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The problem is dystopian fiction is nowadays focused on aesthetics instead of logic because of trend chasing.

the famous gemstone "coal"

You know what i hate about many dystopian novels is that protagonists are almost always teens or very young PPL . I want more dystopian novels where protagonists are old veterans or just generally middle aged washed up dad . It be fun

For people who don't get the scale between Mexico and Ecuador, is about the same between Seatle and Houston. Putting Aztec people in the Ecuatorian Amazon Forest is incredibly ignorant.

“I had never been tear-gassed by the police.” Care to share with the class?

I have science issues with the first book. 1: skin cancer is already very curable with modern day medicine and in a lot of the world, skin cancer is not a death sentence but more of an inconvenience. 2: idk when this book was written but the ozone layer is not being depleted at the moment, it's healing

My dream is to write a book and have James Tullos rip it to shreds

To be fair to "racist hunger games" I'm decently sure the author intended it to be anti racist by reversing the situation, but ended up completely failing.

This series is a huge confidence booster. If Racist Hunger Games can get published, so can I

7:48 Black people and dark South Asians actually suffer a higher rate of melanoma related fatalities because it's just literally harder to see the cancer on them and doctors aren't taught to properly inspect darker skin. I think they also tend to actually experience more skin cancers in general because not burning as easily means they're less likely to wear sunscreen as religiously as say, very white people

ngl this series is singlehandedly making me confident in being a writer because i get to be like "you know, my worldbuilding may be flawed, but at least i'm not the one making racist hunger games"

What I'm super sick of is a setting where it's meant to be post-apocalyptic but there's either plenty of a normally scarce resource like gasoline, or there's plenty of resources to still have a decadent aristocratic society at the top. Never mind that in real life, decadent aristocracies were only ever enabled by vast trade networks or empires, and times of relative world peace providing them with stability. "The world is an irradiated desert, but it's also still Versailles somehow" is the lazy starting point for dozens of cheap, bad YA dystopias.

The best part about the coal thing is that jet exists. You know, the stone the color "jet black" is named after? It even is a type of coal, if you want to stick to that theme so badly (why), *except it is an actual gem.* The things you can learn with 5 minutes of Google.

Aztecs living on Ecuador. If they're Inca/Quechua I could let that pass, because the Inca Empire reached Ecuador during their expansion era. The capital of Ecuador, Quito was built during that era, being the oldest capital on the Americas.

Dystopia is the atonym of utopia. To my mind, that suggests that to qualify as a dystopian society, a setting needs to not be based on someone else's utopian idea and serve as a critique of that idea by showing how bad things would turn out if it were put into practice. 1984 critiqued the notion that society would be perfect if the "right" people were given absolute power, Brave New World attacked crude materialism as a measure of human wellbeing, The Handmaid's Tale exposed the faults of right wing Christian moralism etc. If you just have a generic "evil government" for the heroes to oppose with no real social commentary, you're writing adventure, not dystopia

The problem with the Testing is that if the goal is to create more-and more talented-doctors, engineers, etc., limiting it to a select number of students who get top grades _and_ can survive this insane test is the worst possible way to go about it. The more barriers there are to becoming an engineer, the fewer engineers you're going to get, and the less talent is going to end up in the field. And flat out killing a massive portion of your brightest students just takes even more potentially skilled workers out of play.

It's funny how the testing tried to parody a real thing but ended up falling into the same pitfalls as the thing it was trying to mock

I've always found illnesses/supernatural events that conveniently kill adults and spare the book's target demographic to be contrived. Not that those stories aren't enjoyable; it's just not a worldbuilding choice I would make.

Can we talk about how weird the Battlefield Earth cover is? Like the guy is just standing there with a blank expression on his face firing lasers in random directions. No indication who he's fighting if at all. And what the hell is the gun in his right hand doing? His arm is pointed down and facing us but the gun is firing completely to the side? When I look at this, I don't think "Action packed dystopia", I think "Get that high tech weaponry away from that crackhead before he hurts someone".

I want a novel where the protagonist is an old grizzled veteran and they're trying to protect the person who's the classic young dystopian protag (like The Last of Us but not necessarily zombie apocalypse)

I wanna make a Dystopian story that's "Dystopic comedy" were it's supposed to poke fun at how society is comedically dystopic. The problem is, it'd end up bein too realistic....

