People Say Matched Is Stereotypical Dystopian Fiction And...

I can’t agree with the stereotypical, if for no other reason than there’s no war or major battles affecting the main plot. The Hunger Games was all about the violence - which isn’t a bad thing, just saying. Delirium? People were dying or being imprisoned left and right, lobotomized, blah blah blah. The Maze Runner? I don’t even know the percentage of dead kids. Divergent? All the death and dying and shooting and guns and blood. There’s typically so much death by violence in modern dystopian novels. Not so in the Matched trilogy. There’s some in Crossed but not much compared to other series.

Also, you say love triangle, but it was more of a tangle? Cassia sort of likes Xander, Xander loves Cassia, Cassia loves Ky, Ky loves Cassia, Ky gets a crush on Indi, Indi still mourns her dead boyfriend, Indi loves Ky, Xander loves…the doctor girl from book 3, I forget her name, who is mourning dead husband but loves Ky, I mean…I don’t know, I thought that was an interesting message: your first love isn’t always your last. How often do we see that in YA?

Hope (A Tool of Coercion in Totalitarian Governments - Part 4/4)

In many dystopian novels—indeed, in many novels with any sort of totalitarian or dictatorial government, and even some novels that don't have that in there—there are those oppressed individuals known as the masses. The repressed populace. They suffer the indignities of cruel governments and/or rulers, undergo horrific things in the name of "the greater good." But what about their good? What about the welfare of the individual? What stops people from rising up against these terrible things?

I'm going to use six different dystopian series, as well as references from history, as my examples when answering these questions, but it really all boils down to four very simple things: apathy, fear, blame, and hope. This blog will actually be broken up into four separate posts to prevent having to scroll through a lengthy research-paper-length post if anyone wants to look for something specific.

Hope

The fourth factor is hope. According to the dictionary, hope is aspiration, anticipation, optimism, faith, possibility—something good that people wish and strive for. But what does this, of all things, have to do with corrupt governments?

In The Hunger Games film, President Snow (one of the bad guys) sums it up fairly nicely. He explains that one way to redirect fear and resentment is with hope. Give the people something to hope for. And that is a useful tactic in any corrupt government.

The most obvious example of this I've ever seen is in the BBC Robin Hood series. Almost everyone knows the story of Robin Hood, how he robbed from the rich to give to the poor and how the Sheriff was so horrible and taxed the peasants into starvation and blah-blah-blah. Well, there's an episode in this particular series where the Sheriff does something completely off the wall, something no one would expect. When Robin's right-hand guy, Much, gets captured, instead of executing or torturing him, the Sheriff makes Much a lord.

Yeah, I didn’t see that one coming either. Gave him a nice house, some land, pretty servant girls, wealth, good clothes, etc. Now why would a bad guy do that? The Sheriff explains it to his right-hand man, Guy of Gisbourne—because of what it does to the peasants. "Look at that," they say. "That could be us," they say. "That could've been me. It still could be me if I play my cards right. We could go from cruddy poverty to that." Now because this is a TV show, Much of course is still allied to Robin and helps him out and so because of this loses all of his nice stuff, but that's not the point.

It was only after I'd seen that episode that I realized how this applied to what President Snow is talking about in The Hunger Games. That hope, that sense of "that could be me" is one of the things that helps promote the Games. The victor of the Games gets a super nice house, never has to worry about food again, gets nice clothes, a very generous stipend from the Capitol for the rest of their lives…and this applies to their family, as well. So Katniss winning the Games? All that good stuff goes to her mom and sister, too, whom she's been struggling to support for the last four or five years. The kids from Districts 1-4 actually volunteer (which is why they are almost always either seventeen or eighteen) in order to have the chance to get all of that.


Basically, when despair is rampant, people want to cling to hope, to the long odds in their favor—so long as the reward/outcome of those odds is kept fresh in their minds. Each district has a Victor's Square with lovely houses smack in the middle of it. Each district has a victor living in one of those houses. This only reinforces the idea, "Hey…that could be me someday, if I play my cards right." The slogan for the Games reinforces this too: may the odds be ever in your favor. 

