ranking teen dystopians on how ridiculous their futuristic societies are

she falls in love this is ironic One Direction fanfiction that wouldn't happen remember the time when every young adult author decided to write a dystopian novel The World is divided into two groups those who pour their cereal first and those who pour their milk first and as your 16th birthday you have to choose by eating the genetically modified cereal that will show you all the possible Futures based on your breakfast in a future world and with the world we mean the United States everyone is forced to wear makeup but our main character doesn't like makeup she likes reading books and she starts a rebellion by building an army of young men who are all so enamored by her cuz she's not like other girls I think I could write a bestseller the common idea is that all these young adult dystopian Futures were kind of trash but we also know that things enjoyed by young girls tend to get trashed on a little bit too much so today we're going to take a little bit of a closer look at all those teen dystopian Futures we're not going to look at plots or writing or characters we're just going to be ranking them based on their futuristic societies let me show you tiers that I made the first tier is called slay cuz these are all interesting wellth thought out topics and also often a lot of people die The Perks of Being a cyborg these are dystopian novels that are basically just coming of age novels I think it's good to acknowledge that a lot of young adult dystopians never set out to be a critique of society the dystopian Society of the story just acts as a stage upon which to play out the theater that is teen AG hood and if you do that well I think that deserves credit too then we have why are your scientists so incompetent you're going to be surprised how many of these dystopian Futures exist solely because of really bad scientific conduct niist deor refers to dystopian societies that are kind of lazy overly simple backdrops for just a fun action adventure story the last year I reserved for just the ones that give me a lot of question marks also to spice it up I have added to this list a bunch of my own dystopian futuristic worlds that I came up with when I was around 15 years old and a big fan of all of these books just a kind of contrast a lot of these why dorion books suddenly look really good if you compare it to what a teenager would come up with they are quite unhinged but we'll get get to those at the end let's begin with an absolute classic and that is Divergent so in Divergent the world is divided into five factions based on your personality dauntless aidite emity abnation and Candor AKA Gryffindor Ravenclaw Hufflepuff Hufflepuff plus and honest people at 16 years old you find out where you belong and of course our main character Tris turns out to have more than one personality trait and she is Divergent because she doesn't fit into any of these little boxes yes it's true that this world makes absolutely no sense the idea is that the world was divided into factions to prevent War then why is it bad to be Divergent and have all of these virtuous traits this world has absolutely no relation to critique of the real world unless you're a teenager Divergent may not have created an apt representation of what the world is like but it's definitely an apt representation of what the world feels like when you're a teenager and that's why I think Divergent is a perfect example of just a Coming of Age story with a distopian world that kind of helps that coming of age story unfortunately this is all completely broken down with the final book in the series I put it here because the final book in the series just does a whole one there's like a big plot twist in the final book that is going to be a spoiler by the way that just upends everything we've known from the first two books let me explain it to you the government has genetically modified people to take out the genes that cause crime and murder now this is not too far-fetched there are genes that are associated with vulnerability to becoming a criminal although it's still very very much influenced by your surroundings but instead of being able to fix people genes they accidentally damage everyone's genes and all war breaks out looking past the fact that you have somehow spread out a genetic modification among the entire population and you never found out earlier that it does the exact opposite of what you want it to do but they're trying to cure these damaged genes by setting up these simulation cities like the world of the first book where people people are divided into these five factions and then they hope that once in a while someone is born who is Divergent and if you're Divergent that means that your genes are no longer damaged so not only are all the previous books just a simulation oh it was just a dream now the whole point of the story is kind of interesting it's about how people are not defined by their jeans and even if you have damaged genes you can still be a good person our main character turns out to to have 100% pure genes of course but that is besides the point I would put this in why are your scientists so incompetent but I just remember being so angry at this book when I read it as like a 17 years old I'm going to put it in the lowest here I do really respect all the creativity that went into this books and if you also consider yourself a creative I've got the best place for you to cultivate that creativity with the sponsor of today's video skillshare skillshare can help you go from creative passion to paycheck what are your creative goals maybe you want to start a newsletter to share your writing maybe you want to set up an Etsy store so you can sell your illustrations start up a creative business and need some productivity tips skillshare has classes on all of these things and more as they are the world's largest online learning community for example I am a creative person and my creative business is this YouTube channel and so also for me I found the perfect class on skillshare I follow the class by assentive Bean on notion for YouTube creators easily