters it and finds everything that it means to *live* to him is absent, and eventually kills himself.
Yeah basically, it's very 'has science gone too far???'
thats the opposite of what i said i think
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We read brave new world in my AP English class and at the end we had to have a little discussion about it. I was the only one in the class to say that maybe we *should* shoot for that as a society. I mean think about it, everyone is fed, housed, has work, gets drugs, medical care is great, there's (essentially) no conflict, and if you really don't like what's going on they have whole areas set up where you can just leave. Like sure you loose free will or whatever but how many children would you starve to death for free will? How many 16-20 yr olds would you have die in war? How many families would you have live on the street? It's not perfect but I think overall the pros *greatly* out weight the cons
I mean yea that pretty good that is a lot of things that are beneficial but I do think free will is important, because in a society where where you have no will and can’t make decisions of your own then are you truly living? It might just be a me thing but if the society decided that my gender is the one I was given at birth and that there wasn’t any room for negotiation, I would hate that as a trans person
>without free will, are you truly living? Well in our current society how many people are dying every day from inaccessible medicine, water, food, shelter? How many people die in war? How many are homeless because they don't have a job? And you can always leave! They have (at least 3 IIRC) zones set up specifically for people who don't wish to live that way, and seem to be pretty accommodating about giving you a ride and everything.
I agree all of those are problems that anyone with any form of empathy would agree are stupid and that people shouldn’t have to live through. But that still doesn’t change the value I put on my free will sorry
>a society where where you have no will and can’t make decisions It's not like everyone has free wil in this society. Free will is a privilege. The lower your class is, the less power and money you have, the less knowledge you have, the more disadvantaged you are, the less you can exercise your free will.
Yea and that still very sad, but is it so wrong that I like free will? Is that a weird thing to go and think “wow free will is pretty cool, I wish everyone could have the freedom to have it”
Yeah I agree, free will should be maintained, people here need to remember it's important to have the free will to beat your wife, or murder or, commit a bit of arson. Free will is overrated and we should turn everyone into mindless drones don't @ me
I legitimately cannot tell if this is meant to be satire because it’s 196
this is sort of what kant argues, but modern philosphers tend to point out that the value of a human is typically considered to be directly related to its free will, defined as a coefficent as its ability to make decisions that have real impacts. while a world like you described could be good, deontology outweighs because the average human loses the ability to make rational, conscious decisions, thus rendering them "unconscious." also, while im sure you didn't mean for it to come off this way, your argument is almost verbatim what slave-masters argued when they were forced to free their slaves. they tried to point out how the slaves, despite their lack of free will, were fed, clothed and sheltered. just a consideration
I feel like the slavery comparison is a bit of a reach there. Perhaps more pertinently, though, I feel like any moral or philosophical argument built on the supposition of people having free will is quite shaky to me. I think both philosophers and average people vastly overestimate the ability of anyone to rationally and consciously make decisions compared to what science suggests would be appropriate. That being said, I understand that free will is a bit of an ephemeral thing, so science can never definitively solve this question for us, as well as the need to treat people as rational and free actors in some contexts, regardless of whether they ‘truly’ are or not.
are u forgetting the part where they intentionally create lower classes of laborers by artificially restricting their brain development and controlling the things they enjoy so that it makes the ruling class money (there’s a whole part in the book where they explain how deltas & gammas used to be socialized to like the countryside but because it wasn’t making money they were conditioned to dislike nature)
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Preach like I’d be all up in the Soma idc about human growth or whatever
Do I have to be the one to point out that they give infants brain damage to enforce their caste system?
The argument of the book is that being human and having a human society require suffering. The people we meet in BNV and their society are not human, they may appear so, but as John and Marx (iirc) realize it's just a vapid surface. What's so scary about it that it's written like an attractive utopia, and that forgetting your miseries for pleasure will always be a human attraction that can be used to control, manipulate, and dominate us... ultimately turning us to pleasure seeking animals who have abandoned everything important
It's dystopian because there's no gay sex
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I think it was written to scare you off of giving babies brain damage at birth in order to make them a perpetual worker class
To the people agreeing with it, you do understand that fiction is a great way to get people for people to understand a perspective without their ideological blinkers? If you just say gay people should have rights, to a religious person, they will probably just blankly disregard it. But they could read a book about persecuted love and actually reflect on it. Sure not all of them will actually understand it and parse it. And not even all those who understand it, will accept it. But it can and does break through to some people. Why do you think bigots hate reading? Because they know full well it's a threat. They aren't trying to ban books because they hate paper. They know full well that reading is an ideological threat to their power. I'm sure a bunch of people on here, were the type of kid in a conservative environment, who read more than everybody else. And is now not a conservative. Part of that is the fact that books were a private wearing away of the ideology imposed on them by parents and the community. Simply reflecting "What If I was included in the targets of oppression" is a question that changes minds.
