Mary Suetopia

"How about... an Anarchy? The Reality government is only here to spread news, keep a limited structure of communication and protection, and to deal with foreign worlds. Here, the people take care of themselves, are free to do what they want, and smart enough to know what not to do."

—Mayor Rabbit, City of Reality

Also known as a Straw Utopia, everything is perfect in this ideologically pure country. Everyone lives a comfortable lifestyle, poverty and crime are not noticeably existent, people are friendly and well-behaved, and the trains run on time. The society works, and any historical or economical references to why it shouldn't are either ignored or hand-waved as examples of not doing it right.

Often, the author will make a society such as this work just too well to be believable and will even gleefully punish anyone who deviates from the society's core ideology to "prove" that ideology's superiority; in fact the only time you'll actually see anyone in any kind of distress in the Mary Suetopia is when they try to break with the society's core ideology. Frequently, the biggest external threat to the Mary Suetopia will be an aggressive neighbor whose social-structure represents a Strawman Political version of the philosophy most diametrically opposed to that of The Mary Suetopia - a Straw Dystopia.

Note that there is no reason to assume that it isn't possible to create a better society. Thus, some of these utopias might actually work. However, the distinctive characteristic of a Mary Suetopia is that it goes beyond just being a perfect society; it's a perfect society filled with perfect people, who show enthusiastic support for the society's – and by extension the author's – ideology. For example, maybe no one is poor unless they don't adhere to core ideology. Anyone who disagrees with that ideology is misguided at best and evil at worst, and by the end of the story they will either suffer a horrible fate or give up their old ways and embrace the One True Path.

In many cases, the author just uses the "utopia" as an excuse to step up and preach their little heart out. The author may even take the opportunity to explain why their "interests" don't deserve such a bad rap. If this is included in a work in the fantasy genre, the culture will invariably be some breed of elf. Often the Mary Suetopia serves as the setting for an Author Tract.

Less preachy authors may use this trope in past tense to categorize now destroyed civilizations of the Precursors. How better to establish their era as a golden age than for it to be free of problem? How could an Adventurer Archaeologist not take interest in its wonders? How better to describe the might of the Ancient Evil or scale of the disaster that brought about its end and establish how bad it is if it happens again?

Named for the Mary Sue, the personified equivalent of the Mary Suetopia.

See also Crystal Spires and Togas, Perfect Pacifist People, Utopia Justifies the Means, Utopia. Contrast with Dystopia and Quirky Town. The polar opposite of Crapsack World. Compare Alternate History Wank. Straw Dystopias which are unrealistically efficient may shade into being No Delays for the Wicked.

Examples of Mary Suetopia include:

Straw Utopias

Anime and Manga

  • Ruthlessly parodied in the form of Magical Land in Dai Mahou Touge. Sure, on the initial surface it looks like a Mary Suetopia, with fantastic magical architecture and things with disgustingly cute names. However, dig a little deeper and you'll find that only the royal family (and perhaps a few nobles) actually lives in comfort, and everyone else lives in poverty under the oppressive hand of the Queen.
  • On the whole, Tomoeda, the town where Cardcaptor Sakura takes place; aside from incidents with Clow Cards (which are promptly taken care of by Sakura occasionally with help from Syaoran), it's absolutely perfect! Safe enough that children can be out and about with no fear of being abducted or hurt, but not completely devoid of stuff to do.
    • Note that Free-Range Children is pretty geographically limited: What they call a trope in America, is a Truth in Television in most of the rest of the world, even including parts of USA, actually. It's perfectly normal for Japanese kids to freely roam around unsupervised starting from around eight or ten.
  • Mitsuo Fukuda, the director of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, claimed in a 2003 interview that Orb was supposed to be his ideal Japan:

"That's just an ideal. Japan that is. However, they weren't occupied. Think about it, in order to be ruled you need massive military power and that's troublesome."

—Mitsuo Fukuda, on the meaning of the neutral country Orb

Comic Books

  • In Karma Club, the monetary system is run on good deeds, so bad people simply don't exist, and if they do, they're either brainwashed or they're Card Carrying Villains who are sick of goodness and peace. It's not explained why the main characters—or anyone—actually has a job beyond doing "good works". Not to mention the Unfortunate Implications: "Crime, of course, was completely nonexistent in these parts... Rich people were just too virtuous."
  • The cartoonist Rius, before 1989 portrayed any Socialist country (but above all, Cuba) as this and as an example to follow ("there is no poverty, no unemployment, no drug addicts, no bums, no hobos, no children without schools, no prostitution..."), after that, it has Zig-zagged between depicting them as Crap Saccharine Worlds and Ye Goode Olde Days.
  • Wakanda from Black Panther has elements of this that vary from minor to being played straight to an infuriating degree, Depending on the Writer. To wit, at its very base it's an isolationist African country which is impossibly wealthy due to the huge amount of Vibranium they possess and their technology is better than the rest of the world's. This is most notoriously emphasized under Hudlin, most particularly for one fact: they have the cure for cancer... and they refuse to share.
    • Christopher Priest went some way towards mitigating this (and explaining why they haven't simply conquered the world) by depicting Wakanda as a chaotic ensemble of warring tribes and rival groups that spend most of their time fighting each other for control of the country.
    • The animated series Iron Man: Armored Adventures also strove to avert this by portraying them as a nation of racists with absolutely no contact with the outer world (none of the other countries wants to bother dealing with them) and severely messed up in terms of economy.
  • New Crystal City from IDW's Transformers Drift miniseries qualifies. A bunch of refugees lead by peace-loving samurai settling into an underground city where nobody is poor, nobody is hurt, no social classes exist and everyone gets along perfectly fine and there are no problems finding any sort of energy source (in spite of the lack of readily-available Transformers-compatible energy being the main driving element behind a lot of IDW Transformers tales), unlike elsewhere in the cosmos where the evil Decepticons and the just-as-evil Autobots (or so author Shane McCarthy would have you think) wage their war.

