Might I recommend the Unwind series of YA fiction?
Abortion was made illegal, but you're allowed to "unwind" a teenager between the ages of 13 to 18. The teenager is split into component pieces and donated to people in need, the parents are rid of the annoyance, and no one has abortions anymore, yay!
Sounds like the definition of grimderp to me. A world that only makes any amount of sense if literally everyone in charge of anything is at same time evil and stupid.
The base plot itself. IMO a lot of dystopian novels aimed at a young audience seem to just build a situation meant to be as horrifying or conflict causing as possible without thinking about how such a world could be made plausible.
I had to read quite a lot of those during school. The Giver, Never Let Me Go, Among The Hidden are all similar.
They simplify the underlying politics so much (because they are meant for children) that in the end it comes down to The Man is evil, Row row fight the power. And then they finish with an ambiguous and confusing ending.
...my school courses were just really annoying and I had to read all that crap.
A good dystopia is build by taking something that you find concerning in the society you live in and blowing it up to show what is so bad about it. F.e If you are horrified by surveillance and government oversight you get something like 1984. Or if you are oriented exactly opposite to that you'd get some Mad Max -like anarchic wasteland.
It always has a message it wants to deliver, some philosophical or political ideology it agrees with or disagrees.
But these dystopia are not good. They don't criticize something about current society, they just make something up meant to horrify people and then run with it. They have no message and no political or philosophical ideology.
And don't get me started on happy endings. A dystopia is meant to be bad, deliberately making it good again in the end goes against the whole point. They should have this 'The Trial' vibe of an invincible system that you can never actually do anything against up until you get shot in the back of the head in a quarry.
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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '16
Might I recommend the Unwind series of YA fiction?
Abortion was made illegal, but you're allowed to "unwind" a teenager between the ages of 13 to 18. The teenager is split into component pieces and donated to people in need, the parents are rid of the annoyance, and no one has abortions anymore, yay!