When 2,000 civilians invaded the United States Capitol, I was in the middle of a re-reading of C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins to prepare for writing an uprising of the oppressed in my own novel. It had been six months since my last protesting arrest, and I watched the insurrection with an uncanny mix of the familiar and the horrid, like coming upon maggots in food you only knew as good. The tactics were familiar, the indignation was familiar, the beneficiary was not.
When I’d imagined seeing an uprising against the government in my lifetime, I never predicted it would be on behalf of the least disenfranchised man in the world. That civilians would put their bodies and liberty on the line, not to speak truth to power, but to aggregate more power where power already was. I never pictured a coup for the “oppressed” that members would take private jets to attend.
Resorting, as always, to dark humor in uncertain times, I remember watching the footage of a ragtag group climbing through the windows and texting a friend, “Do we think they watched The Hunger Games, too?”
The uncomfortable truth for those of us who love both science fiction and direct action protest, is that they very well might have.
When the 2000s wave of dystopian uprising fiction came into popularity, it married the sentiments and iconography of real world oppression and resistance with the possibilities of fictional worlds. These books kept hallmarks of historical resistances—the incendiary three fingered gesture of The Hunger Games being taken from real Thai activists while also deployed in a way that invokes the raised fist of 1960s black power movements—but decontextualized them. By removing specifics of race and geography, they told a story where anyone could be the hero, anyone the crowd of oppressed.
And I do mean anyone.
In her article “Capital or the Capitol?: The Hunger Games Fandom and Neoliberal Populism”, Rebecca Hill tracks the popularity of the novel among conservatives and far right extremists, pointing to examples like a commenter on the neo-nazi site Stormfront who praised main character Katniss as a “Hitler figure, a veteran, a reluctant hero, an idealist.”
The unintended side effect of cloaking these oppressions in metaphor is the space it leaves for bigotry to not just hide, but be affirmed. Hill diagnoses this as a craft problem, a “failure of detailed world building,” but I disagree. This transportability is not a failure within the text that leads to this overlap, but a success with unintended consequences. To envision yourself as the main character is the invitation of fiction, and the long reach of these dystopias are testament to the skill of writers like Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth at crafting such an invite.
The problem isn’t with craft, but with the human heart.
The protest group I was a part of in 2020 never breached the doors of our capitol, but because we were gathered for antiracism, not feral nationalism, we were arrested violently for “crimes” as trespassing despite being on the public ground surrounding the building, or felony vandalism for writing names of victims of police violence in chalk.
At first glance, our group couldn’t have been more different from the January 6th participants. We were trying to lessen the hold of racism’s representation in our government by demanding the bust of the first grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan be removed from its place of honor in the capitol building; the insurrectionists were trying to maintain racial hierarchy and furthered racial terror by committing the act while wearing symbols from white supremacist groups. We hosted speakers from the community, sang hymns, and held vigils for those killed by state sanctioned violence. They… smeared shit on the walls.
So no, not immediately analogous in an obvious way.
But I have no doubt their conviction was every bit as pure as mine, that their belief in their own heroism was just as potent as any freedom fighter, and that tales of individuals rising up in defiance were as dear to their heart as they remain to mine.
The answer to this problem could never be to go back in time to change the texts, because our desire to see ourselves as the hero will persist. The dystopian uprising tales of the 2000s captured the attractive clarity of good versus evil even before the Marvel Cinematic Universe had fully tapped into that potential. In the stories the hero is always scrapping, suffering, and trying. The villains, various light-haired authoritarians who manage to be both ruthless and largely unaffected until the very end.
The equation makes it clear: am I experiencing true outrage, sweaty conviction, a hint of rage at my own mistreatment? I must be the hero. Smarmy calculating coldness with a desire to exert control? That’s the villain. Assigning roles based on emotion means when someone tells you you’re wrong, and it hurts, that must be an attack, because the feeling is what decides whether it is or not. And if you are being attacked, you must be the protagonist. Not just a hero, but a righteous one, an avenger. And if you perceive the entity hurting you as being more powerful than you? Congratulations. You’re a revolutionary now.
Does this mean it’s unavoidable? Is this the inevitable consequence of art that compels mixed with a human tendency to imagine ourselves as the center of these stories? Are we doomed to the same decontextualization of metaphor that allows cops to wear Punisher logos on their uniforms? I don’t accept that. I love story like a well-meaning, accident-prone friend, meaning I choose to believe it causes no problems it cannot also fix. For every Jane Eyre, a The Wife Upstairs. For every Ringworld by Larry Niven, a Loki’s Ring by Steina Leicht. For every Starship Troopers, a Starship Troopers (1997).
So what would it look like to use the effectiveness of invitation as a moment of self-reflection instead of carte blanche empowerment? What happens when the call to imagine yourself as the dystopian hero main character is a trap? What happens is something like Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory.
Tesh’s narrative begins very much like the dystopias of the past. The main character, Kyr, fits the “dystopian heroine” archetype: exceptionally skilled, full of conviction, and dedicated to the cause of overcoming an oppressor. But as the narrative progresses, and Kyr’s dedication rides close enough to fanaticism to challenge the reader’s morality, each off note in her decision making becomes a dare to the reader: how far will you follow that feeling of righteousness before asking, Am I the bad guy?
Tesh’s work tells us an uncomfortable truth: villains are not mustache-twirling, cold-hearted monsters who know only greed and lust for power. They can believe in their cause. They can love those who engage in it with them. And they can feel every bit as righteous as their opponents. For Tesh’s Kyr, once she moves past the emotional and individual response to the historic loss of her homeworld, she is able to look outward to the larger systems at play to understand where harm actually resides. To face the impossible truth that her people may have suffered a loss, but they’d allowed a fixation on their victimization to turn them into the worst kind of villain.
We’ve done a lot of work to move into a place where feelings are validated. This is an important step. But the next challenge after acknowledging individual feelings is to contextualize them, to recognize that they don’t exist in a vacuum and often they are given to us more than they originate within us. The fear a white woman might feel when she crosses the street upon seeing a black man might feel legitimate, but that does not mean it is clean. Structures of power, historical legacies, and social realities are always at play around us, consciously and unconsciously. That is why, even though both things may hurt the recipient, meanness is not the same as racism, and the difference between an inconvenience and a hate crime is not that you hate it. Fifteen years ago, dystopian science fiction invited us to pay attention. It asked us to notice things we did not like and rise up to change it, regardless of what those around us thought. In a post January 6th world, we might be best served by lingering in the space between outrage and action, to investigate hurt rather than linking it to impulse, to look for blood on our own hands before demanding it from others. As we learn from Emily Tesh’s Kyr, sometimes the way to become a hero, is to relinquish the assumption that you already are.
