Thread by @Delafina777

I read a lot of YA because it’s where some of the more interesting SFF stuff is happening, but that also means I also start reading a lot of stuff that’s not great and boy howdy let’s talk about the normalization of white Christian society in dystopian YA stuff.

Like, if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’re probably aware of how frustrated I get that a lot of internet atheists seem unable to perceive just how Christian their vision of a secular society is.

But WOW does a lot of YA worldbuilding have the same problem.

And that means that there’s a lot of unacknowledged genocide lurking offstage in these books.

And not acknowledging it feels like a really big *problem.*

You know what I’m talking about?

The books always have people who Died Tragically at the hands of the regime, usually someone related to the protagonist. They died because they were intellectuals, because they read Forbidden Books and rebelled, etc.

Occasionally you get the Charming Gay who dies because he or she is gay, just to show you how very, very bad the regime is (a la V for Vendetta).

But what you don’t generally get overt discussion of is what happened to all the people from cultures with different family and social structures than the very WASP “secular” government allows. Cultures with different ways of being.

I mean, you will often get a character with an Obvious Muslim Name or an Obvious Hindu Name or even, in The Selection, Shalom(!) Singer, but for the most part all that remains is their name and appearance

They have otherwise assimilated into being a One or a Blue or whatever.

I want to give a positive shout-out to The Hunger Games here which managed to create cultures in its districts (perhaps only because they were described very sparingly) that felt lived-in and like they could have plausibly evolved from contemporary America but…

…also felt like they had room in them for the survival of cultures that weren’t some kind of government-imposed WASPiness.

And that’s probably because in The Hunger Games, you had a dystopian government that largely didn’t give a shit about what was happening in the districts as long as they were producing and not rebelling.

In fact, ironically, The Hunger Games feels like a dystopia in which non-WASP cultures could survive precisely because the powerful wanted to lord their differences over the conquered, not attempt to get them to conform.

And I don’t want to claim that that attitude represents any sort of virtue, but I think it’s an interesting contrast because despite a few rhetorical feints in that direction from leaders, the Capitol isn’t really claiming it’s running a universal utopia.

The Capitol’s power is brutal, but it doesn’t seem particularly hegemonic, I guess.

But a lot of dystopian YA involves a purported utopia that is, of course, actually a dystopia. And generally what we’re supposed to understand as the TRUE horror of the dystopia is whatever keeps the protagonist and her love apart.

The rest goes largely unexamined.

What made me think about this today was that I flipped through some YA on Scribd and started reading a book called Lush by J.L. Baum.

The book description made it seem like an example of something totally different that I’m seeing in a lot of SFF aimed at teenage girls:

Which is what seems to be an increasingly bright thread of anxiety around fertility and reproduction.

But that’s a different thread.

The setup for this book is boys and girls are separated until they’re 18, at which point they get a tattoo indicating whether they’re fertile and are allowed to mingle, are assigned a profession, etc.

So ok, people are matched up, nuclear families, bear kids, the kids are taken to be raised at single-sex boarding schools until they’re 18.

Haven’t gotten to how professions are assigned yet, I’m only a few chapters in.

And I come on this.

So to be clear, the society genocided anyone who didn't want to live in WASP family structures, send their kids to residential boarding schools, het-marry purely to procreate, and observe a Sunday Sabbath, by STARVING THEM TO DEATH, but the REAL horror is not dating before 18?

And like, I searched the book for terms to see whether this was *ever talked about again*, or whether there was ever any acknowledgement of WHO most of the people genocided were, and nope.

And yes, this is a dystopia, but like so many YA dystopias, it thinks the government controlling every aspect of your life is bad, but it handwaves away a lot of aspects of that as fine.

Like, it's cool that we STARVED TO DEATH all the Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Indigenous people, Black Christians, etc. who wouldn't assimilate into white Protestant-based "secularism" because religion just causes violence, yo.

Also anyone who resisted that was doing so through terrorism.

What's unusual about this book, though, is that at least it admits, however glancingly, that it HAPPENED.

In most of this particular subgenre of YA, all those people are just GONE.

And like I mentioned above, when we talk about who the government killed, it's always for reasons compatible with the white Protestant secularism.

No one gets killed in these books because they won't give up their veladoras or stop lighting Shabbat candles or other rituals.

No, the protagonist's mom gets executed because she was letting kids read banned books like 1984. The protagonist's sister gets executed because she fell in love with with a boy from the wrong division of society. The infertile friend gets sent away/killed.

I got bored with reading Lush and started reading Delirium, which is "love has been outlawed and is chemically suppressed."

And like, same setup, but where everyone who doesn't assimilate went is as yet unacknowledged.

Oliver is definitely a better writer, and looks to be doing some interesting things with the government's "New Religion" (and searching through the book, it looks like the protagonist comes on exiled "Old Religion" practitioners who are (ack) "true" Christians.

But again, we have a very white Protestant-normative, ostensibly secular(ish) society that never seems to acknowledge how WASP it is. (See also The Selection, and, oh, I dunno, about a bazillion books I got, read, and returned to HPB.)

So, look, I get that these are dystopias, and yeah, actually, it's hard to think of anything more dystopian than white Christianity (whether explicitly religious or "secular") managing to destroy every other culture out there.

My problem is that the white Christian-ness of these dystopias is hardly ever acknowledged--they're usually presented as generically "secular"--the *deaths* they acknowledge are the deaths of people who do things that don't challenge the white Christian-ness of the society...

...only its control, and the thing that's bad about these societies isn't that they're white Christian hegemonies that have eliminated every other way of being, it's that they exert control over the protagonist's love life.

The whiteness and Christianness of them is normalized to the point of being both invisible and unremarkable, and what it took to GET there is rarely if ever acknowledged.

And I feel like that sets up a certain white (and often white supremacist, even if unintentionally) libertarianism as virtue.

These books are very "too much government is bad!" without really acknowledging the actual reasons why this government is bad.

And no, I'm not trying to Cancel Dystopian YA--I wouldn't keep reading it if there weren't also good stuff in it. And obviously it's not ALL Dystopian YA.

But it's a thread that's troubling me.