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Crapsack Only by Comparison: Difference between revisions
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== [[Comic Books]] ==
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* Inverted & played with in ''[[The Giver]]'' and ''[[Gathering Blue]]'': Jonas at first ''thinks'' that he's in a utopia, but it's actually more of a [[Crapsack World]]. The town of [[Gathering Blue]] thinks itself a utopia, but it really isn't.
* Inverted in ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Interesting Times|Interesting Times]]'', with a traveler who considers Ankh-Morpork to be ''not'' crapsack because his own homeland is so much worse. Rude and obnoxious guards are celebrated for not torturing random innocents to death, and so on.
* This trope, or possibly its inversion, shows up in ''[[The Dispossessed]]'' by [[Ursula K Le Guin]]. The protagonist, Shavik, goes from an anarcho-syndicalist utopia on the planet/moon Anarres to its planet/moon Urras (it's a double-planet system, and the two bodies aren't too different in size), which is dominated by the capitalist parliamentary republic A-Io and the totalitarian socialist Thu ([[Does This Remind You of Anything?|if this reminds you of anything]], [[Cold War|it]] [[Space Cold War|should]]), both of which have rigid class structures. After encountering the way the lower classes live and then being forced to take refuge in the embassy from a post-apocalyptic Earth, he says that the planet seems like hell to him; the ambassador comments that, compared to the way things are on Earth, it looks like heaven.<br /><br />We should note that ''The Dispossessed'' has a subtitle: "An Ambiguous Utopia;" LeGuin takes pains to portray the problems of an anarcho-syndicalist system in practice,<ref>Here would be a good place to note that LeGuin herself is an anarcho-syndicalist</ref> and Shavik frequently has his doubts about his own society.
* In ''[[Brave New World (Literature)|Brave New World]]'', John the Savage views the "utopian" world of London as amoral, unnatural, and pointless, while Lenina sees John's home on the savage reservation as backwards, uncivilized, and barbaric.
* ''[[The Number of the Beast]]'' by Heinlein has our protagonists run into several such worlds. One of these, merely described, indicates abrupt [[Earth Drift]].
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