I cannot help but notice people only started to mock dystopian novels when women and girls started to write and be featured in them.
People started mocking dystopians when they became formulaic and commercialized, ironically undermining the messages that dystopians had when they were written in an era in which fascism was a very real threat and reality for much of the world.
But if it helps you feel better, Veronica Roth and Suzanne Collins have higher net worths than George Orwell ever had when he was alive.
Also authors like Margaret Atwood and Lois Lowry exist? Hell, even Ayn Rand. They wrote before the era of the crappy Hunger Games rip-off.
Can we please stop defending bad writing/characterization with feminism? Sometimes writing is just bad, and the latest trends with dystopia are, frankly, lazy and based more in making money.
Undoubtedly, but the amount of bad dystopian fiction written by men totals thousands. Go to your local multiplex during blockbuster season and there are what seems like hundreds of Straight White Dude (Who Would Probably Not Be Oppressed At All In Real Life) Challenges Oppressive Dystopian Society movies, written and directed by white dudes. Go to your local bookshop and there probably are literally hundreds of books about the same, and a lot of them are, not to put to fine a point on it, terrible.
Lots of female-centric dystopian fiction is terrible too, of course. I haven’t watched or read Divergent (which is what seems to draw a lot of the ire), it could be awful for all I know, but I’ll be surprised if it’s as boring or derivative as Oblivion. And yet – it was only when the new wave of dystopian fiction that featured teenage girls came in that the genre really started to be mocked and held under a microscope. And most of it was – still is – just the old “Mary Sue!” finger pointing under a different name.
There’s a good post floating around tumblr that goes something like “when teenage boys have dumb,
derivative movies and books made for them, everyone’s fine with it. When the same stuff gets made for teenage girls, suddenly it’s the end of the world.” And I think the same thing goes here.
[This is the same reason I will generally defend Twilight, despite hating it, and the vampire/supernatural craze it spawned. Most paranormal romances are so boring to me I want to gnaw my own arm off. But teenage girls seem to like ‘em, and they’re not exactly a group society goes out of its way to cater for.]