Miedo

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

“I can’t go to Hell. I’m all out of vacation days.”

“Despite everything, it’s still you.”

“My brother’d really like to see a human, so it’d really help me out if you’d keep pretending to be one.”

“Don’t worry, my little monarch, my plan isn’t regicide. This is so much more interesting.”

“First, however, is as customary for those who make it this far… I shall tell you the tragic tale of our people. It all started, long ago… No. You know what? SCREW IT! WHY SHOULD I TELL YOU THAT STORY WHEN YOU’RE ABOUT TO DIE!”

“The more you kill, the easier it becomes to distance yourself. The more you distance yourself, the less you will hurt. The more easily you can bring yourself to hurt others.”

“If I were you, I would have thrown in the towel by now. But you didn’t get this far by giving up, did you? That’s right. You have something called ‘determination.’ So long as you hold on… so long as you do what’s in your heart…I believe you can do the right thing. Alright. We’re all counting on you, kid. Good luck.”

“I understand why Asgore took so long to hire a new royal scientist. The previous one… Dr. Gaster. His brilliance was irreplaceable. However, his life… was cut short. One day, his experiments went wrong, and… Well, I needn’t gossip. After all, it’s rude to talk about someone who’s listening.”