We see a similar—though far less deadly—version of this "that could be me" ideology in The Selection, by Kiera Cass. In The Selection, there's a competition similar to The Bachelor television show, except the guy up for grabs is one of the princes of the royal family, and the girl selected will marry him, thus improving her lot in life as well as her family's lot. In a culture where social class is a rigorously upheld way of doing things, that's a pretty big deal. Of course, it might not seem like that if—like the main character, America Singer (I know, it's like the only major flaw in the book so far, but really?)—you have a boyfriend already and then get selected for the competition, since the hopes and dreams of your family will be riding on your shoulders. But again, this is a good example of the system-that-isn't-really-fair offering the-thing-you-really-really-want in order to keep the populace from exploding.

Sometimes, it's not even the prize in a competition. Sometimes it's just the hope or dream that you've wanted all your life, and the system can help you get it. In Caitlin Kittredge's The Iron Thorn, Aoife wants to be an engineer more than anything else in the world. It is her fondest, most desperate dream. And in order to get that dream, she has got to be careful, she has got to walk the line, and she has got to stay out of trouble, or that dream will go poof.

The same thing is in Matched, by Ally Condie. A lot of the adults, Cassia discovers as she goes through the plot of the book, have made the conscious decision to sacrifice certain things in order to hold onto what matters most to them. Cassia is exposed to the hope that if you play by the rules, you get rewarded with the thing you want the most—even during those times when the rules may or may not be fair. Cassia wants to be a sorter, a particular job she loves; that aspiration is threatened when she tries to flout the rules. She backs down (at first) in order to hold onto that dream.

"Eyes on the prize" is a technique used by a lot of totalitarian governments, but in small doses, to help maintain the status quo. Basically the corrupt ruling institution, whatever it is, continually reinforces the idea that "this thing you want could happen to you! As long as you don't screw up." By itself, it's a weak and ineffective tool. But combined with the other three…hey, it works.

Blame (A Tool of Coercion in Totalitarian Governments - Part 3/4)

In many dystopian novels—indeed, in many novels with any sort of totalitarian or dictatorial government, and even some novels that don't have that in there—there are those oppressed individuals known as the masses. The repressed populace. They suffer the indignities of cruel governments and/or rulers, undergo horrific things in the name of "the greater good." But what about their good? What about the welfare of the individual? What stops people from rising up against these terrible things?

I'm going to use six different dystopian series, as well as references from history, as my examples when answering these questions, but it really all boils down to four very simple things: apathy, fear, blame, and hope. This blog will actually be broken up into four separate posts to prevent having to scroll through a lengthy research-paper-length post if anyone wants to look for something specific.

Blame

The third factor is blame. According to the dictionary, blame is condemnation, accountability, culpability—basically, who's at fault for something. The blame game has been played by dictatorships for like, ever. The most well-known instance of this is found during the Nazi Regime.

After WWI, when the German economy tanked and fell into a depression, one of the things Hitler did was blame a lot of Germany's problems on other people. The Enemy, as it were. Hitler blamed Jews, homosexuals, black people, Gypsies, Catholics, anyone who didn't fit into his concept of a pure race. Most people think about this from an objective standpoint and think that it's ridiculous that anyone would buy into that. How could the German-Jewish community have possibly destroyed the German economy? And why would they? What would be the point?

But if you look at it subjectively, that kind of mindset sort of makes sense. It's completely, morally wrong…but it makes sense. People ask questions that hint at this mindset all the time. Why me? Why did this happen to me (or my wife or my kids or my parents or whatever)? Why does God let bad things happen to good people? The inherent blame in those questions is obvious. The phrasing of the question pushes aside the possibility of a blameless answer. Most people refuse to believe that the answer to "why me?" is simply "because." People naturally look for someone to blame.

In a way, it's a bit like a defense mechanism. When something bad happens, people want a way to solve it. How can something be solved if no one and nothing is behind the problem? If it's one of those things that just happens? People need someone to blame. Someone to direct all of those negative emotions—fear, anger, even hatred—toward so they can feel as if it's possible to do something about it. Negative emotions need an outlet, a target. Blame gives that.

What does this have to do with forms of coercion in totalitarian governments?