Films -- Live Action

  • In Demolition Man San Angeles is simply unable to defend itself against violence anymore. It's almost a Deconstruction of the Mary Suetopia (to be more exact, it's a parody of Brave New World), showing how all it takes is one violent, crazy psychopath to tear the whole damn thing apart. Two. Two violent, crazy.... Three. Three violent, crazy psychopaths. One who knits, one who needs a shower, and one who's Wesley Snipes.
    • Well, Edgar Friendly is no "violent, crazy psychopath". Actually on the scale of criminality, Edgar just barely comes up to the level of "troublemaking teenager". The fact that that was enough to start an upset to San Angeles' society is telling.
  • Avatar: Pandora. The movie and book state that the Na'vi society is utterly idyllic - they are so blissfully happy that they have no needs or wants, can't be offered anything because they already have everything they could possibly desire, have birth control so they never expand enough to damage the environment, much less come into conflict with other tribes over resources, and more.
  • The 300 version of Sparta makes the titular city-state into this trope, or more accurately a Gary Stu-topia, where all the men are perfect warriors (except for the evil Smug Snake types), all the women are perfectly beautiful and the rest of Greece respects and fears them. Justified by use of an Unreliable Narrator. Note that some of the unpleasant aspects of Spartan society (infanticide for the weak, Training from Hell for children, a culture of warfare) are presented as being part of the utopian ideal. Similarly, the Spartans' historical penchant for pederasty is carefully excised from the film. If it was there, the joke about Athenian boy lovers wouldn't work as a putdown anymore.
  • Dances with Wolves's merry Sioux are a Gary Stu-topia. They're communists, have no sexual hangups, and the sheer amount of male solidarity, while reflecting traditions, is taken to extremes, though not to the extreme of misogyny. They're also completely friendly to anyone, even the white men trying to kill them, as contrasted with the Exclusively Evil Pawnee, who even attack their white allies.
  • Star Trek: Insurrection has the Bak'u, who live on a planet with fountain-of-youth powers and espouse a technology-free society. SF Debris tore them apart in his review, pointing out how improbably clean and orderly everything and everyone is, especially since our modern standards of cleanliness are derived from technological advancements.
  • In Little Buddha, the King attempts to invoke this when his son, the Prince Siddhartha decides to leave the palace to learn more about the world. The whole city seems to live in the same splendor the Prince does, it seems like he has no reason to leave his home... until Siddhartha sees a poor beggar wander into the crowd who is then hauled away by the guards. This revelation about the world is one of the things that causes Siddhartha to begin a journey that will ultimately lead him to become the Buddha.
  • The 1936 film Things to Come takes "Everytown" (obviously London) from an alternate 1940 to a sort of proto-Bartertown, challenged by the heroic black-clad aviators of Wings over the World—a council that eliminates things it objects to (such as private aircraft and "independent sovereign states"). Everytown finally morphs into a shining white-and-crystal Mary Suetopia where everyone wears white togas, where a character says he has the right to speak and be heard because he's a Master Craftsman, where an old man explains to his great-granddaughter about the bad old days when houses were built above ground and actually had windows—and where anyone who has any qualms about this is explicitly and specifically opposed to "Progress", thinks "Progress" is a bad thing, and wants to put a stop to it once and for all.

