We rarely imagine ourselves as the villain. Especially not when we believe we’re doing the right thing.
That’s what makes writing utopias so complex, because one person’s perfect world is another’s prison.
In speculative fiction, utopias are often built on control, categorization, and compliance. Order masquerades as progress. Safety becomes surveillance. And the people who created the system—the visionaries, the architects, the saviors—slowly evolve into something else entirely: guardians of a new kind of oppression.
I find this idea haunting: that you can set out to make the world better, and still become the reason it breaks. That the values you fought for can twist into something you never intended.
And yet, it happens. In fiction. In history. In life.
What if your definition of peace erases someone else’s freedom?
What if your desire for justice hardens into punishment?
What if your utopia only works because someone else suffers quietly in the background?
In my writing, I don’t like villains with capes or easy motives. I’m more interested in the people who believe they’re right—and maybe were right, once—but couldn’t stop long enough to see who they stepped on along the way.
Can you be the villain in your own utopia?
Absolutely.
Especially if you never stop to ask who built the foundation—and who’s being crushed beneath it.