One of the best ways to keep a group of people from noticing the enemies within is by giving them an enemy from without to deal with. During the Nazi Regime, it was everyone who was non-Aryan. During the time of the Hauns Mill Massacre, it was the Latter-Day Saints. During the Cold War, it was the Communists. And it's ridiculously easy to train someone to hate or fear another person, to believe they are the enemy. All you need is someone incredibly charismatic who knows how to manipulate people, and the proper setting for the manipulation to take place. Once you've managed to convince someone to draw the line between "us" and "them," it can take years, decades, or even centuries to undo that division. The blame game can be used most effectively to take the fear and resentment aimed at the dictatorship and direct it outward at someone else—the Enemy.

Although we see this a lot in dystopian novels (and in a lot of fantasy novels as well, such as the small-town mindset found in Eragon's home village in The Inheritance Cycle or even the anti-outsider point of view we get from the Hobbits in Tolkien's works), we don't see it everywhere. For example, it's not in Beth Ravis' Across the Universe* series. And in certain other series, such as The Iron Codex and Ann Aguire's Horde Trilogy (Enclave, Outpost, etc.), the Enemy really does exist. In Enclave, there really are zombies out there that people need to be defended from; same as in Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which has a small settlement with a rather dictatorial government in place. In The Iron Codex by Caitlin Kittredge, there really are monsters that want to kill people, as well as people with magical powers who work for the enemy government who are spying on the US. Those threats are actually legit. But legit or not, the government can still use them in these novels.

In Matched by Ally Condie, Cassia is afraid of two types of people at the beginning of the book. One: the Enemy that the Society is currently supposedly at war with. Two: a class of people known as Anomalies.

Of course it would make sense for her to be afraid of someone her country was at war with. Of course if anything crazy-terrible happened on the border with those enemies, and the government said the enemy did it, that would make sense to believe it.

But what are Anomalies? Why does blaming them for bad things reinforce Cassia's belief in the system of the Society?

Anomalies are people with an intense predisposition for violence and cruelty. At the time of the Matched Trilogy, which is at least a couple hundred years in the future, the Society has figured out how to screen for that sort of thing. It seems a little drastic to push anyone with this predisposition out of society, though, doesn't it? Why would anyone be okay with that? That's prejudice; it's infringing on civil rights.

Because of the blame game. The decision to exclude Anomalies from the Society was made before Cassia was even born, but she fully supports it. Why? She's afraid of them. She's been taught her whole life to be afraid of them, and her one exposure to an Anomaly only reinforced that. Because of the rules of the Society, people are safe—for the most part. Cassia's never experienced a crime, never had anything stolen from her by another person, her house has never been broken into, she's never been beat up, nothing. The most anyone has ever done to her is call her names or exclude/ignore her (which in and of itself is bad, but explains her reaction to the following).

Her one brush with an Anomaly was when her neighbors' son was brutally murdered by an Anomaly when she was a kid. In a country where murder and assault and rape are almost unheard of, this of course has a serious impact on her. It reinforced in her mind, "Of course I should be happy that the Society does what it can to protect me from that sort of thing."

Which is how manipulative governments work; they give you something to be afraid of, something that makes you grateful for their protection, as a means of reinforcing their control. People do it to other people all the time. Why can't groups of people do the same thing?

I'm going to branch out real quick and talk about a novel that actually isn't a dystopian novel per se, but does have a bit of a problem regarding the government up to a point. It's more the military, actually. This novel—Lia Habel's Dearly, Departed, which takes place about 300-400 years in the future in another country—is set in a country where the military has almost as much power over the lives of private citizens as the government does. For the most part, the military doesn’t abuse this power, but when they do, it's chalked up to being for "the greater good." Why? Because everything the military does that seems so horrible in the novel is claimed to be a means of defending against the enemy group that this country has been at war with for the last hundred or so years.

In Delirium, pretty much every horrible/inconvenient/annoying/awful thing that is done by the government is said to protect people from the Enemy—the Invalids. Every terrible thing is blamed on the Invalids. You actually see a great example of this in book two, Pandemonium. In Pandemonium, a terrorist attack takes place in a major city. A terrorist group takes credit for it; this group is made up of "Invalids." However, the government blames the attack on all Invalids, not just the militant group responsible, furthering the fear of anyone who refuses "the cure" for the deliria.

