Asakiyume mita

osprey_archer has some interesting thoughts on The Giver (book, not movie) here, and what she said about the coziness of the society got me thinking about how there are, broadly speaking, two perspectives stories generally take on a dystopic society. Either the protagonist starts out as one of the happy crowd--maybe a member of an elite minority, or maybe a member of a relatively well-managed majority--or else they start out as a member of the (or an, if there's more than one) oppressed group. In other words, either they [appear to] benefit from the dystopia, or they're oppressed by it. In the first case--like in The Giver or in 1984, the story is about a gradual realization of the nature of the society they'd always accepted. In the second case--like in The Hunger Games--they know from the start that the situation sucks, and it's a matter of finding their way to working for something different. To generalize further, the first sort of story is about an awakening of the privileged, and the second is about the empowering of the oppressed. I imagine there are some stories that combine these viewpoints.

Thoughts?