OK but how do the starlings keep their reproduction at a sustainable replacement level? Making sure each woman has 2 kids before 25 would be hard. And who is raising all these kids if their parents all die mid twenties?

Young "adult" novel worldbuilding guide: -Must take place in a post apocalyptic world (mandatory) -Generic dystopian government with no real motives other than acting as the story's villain -The dystopian government should have little to no grasp of modern day sciences, despite being several hundreds of years more advanced than us -Some kind of death game or whacky experiment as the main focus -Rebellion, led entirely by high school freshmen, the rebellion also must win at the end of the story, no exceptions -Adults in the rebellion should be slightly less evil than the dystopian government or have ties to the dystopian government (optional) -Zombies, but change what you'd call the zombies and name them something vague and unexciting like "Chargers" or "Squealers"

I feel acknowledged by the fact you mentioned people use your videos as background noise while playing games, because that’s exactly what I was doing while watching this.

My sisters darker than me and she still had her skin peeling off just from being in the sun for a few hours too long. I don't think the author's ever been to a beach XD. And fyi scientology comes after literally anyone who says "I think theyre weird" they have a website for it and I might be on it someday too.

Infecting the rest of the world with a deadly dicease and saying "is Ok we have a cure now" sounds like something the American Pie guys would do if they ended up in a post-apocalyptic dystopia

it's truly amazing how easy it is to get a blurb from a new york times bestselling author apparently

I have an idea for an YA dystopian novel. It's set in a post-apocalyptic America where everyone is forced by the government to write YA novels so Hollywood can adapt them into movies, but they all have to be Hunger Games clones or they will kill you. One day, one teenage girl (who is somehow both very plain-looking and lusted after by every male character) writes a dystopian novel so good that would make George Orwell weep tears of joy, but the government is now after her because it's not vapid and by the numbers enough. Also she's in a love triangle with both her editors I guess.

YA dystopia's tend to fall into this trap of ''i'm special because i'm outside the pre established system'' but instead of using that as jumping off point to deconstruct the whole system its kept in place to make the main character(s) have a baseline of being special you can tell us how ''great but persecuted'' our protagonist is but if they're not doing anything to show everyone that the overall system is dumb and only exists to exploit people it kind of makes them look just as bad as those on top of it

To me the problem of dystopia is that it's becoming a naturalized narrative. Instead of being a direct criticism and a warning, it become an inevitable end, since never is presented an alternative to what is the engine of most of these problems. Consequently plaguing the creative capacity of think a new worlds even in fiction.

Honestly I don’t mind everything taking place in North America, I’m also guilty of that just because I don’t trust myself to successfully write a different culture and geography without ridiculous amounts of research. There’s a good reason to set the story in the general geographical and cultural area you know best

I think cyberpunk dystopias are better. Their settings are related to our world and they can be crazy without ruining character development. Well, sometimes they can be bad too.

I know you're not making the point in full seriousness, but the mental image of a Psyclo being the weight of a medium size horse just sent my brain on a magical journey. Horses eat so much by volume/weight because they're grazers and browsers. If Psyclos ate like horses, they'd also poop like horses, have bellies like horses (you need to put all that fermentative gut mileage somewhere after all), probably have some fantastic rose gardens, and physical aspects aside, they'd lose 75% of their perceived threat level because they'd prefer to be constantly nibbling on sillage or gorse or whatever, to keep their tummy happy. Furthermore, if Psyclos had an equine-ish digestive system, their entire food infrastructure would be very different from ours. We humans get a lot of mileage out of our digestive capacity. Not only can we eat pretty much anything that's not extra dedicated to poisoning us, our simple and short GI system makes pre-digestive technology i.e. cooking a great deal, allowing us to meet our caloric and nutritional requirements with smaller volumes of food, making for better efficiency in food production and storage. A human can pack a light load with a travel kettle and dehydrated foodstuffs, and go for a week. A horse-gut Psyclo can carry grains of concentrate pellets to supplement the energy expenditure, but they'll still require about half of their calories from roughage. So they'll need to carry poor density food like hay briquets, to alleviate situations where locally available plants aren't suitable for bulk feed, and avoid sudden changes in the quality when crossing steep environmental gradients. And that's assuming the environment has plenty of plant material so they can keep munching as they march... A bovid-gutted Psyclo would do just fine on poorer roughage than an equid-gutted one, thanks to the protein alchemy that goes on in the rumen. They'd also not need to eat all day long, since a bovine system is built to facilitate inhaling the food quick and being able to retreat to a secure spot to finish eating it.