Going back to book one for a moment, Lena (the MC) often says, "Well, this rule here is annoying, but it's to make sure we don't have an epidemic. If the Invalids weren’t so crazy, we wouldn’t have this problem." That right there is a perfect recreation of the same anti-Semitic thinking people entertained in Nazi Germany.

Not only that, but whenever someone has a thought or makes a statement along the lines of, "Well, but this still seems a bit much," the people who have already been "cured" respond by blaming something and someone else—the person making the statement. You actually see something similar in the real world right now. When someone young is upset or unhappy about something, I can't count the number of times an adult responds with, "You'll forget about when you're older," or "I know it seems like a big deal now, but when you're older, it won't bother you so much," or words to that effect.

In a way, that's what the "cure" for the deliria has done and that's what people in the world of the Delirium Trilogy do now: they blame these feelings of dissatisfaction on the intense feelings that are so common (and normal, contrary to their opinion) feelings to be found in people that young. "When you're cured, you'll realize you were overreacting." Those words simultaneously cast blame on the deliria and the nature of a person before the "cure," as well as acting as a subtle and probably unconscious warning that too much of this might make people think you already have the deliria. Once the "cure" is administered, these feelings go away and the person only has a sense of contentment.

Regarding Caitlin Kittredge's trilogy, in The Iron Codex the blame is actually adequately placed for the most part. For example, the city of Lovecraft enforces a curfew set at sundown. Seems a little ridiculous, right? Except that that’s when all the monsters really do come out. The only people who should be out there are the City Guard, who keeps the monsters from going to close to people's homes. If anyone else is out after dark, the government assumes they're "heretics" who associate with these highly dangerous creatures. And for the most part, they'd be right.

Same thing regarding those people executed as heretics—they associate with the Crimson Guard (that's world Russian forces; remember, TIC takes place during the height of the Cold War, except on steroids), they dabble in things that might attract the monsters, or they associate with people who do the dabbling. This is 100% true in every case we've seen so far.

Does that mean all these people are evil? No. And that's the problem. But we'll talk more about that in my review of book one of TIC, The Iron Thorn.
In The Hunger Games, the Capitol deflects the blame for a lot of things onto other people. The biggest example of this is the event of the Games themselves. For the most part, only the people in the Capitol buy this. No one in the districts believes it. And the government blames the Hunger Games on two groups: one, District 13, who started the rebellion/war that the Games are still punishing; and two, the other districts, which according to the government still need to be kept under the Capitol thumb so they never think about rebelling again. Unlike with a lot of dystopian novels, the blame aspect of coercion isn't actually used that much. This is its main example, but it's a big one, so I felt it should be included.

Lastly, there is one of my favorite futuristic novels, Veronica Roth's Divergent. In Divergent, the main government isn't actually corrupt. It actually works quite well. But a small faction of the government doesn’t like the current heads of state, and so she is playing the blame game in order to roust them from power. It's because of Abnegation (that ruling faction) that the other factions don't have cars. Abnegation is hording supplies from the other factions. Abnegation is doing this, Abnegation is doing that. And all of this anger and resentment and blame gets stirred up so that when this woman eventually takes power, people (for the most part) ignore the other horrible things she did to get into power in the first place because they're too busy being ticked off at the group she did all those horrible things to.

Now, blame isn't as widely used as an effective manipulation tool in novels like these as other methods are, such as fear and apathy. But there is one other tool that, when used in small doses, can help quell the rebellion beast stirred up by the others: hope.

Melting into Dystopias

As a writer who is friends with other writers, of course my friends and I all read. And of course because we both read and write, we like to discuss the books we read; what we think of the plot twists, the characters, etc. We debate points, consider outside possibilities, predict possible outcomes, and ferret out weak spots.

So during one such discussion, my fellow writers in my writing group and I started talking about dystopias. We've all seen them. The most famous ones right now are The Hunger Games (the second film, Catching Fire, came out semi-recently), followed by the Divergent Trilogy, the first film of which premiers in mid-March. Then there are the classics like Soilent Green and Fahrenheit 451.