Literature

  • Most Soviet speculative fiction was like this. The Communist party had set a timeline for when they expected to achieve certain goals related to the advancement of Communism. All fiction in a futuristic setting was required to adhere to this timeline. This means future Earth was always a Communist paradise. Also, any aliens more advanced that humanity would also have naturally discovered the superiority of Communism, and would also live in Communist utopias. Writers who disobeyed these rules risked never ever being published. Ivan Efremov's Andromeda Nebula and The Hour of The Bull are perfect examples. See Noon Universe by the Strugatsky Brothers for notable subversion.
    • Ironically, whatever the authors thought about Communism and what authorities did were quite often drastically different things, which sometimes has led to extremely funny situations. For example, Efremov, who sincerely believed in the goodness of Man and wrote such utopias because he indeed though them to be the only way, still caught a lot of flak for criticising the sides of the Soviet society even the official opinion believed reprehensible, only because he didn't toe the party line perfectly. The Strugatsky Brothers were an even better illustration, because their view on the perfect society differed from the party line pretty heavily.
  • There was a whole planet like this in The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted. Supposedly the currency there was directly based on hours worked, and that basic needs can be paid for by about a 6-hour workweek.
  • Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Cycle: The eledhel in Elvandar. They are all morally upstanding, all beautiful, all skilled. Their very home is a work of art, the mere sight of it sure to drive the most grizzled veteran to tears. They harbor no resentment for anyone, regardless of reason. Any elves who don't live as they do are considered unfortunate deviations from the ideal (as the term "The Returning" implies), but are generally happy to abandon their whole life's worth of teachings and values (and, in the case of the moredhel, family and friends too) and go live with the eledhel as soon as they realise how awesome they are. The glamredhel literally skip off to Elvandar as soon as they learn it exists. And of course, moredhel can go "good" and become eledhel, but no eledhel ever goes bad. Ever.
  • Robert A. Heinlein:
    • Beyond This Horizon. The world is "perfect", but a few people feel they should be in charge and that society has never given them the credit they deserve. Our hero fights them to preserve the utopia. Interesting, in that this early work of his has the "best" people working, but attaches no stigma to not working and the government gives out money to everyone, so you don't have to work—the society is a representation of everything that is good about socialism. Contrast this with his later, more "conservative" views that are negative toward "freeloaders", when the society has become a strawman for Communism/Capitalism—Heinlein had divorced his first wife, who was very liberal, and remarried a woman who had much more conservative views.
      • Note that the "perfect" society is both violent and sexist—men are expected to carry guns, and duel with them over minor insults. A woman who carries a gun, however, is regarded as rather odd.
    • His last/first book For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs is essentially a guided tour through a Mary Suetopia. He wasn't able to sell it when he originally wrote it (it was only published after his death), and reading it, one can see why. There is a single sequence where a politician admits that there is still corruption and stupidity, but after a couple of lines of Informed Flaw we're again being indoctrinated on how this society rocks.
    • The society in Starship Troopers was also a sort of Mary Suetopia, based on his later conservative ideals. Of course, the films subvert this into a Straw Dystopia, but not an actualized one. The book did preach a "military democracy" that utilized corporal punishment for crimes, and capital punishment even for insane persons; the given rationale for the society was that "it works," using only the fictitious evidence of the book itself, while scorning all 20th century conventions as "primitive myths" which were naturally proven wrong by "advanced scientific proofs" of Heinlein's Suetopian future-world (such as the supposed need to corporeally punish dogs in order to housebreak them).
    • In Time Enough for Love, he opines that only a libertarian, near-anarchic Frontier society of fully self-sufficient "rugged individualists" can be ideal; anyplace with enough people to "require identification cards" is explicitly considered a Dystopia to be fled from at high speed. Luckily, in that universe All Planets Are Earthlike, so there's an actual frontier to flee to. This is a bit borderline; the character espousing this opinion is a near-immortal who isn't too keen on being found out after what happened in the previous book, Methuselah's Children and who is an admitted iconoclastic curmudgeon who was born in 1912 and reached adulthood well before World War II.
    • Stranger in A Strange Land also had a small Mary Suetopia based around Martian philosophy. In the book, having lots of free love and learning the Martian language apparently gives you telekinetic powers and cures all your health problems. Might be a Suetopia, but it's quite explicitly hammered in that it's pretty damn difficult to actually adopt the Martian outlook, and it'll only become widespread when their group basically out-competes normal humans into being assimilated. It must be also noted that in the story, that Heaven is a real place—and that humans do actually become angels after death, and so are able to oversee the universe to prevent disasters from occurring.
    • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a borderline example, a population consisting largely of convicts and descendants of convicts somehow turned into one of the politest and most chivalrous societies in human history simply because "stupid" people have a tendency to end up on the wrong side of an airlock without a p-suit and there were extremely few women.
  • Greg Egan's novel Diaspora has the posthuman Coalition of Polises. An assortment of anarcho-libertarian utopias, where the inhabitants are immortal, have cognition that is so accelerated that they experience one-thousand subjective "days" over the course of one chronological day, have "children" via software recombination, never kill each other or war with fellow cities, and have no environmental concerns because their population size is static over the centuries. They reproduce, never age or die, are accelerated 1000-fold, and have a static population size over centuries. They do die. To quote: "death meant suicide. There was no other cause."
  • Karen Traviss' Mandalorian society could be seen as this trope. Mandalorians have a mandatory draft for all males, who craft their own armor. Females often do likewise and go to war as well. Some of them stay at war, acting as high-paid mercenaries for various individuals and governments, although some take up less warlike professions (apparently the surname "Fett" means "farmer")-- all are nonetheless required to have armor and fighting capability. The language has a single gender-neutral pronoun for living things and is quite easy to learn; the society is welcoming to those who can fit into it, all of them love children, marriage and divorce are done with a few phrases in a few minutes. Women bearing sons traditionally wait five years to conceive again, one year if it's a daughter, because daughters don't always want to go to war. While this would be an interesting and valid society, and it's more developed than a lot of the others in Star Wars, Traviss always portrays it as a desirable culture with several of people wanting in and no-one but a few degenerates wanting out, and with most Mandalorians believing themselves superior to all the other societies. Traviss also has a tendency to portray them as superior to the Jedi to the point when a Jedi left the order and became a Mandalorian.
  • Redwall and Salamondastron obviously qualify, but then again so does any society or group made of "goodbeasts," ie mice, otters, hares and so on. Practically all of them are upstanding and responsible members of society and noble and compassionate as individuals. Even though they're pacifists, most Redwallers can easily outwit and outfight hardened killers, and Salamondastron, being an army of badass, is nigh invulnerable. There is almost no internal strife, poverty, dissatisfaction or vulnerabilities. If more than three members existing at once have real flaws, then it's a bad generation.
  • Ernest Callenbach's novel Ecotopia, featuring an environmentalist utopia made up of several breakaway U.S. states. The villains are the U.S. government (which wants Ecotopia back in the U.S.) and Ecotopian businessmen who want a loosening of government regulations. Ecotopia exists solely as a tool for the author to attack capitalism and promote environmentalism.
  • L. Neil Smith's Probability Broach series, whereby an anarcho-libertarian society is so perfect that not only is it completely at peace with the world, science is so advanced that Alexander Graham Bell is able to make technology to talk to dolphins, chimpanzees and orcas in the mid 1860s! A luxurious airship has marble columns in its lobby, yay! And then Ayn Rand became president and flew to the moon! All this because of one extra word in the Declaration of Independence! Seriously! It's worth noting L. Neil Smith won the Prometheus Award for this book. Who created the Prometheus Award? L. Neil Smith.