having to go to school even after society has collapsed truly is dystopian

"... something to listen to while playing Dark Souls." Me, playing Ds3 atm: "WTF JAMES"

I still think one of the more hilarious things about Lightlark is how unbalanced the curses are. They’re meant to be ironic like that’s why the Starlings die at 25, because previously they lived for hundreds of years. Sunlings can’t go out during the day, Night people can’t go out during the Night. Meanwhile the funniest one is the Air people, whose power was that they can fly, and whose curse is that they can’t fly. Everyone else gets insanely debilitating curses that can kill them with one wrong move, while Air people just live normal lives lol

The issue with a lot of these writers is they don't appreciate where the things they use and eat come from.

k you say "bad world-building is NOT the kiss of death" but I find it really hard to get into a story with it, and many flops like the Divergent trilogy would not be such big failures if they had better world-building.

It sounds to me like the book "Struck" was ghost written by the author of JoJo's bizarre adventure. The only thing that's missing is punching ghosts, but then again I haven't read it so maybe it also has punching ghosts.

Wait. Your description of Lightlark and what it’s lacking would make for such a good story. Imagine living on an island you can never leave and knowing of the outside world only from stories passed down to you and the knowledge that there’s some sort of upcoming event where the outer world descends upon you for a period of time to do some sort of ritual. And maybe you’re dreaming of how this can shake up your boring life or whatever only to have the participants come and be nothing by like what you expected. Meanwhile the whole faction thing still exists in the outer world and they show up all at odds to find this place where people are living in harmony (or at least close it it. Depending on how the lore is established, it is possible for there to still be some racism even if it’s far downplayed). Obviously a story like this would need to be carefully written to depict its fantasy racism respectfully, but with sensitivity readers and research, it could be a really interesting exploration of it. And having a pov character who’s one of the islanders could be such an interesting way to learn about the world and explore its history and break down all of the conventions while still getting to play them straight.

assimilation and acculturation: *exists* Logistics: *also exists* Alex aster: I'll pretend I didn't see that

To be fair to the LightLark author, there was a time at her highschool where some classmates dropped dead every year for random reasons. Not sure if that was her inspiration, just wanted to share.

"corona was still a beer, i'd never been tear-gassed by police, and my channel was half the size it is now!" hey uhh...james you wanna run that middle part by us again?? i'm sure there's some context but like...all i'm thinking is some cop didn't like one of your reviews of his favourite book and tossing a gas grenade through your bedroom window

So... Lightlark is an Chile shaped island?

We really need more main characters like Will Graham, a mentally ill, neurodivergent adult that stumbles through life with his seven dogs. We're tired of barely legal teens being sexually harassed or sold off as currency.

Tear gas by police?! 😰

I hadn't heard of "Save the Pearls", but your synopsis reminded me of something. From what I can gather: > The Sun is turbo-deadly > Deserted Earth > Society moved underground > Members of the higher social hierarchy levels are less susceptible to the Turbo Sun > Becoming a non-human (i.e.: some mythological figure) makes you less susceptible to the Turbo Sun That book is just Digital Devil Saga 2 with racism. In that game: > The Sun turns you to stone (this is lethal) > The Earth is completely deserted (the Sun killed most of the flora) > Society moved underground to not be exposed to the Sun > Members of the Karma Society have a big dome over them that stops the Sun from turning the people in it to stone > Becoming infected with a virus that turns you into a demon based on a mythological figure also happens to make you immune to the Sun However, the DDS duology is actually good, so there's that.

Refreshing to see someone who actually, genuinely understands how subjective and arbitrary "races" are as a concept

I will always care about crop yields. First rule of worldbuilding: People gotta eat.

I'd love to start seeing Utopian novels again. Like, maybe the adventure is about trying to iron out the challenges of building a better world, the moral ambiguity of realistic compromises you'd have to make... maybe even bad guys who want to stop it!

Have you played Disco Elysium? I would love to see you tackle the world building of my favorite game to read

"And a bigger slice to our employer... But that's another discussion" Loved that bit, would be excatic to hear the discussion!!!

What’s this story about James getting tear gassed?

