Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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“Dystopian fiction is when you take things that happen in real life to marginalized populations and apply them to people with privilege.”
👓 quote science fiction storytelling 🔗 View Highlight
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The dystopian reality is not new and has been with us for a while. Its fictionalizing continues till date despite those debates regarding its relevance or necessity.
✏️ Basically, arguments that dystopian fictions are not vogue anymore (because white people have experienced things like pandemic, US issues, etc.), is ridiculous and privilege-centered. Dystopias have always existed on this planet, we just haven’t been paying attention to them when we’re in our couch of privilege. 🔗 View Highlight
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Margaret Atwood herself admitted that when she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale “nothing went into it that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time.” Yet people want to, and hold the view, that these are new or recent events.
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This is why when people from certain regions that have been dubbed Third World or developing, marginalized people, write dystopias, even non-dystopias, any kind of reflection of their reality which is flavoured with a certain harshness, it’s considered too unpalatable, unbelievable, too dystopian, especially at the moment, by the global publishing machinery which is largely Western. The question we should be asking though is too dystopian for whom?
✏️ “Too dystopian for whom?” is such a powerful quote. 👓 quote 🔗 View Highlight
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There is of course reality fatigue, and one may need to step away from it all for the sake of their mental health. And that is an entirely valid reaction. But claiming that all fictional dystopias are redundant because we NOW live in one is a dangerously high level of presumption and an inaccurate assertion. Because we have always lived in one, there has always been a dystopia somewhere in this world that we were only unaware of.
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no matter how often it’s created or consumed, dystopian fiction never really loses its power, because its consumption does not just have one effect or purpose. Dystopian stories are not monolithic in effect. While they can horrify, they can also provide catharsis, warnings, and myriad other useful reactions that continue to benefit the consumer and society at large, in any time at all.
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I believe that dystopias in fiction present an alternate, truer view of reality than our actual reality
✏️ What’s interesting about this is it does touch upon the idea of what’s “truer”.. our real sensory experience of things, or one that is told to us through a story? Our brains are not machines. Our senses and our memories and our very beings will always subjectify everything we experience. Our memory itself is constantly being rewritten. So there isn’t anything sacred or true or objective about our real life experience. And as she says later in article, we can recognize things like abuse when it happens to a random character, more so than if it happened to a direct loved one. That level of removal that a story gives, is enough to allow us to actually inspect this version of reality being presented, even if it’s exactly like our own, and actually especially so. 🔗 View Highlight
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I think that these stories are bereft of the bias lived reality has when they are populated with characters we know, as life so often is. We are unreliable judges in reality’s cases and so subconsciously recuse ourselves because of a likelihood of bias and fail to pass appropriate and often any judgement.
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There is this airbrush effect the mind applies to our lived reality, self-protective perhaps, in a bid to preserve our mental health and sanity. This is why the movie Don’t Look Up caused such a stir even amongst people that brush aside climate fiction dangers and disasters that happen daily. It’s like we lose that natural airbrush effect in fiction, making it a tad more accurate and reliable an examination of reality. We don’t think it’s real, and our defences are consequently not up. So the full force of the told reality hits us with an impact the lived one often does not. Doesn’t this then make it even more imperative to write dystopias? Especially now? To harness and exploit the window of opportunity they create in allowing us to showcase realities in the most powerful and honest ways, even beyond what lived reality can?