  • In The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson), it is believed that society was like this in the Second Age before the Bore leading to the Dark One's prison was discovered...incorrectly, since the backgrounds of the Forsaken clearly show that there was still plenty of crime (including white-collar crime like insurance scamming), discontent, and war. Though they certainly did have methods of enforcing good behavior with the Binders, or as the current age knows them, the Oath Rods. In the Third Age, the Aiel society and The Two Rivers come close at times. Possibly justified because these are the two societies that have the clearest equitable power breakdown between men and women; a major theme of the series is that gender imbalance leads to trouble.
  • Atlas Shrugged: Galt's Gulch would definitely fit in this category. It extends to the whole world when Galt and his companions emerge from their valley.
  • The Dr. Seuss story I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew ("... where they never had troubles (or at least very few)") is a subversion, since the Aesop of the book is that you can't ever get to Solla Sellew, and would be better off facing your problems in the real world rather than wasting time trying to escape them.
  • James Gurney's Dinotopia novels might count.
    • Humans of all races and all manner of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals live and work together in harmony. There is no money, no war, everyone is vegetarian, eating fish at most. Those predators that don't integrate with society do make crossing the Rainy Basin hazardous, but they are intelligent and easily bought off by offerings of fish, and never stray out of the Basin to wreak havoc. Everyone does what they want to do, most of it meaningful work, humans live for a very long time due to special herbs, the few sour notes are all provided by the few rebellious people. But Gurney's Dinotopia books are beautifully illustrated, the dinosaurs are well-researched, there is a good deal of realism in little details, and overall it's not nearly as grating as some of the other examples.
    • The attempted TV series pilot: two guys from the modern world are stranded there after a plane crash, and when talking to some sort of council of elders about the outside world, are somehow unable to say a single thing better about the "real" world that one of the council doesn't calmly refute, in mystified tones, with how Dinotopia is about 1000 times better.
    • However, given that the perfect world is shown to be stagnated and stuck in traditions to the point where it's stifling itself and only the newcomer American boys can save the day, the show-Dinotopia applies a bit less than the book-Dinotopia.
    • There's also the point that no one can ever leave, making sort of an enforced utopia. The island is completely surrounded by an Eternal Storm, making it impossible to even communicate with the outside world. Fine if you've got nothing left behind. Not so fine if you had any loved one's that were relying on you to support them. Yet no-one ever seems to think of this or mind. Even the one rebellious human, Lee Crabb, just wants out for no reason beyond disliking dinosaurs. Well, that and the enforced vegetarianism since every single living thing on the island is inexplicably sentient.
  • Subverted in Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", where Omelas starts out looking like a ridiculously perfect utopia, until we learn it hides a dark secret. Le Guin likes subverting this trope. Anarres in The Dispossessed also appears to be an example of this at first glance, but as we progress through the plot we learn that it's pretty damn flawed.
  • In the Book of D'ni, where Terahnee is a similarly utopian world (whose wealth happens to be based on slavery).
  • The Harshini in Jennifer Fallon's Demon Child and Hythrun Chronicles series are immortal, uniformly beautiful, perfectly polite, and constitutionally nonviolent.
  • Ironically reversed in a lot of dystopian fiction, like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The world first appears perfect, till it becomes horribly clear it's not.
  • B.F. Skinner's Walden Two, a perfectly-engineered commune based on Behaviorist principles. When challenged by the story's Strawman Political on its theoretical problems, the Suetopia's defender would simply say cite the Suetopia as living proof of the effectiveness of Pavlovian conditioning (or as Skinner calls it, "behavioral engineering") in producing people who are happy with any desired result at all—despite that this is no different from any other indoctrinated regimes of the past, in which charlatans wreaked misery upon mass-civilizations; Skinner does not cite a single real-life study which backs him up, but instead recommends even the electrical and other torture of children in order to teach them to "overcome pain".
  • Subverted in Michael Moorcock's The Land Leviathan; the Alternate History Earth he depicts seemed to be developing into one of these by the end of the nineteenth century, as a young genius' inventions all but abolished war, famine and want, and ensured that everyone was educated and well-fed. However, human nature wasn't quite so easily solved; whilst the current generation was quite content, the next generation—realizing that all the power was in the hands of an elite, and seeking to become that elite—soon turned to rebellion, resulting in a near-constant global conflagration far worse than what eventually happened in our history.
  • The country of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels appears on the surface to be a utopia, run by noble intelligent horses who adopt Gulliver as an amusing pet. The only trouble is that the horses can be arrogant tools at times, particularly to Gulliver, and the only human-like creatures on the island are the savage Yahoos. There is some debate over whether Swift actually meant us to side with the Houynhmns in the declaration that Humans Are Bastards, or whether he meant something more cynical yet: Everyone Is A Bastard, Even The Horses. Let's not forget that he was insane. Gulliver has the tendency to interpret every culture with which he is presented as a Utopia, blatantly ignoring its glaring flaws.
  • Aira in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Quest of Iranon". Except for the twist: it doesn't exist, except in the mind of the titular poet -- but it's better to exist there than not at all.
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman's first-wave-feminist utopia, Herland (1915) -- a manless country where the women reproduced by parthenogenesis. The culture is run by a council of "Over Mothers", and motherhood—the bearing and rearing of strong, intelligent, competent, happy children—is the ultimate aim of every member of society. (They're also cheerfully eugenicist.) They are not a lesbian culture: in fact, they're completely uninterested in sex. One expresses to a male visitor from "Outside" a vague astonishment that in his (presumably North American) culture, married couples engage in sex even when they're not specifically trying to conceive a child: "Do you mean ... that with you, when people marry, they go right on doing this in season and out of season, with no thought of children at all?" (Gilman may have rejected the idea that men were necessary but she wasn't able to see further than other authors of her time, who all assume the same thing -- that decent ladies don't care about sex.)
  • One of the societies in Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time, and the one the character most often visits. The main future is a rural utopia in which virtually the entire political and social agenda of the late sixties and early seventies radical movements has been fulfilled: free love, no class or gender distinctions (going so far as to eliminate the he/she distinction in favor of "per"), no consumerism, and ecological sustainability. The only exceptions to this are the death penalty and war, which they still practice, with good reason. The death penalty is a form of a two-strike rule, where the first time someone commits a crime, rather than punishment they have to go through mild repentance (like serving on sea vessels), but the second time (and it seems it doesn't matter too much what the second crime is) they kill the person, because they feel that doing otherwise would destroy the mutual trust everyone feels toward each other, and they can't bear to have prisons anymore. As for the war, they're fighting a war of attrition with an evil technological empire.
  • The Culture from Iain M. Banks' series of novels would be one of these, if Mr. Banks wasn't such a good writer. While admitting The Culture is the ideal society he'd love to live in, many of the novels explore its flaws and darker activities. He also readily admits, and at several points in the narrative explicitly points out, that it wouldn't be remotely possible for a society that is not already post-scarcity to attain the level of superiority the Culture has.
  • Shangri-La comes from a book written in 1933, Lost Horizon. National Geographic magazine, in an article on the now-real city of Shangri-La, describes the fictional version as a novelist's imagination mixed with Tibetan mythology, the writings of a botanist and explorer, and a whole lot of longing.
  • Averted in H. G. Wells The Time Machine. The Eloi seem to live in this until the protagonist finds out they're really just cattle for the Morlocks.
  • Malacandra (Mars) in C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet is "the world that never fell" and remains a perfect, Edenic society. Technically, Malacandra was damaged in the fall, but not in the moral sense. Oyarsa states that everyone used to live on the surface, but Satan damaged the planet, forcing him to dig out canyons for everyone to live in. Morally, however, all of Malacandra's inhabitants are upright. The real Edenic world is Perelandra. The entire plot of the book revolves around keeping it that way when a demon shows up to ruin everything.