manage your creative projects this class really helped me optimize my own content creation database in notion and she gave a lot of very useful tips that I wouldn't have found out about myself if you want to take your creative Journey to the next level I highly recommend skillshare the first 500 people to sign up with my link will get a full month free trial of skillshare so click the link in the description to get your month of free classes and thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video next let's talk about Wither in the world of Wither there was an attempt to genetically turn everyone into a perfect race but yet again it went wrong and now oops all men die at the age of 25 and all women die at the age of 20 yet again I'm just asking how are these futuristic scientists so incompetent that they give the entire world popul population and with world population we do mean just the US this genetic modification and it backfires to the complete opposite in a way that they've never found out in all of their preliminary research if my memory is correct the reason that it only takes place in the US is because the rest of the world was destroyed by climate change I could have made a tier for lazy reasons why the rest of the world doesn't exist anymore so that the author doesn't have to deal with geopolitics but then pretty much all of these books would just end up in that tier now the point of this book is that our little main character gets sold off as a bride to a random man like most young women do so they can become baby machines and I actually realized that this book I think takes a lot of inspiration from Blue Beard the fairy tale because the bride lives in this big house with the man but then there's a secret underground chain chamber that is full of all of the corpses of all of the previous Brides that have been used to experiment on the whole plot of the story is absolutely insane not plausible at all but I do think it's kind of poetic like this world where nobody ages beyond their youth I don't actually hate it but it's just going to lose points for the incompetent scientists then there's the Beloved Shatter Me about a girl who is lethal in the world of this book disease is everywhere the birds don't fly anymore everything is a desolate land I do not remember and I also could not find out on their wiki page why the world ended up like that it is possible that this is never explained only thing I know is that the reestablishment is an entity that's trying to fix it and they now rule the entire world all of it this whole book is basically just about our main character being turned into a weapon and learning to embrace her power so this is a very good example of nice Decor there's just some desolate world that's just like some lazy backdrop to the actual story we have the 100 I've never actually seen the show I've only read the book the world has been completely destroyed by nuclear war people have fled to space in a big spaceship and then youth delinquents are sent down back to Earth to see if it's livable yet again this is a post-apocalyptic world that is mostly just a stage for the adventure story oh maybe we should talk about The Hunger Games in The Hunger Games the world is divided into 12 districts and they are ruled by the very rich Capital as a punishment for past Rebellion the 12 districts have to reap a child every year to go into the Hunger Games where they have to fight to the death the rich overly decadent capital is basically us the over consumption the blinders for all the suffering only wanting things to be entertaining and a spectacle how to Capital keeps its citizens docile and blind for all the Injustice by just giving them the entertainment of The Hunger Games so they don't start questioning the world because at least they're entertained that is literally the plot of Brave KN World an acclaimed distopian book The whole idea of these districts being put up against each other turning each other into the enemy so they don't realize who the real enemy is the capital that is oppressing them all the districts being poor and underdeveloped even though they are the ones providing all of the products that make the capital so luxurious like how countries in the global South provide all of our clothes our Tech Supplies our wood all to sustain our luxurious Western Lifestyles and in turn we just exploit them I could go on and on about this forever the point is Susan Collins thought about what she was writing whenever I see someone believe that the Hunger Games is just a stupid young adult dystopian with a love triangle I instantly no longer take any of their opinions seriously it's a sleigh okay what's next ooh Let's uh talk about my favorite one aside from the Hunger Games and that is Angel Fall by Susan E I think I'm going to have to roast my fave so this story is about the apocalypse the biblical Apocalypse in which the Angels come down and just start ruling and ruining the earth I do really like that this is a story where the angels are the bad guys cuz angels are often presented as these like really nice beautiful beings but they can be very scary and no matter how much I love this book this really is just an apocalyptic world that is there as a stage for all the fun action okay then we have have Legend here we follow June a military Prodigy who has scored like a perfect score on like the trial aptitude test from a very privileged background and then we also follow day who's a boy from the slums so in this world children who don't score high enough on this trial aptitude test are basically just discarded and they're experimented on which I think is like a really interesting parallel to how Cutthroat Academia is and how children are like really pushed to get the biggest and highest grades and if you are not good at school you're kind of like seen as worthless in this book there's a war between the Republic and the colonies and apparently the Republic has just constantly been lying about them being on the winning hand when really the colonies have been on the winning hand for a long time and I'm pretty sure that is something that exactly happens in 