On Worldbuilding and the Question of Resistance
Do novels in which their protagonists overthrow the system actually encourage resistance in their readers? This is a question I have been wondering for a while.
Living in a dystopia, Americans read a lot of dystopian novels. One of the most popular structures for dystopian resistance can be found in The Hunger Games or Divergent. One person who is different stands up reluctantly to who they think is in power, only to discover that this power is larger than they had thought, which means they have to go on in future books to fight the entire system.
It’s a satisfying structure because the protagonist has to fight progressively larger manifestations of the same core problem. It is also satisfying because these novels rely a lot on worldbuilding, and the world becomes progressively larger while the core remains the same.
In other words, the challenge and pleasure for the writer of a dystopian novel (or series of novels) is not in coming up with a new plot, but in coming up with a new system—or, rather, a new representation of the system we are already in.