In my own dystopia WIP, which happens in Europe, I made it canon that every other YA distopia actually happened and so North America has just been wiped out from the earth while everyone else was chilling.

James when he got teargassed by police: "Bad worldbuilding."

Thereis a significant flaw in the first part of your video, that being referring to Nationalities/ethnicities as races. It must be understrood that the book's conception of race is largely an american invention with a bit of Nazi stuff on the side, and it shows. The example of the Rwandan genocide was therefore wrong on a techicality, because it wasn't a racial difference that was defining, it was the ethnic one. Same with European nationalism, Germans and French people didn't like each other for most of industrial history, but only the Nazis drew a racial difference, and they were in power for only 12 of those 200 years. A Northern Frenchman and a German are indistinguishable just by looking at facial structure or skin coloration, the difference between them that coused nationalistic conflict was once again, not a racial one, but an Ethnic one, if you took a german baby and raised it in France it would most likely grow up to hate Germans and vice versa, because the difference that caused hostility was linguistic and cultural, not racial.

I always knew I disliked Dystopian Novels, but I think now I can finally put my finger on the reasons why, O was getting pretty close already, starting to notice that I can't ever seem to care about the world or the characters, because I knew every story was going to kill characters left and right without giving them much use other than shock value, or that the protagonists would always be teenagers and so on

I want a dystopian film about somebody who's anywhere between his 30s or even as far as 70s and hasn't accomplished anything in spite of his dreams of becoming famous person. But i also want the actions that said person takes to lead up to a Solar punk future Utopia. Going from a dystopia to utopia and having people understand that said utopia can very easily revert to the same dystopia if people let it. I'm nearing 30 now and i feel unbelievable debilitating depression from not having done much of anything in spite of my desires, but i found out the reason is due to mental/neurological illness due to a combination of ADHD, Autism and severe abuse i faced as a child and teen. Starting to fix the problems by asking for help, trying medication and trying everything i can do in spite of everything holding me back has been incredibly worth it and i would like to see a dystopian/utopian movie or novel that reflects that.

I love the fantasy series Wheel of Time, still haven't finished it, but as the story progresses you learn you're reading a dystopia. The world is our own and this is either the distant past or future depending on how you look at because seasons turn and ages come to pass and once was will come again, paraphrasing the intro of like every book in the series that I've read. It's kinda cool and makes for a well thought out fantasy and dystopia and the TV series sucks balls.

I want a story about a "dystopian post-collapse resurgence" or "post-post-apocalyptic": The evil regime eventually got destroyed along with society in an apocalyptic event, but people survived and slowly started to rebuild civilization. Fast forward a couple hundred years, and there's the setting.

Gorb

Latino as a race is very American and make no real sense. I have a friend that has slanted green eyes and red hair, because BRAZIL. Well, the whole concept of race doesn't survive much scientific scrutiny anyway, and is mostly a relatively recent social construction. It changed a lot along the centuries and places.

ayo bro finally got a bookshelf and doesn't have to stack his books in his closet anymore W

To be fair to Lightlark, it could be the island is in the eye of the storm.

this is making me feel better about my worldbuilding lol

Though hearing about Save the Pearls made me somewhat concerned over a sci-fi universe I myself was building where the people had jet black skin (as in far blacker than normal, even their flesh and whites of their eyes are black) as a result of nanomachines and genetic engineering as protection for radiation alongside some other adaptations to better survive in space.

Dude, it would be REALLY interesting to explore the basic premise of Young World from the PoV of the Western Hemisphere people who suddenly don’t have a country to go back to. Like, if you’re a military member stationed overseas, but your country and most of your government suddenly dissolve, what do you do? Do you follow your command chain or seek refuge in the country they’re stationed in? It would be a great way to talk about the challenges that real-world refugees struggle with but with a more familiar context-removing the sense of “That only happens in other places to people who aren’t like me” that first-world audiences (especially American audiences, let’s be real) tend to approach these topics with.

Jokes on you I'm not playing Dark Souls, I'm playing The Long Dark

I would enjoy seeing more videos like this one. It's really interesting, both from its entertainment value and from what I can learn for my own writing.

Since I have no intention of reading Save the Pearls, I want to ask a dumb worldbuilding question: Would clowns be considered a symbol of hatred against white people like how minstrel shows are in the real world, since clowns tend to have totally white skin, overly red lips and brightly colored hair? If not, I thought of that idea in less than five minutes after I first learned about this series, and even though it’s silly, if it were a background element it would give a clue as to how this society views white people. But I don’t think this series can be saved with more details like these.

