decadent-trans-girl:

decadent-trans-girl:

“Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance,” author and historian Jill Lepore wrote for the New Yorker in June, “[now] it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen 21st century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness.” Lepore continues:

[Dystopia] cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own.

To Lepore’s point, we now mostly evoke dystopia not to resist but to hide. But Hollywood, more concerned with being on-brand than forward-thinking, wants to make us believe that a dystopian feminist show winning awards is some kind of meaningful change in itself.

The last paragraph removes a lot of the bite, and I’d critique the acceptance of earlier dystopian literature (as well as the loose definition of dystopia), but the rest of the critique is worth it