  • The creation of a Mary Suetopia is the main focus of Plato's The Republic, though it is completely hypothetical and part of an elaborate thought experiment. Still, the level of detail to which the "perfectly just society" is described makes it similar to the other fictional utopias listed here, and there are just as many overlooked flaws and just as much Values Dissonance.
  • The original Utopia by Thomas Moore. They had such brilliant ideas as eliminating religious conflict by having everyone worship whatever they wanted so long as they did it exactly the same way at the same time in the same places—and it worked, of course. That said, the book was about how something like this can never happen in real life. 'Utopia" is a pun on both eutopia-"good place", and outopia-"no place".
  • Scott Westerfield's Uglies series appears to be one of these at first glance. There is no poverty, no hunger, no crime, and no pollution—all these things have been overcome through technology and are abhorred as products of the ancient "Rusties." In addition, all teenagers are given a complete surgical makeover on their 16th birthday to turn them into supermodels with enlarged eyes, perfectly symmetrical faces, entirely new and flawless skin, an immunity to sickness and even new ceramic teeth. These teenagers are appropriately called "Pretties" and get to do whatever they want and party all day without consequences; they can even continue to get free "surge"—more surgical enhancements, including ridiculous things like tiny gems embedded into the iris to function as a clock, or tattoos that swirl in response to heartbeat. However, as the mechanisms behind the Pretties' world are revealed, the reader quickly realizes that the world is actually a dystopia, particularly when it is revealed that part of the Pretty surgery alters brainwaves to turn all the Pretties into unquestioning bubbleheads.
  • This plot was used in the Twilight Zone episode, "Number 12 Looks Just Like you." In addition to making one beautiful and compliant, the surgical transformation also granted extended life. Although the rules of society state that a person could refuse the surgery if they wanted to, in practice, they really couldn't.
  • L. Frank Baum envisioned Oz to be this. Even with Wicked Witches around, Dorothy never had to pay for anything. It gets more explicit in his later books when Ozma assumes the throne and everyone in Oz is granted functional Immortality.
  • Quetzalia in James Morrow's Wine of Violence where all violent impulses are literally sucked out of people's heads and thrown into a river of liquid hate. Hope Morrow thought about safeguards for that river. There's easily half a dozen way this could go horribly wrong, from simple overflowing to the hate coalescing into a soul-crushing, insane monstrosity.
  • Ralph Nader's Only the Super Rich Can Save Us shows the construction of a Mary Suetopia by 17 super-rich celebrities.
  • Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 envisions a turn-of-the-millennium America that has become a Christian socialist wonderland. It was hugely popular among late-19th-century socialists.
  • Sendaria from David Eddings' Belgariad and Malloreon series comes pretty close to this. They elect their kings, and they're easily the most practical and sensible of all the races. The people are honest and have a strong work ethic. Oh, and they pay equal respect to all the gods rather than only picking one. However, it is also hammered in the books that they have no military to speak of, and the only reason it has not been gobbled up by one of its neighbors is that Belgarath and Polgara arranged it to be protected by the Roman Empire Expy culture Tolnedra.
  • Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold is a libertarian-pagan freemarket paradise in stark constrast with the UN dominated politically correct Earth which is portrayed as, well, Hell-on-Earth.
  • The eventual perfect world created in The Turner Diaries is definitely this, if only in the mind of its author, William Luther Pierce. The fact that it's created via a nuclear race war that eliminated all non-white people in the world makes it one of the more extreme examples of political shoehorning.
  • The elves from The Inheritance Cycle by Paolini seem to live in this...
  • "Inuaki, the reptilian within me" by Aryana Havah has a kid who is the reincarnation of a lizard-like alien explain how on their world agriculture means you put a seed in the ground, fill it with "light and love", pray and get food. No waste problems appear because nobody would ever think about not recycling, everybody is friendly with everybody else and nobody would dream of harming everybody else because that would be very silly of them.
  • The Night Watch series has a hypothetical Mary Suetopia. In Twilight Watch, there's a discussion of how Light Others intended to help the cause of Communism early in the 20th century by putting a spell in the Russian food supply to make people good, loyal communists. Had this been done, Russia would be a powerful and prosperous democratic socialist country and the rest of the world would follow their lead. Technology would also be much more advanced- it's asserted that there would already have been shopping malls on the Moon. The reason it's hypothetical is that the Light Others realized that this utopia would lead to The Masquerade being exposed and Muggles would attack them (because Others would be an affront to equality). So, the Light Others let Dark Others sabotage the plan, and so Russian communism instead resulted in the deaths of millions of people.
  • Gondawa in Rene Barjavel's The Ice People (La Nuit des Temps) is an ancient earth civilization with most necessities controlled by automatic machines and computers run on universal energy. People are free to pursue pleasures and to create scientific and artistic achievements. Work is completely optional. At your coming of age the computer grants unto you a number, a key, and a (usually compatible) opposite-sex spouse. The narrator admits that sometimes the computer fouls up on the compatibility part. The key is used as a debit card; at the beginning of the month everyone gets a certain number of points. Work does not earn more points. There's no rollover, you just get the same number of points next month, but it's very hard to exceed your limit. Then you find out what happens to those who do (and that link is putting it mildly).
  • Coraline‍'‍s Other World starts out as this (but since there are only five or six people in it it may not count as a society) and is deconstructed beautifully the more Coraline discovers the truth behind the Other Mother.
  • The Neanderthal world of Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids is depicted as such. Everyone wears a wrist computer so you know what's going on and crimes are easily solved. Violent crime has been wiped out. A lack of religion gives people freedom from such evils as prejudice, stereotypes, and embarrassment. And enforced rhythmic birth control keeps the population low so they don't destroy the planet. However, in addition to the ubiquitous surveillance, if someone commits a serious crime, that person, and anyone who shares half of their DNA or more (parents, kids) is forcibly sterilized. It's utopia, but through draconic means.
  • Zenna Henderson's The People stories tend to this kind of thing, both on Home and in the earth colonies. The part about Author Filibuster (she tries to keep it brief) and "the only time you'll actually see anyone in any kind of distress is when they try to break with the society's core ideology" are true of her stories.
  • Rosewood, Pennsylvania in Pretty Little Liars.
  • S.M. Stirling's Draka stories portray The Domination as a Villain Suetopia, where history just seems to repeatedly break in favor of The Draka, in defiance of all logic.
  • Richard M. Wainwright's The Crystal Palace of the Adamas has Adamas. The main character, Janus, lands on this planet and discovers a peaceful, harmonious society. The family that takes him in has all generations living under one roof, they grow their own food, educate their own children and seem to be at one with nature. Janus contrasts this with his own planet Segatum, which is overpopulated, technology-dependent and has no natural spaces left. However, we later find out that the Adamians DO have modern technology (which they got from visiting earthlings), except they only use the kind that they deem useful (like medicine) and not the kind that they deem trivial (like television or cars).
  • S.L. Viehl's Jorenians verged on this in some of the early Stardoc books.
  • The Shire in The Lord of the Rings was Tolkien's idealised version of the rural England where he spent his childhood.
  • In The Kingkiller Chronicle, the Adem are an entire society of warrior-philosophers. They're ruled by their elite mercenary schools, whose martial arts secrets make them almost superhuman. Their leaders are selected purely on merit. They have absolutely no sexual inhibitions, yet also have absolutely no venereal disease. Their language is far more subtle and elegant than any other. They all have iron-clad composure. Their food is delicious. Their medicinal skill rivals the greatest academic institutions. They are technologically advanced. They live in great wealth and comfort, but without needless frills or vanity. They seem to lack crime, corruption and poverty. The only real flaw in their society is that they are female supremacists, but there is no evidence that men are oppressed. They also do not believe that sex causes pregnancy, but even the story's genius hero admits that he cannot supply evidence to prove it conclusively.

