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@taylorclogston

If you’re trying to find interesting ideas, I suggest you not fixate on a government specifically as your dehumanizing system. You *can* use that, but you might find new ideas by moving away from it.

Absolutely agree, which is why I listed it as one of the things I prefer to not have–or at least to have it not feature in a big way.

at least, the antagonist falls into “man vs nature” and “man vs God” more than “man vs man.”

What exactly do you mean ‘man vs God?’ As for the man vs nature, I’m not a huge fan of that type apocalypse world/diseases/dinosaurs/fill in the blank type thing for the antagonist, but there is a lot of room for ideas there for sure.

One of your main points seems to be not to have a central villain or government that is clearly completely evil and the whole point is to take it down. If that is your main point, then I cannot agree enough. In all of my writing, I try to show multiple antagonists, the right and wrong in both the antagonists and protagonists, characters with dark sides achieve results through immoral ways, clash of bad against bad, etc.. Having one system that is clearly and completely bad is not usually realistic, and thinking of story telling as presenting human nature makes for very interesting characters and plots.

In a nutshell, my advice is, “Create a dehumanizing system and then ask, ‘How do we remain human inside it?’”

This is a great point. I will add it to my jumping points for brainstorming.