The Hunger Games

[Ben X]

Decided to start a new topic on this, because we don't have that many yet and I think enough people will have stuff to say about this.

Apologies to Joel Stein, because I enjoyed this YA series. I blasted through all three books on holiday over a week, and found it well-written, affecting and, um, "thematic". It's kind of halfway between HP and His Dark Materials in terms of writing and depth.

[Sal Limones]

I really enjoyed the explorations of marketing and propaganda. Yeah it's kids killing each other in a not exceptionally strong concept of a dystopia, but it's also very much about propaganda, revolutions, political figureheads and the way the media (particularly reality TV) is manipulated and used to manipulate. I thought that was a cool concept to explore in a YA book.

Shame about the romance subplot though. I mean it's great the way that it, itself, is used as a propaganda tool, but

Pita's amnesia really evidenced how utterly baseless Pita's attraction to Katniss is. The entire time he's all like "wow you're kinda horrible, why did I ever like anything about you" and I was inclined to agree. AND THEN THEY GET MARRIED. :I

[Ben X]

I found the romance stuff a little tiring at points too, but thankfully it never got to Edward/Jacob levels. I thought the

Peeta (not Pita, despite being a baker!) mindwipe thing was interesting because it forces the reader to re-analyse Katniss and not just assume she's essentially good just because she's the protagonist. To be fair, she does actively win him back over by getting over her teenage insecurity bullshit and treating him as she would want to be treated if the situation was reversed. It totally did feel at first like a cheap plot-device to throw an obstacle in the way, though, in a 24 sudden-amnesia way.

[Sal Limones]

Hahaha, sorry about the misspelling, I read it in audiobook form. The whole time I thought she was just saying "Peter" with a nonsensical British accent, and didn't get it until later when I saw the bread pun mentioned online.

[Ben X]

I actually did not get that pun until now either! I assumed it was supposed to be a future-bastardisation of Peter. It also took me 'til the end of the books to notice Cinna is a homonym of sinner, and I never noticed in HP that Kreacher = creature or Diagon Alley = diagonally *facepalm*

[dibs]

I enjoyed the first one for the bus journy fluff that it was. The second one was ok. I wish i had skipped on the third one.

The whole thing just fell apart into a mess of new characters, shoehorned settings and teen angst. This urban battleground IT'S JUST LIKE ANOTHER HUNGER GAMES (really?). Gale....YOU'VE CHANGED. All the new characters were killed...WATCH ME CARE.

[Salacious Snake]

Diagon Alley = diagonally *facepalm*

Haha, I feel dumb now.

I read the first Hunger Games installment, and the general momentum of stuff happening kept me going until the end. I read a few pages of the second and immediately put it down in distaste, because I couldn't deal with any more relationship stuff.

I didn't want to kill myself reading the first one, but I don't understand why it's such a phenomenon. The writing style is abysmal.

The whole way through the book, I couldn't stop wondering why people cooperated with the games. It's a pretty awful thing, and it doesn't seem like it would work if everyone simply refused to participate.

edit: I mean I guess you could make the same argument about a lot of real life atrocities which have occurred, but this one in particular seems so artificial. Like, how did they get that shit going and convince people it was a good idea? Hey, guess what! New show, where we kill a bunch of kids. It'll be great!

Those districts are of great economic importance to the Capitol, right? I guess I needed some more detail on how the heck it all works and how it came about.

[Gwardinen]

The whole way through the book, I couldn't stop wondering why people cooperated with the games. It's a pretty awful thing, and it doesn't seem like it would work if everyone simply refused to participate.

Well without having read the books or seen the film I can't give an answer, but that is usually the question asked about war in the real world. The answer tends to be that war arises out of the needs and desires of one group coming into conflict with those of another. So even though no one wants to be at war, sometimes the other things we want and the other things another group wants are opposed and those other needs are more important than our need for peace.

Does the world of the Hunger Games have a similar situation? Is there a scarcity of resources? Or is there a societal system which requires a certain class of people to be oppressed to maintain it? Or is it actually just that there's a flaw in your question, which is that maybe everyone doesn't see it as awful? If there are people who want the Hunger Games to exist, then the answer is probably as simple as "those who want it are powerful enough to maintain it".

[Salacious Snake]

Well without having read the books or seen the film I can't give an answer, but that is usually the question asked about war in the real world. The answer tends to be that war arises out of the needs and desires of one group coming into conflict with those of another. So even though no one wants to be at war, sometimes the other things we want and the other things another group wants are opposed and those other needs are more important than our need for peace.