Live Action TV

  • Star Trek:
    • Had its share of Space Amish presented as the pinnacle of civilization which even the Federation could not hope to achieve. They tended to come off as self-righteous pricks who couldn't shut up about their new-agey ways.
    • And of course The Federation itself. Want to work? Cool, do what you want. Go found a new colony. We don't use money, we have replicators and everyone works only for their own benefit. Deep Space Nine is both well-liked and criticized because it breaks this Utopia.
    • There have actually been a few instances - subplots at least if not full episodes - where the "perfectness" of this society are brought into question. There's some instances of meritocracy (you get everything you need, but if you want something you have to earn it) and there's the odd situation with having to deal with a race that thinks you're being retarded as an entire species for giving up money (namely, the Ferengi.) Most of the arguments, however, seem to come from the standpoint of "Utopia only works if everyone is in on the gig, even folks that don't want to be."
    • In fact at one point Sisko clearly points out that really it's just Earth itself that's the Utopia. People on the fringe, colonists or rebels do exist, and those are the people Starfleet has to deal with. It actually shows a bit of in-universe dissonance: Earth is wonderful, the fringe worlds aren't. People wouldn't want to remain part of a society when they receive no representation and no benefit from belonging.

Music

  • Neil Young's song "Cortez the Killer" depicts the Aztecs, of all people, in this fashion:

And the women all were beautiful
 And the men stood straight and strong
 They offered life in sacrifice/So that others could go on.
 Hate was just a legend
 And war was never known
 The people worked together
 and they lifted many stones."

Tabletop Games

  • Despite being in the horrible world of Shadowrun, Sweden and New Zealand have both somehow become a paradise, where the Megacorps are at bay, everyone is rich, technology is years ahead of the rest of the world, the environment is pristine, nothing bad ever happens, and candy drops from the sky. Maybe the author thought he was writing for another universe. A lot of the fluff for Shadowrun is basically "Socialism good, capitalism bad!!" Which is odd considering that the heroes you're playing are essentially anarchists-for-hire. This is to provide a balance in a Crapsack World. There needs to be a place where life doesn't suck.
  • Warhammer 40,000 had a bit of fun with this one.
    • The third edition introduced the Tau Empire, which (despite its name) is The Federation consisting of the Tau and a number of allied races. The Tau, unlike all the other species, have no species infighting and a society that is basically Communism that works (and In Space), are willing to use diplomacy as a first resort, and were presented as having assimilated several nearby human colonies into the fold of the "Greater Good". For a universe as badly off as Warhammer 40,000, the Tau Empire were quickly singled out as a Mary Suetopia for it. Then came the fourth edition rulebook for the faction where it was hinted that the Empire is kept in control due to Mind Control by its ruling class, Dawn of War's second expansion had the Narrator (an imperial scholar) implying that the Tau used forced sterilization on the population of Kronus in the Tau ending, and finally, just to hammer the point home, Games Workshop sicced a large splinter of Hive Fleet Kraken at them. While Tau naivete was played for dark humour: a Necron fleet suddenly pops in and wipes out the bugs over Ka'mais, and… "the Necrons landed they were greeted with great ceremony by Ethereal Aun'taniel. Despite the welcome, Aun'taniel was quickly slain by the Necrons and Ka'mais was then harvested". Then the 4th Sphere of Expansion happened, and things got really hairy: Tau could neither maintain their obliviousness nor take their discovery in stride, so 4th Sphere began to exterminate their auxiliaries and became as xenophobic as most people in 40k.
    • A straight example is the Ultramarine-ruled sub-empire of Ultramar. It is basically the nicest place to live in the entire galaxy, because the Ultramarines are not only the best warriors in the universe but magnanimous statesmen, and even other space marines want to be them, and those that don't are only rebelling because of their inferior and defective gene-seeds.
      • Incorrect. Not only has Ultramar been devastated by Hive Fleet Kraken and Warsmith Honsou's invasion, it is much the same as the rest of the Imperium. The difference is people in Ultramar accept being drones. Then there is the old fluff about enforced sexual slavery to the Ultramarines to keep the genestock healthy.
  • The Dalelands come across this way in the Forgotten Realms, particularly Shadowdale. They have to constantly fight for it, however.
  • Mordent, a quietly-rustic domain of Ravenloft whose darklord never seems to leave his house, and in which the Land of Mists' greatest monster-hunters were headquartered, can seem like a Mary Suetopia when compared to the misery and dread of the rest of the game-setting. The 3E Arthaus products opted to subvert this: Mordent's nastiness is there, it just waits to happen to people until after they've died and their spirits are vulnerable. And Godefroy does have free run of the place, so he can ensure this happens as soon as he's in the mood to torture somebody's ghost.
  • In Mystara, the Hidden Elf Village of the Karimari, a pygmy-like human culture is this trope in spades. Apparently, thousands of happy hunter-gatherers who all opt to settle down in one place, without otherwise changing their way of life, wind up surrounded by pleasant gardens, group singalongs, and dinosaur polo matches, not hunger, poverty or open sewers.
  • Blue Rose has Aldis as Mary Suetopia, with neighbours being Lesser Mary Suetopia and Strawman Land… and then there's Mordor.

/tg/: Blue Rose is just embarrassingly blatant about this shit.

Video Games

  • Gallia of Valkyria Chronicles, where everything is wonderful because they're sitting on the world's largest deposits of ragnite, which is implied to be the cornerstone of the world's ability to function and thus means Gallia is amazingly well-off in the global economy. We're told that the major cultural problem in Gallia is racism against the Darcsen race, but this is solved by the end of the game when the Princess is revealed to be Darcsen and doesn't lose the approval of her people, and nearly all the racist Gallian characters either learn the error of their ways or have their personalities corrected. The game does an excellent job of making the player as invested in Gallia's safety as the characters are, but Gallia itself is the literal moral high ground that the main cast stands on.
    • Then again, the main conflict of Valkyria Chronicles II is a coup made by racist nobles to dethrone the Princess and racially purge the Darcens. That and several characters are still prejudiced against them, though most of them can learn to get over it all save for the Imperial foreign exchange student.
  • The Polaris civilization from the computer game Escape Velocity Nova, which features a perfectly organized enlightened society, the complete absence of piracy (or any sort of conflict) within its borders, and dramatically overpowered technology far in advance of its rivals. They did have to go through a civil war thanks to an issue with their system, and there are two implied reasons why their technology is far in advance of their rivals that have nothing to do with the Polaris having a superior society,[1] but...
  • Parodied in the Team Fortress 2 Engineer update comic, where it's revealed that Australia became a hyper-masculine Gary Stu-topia at the pinnacle of technological progress thanks to the discovery of Australium. Even though the Australians were originally dumb, the Australium made them super-geniuses and allowed them to grow marvelous handlebar mustaches, even on women.

