Wattpad Pet Peeves

Dystopian: Maze Runner, Or Hunger Games?

It's Christmas season, people! How exciting! Now let me tell you why I hate dystopian novels!

When I was in middle school (which was around the time I started reading books directed towards teens and young adults) dystopian books were all the rage. Pretty much all my classmates had read Hunger Games, Maze Runner, and Divergent. And that's what I think lead to the problem we're facing in our Wattpad society (lol). I think most Wattpad writers are close to my age, maybe a few years older (I'm not gonna tell you how old I am). We grew up with those books. And it's obvious they've inspired many people.

But not always in a good way.

You see, out of the three series I mentioned, two of them fall into their own distinct categories: Hunger Games, and Maze Runner. Hunger Games is all about dystopian society with factions and inhumane traditions and blah blah blah. Maze Runner is all about a corrupt social experiment involving an "epic"challenge. You may have noticed Divergent falls into the Hunger Games category. It's about a corrupt future society where everyone is sorted into groups based on what they're good at. Hunger Games and Divergent are also similar in the regard that the third book in the saga is so boring it's pretty much unreadable.

So when a Wattpad writer wants to write a dystopian book, it always seems they choose either the Hunger Games route, or the Maze Runner route. Like, they don't even try to make their plots seem original. It's like a sad fanfiction.

Dear writers (it's yo girl, the English professor imposter), if you're gonna write dystopian, just MAKE IT ORIGINAL. When people paint landscapes, they either go out into the world and find their own inspiration, or they make it up based on their own ideas. A LANDSCAPE PAINTER WOULDN'T LOOK AT STARRY NIGHT (for example) AND COPY IT PRETTY MUCH EXACTLY OTHER THAN MAYBE CHANGE A FEW COLORS OR ADDING OR REMOVING A FEW EXTRA DETAILS. It's okay if you want to have factions, like in Hunger Games, or a corrupt challenge, like in Maze Runner, but make it your own! Writers are just painters, but with words! Treat your books like paintings! You wouldn't completely base your painting off of someone else's, would you?

I don't like when people copy book ideas in general, but it's ESPECIALLY annoying when I see a book in the Editors' Picks or Watty's reading lists that fits EXACTLY INTO THESE TEMPLATES. Like sometimes, I don't even have to read the description of those books to know that they're 99% copies of Maze Runner or Hunger Games. Like bruh, how is this not some form of plagiarism?

Well that was a passionate chapter! I hope to write more chapters as passionate as this one in the future! Thank you for reading!