A Funny Thing Happened During Allocated "Procrastination" Time...

I'm going to take a quick step out of my ordinary blogging style (An angel, the Devil, and MJ), and discuss something quickly that I found particularly interesting.

As a frequent online role-player on Dreamwidth, I find myself bombarded by a variety of role-playing games where one can do pretty much anything with their characters that they could possibly want at pretty much any time. There are games for horror, games for sex (not that I would ever join one of those or anything) and the like. I frequent a place called bakerstreet, that is a "meme" community, specializing in short, one-shot game threads for people to play in. There are usually topics one can use from (or use a random generator to get a random number for) and character options to keep your character in the "world" of the meme when tagging (aka: playing) with other people.

I have been playing in a long-running "thread" for the last few weeks in a particular meme, and it wasn't until today that I realized something. This meme is a Dystopia Meme. The word "Dystopia" is so frequently used in fiction for me that I didn't even recognize until now that it relates directly to this class and what we're working on. I don't think that an actual "Utopia" meme has ever appeared in this roleplaying community, perhaps because Utopia would not mean drama, and unless you're a PWP writer without a life, that's no fun at all.

Now, some of the options chosen by the meme's creator, steahl, are very interesting. There is a subject of "Class" as one of the options to be chosen. S/he gives options from "High/Royalty" to "Transitory", with everything in the middle from "alien" to "pariah" to "created". I find the fact that class is such an important issue very interesting in this meme. It reminds me of Plato's "The Republic", and the importance of the class within the city Socrates had created. This sort of a topic is almost never seen in memes, since "class" isn't something most Americans think of. Even in historical or "royal" AUs (that is, Alternate Universes), class doesn't come up, but steahl sees is as an important part of the meme. In #22 of the "Prompts" section, s/he even mentions "the City". An interesting mention, probably relating back to "the Republic".

The next section, the one I just mentioned, is the Prompts section. It's fairly standard fare for a meme, from "mix and mingle" to "SCIENCE" and "Brave New World". They throw in little references to all sorts of different utopian and dystopian books and movies, which, again, I didn't even think to relate to a class on Utopia until just now. There's even a subtle nod to Firefly, which I have always seen as one of the ultimate dystopian stories.

The most important thing in this meme to me is that this is all set in a futuristic setting. Unlike Plato or More, who see Utopia as something that can be achieved now, this meme sets up utopia (or, in this case, dystopia) as something that has to be made in the future.

Just FYI: My thread involves a "created" character living in a futuristic New York that is blotted out by pollution and riddled with crime and drugs while the elite sit on their high towers. In other words: Standard Dystopian fare. What do you think makes this "standard" for Dystopia? Why do you think I failed to notice that this was so intimately related to this class?

What are your thoughts on this? Besides the fact that I am clearly a huge loser.

Also, if you work out which character is mine, DO NOT EVER TELL ME THAT YOU KNOW.

Also, standard disclaimer: I haven't read all of the threads, some of them could very well be NSFW (that is internet speak for Not Safe For Work/School).