Web Comics

  • A tiny example in Sinfest, where Perfectron needs villains.
  • An Alternate Universe in the webcomic Sluggy Freelance. When Torg first visits the dimension early on, all the characters except Kiki are surprisingly polite, and every day is nearly perfect. He is horrified to discover, though, that the dimension contains no alcohol, leading everyone to call it the Dimension of Lame. The dimension contains no violence at all. Torg later revisits it during the "That Which Redeems" storyline, only to find that the dimension has been invaded by demons from the Dimension of Pain. No-one can even imagine defending themselves. When the world governments drop a Nuke, it turns out to be a Notification of Unified Kindness Envelopes, basically a lot of scraps of paper. Torg also finds out that "nice" and "pacifist" isn't the same thing as "perfect", or even "good".
  • In Escape from Terra, the Asteroid belt is an anarcho-capitalist paradise, bit similar to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress minus the convicts. Earth meanwhile is a bureaucrat-ridden socialist-fascist society of drones.
  • Candi Levens grew up in Gerosha, Indiana. While never a perfect utopia, it fared a lot better when her parents were alive and everyone either went to church or at least had some sort of mildly conservative moral framework. Cue the aggressive takeover of its culture after straw tolerance arguments win the sympathy of a few too many in town. Pretty soon, the town's youth turn into a bunch of lustful, violent little twerps who grow up to become either pervs of one shade or another or hypersexuals, or criminals. It remains a quiet town, but nearby Dirbine goes down the crap hole pretty quickly. And everyone acts like they have rabies when this happens.
  • In City of Reality, the titular city is intended as a Deconstruction of the typical version of this trope. It's really, genuinely true that the government is nonexistent, crime is unheard of, and people just want to get along. It's also true that there are a lot of worlds that are not Reality that quite frankly suck, and Reality doesn't get along with them very well. People being born in such a 'perfect' world as Reality being ill-prepared for a world significantly darker than theirs, which is both played straight and subverted on several occasions, even leading to the creation of some well intentioned extremists among Realists who deal with other worlds. It also shows that they've created and maintained this world by a stringent set of rules for immigrants... you have to be a genuinely good person as checked by tests and empaths to move to Reality to begin with (which makes you wonder how Hawk got in), and immigration is small enough that it's hard not to get assimilated to the Realist way of thinking. Naturally people born there would be raised by example.
    • There is an implication that Reality used to not be nearly so nice, as demonstrated for the SUEPR (troubleshooter/superhero) centers being many many times the size they need to be, and only gradually made their way to their current state the hard way, by working for it.
    • The storyline at the end of the first 'season' has the government of Reality itself come to question it's isolation leading to an event that was utterly disastrous. City of Reality isn't one to let potential holes in it's utopia remain unpoked, half the comic seems to exist to test the limits of it's utopia and the other half to revel in it.
  • Yiffburg in Kit N Kay Boodle, with a straw-dystopian counterpart in the Karostropov Dictatorship.
  • Sonichu has CWCville, where all benefit from the wise and magnanimous rule of Christian Weston Chandler. "Tobacky" and alcohol are banned, though the mayor has eventually abandoned his principles and gotten on the booze. The town has several taxpayer funded soup kitchen hotels with cable television and internet in every room. Each person gets their own room and each hotel is at least five stories tall. Also, some of the 'heroes' of the comic have mobiles with unlimited free minutes and cards that allow them to eat anywhere for free. With very little effort, the trolls make fan fiction depicting CWCVille as a hellhole headed up by an insane, tyrannical manchild.

Web Original

  • As revealed so far, the Union of American Socialist Republics in the alternate history series Reds! is a deconstruction of much of the tropes of utopia. Is life in the UASR better? Perhaps. Is it very different? Absolutely. The cultural and social values that developed over a century of tremendous divergence, revolution and the like are very much alien.

Western Animation

(plays a slot machine and wins) "A casino where I win? That accident must have killed me. I must be in Heaven!"
(plays and wins again) "A casino where I always win? That's boring. I must really be... in HELL!

  • Towards the end of the South Park episode "Goobacks," everyone decides to act responsibly to make the future a better place so that people have don't to timegrate back to their time and take their jobs anymore. It works, just like that, and the town is shown becoming a Mary-Suetopia... until the characters realise that "this is really gay" and go back to their old ways.
  • An episode of Family Guy has Peter go back in time to sew his wild oats, meaning he and Lois never married. For some reason, this also puts the US government firmly in the hands of Democrats (Al Gore was elected President in 2000 and all the Supreme Court justices are liberal). The alternate present is depicted as a dream world where crime and pollution are nonexistent, Gore hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden with his own bare hands, and several prominent Republicans like Dick Cheney were killed in a hunting accident. Brian tries to convince Peter to give up on Lois and stay in this reality.
    • Another episode did much the same thing, this time with Brian and Stewie using a device to travel to different realities. The first reality they visit is one in which Christianity never existed, and, as such, the Dark Ages never happened and society is now a utopia where technology has made huge advances (everything, even pooping, is done "digitally") and absolutely everyone (even Meg) is gorgeous and travel across the Atlantic takes seconds. The only downside presented is that the artwork from the Renaissance-era does not exist.

Straw Dystopias

Comic Books

Films -- Live Action

  • The Norsefire Britain of the V for Vendetta film. It's Thatcherism straw-manned into Fascism—and no-one is happy unless they join V and rebel against the government. The graphic novel is more subtle and ambiguous about this; while the Norsefire Coalition are obviously totalitarian monsters, they're also the only thing holding Britain together after a nuclear holocaust, and V himself is more a sociopathic anarchist than a heroic freedom fighter.
    • Which is puzzling, as the Britain in the film, although a ruthless dictatorship that suppresses civil liberties, still looks prosperous, at least for the residents who aren't gay or Muslim. Just about every citizen we see is living a comfortable middle-class existence with pubs and late night talk shows. How likely are they to rise up? At least the residents of the hell-hole Britain of the comics are desperate enough to clutch at any straw.
    • In the comics, Norsefire were very clearly based on far-Right English racist organisations like the National Front. In the film, Norsefire just becomes the English Nazi Party, complete with its leader having his last name changed from "Susan" to "Sutler" and trading his NF-esque blue suit and clean-shaven look for a Hitler-esque black suit and moustache appearance.