That "dieing on the 25th birthday" reminds me of Tales of Berseria. Tales of Berseria features the twleve year sickness, which consists of fevers that appear every twelve days which get gradually worse until they die on their twelfth birthday. One character even comments it sounds more like a curse. Of course it's better explained and is rather rare so it works better.

To be fair, after the corona pandemic it doesn't seem that unrealistic that children are still forced to go to school despite nothing else functioning anymore

How about a video over the different zombie settings not sure what you could talk about different zombie types, maybe the different group dynamics of the people, how the military always tends to suck 😆 just an idea, awesome video!

Falun Gong keeps leaving their little messages in the bathroom where I work.

also about the height thing, iirc stronger gravity means its harder and takes more energy to grow upwards and i say that as someone with alien characters over 10ft (about 3m) tall i think it just boils down to the idea that the harder you try to justify your worldbuilding, the harder suspension of disbelief is "these aliens are huge because im the author and i say so" okay cool "these aliens are huge because of real life gravity" um akshually-

“last time i released one… i had never been teargassed” bro WHAT DID U DOOOOO

"im like that kid in your highschool english class that was very clearly autistic but he was unaware of it and talked about niche interests for way too long" he is just like me

As a South African I don't think the comment about Chinese/Japanese people at 5:30 is actually accurate. Seems like a corruption of the fact that nationalities(?) like the Taiwanese (not necessarily a distinct nation yet by this point) were treated as 'honorary white' for political purposes

Every YA dystopian I read I always wondered two things: what’s going on in the rest of the world and since America is treated as a myth in those books despite taking place in America, how would these characters react to a time traveler from the past? It would be cool to read a book that combines them

It's my 16th sun cycle day of the Georgian calendar and the government is administering oxygen! (I never do explain why I don't just leave the country). Oh no. I have to take my special test! I say as I wave my blonde hair in my messy bun and my dark eyes brighten.

1984 is still the best dystopian novel. It will make you shivering

What was the big dystopia novel that set this off? Was it Hunger Games? Also yes yay I have Campfire and recently updated it with a ton of world building notes!

I really want a teen dystopian book where the twist is that the plucky rebels are actually just terrorist and the dystopian world is actually a utopia.

When the central component of your world-building falls apart when meeting a simple "But why?", it is probably not very good world-building.

"if the US debt defaulted, banks would go out of business" in a world where all adults pretty much die immediately, I'm going to assume there's bigger issues on Banks' plates than debt defaulting lol

the "and giving you something to listen to in the background while you play dark souls" got me because I was actually playing Dark Souls

This guy when authors in America set their books in the country they’re familiar with: 😮🤯

why is it always the ruins of chicago and not detroit or sumn 😭

Hey James, considering this is about Dystopias and their world building, have you considered reading “Arc of a Scythe” trilogy by Neal Shusterman? Its worldbuilding is actually decent!

_The Testing_ wants to be the _Hunger Games_ so badly 😂 That cover omg…

So the Young World ripped off the plot of the Original Star Trek episode Miri? Oh yeah, what happened to the Intro Song that wasn't too long?

7:58 It seems that according to the author, the sun is simply a deadly lazer.

25:10 is the ultimate dystopian nightmare: the world ending but that does not excuse you from first period algebra

When I pick up a book that looks nice or sounds cool, I DONT WANT TO READ HUNGER GAMES FOR THE 2Oth TIME!

Man, you have no idea how many videos like this I've watched. I eat them up like cereal, istg. It's crazy

Lightlark from that description sounds like it was written by a video game fan who did not factor in the fact that distances are made smaller in an Elder Scrolls game as a concession for gameplay purposes, and the geography in game is not meant to be completely realistic to even the world building in game.

Excellent work, man. You will definitely eat this month.

Will you ever do something similar for cyberpunk considering the overlap with this genre ?. Also have you ever heard of the solar punk genre because you can have at least a 10 hour long field day with that one, just type it in on KZfaq and look at what comes up . And you are right about the sun burn thing because am a black man born in Jamaica and I got sun burned before .

If I had a nickel for every time James mentioned Ecuador in this video I'd have two nickels