I doubt that this is original at all, but in my recent bout of dystopia-reading (The Selection, Matched and The Jewel) I'm starting to wonder whether there are a finite number of streams to which YA dytopias adhere, all of them related to reality television.
There's the "Survivor" stream, which includes The Hunger Games and Divergent.
There's the "Bachelor" stream, to which The Selection and The Jewel most definitely belong.
I feel like Matched might be a sort of "Survivor"/"Big Brother" crossover, and now I need to look at the other dystopias I've read to see if they fit into this pattern. That said, I'm mostly thinking the post-Hunger Games books: I've been reading YA dystopias since ... well, since a random not-entirely-post-apocalyptic story on For the Juniors, on the ABC, when I was a kid. And a lot of those pre-date reality TV.
But so many of the books these days seem to stem from either "Survivor" or "The Bachelor" - am I totally off the planet, or do I have a point?
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