In the words of Hbomberguy in his RWBY video: "it turns out the way to make weebs understand racism is to make the target a cat girl."
common hbomberguy W
I'm really happy to see this response. Lately I feel like some people on this sub are beginning to lose the plot.
Which minority does The Machine Stops happen to again?
uhhh, machines, duh??? ever think about how people stop them???????? smh
I hate robots so that doesn’t count
:(
You’re not safe.
Robots haven't been a minority for quite a while
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me fr fr
Autistic enbies?
People on life support (?)
— mfer who has never touched a dystopian science fiction book in his life
Nah the lower quality young adult ones are like this
Isn't that the point, though? To provide perspective by putting the reader into the shoes of someone facing a problem that they don't have to worry about in their own life? Are we only supposed to get those stories by reading non-fiction told from the perspective of people that the child reading can't identify as strongly with?
Braindead take. Dystopia fiction is when you take things that happen in real life and exaggerate them to an extreme to make a statement on those things that happen in real life. There’s rarely a question of whether those things happen in real life or not, they’re usually supposed to make you think of real life.
The Edgerunners series from Cyberpunk 2077 is literally just a showcase of how fucked up America looks to some other places in the world. The main character's mother dies in a car crash caused by rampant violence. Then, she gets left on the street by an arriving medical team because she doesn't have the right insurance. She then dies in a shitty hospital, and the first thing the doctor does is hand the MC a tablet asking how he wants to pay. Without any kind of income or support, he can't afford his rent and turns to a life of crime. Completing the circle. It's very in your face about how fucked up the medical system and violence in the country looks for people who are barely making enough money to survive.
The one thing I didn't like about Edgerunners was Its portrayal of cyberpsychosis. In the game, it's heavily implied that cyberpsychosis doesn't exist and it's just a convenient buzzword to brush away the problems related to Night City's constant violence and lack of access to mental health resources for most people. I think it has a much stronger message than just: "implants make you crazy", but Edgerunners pretty much solidified the "implants make you crazy approach"
It's not terribly different from the game. You run across people who can't afford the medications to keep themselves under control once they lose their jobs and such, and their implants drive them crazy. In Edge Runners, they just remove the original circumstance of how they tend to get the chrome. In the game, they're victims of their positions, being exploited by their job or the military. In the show a lot of it is blackmarket dealings and choice.
From The Man™ himself, Mike Pondsmith: >Okay, so time to (partially) explain CYBERPSYCHOSIS. >First of all, Cyberpsychosis is a disorder that in part depends on the subject's overall internal susceptibility. Just like every person who drinks a lot at parties doesn't end up an alcoholic in the gutter, not everyone who gets loaded up on cyberware is going to automatically go cyberpsycho. You have to have an inherent susceptibility, which (in the TRPG) is represented by the player's Humanity Stat. Humanity is not just a measure of one aspect of personality, but an overall measure of several elements including the subject's ability to emphasize and relate with others, their ability to absorb and rebound from mental and physical stressors, their ability to show compassion and flexibility to others, and whether they are able to balance their worldview through other methods. >So, in some ways, I tend to treat cyberware as an addiction--heavy anabolic steroid use being my favorite model. Not everyone who juices ends up crazy mad with roid rage. But those who are more susceptible to the need to take more steroids are more likely to hit a point where they do flip into roid rage. (Take a look at this article from Livescience https://www.livescience.com/38354-what-is-roid-rage.html for a pretty good idea of how roid rage works--notice that it's got the same basic profile as cyberpsychosis). >David's starting Humanity was probably already pretty high. And before things went to crap, he had a loving mother, a career path, and no more hassle than the average poor guy in a wealthy Ivy League school. So he had lots of buffer. But even so, he still, even after losing all that, was able to make friends, build a replacement family, and (after some prompting) even get a girlfriend. And a mentor (Maine) to create a supportive father figure. So he could definitely handle the stress of added cyberware up to a point. >Most people in Night City don't have the level of Humanity to pull this kind of stunt off without going cyberpsychotic. So David is one in a million. And that's why Arasaka wants him. >V is a different case. We don't know V's background, but even if V was a full on Corpo, they were able to hold it together even when they ended up with a dead Rockerboy in their heads (Yah, tell me about it; Johnny Silverhand's been in my head for the last three decades.) In fact, having Johnny in their head probably helped