But it seems like these days, the classification of dystopia is being thrown around a lot when it doesn't really fit well with the actual premise of the book.

What is the biggest theme of a dystopian novel? A dysfunctional government, seething with corruption, that's basically out to get you. Screw up once, you're dead meat. In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, reading actual books is a crime that—if you refuse to surrender said books—can result in your execution.

In The Hunger Games, if you defy the Capitol, they come after you hard (case in point, the ultimate destruction of Districts 12 and 13). In Lauren Oliver's Delirium, anyone who breaks the laws to prevent "infection" from this supposedly contagious mental illness is sanctioned, then put in prison or punished in some horrible way. I recently wrote an essay, actually, about the difference between utopia/dystopia and straight-up dystopia novels, highlighting the acknowledged tyrannical fist of a corrupt government.

But a lot of books these days that I've seen have been labeled as dystopias when honestly, it doesn’t actually seem like they are. Maybe it's a sales ploy sort of thing. Maybe it's to make more people buy the books. I don't know. But I'm seeing less dystopia in my dystopian novels these days, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

In Kiera Cass's supposedly dystopian novel The Selection, we're introduced to the kingdom of Ilea, which is run via a caste system. While they have rebellions, and the laws can be fairly strict (being pregnant outside of wedlock can get you thrown in prison unless you were sexually assaulted), there isn't really anything corrupt in the government that we see in the first novel. The government isn't tight-fisted or cruel or tyrannical. The king and queen genuinely care about their subjects and their kingdom. What is so dystopian about this book, exactly?

Hop over to Wither by Lauren Destefano, first book in The Chemical Garden Trilogy. In Wither (and its sequel, Fever), the government doesn’t really show up in the storyline. You see the president on television maybe once or twice. You hear about riots and rebel attacks and all that.

But no policemen or government workers ever attack the main character or anyone she knows. The bad guys don't have government authority behind them. The government is actually pretty much an ineffective mess sludging around in the background, not doing anything. The tyrannical evil entity is the father-in-law of the main character, Rhine—and he's the villain of the novels, as well. In fact, his creepy attitude and scary dictatorship reminds me more of less-violent and overtly-psychotic Annie from Stephen King's Misery than President Snow from The Hunger Games.

I'm currently reading a so-called dystopian novel called Inhuman by Kat Falls, where the government has a fairly iron-fisted grip on the country. But that's because about twenty years prior in the storyline, a virulent and so-far incurable form of fast-mutating super-rabies swept through the country and martial law was basically put into place to try and stop it before everyone keeled over dead. The virus is still incurable, and outbreaks still happen.

Imagine if zombie plague popped up in the real world. How would the US government handle it? Exactly the way they do in Inhuman. That's not dystopian. The government's not corrupt. No one's rights are being unfairly squashed or whatever. It's a public safety issue, like the cops forcing you to stay in your homes while they try to apprehend a terrorist running around out on the streets.

I could go on for days about this, actually. Novels like Divergent by Veronica Roth, Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel, Rot and Ruin by Jonathon Mabry, The Loners by Lex Thomas, Shatter Me by Tahareh Mafi, Insignia by SJ Kincaid, or Gone by Michael Grant aren't actually dystopian novels. Most (though not all) of these actually fall more under post-apocalyptic, which isn't the same thing—though I fear it may be melting into the blanket-label of dystopian.

Am I being too picky about this? Maybe. But I actually know people who hold the dystopian classification in contempt, and those people aren't buying a lot of the books I mentioned above which are being incorrectly labeled.

What's my point? Authors, editors, agents, publishers, reviewers—be specific. Just because it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, doesn't mean it's a duck. It might actually say "cock-a-doodle-doo" instead of "quack," which probably means it's not a duck. Actually, if it looks like a duck but crows like a rooster, it's probably a parrot in disguise. And maybe readers shouldn’t judge a book by cover or classification, but you know they do. So please, advertise accurately.

Stay tuned for reviews for Shatter Me, Inhuman, The Loners, and Rot and Ruin coming soon!

— LA Knight