Does the world of the Hunger Games have a similar situation? Is there a scarcity of resources? Or is there a societal system which requires a certain class of people to be oppressed to maintain it? Or is it actually just that there's a flaw in your question, which is that maybe everyone doesn't see it as awful? If there are people who want the Hunger Games to exist, then the answer is probably as simple as "those who want it are powerful enough to maintain it".

The games don't fulfill any need except that of entertainment for the people who enjoy watching kids kill each other. There's a powerful central seat of authority against which the outlying areas rebelled at some point in the past, and in retribution, the central authority obliterated one of those "districts" and instituted the Hunger Games. Each remaining district hands over two kids to participate in the games every year (I think).

The stated reason for it is that it's supposed to remind the districts that they shouldn't rebel or something... it's not elucidated very well. I guess some of the lack of clarity can be attributed to the fact that the narrator doesn't know fuck all about anything.

I presume the later books feature another rebellion.

[Ben X]

It's oppressive. It's to illustrate to the districts how the Capitol has absolute power and can do whatever the fuck they want, no matter how heinous, and the districts just have to smile and pretend to appreciate it. It was introduced straight after a rebellion, so the Capitol citizens were angry and vengeful and allowed it to happen, while the districts had no choice.

[Sal Limones]

Yeah, it's part tribute of conquered people and part punishment/intimidation.

I'm reading David Graeber's Debt right now and there's a couple of passages that make something like the Hunger Games seem less far-fetched:

For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed.

One extreme possibility might be the situation the French anthropolo­gist Jean-Claude Galey encountered in a region of the eastern Himala­yas, where as recently as the 1970s, the low-ranking castes-they were referred to as "the vanquished ones," since they were thought to be descended from a population once conquered by the current landlord caste, many centuries before--lived in a situation of permanent debt dependency. Landless and penniless, they were obliged to solicit loans from the landlords simply to find a way to eat - not for the money, since the sums were paltry, but because poor debtors were expected to pay back the interest in the form of work, which meant they were at least provided with food and shelter while they cleaned out their creditors' outhouses and reroofed their sheds. For the "vanquished"­ - as for most people in the world, actually - the most significant life expenses were weddings and funerals. These required a good deal of money, which always had to be borrowed. In such cases it was com­mon practice, Galey explains, for high-caste moneylenders to demand one of the borrower's daughters as security. Often, when a poor man had to borrow money for his daughter's marriage, the security would be the bride herself. She would be expected to report to the lender's household after her wedding night, spend a few months there as his concubine, and then, once he grew bored, be sent off to some nearby timber camp, where she would have to spend the next year or two as a prostitute working off her father's debt. Once it was paid off, she'd return to her husband and begin her married life.

This seems shocking, outrageous even, but Galey does not report any widespread feeling of injustice. Everyone seemed to feel that this was just the way things worked. Neither was there much concern voiced among the local Brahmins, who were the ultimate arbiters in matters of morality - though this is hardly surprising, since the most prominent moneylenders were often Brahmins themselves.

wild stuff

[Gwardinen]

Wow. Sometimes I think humanity's capacity to adapt and grow accustomed to such a wide array of circumstances is one of its greatest strengths, but... sometimes it seems to lead us down profoundly dark paths. That we could be so shocked and appalled by that and the people actually living it could see it as simply "the way things worked" shows how scary the relativity of normality can be.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Sounds like they did a better job of getting this across than Whedon did with Firefly.

[Sal Limones]

The best part of it is that they're expected to feel honored to be chosen to represent their districts, and in fact the richer districts (the ones that produce luxury goods, like fancy fabrics) do, with some kids training for it all their lives and being all OO-RAH about it. The poorer districts spend most of their lives hustling for food, so they don't have the time, resources or emotional energy to give a shit about the Capitol.

[dibs]

I do like how ridiculously detached Effie their carer is from the conditions in the district, and the feelings of her wards who were facing a pretty huge chance of dying in the next few weeks.

Added to what Sal says above, the teenagers from the districts have the option to add thier name to the pool extra times to recieve a pittance of food for the year. I thought it was a particularity nasty touch to force people into the competition to feed their families.

[Gwardinen]

Added to what Sal says above, the teenagers from the districts have the option to add thier name to the pool extra times to recieve a pittance of food for the year. I thought it was a particularity nasty touch to force people into the competition to feed their families.

I presume that explains the Hunger Games' name? If so that's probably a pretty strong aspect of why people can't just not engage with it - perhaps the Capitol's grip on the food supply is sufficiently tight to make the districts' only realistic way of feeding themselves relying on the Capitol and (perhaps secondarily) the Hunger Games.

But yeah as I understand the books are largely about revolutions and such, so I guess the answer to "why do they stand for it?" is "eventually they don't".