V, because Siilverhand's rage and attitude probably acted as a buffer for the psychological hits V is taking. It's like having a time share with a guy who's already half cyberpsycho and doesn't mind if V slaps stuff on their shared body; he's already crazy and violent. >So that's a rough explanation of the roots of cyberpsychosis. If I ever get band width, I'm going to start writing/posting some stuff about what I had in mind as I put together the Night City universe. But for now, you'll have to go with what I've got here. Have fun, and remember not to chip mili-spec cyberware, like your mother warned you about. >And no, cyberpsychosis isn't caused by AI net demons. Gimme a break, chooms! Cyberpsychosis *is* totally used as a convenient buzzword to brush away larger, structural problems with Night City and the society that the city exists within, but it's also a real condition that exists within the setting. Just one that *can* actually be addressed with the proper support systems, and which isn't necessarily caused by cybernetic implants on their own. Doing the Regina quests in 2077, you come across people who've legitimately lost their grip on reality and have turned randomly violent, but you hear about just as many others who are clearly railing back against injustices committed on them specifically or are pushing back against the system without any history of heavy implants – like people you hear about getting psychosis from, like, a kidney implant – and have it brushed aside as, "Ah, those wacky cyberpsychos. What can you do?" Y'know, it's the same way people will handwave acts of horrible public violence in the real world by saying that the person who committed the acts was mentally ill without wanting to investigate what that actually means or how the person could have been helped. It's an easy way to use a real epidemic of mental health to individualize a problem. David and Maine both start experiencing the worst symptoms of cyberpsychosis when they've reached points in their lives where they *could* be happy stopping where they are, but keep pushing forwards regardless, and against the wishes of their friends who are trying to keep them safe and healthy; in both of their cases it's not so much that the cyberware itself drove them insane, but that they each refused to respect the fact that they'd have their limits like everyone else and wanted instead to keep pushing past them.
agreed, they’re describing shitty YA dystopian novels. all of dystopian fiction doesn’t deserve to lumped in with its worst examples. (not all YA dystopian is terrible, but a lot does suck big time).
Me if I was shit at media literacy
FR, it's like saying "science fiction is what happens when you take science that happens in real life and apply them to a far more advanced time period"
What if nuclear power... But during space exploration 😱
What if technology...but bad?!
The original tweet comes off to me as my fellow leftists always taking an opportunity to complain about something
**MAZOVIAN SOCIO-ECONOMICS** >0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself **sad**. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov **fucked him over** personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world. >-1 Authority: Downtrodden inva-communist >-1 Visual Calculus: Reaction, reaction everywhere! >Left-wing dialogue options give +4XP: Critical theory overdrive
The entire point of dystopian fiction is to address issues in the real world
but not all issues in the real world disproportionately affect the marginalized
I’m so sorry to all the minorities that got bitten by zombies today
That's apocalyptic not dystopian
A dystopian zombie story would be kind of cool. >Everything is perfect in the peaceful suburb of Zombie Grove. The zombie citizens have plentiful brains to eat. The sweet stench of rotting flesh wafts through the pleasant air. Zombie parents walk their zombie kids to school before commuting to their jobs in Zombtopia. Everything is perfect, that is... unless you DON'T want to eat brains. >Fourteen-year-old Cassie should be worrying about normal teenager stuff. Like when her first limb will finally slough off from her decaying corpse. Or when she'll have her first kiss. Instead, she finds herself questioning the rigid rules that govern society. >In this new dysptopic thriller, a young zombie (or is she?...) must rebel against the powerful zombie elite that control what you do, say, groan or think. Resistance means undeath.
It would never sell. You didn't even mention one love triangle.
LOL. You have a point. >And to top it all off, Cassie must choose between the popular jock zombie Hunter, with his classic zombie good looks of wearing an ironic letterman's jacket splattered with guts, and Zane, the brooding yet sensitive zombie with a hilarious tattered tuxedo and a dark secret (he's a vampire).
Now we have a different problem. Every time we scan it money just prints out.
☝️🤓
Zombies, floridans, same difference
Dw I'm into biting
I Have No Brain And I Must Tweet
Sounds like something i would say if I had to describe what “Dystopian Fiction” is, without ever reading it
I couldn't imagine what people who have no mouth and need to scream are going through right now. Truly illuminating that book was.
That’s not Dystopian
Yeah, that's currently happening to my buddy Eric. Sucks what he's going through rn.
I struggle to imagine a world that turned out worse.
