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Dystopia Is Hard: Difference between revisions
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Typically leads to [[A World Half Full]] situation.
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** Keep in mind, however, that the A New Hope novelization was written in 1976, at a time when Emperor Palpatine hadn't been fully fleshed out as a character. In fact, [[Canon Dis Continuity|he was originally portrayed as a helpless puppet of his governors]], not the [[Magnificent Bastard]] master of [[Xanatos Roulette]] we know him as today. Today, it's probably fairer to say that the Empire was poorly run less due to Palpatine's incompetence and more due to the fact that he was such a fan of [[For the Evulz|being an evil prick.]]
*** In other words, he isn't ''incompetent''' by any stretch of imagination, its just that his priorities as Emperor and the priorities of the citizens, corporations, [[Overly Long Gag|livestock]], [[The Long List|force ghosts, and droids]] that compose the Empire are not in any way related. Like many real-life dictators, he's too busy with building up and maintaining the military, protecting himself and ensuring his continued rule, and ensuring corrupt bureaucrats liked him to care much about economic stability, competition maintaining the integrity of industries and product safety and quality, prosperity of the citizens, or well-being and quality of life in general.
* This is one interpretation of the epilogue of ''[[Nineteen Eighty
** The Newspeak is nothing but simply an agglutinative language - just as Finnish, Japanese, Turkish or Hungarian. All of these languages have extremely small corpus (basic vocabulary) and words for new concepts are formed by derivation with various prefixes and suffixes. And in agglutinative languages, that is incredibly easy. Creating a Newspeak is basically giving a loaded gun to the hands of the dissidents: creating new words for new concepts is childishly easy in agglutinative languages, and no state machinery can control that.
** In any case it seems impossible for the hopelessly corrupt, decaying Stalinist society of 1984 to endure; a fairly popular piece of Fanon for the novel is that ''everything'' in the book, even [[Info Dump|Goldstein's book]], is a lie; Oceania is actually a North Korea-esque pariah state contained on the island of Great Britain.
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== Western Animation ==
* This trope is invoked, in all places, in an episode of the original ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987 (Animation)|Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' cartoon. The Turtles are teleported to a [[Crapsack World|Crapsack]] [[Alternate Reality]] wherein they didn't exist and Shredder and crew managed to take over. Meant as [[An Aesop]] for our boys about not wishing you never existed, the episode takes a shocking swerve in its last act: {{spoiler|when finally confronted, we find out that Shredder ''absolutely'' '''''hates''''' being the [[Evil Overlord]] in practice, because it involves running the day to day operations of tons of things he hadn't even vaguely considered when actually trying to ''conquer'' things and he's completely inept at doing such and is thoroughly miserable in his new position; [[
* In the ''[[Justice League]]'' episode "Kid Stuff", after Mordred expels all adults from Earth and sets himself up as king, the miserably bored look on his face as he magically fulfills the various requests of his populace is ''priceless''.
** [[Hand Wave]] in episode "War World". Mongul is largely aware that his planet is in bad shape, but he is able to distract people from the problems with gladitorial fights.
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** It is important to note that the Communist state of North Korea has managed to endure without any real institutional change, which should go as an example of just how much a government can get away with so long as it maintains the support of the military and keeps the population so repressed that organized opposition is impossible. However, North Korea's policies and lack of reform do mean that it is heavily reliant on aid from the outside world (including its enemies the U.S and South Korea ironically) to survive.
** North Korea's international economic strategy at this point is essentially to [[Batman Gambit|extort the rest of the world into sending aid to its populace by threatening to kill them, then intercepting and selling the shipments]], [[Crapsack World|while using the populace as human shields to ward off potential invasion and buying off the countries that wouldn't care as much about the collateral damage]].
** It has been [http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/21/324835/nothing-to-envy/ argued] that North Korea survives because the ''rest of the world doesn't want it to collapse'': China fears that a collapse would bring millions of refugees in its northern provinces as well as ultimately leading to a US-aligned unified Republic of Korea on its' border, South Korea fears the logistical nightmare that re-assimilating the North would create and the rest of the world fear [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|creating an even worse humanitarian catastrophe by letting the regime fall]]. At this point, North Korea may not even ''need'' to bully the rest of the world into keeping it on life support: [[Thanatos Gambit|the feared consequences of its regime's death]] [[Vetinari Job Security|have become a threat by themselves.]]
** As of 17 December 2011, the so-called "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il is dead. Even though his son Kim Jong-un is supposed to be his replacement, there is a question on whether he will be one, and if so, for how long. There's no question that North Korea's regime will collapse. Instead, the question is merely when and how.
* The only reason [[Nazi Germany]] lasted as long as it did was because [[Adolf Hitler]] was very, very good at convincing people to ignore logic and observable evidence, and because the loot from invaded countries all went to Germany. By the end of [[World War II]], the economy and government was in shambles. Even if Germany had won, the regime probably would not have lasted very long, especially once there was no longer a war to distract people's attention.
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