Literature

  • The futuristic, hedonistic Britain of Brave New World, which is utterly perfect in some ways (amazing medical advances mean no-one ages, travel 'round the world takes minutes). Yet, at the same time, their society depends on thinly-veiled eugenically-altered slave labor, families are unknown, and all classes of society are conditioned (often through pain) to perform their roles. Furthermore, it's pretty clearly established that all that super-fun hedonism has resulted in a world where life is almost completely pointless.
  • The Strawman Communist dystopias of Ayn Rand's Anthem and Terry Goodkind's Faith of the Fallen. Very blatant in the Sword of Truth example, as Richard is basically kidnapped by the dark sister Nicci, who delivers tract after tract about the "enlightened" administration of the Imperial Order. For starters, a prospective worker must present himself to a board of administrators for a job, who judge him not by his willingness to work or his aptitude for the position, but by his need. Weeks after being on a waiting list, he may be hired, but is "encouraged" not to be too successful, lest he receive complaints from his fellow workers about making them look bad and casting light on their Creator-given handicaps. As for business owners, they may be in desperate need of supplies, but first their request must be routed through yet another council to judge its urgency and gauge how to distribute the orders; again, not by ability to fill the orders or other practical considerations, but by what is most "fair" to the supply businesses, leading to the supply request being divided among several different groups, only a few of which will ever be filled. With no supplies, the business cannot do its work, and with no work, it cannot keep on its employees. Yet any complaints will be frowned upon for casting a negative light on the supply businesses, who would like to fill those orders, gosh darn it, but half their employees have a boo-boo and called in sick. Because of the overall focus on catering to employees' need rather than ability, the society actively encourages sob stories and laziness, as people with the most "hardships" receive preferential treatment. One can only assume that Terry Goodkind had a bad experience as part of a union at some point.
  • In the CoDominium series by Jerry Pournelle, Earth has become an extreme exaggeration of a Welfare State where the privileged Taxpayer class support massive "Welfare Islands" where uneducated citizens receive an endless supply of free food and drugs.
  • The future UN from Michael Z Williamson's libertarian-tract Freehold novels (Freehold and The Weapon).
    • While run as a repressive surveillance state, to the point that everyone has an implanted radio transmitter monitoring their every move, Earth's cities are a Clockwork Orange nightmare ruled by brutal street gangs—an apparent contradiction, but thematically resolved through bureaucratic inefficiency and dysfunctional incentives. Meanwhile, the UN's military is an utter joke, populated by time-servers and serial rapists, crippled by its own sensitivities, and seemingly incapable of successfully oppressing anything more fearsome than an orphanage. There are some mitigating circumstances and real-life precedents for most of the above, but it still comes off as rather unbelievable.
    • The Freehold of Grainne, in the first book, is somewhat of an example of a Straw Utopia too, with free sex mostly without consequence due to 100% failsafe contraceptives, freely available drugs for recreational use, no traffic laws, and no overtly evident crime. Things became a little less rosy with companion piece The Weapon, where the Freehold underground is pointed out better—and it's said in no uncertain terms that little girls running around unarmed are at serious risk.
  • The Domination of Draka is an odd case, best described as a Villain Sue-topia. Supposedly a study in the nature of evil on a metatextual level and possessed of a social structure resembling a pre-Emancipation Caribbean "sugar island" (small citizenry ruling over several times their number of slaves) massively scaled up. The question is how the Draka manage to constantly display every martial virtue in the book for generations, become a beacon of gender equality, and retain an advantage in technological innovation that does not begin to narrow until the late 20th century (the notational POD is in the late 1700s). Furthermore, as this site notes, a large part of their success comes from a mixture of Author Favoritism and the fact that every other nation is handed the Idiot Ball regarding them until it's much too late.
  • Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time again. The main character visits a craphole future very briefly. It's more technological, but everything else is terrible. No one on Earth can see more than about 20 feet due to pollution, most people don't live past 40, a lot of technology's broken, and the only people that have it good are a few ruling elite who live past 150 in orbiting space stations and buy fresh organs from the lower class. Piercy obviously included this chapter just as a foil to the Utopia of the rest of the book, and the main character, fearing this future, never goes back.
  • The first Wind on Fire book contains this and Straw Utopias. People in the dystopia take tests constantly to determine their aptitudes. Children—even those only about a year old—who misbehave in public are given demerits, which affect their entire families' social status. The child who happens to live with an aunt rather than his parents is grubby and socially backward because "he has no one to tell him to wash". Repeat child offenders get sent to live with the "Old Children", even though being touched by one turns you into one of them and this is universally understood to be Not A Good Thing. The government officials basically state that they want to make life hard for the main characters, because obviously the readers couldn't accept Well-Intentioned Extremists. And yet... you have the chance to improve your status based on your own merits, and if you keep your head down and are good at memorizing the information on the standardized tests, you're pretty much left alone. The biggest problem with this government seems to be that it never considered that different people are competent in different areas. Oh, yeah, and that it doesn't accept that "We're only this way because the magic left! When these seven-year-olds bring it back, it will make everything all better. Somehow."
  • Jack Chalker described himself as a 'militant centrist', and claimed that all or most of his dystopic societies he got by taking an outlook or group's proposed theories and taking them to their logical conclusion assuming no competition or dissention from other outlooks.

Live Action TV

  • The society in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Masterpiece Society" was deliberately designed to be a Straw Utopia. Every inhabitant was genetically engineered to fit perfectly into his place in the Perfect Society. But any outside influence—like a visiting starship or a natural disaster—destabilized that society to the point of destruction. A very heavy-handed Aesop about Straw Utopias in general.
    • The dystopia was in fact so full of straw that it wound up backfiring on the writers. Geordi defends his right to live to one of the society's members, since he's exactly the sort of "genetic defect" that would have been aborted in their society. This wound up giving the episode a rather Pro-Life aesop, which the creators immediately denounced when it was brought to their attention... putting them on the side of their own strawmen.
  • Anviliciously done in "Quarantine," of The New Twilight Zone. A space-weapons expert is brought out of cold sleep to destroy a meteor that's about to fall on Earth. In this future, everyone has psychic powers and live in a wholly agrarian society that hippies can only dream of; even the biocomputer chimpanzees are equals. Every tiff the guy has with the future society is brushed aside with some half-baked response to the effect of, "Ha, we're just that damn awesome." However, it's revealed that they didn't bring him out of cold sleep to destroy a meteor, but to destroy a ship of survivors from the nuclear holocaust. Because we can't let those damn dirty military people land and ruin our perfect planet, especially since they're American damn dirty military people. In the shot of the ship being destroyed, the "United States of America" label on the side of the ship was extremely large. The writer sure wanted to let you know who the "bad guy" was in the nuclear war.

Video Games

  • In Sharin no Kuni, considering the effort made to point out that Houzuki is badly abusing the system, showing what it could be made to do and what a bizarre case the town is in terms of their obligations, it's difficult to entirely believe the assertion that it's such a terrible system. Or worse than the normal justice systems that it is compared to. Arguably, Sharin no Kuni subverts both the Utopia trope, and the Dystopia trope. The Country of the Wheel is neither perfect, nor hellish, in the end. There are ways in which it is worse (the Involvement clause, the treatment of the foreigners), and there's ways in which it is better. There's good people, and bad people in it, and the rules themselves are frequently bent or corrupted for good as well as for ill. The final plot of the antagonist is his attempt to undermine the system, so as to implement *our* justice system, albeit his version of it. In many of the endings, the protagonist can choose to not follow in his father's footsteps and instead finally make peace with the system, and in most of the routes, the obligation system is the least of the problems the protagonist faces.
  • Dungeon Keeper subverts this. At the beginning of the game you look out across a blissful land ruled by good and just rulers, with no trials or tribulations, bar a few aching facial muscles from smiling too much. It's your goal to turn these joyous lands into terrible lands ruled by fear and anthrax.
  1. ↑ One being that their space happens to include the only two known major Precursor artifacts that aren't dangerous to be near, the other being that their isolationism and switch-over to a less Hypergate-based system insulated them from the consequences of the destruction of the Hypergate network that dragged everyone else down into barbarism
This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.