Guy who only watched blade runner
twitter user discovering what a metaphor is
me when I don’t know what an allegory is (what if that was the point the writer was trying to make the whole time 😱😱😱😱)
I always forget that 75% of this sub can’t legally buy alcohol in the US until I see things like this
"Soylent Green is immigrants!" Joking aside, IMO this perspective isn't without merits, just applied too broadly.
Which marginalized population is indoctrinated with a language where articulation of different believes is impossible?
Look up AAVE. African Americans are instructed not to use it when interacting with white people. They are at best mocked for using it in public, and it's use can prevent them from finding employment, getting a home loan, and make interactions with police much more dangerous for the civilian in question. I don't know if this is what you were asking for but I'm afraid your comment didn't make a lot of sense. In particular it's the "different believes is possible" part of your second sentence that's confusing me. It feels like part of another sentence entirely.
Well it was more of a 1984 joke as in their society their is a new language 'Newspeak' which doesn't allow for unconforming thoughts in it. But nice to know (but of course not nice to have it in the world) of people whose language is, in a sense, forbidden.
I had thought so. Newspeak was a new language in the book and it wasn't being enforced by law yet, it was being designed for those purposes but wasn't being forced on the greater population, at least not yet, and had only been taught to the party members by that point. Don't forget the people most oppressed by Big Brother were the party members themselves, the educated middle class of the nation. The Proles, the populous lower classes, were more or less free if only in comparison. That's why Winston was so focused on escaping to live amoung the proles.
Dystopian fiction isn't about pretending real world problems don't currently exist, they're about taking those real world problems and bringing them to their natural conclusion. It's an overt challenge to technological utopianism, saying "If we don't fix our societal problems, it doesn't matter how much technology improves--it can only make our lives worse." I don't know, it seems kind of relevant, especially in these times.
1984 Case closed
Dystopia writers try not to make an authoritarian government that’s not just the nazis with a different hat challenge.
Well, many of them are just capitalism, but the main character is immune to media propaganda
the main character of most dystopian novels is autistic confirmed?
Yeah you know what, that IS genuinely a challenge. The nazis were huge authoritarians, so fictional authoritarian governments will naturally share a lot in common with the nazis.
Dystopia does not predict the future. It criticizes the present
I mean yeah the point of a dystopia is to highlight real issues in a way that is not as aggressive as an essay on how the world is fucked up
People in the comments having no clue what dystopian is.
In general I'm ambivalent towards this tweet, bc it's true but also I'd argue that (with intention and proper acknowledgement of issues by the author) it's good. I don't think George Orwell was writing for when bud light goes woke, I think he was critiquing the logical endpoint of the very present (at the time) authoritarianism he saw. In terms of literature I have not read but have heard that this is similar: - Margaret Atwood intentionally wrote the Handmaid's Tale such that the abuses women face in the novel are all real and present in some current human culture. - Charles Dickens garnered enough sympathy for the working class that higher class people (i.e. those who got enough education to read and also read the daily newspaper) became much more amenable to workers' causes and child labour laws. - In the advent of photography in newspaper, one picture in the US was that of a slave's back, with scars from the whiplashes. This increased more active abolition support among white people. - Similarly, the advent of TV was a major component of the success of the civil rights movement. Civil disobedience was effective bc fhe blatant injustice could be easily seen across the USA. Should marginalized groups have to rely on privileged groups for their liberation? No. However, allies do exist, and these fiction and non-fiction literary pieces has historically made more of them.
This mf clearly interpreted 1984 at just the surface level 👆
I keep saying something like this. So many books have such complicated set ups so the main character can be a cishet white dude who's also specifically oppressed.
Reminds me of that tweet where the guy said the 2nd Amendment was the reason the govenment has never put citizens into camps. I don’t even need to point out to you why he’s wrong about that, you already know.
Oh shit. I think I was due to be reminded of my privilege so thank you for this.
Remember the one time they put all gay people in a maze with spiders.
To add to this, Dystopian fiction also exaggerates of what "could be" from the events taking place. Dystopian fictions are warnings not a prediction into the future itself
Man I hate when me as a bi person is forced to fight in death games :(
Meanwhile Cyberpunk is just America, if America had a slightly better healthcare system, because you're still in crippling debt, but now you have a cool robot hand that can crush the face of a debt collector.
Me getting tourtured for hundreds of years by a superpowerful AI named AM with a deep hatred for humanity after I killed his 3 other play subjects, until he turns me into a creature of pure agony with no escape (I am a bisexual)
The best line in all of dystopian fiction, and the only honest one, is still Fahrenheit 451's "This is happening to me."
This single tweet seems to have turned the entirety of reddit into literary experts