1984 if I remember correctly I really feel like Marie louu the author of this book had something to say so I'm going to put it in sleigh Cinder by marusa Meyer unlike every other book we've discussed so far this one actually doesn't take place in the US it takes place in the Eastern Commonwealth of New Beijing there is also a country on the moon I think one of the most implausible parts of this story is that the moon has been colonized by scientists who just kind of live there because they want to do their research and their exploration if this happened in real life there would 100% already be some kind of billionaire taken over the moon to somehow exploit it for money but in this book the people on the moon had been exposed by cosmic rays which mutated their Gene leading to a lunar Gene that gave them magic it's very implausible that if you are exposed to raise ionizing rays that there would only be one singular Gene mutated that wouldn't happen now I will say I have a hard time categorizing this book as fully dystopian I feel like it was categorized as that because that was the thing the hype at the time but it's it's really more just like a fun little science fiction where this futuristic world is a genuinely Fun World for the adventure story but it's not like an interesting dystopian Future Okay so before we move on to my own horrible dystopian Futures that I came up with there are a few more dystopian books that I personally haven't read but I couldn't make this video without them because they are such Staples of the genre so bear in mind that I have not read these I've just done research on what their dystopian worlds are based on let's begin with Uglies at 16 years old all teens are given a pretty operation where you become conventionally beautiful and all young people are persuaded into thinking that they're ugly so that they'll all undertake this pretty operation this is brilliant this is just a fantastic concept exploring beauty standards it has to go at the top then we've got delirium this is about a world where love is forbidden and when you're 16year old you are given the Cure against love but of course oh our main character is about to turn 16 but right before she gets her cure she falls in love is this very very farfetched yes I do not for a second believe that there would be a futuristic world where we Outlaw love is it poetic hell yes I think this is a very interesting concept especially for teenagers to explore First Love and the importance of love it makes for a really great Coming of Age story so I'm going to put it in perks of being a cyborg O Let's Talk About The Maze Runner so the whole idea of this world if I'm correct and these are spoilers for like the later books cuz only then is it revealed there was a virus and the scientists are trying to find a cure of course so they put children some of them are immune some of them are not through all of these trials like the maze like The Scorch Trials in the second book to research the virus and how the immunity works again what is up with all these horrific scientific practices O then we have matched by Ellie coni so in this world the officials decide everything about you what you do for work when you die but also who you love our main character gets matched to her perfect partner according to the officials According to some kind of test but then then a little love triangle happens and she kind of has to choose between her like perfectly matched partner like on paper her perfect partner and a boy that she feels more like feelings passion for I know that this book is kind of clowned upon for being really bad I haven't read it and I'm going to be honest I find the concept pretty interesting it's so world that explores what it means to be compatible how the influence of what other people think about your relationship impacts your own relationship decisions should you choose your own Fate To Love or rely on the idea that other people may know better than you it's pretty good it's pretty good concept I feel like this could be a Black Mirror episode oh wait it is a Black Mirror episode and it's one of my favorites it really reminds me of hang the DJ so yeah maybe the books are like extremely poorly executed but again this tier list is just based on the concept the idea of their futuristic world and I kind of like this one so I'm going to put it up here hello editing me here to say that I should not have put Match in the highest here like what I'm getting at at these last few Clips is that I think that the Matched story line and concept really works for a good Coming of Age story so I should have put this in the second tier not on the same tier as The Hunger Games ah next up everyone's favorite the selection so this is a world divided into casts where you get like a number like one is the best and eight is the lowest and there's a girl from a lower cast who enters this bachelor like competition to become the Bride of the prince I think and then you become higher cast you become number one so the dystopian Society here is that the US and China were at war with each other China won and the us became a colony of China then Russia joined the war and China and the US teamed up to defeat Russia to be honest I cannot see this based in any real criticism of the world other than just the US's General fear of China and Russia and always making China and Russia the bad guy but what I find the funniest thing about this series is its cast system they do criticize the cast system from what I've gleaned from plot summaries of these books it's all like oh the casts are bad and it's really sad for all the poor people and then the prince is like a hero in the last book because he disbands the cast system but also the whole point of the series is a Rags to Riches of ooh the main character is now among all these rich people and ooh she gets to experience all these luxuries and isn't it wonderful to be rich like where do you think they got all this money from and at the end of the third book again spoilers for the last book she does become royalty marries the prince like they do disband the cast system cuz it was so bad to have all this class division but o our main character is royalty now look at how cool it is now she's so rich in royalty and full of luxury and for that I'm going to put it in the lowest here okay before we get to my own stupid little IDE ideas the final one is the giver The Giver is a classic about a world without color without emotion and where everyone has to kind of fit into this concept of samess and it's about a boy who inherits the memories of the time before sameness and because he inherits these memories he himself for the first time starts to explore emotions and experience emotional depths so so hey I'm going to be honest this doesn't look that bad so far we haven't talked about my my ideas yet when I was reading all these books I of course also wanted to write my own and I just liked writing for fun so I wrote my own dystopian stories they're exactly what you would expect from a teenager who dropped history and geology classes as soon as she could which one shall we start with we'll leave the most unhinged one for last let's start with this one this is ironic One Direction fanfiction where the love interest was NY horon and all of his evil clones oh this is insane why am I sharing this the main character is not like other girls because she doesn't like partying and she prefers reading and her and her friends are on this big cruise ship on like a school Excursion the captain of the ship turns out to be evil his name is Captain SharkMan and he is secretly a British pirate and he's giving all these teenagers on his ship these deadly puzzles and trials to find out where the secret treasure is hidden on his ship I really had a thing for writing stories with deadly games in them I wonder where I got that from I also have to share with you the Hunger Games fanfiction that I started writing with a few of my friends we never got further into than two chapters but that was enough for us to build an entire dystopian world the capital has been disbanded and is now part of the district it's called district 14 and The Hunger Games are back again why because it wouldn't be an interesting story if there were were no Hunger Games and the twist that we came up with is that instead of people being reaped like normal as individuals an entire family would be reaped and then people had to vote on who from that family would go into the arena why was this implemented because we needed a fun little twist because drama that's why okay and now for the actually most hinged one this story was called the black parade this story is the direct result of a teenager reading way too many of these Grim dystopian stories without understanding the point of their grimness so I just wrote an incredibly edgy story oh I need to wait oh I need to share the chapter titles that I came up with for this one the chapter titles are as follows and I'm directly translating these from Dutch because of course I wrote These in my mother tongue a selection of girls allowed to die chapter 2 is a smile in the dark chapter four is called the meaning of death and chapter four is called survive that's good advice I think I directly stole that from The Hunger Games without realizing it and the first sentence of the story is there was one room with four mattresses three girls and one corpse so if you thought that was already bad wait until you hear the dystopian concept behind this let me tell you what this is about there's all these girls that are just pushed ruthlessly into a trailer and they're brought to some kind of camp and through GRE out the first chapters our main character Jiran Jiran Jiran is constantly reaching for a Band-Aid on her arm and she's like thinking about how she knows it's going to hurt soon she's expecting this feeling of unbearable pain and we get other characters talking about what the experience was like for them and and how much pain they were we hear from other characters that this thing that jiren has been put into her arm has made them lose their tongue and others have had their legs become completely paralyzed and the thing that has been doing this to them was a vaccine this story was about a government mandated vaccine that leaves people mangled and with horrible illness it's a good thing this never got published because qanon would have had a field trip with this and it gets worse and the government gives everyone in this country a vaccine that will try to kill you those that were strong enough to survive the vaccine deserve to live and those who died from the vaccine didn't deserve to live in the first place so it was just straight up Eugenics that's what it was also clearly I did not understand what the vaccine was because what I'm describing here is just a poison I just called the vaccine cuz it sounded cool and the whole plot of the story is that our main character gets kidnapped to join this thing called The Black Parade which is basically just squid games where people have to play these like deadly games for the enjoyment of rich people so basically squid games but without any political awareness so you know all these dystopian books really weren't that bad honestly they these should be in a tier of their own like the selection and allegion are way better than whatever that was okay well thank you for watching let me know if you agree with my ranking or if there are some things that I've missed I would love it if anyone would share their ridiculous dystopian ideas that they came up with as a teen because I'm pretty certain I hope I hope so that I'm not the only teenager that came up with these woefully unaware dystopian ideas I want to give a big thank you to all of my patrons for supporting me with a special shout out to all of my Elite patreon members in December we're going to be reading weathering Heights for my patreon book club I will leave the link in the description if you want to join thank you so much for watching this video I hope it brought you some joy and I will see you soon in another video next week [Music] goodbye [Music]

Channel: The Book Leo

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Length: 29min 7sec (1747 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 10 2023