The inevitable Hunger Games thread

Apparently her other big series had huge star-nosed moles!

I thought this must be what "City of Ember" (the movie) was based on, since the film is also a YA thing in an underground city with a giant star-nosed mole and came out the year after the last book, but apparently it's completely unrelated! And apparently "The City of Ember" (the book) didn't have a star-nosed mole in, either.

Have not read the Hunger Games books but apparently a coworker's kid has been voraciously reading them, demanding multiple library trips per week to get the next one out, etc.

xpost Yeah, pretty sure the lead character is supposed to be a olive skinned, dark haired, etc. teen, so of course heads were scratched (or not) when they cast a blonde, blue-eyed twentysomething. The dudes they cast, btw, looked distractingly hunky to me, in the soap opera sense. But whatevs. I've got no dog in this fight, though I do like Gary Ross.

100 pages into this and so far it's reminding me of michael swanwick's 'iron dragon's daughter.' very pleasantly surprised at how blatantly class conscious this is

i hate these books almost as bad as the rick riordan ones

Is there any point in reading this if you've already read Battle Royale?

there's no point in reading it if you haven't

haha wait, you mean "just don't read it", right? not "you have to read BR first"

only riordan book i read replaces hogwarts with lucian's olympus. tone's a little different so far in 'the hunger games,' more pg-13 gene wolfe or michael swanwick

just started Mockingjay, haven't read anything so gripping and fun in a while. lots of gore for a YA book (or maybe they're all sex&violence these days, i dunno), be interesting to see how they handle it in the movies. the dumb names are starting to get to me though (Peeta, Cinna, Beetee blargh)

^ for a YA series, I read the first two over the past week

my objection is that these books are just ... easy fiction, kind of pandering 'boy stuff' w/ lots of graphic violence that milks video games and episodic TV for ideas and is otherwise woefully ignorant of the larger literary tradition or canon. it is written in present tense and basically free of any device or craft beyond basic storytelling aptitude. it perpetuates the same limerence-drenched soap-opera shit that's saturated YA for the past half-decade, and does a lot of the ham-fisted world-building that passes for 'imaginative' and refuses to allow the reader to experience wonder, confusion, or ambiguity. i like gore and gruesomeness in YA - it's such an overly mannered genre - but I think a lot of other authors have recently done better jobs conveying it, like Rick Yancey in his Will Henry series – 'The Monstrumologist' & 'Curse of the Wendigo'

never heard hunger games dismissed as 'boy stuff' before

i'm not dismissing them out of hand – i read all three of them. in my classroom, however, it's 99.9% of the time the boys who grab for the books before the girls.

well i avoided twilight so i might give these a go i guess

doesnt it have a huge female following because of, y'know, the strong and independent young female protag? theres a considerable number of feminist readings out there that seem to find value in it & i feel like its worth embracing just for that (NB. i havent read these but i hear in the later books she becomes more marginalized while the men assume a larger role, which is a shame if so)

in the year 2011, YA literature shelves are filled with strong and independent female protagonists – and this, i don't think is one of the better examples. the predominance of feminist readings are, to my mind, occasioned by the popularity of the books and not their quality.

so this appears to be an interesting set of books, being adapted into films by a decent filmmaker with a strong cast. as far as megafranchises go, we could do worse.

i'm the first guy i know who's reading it. lots of ladies i know have though. so far the girl from 'true grit' would make a way better katniss than the girl who played mystique in the last x-men. that's who they cast, right?

remy, are you serious that you expect literary erudition to shine throughout young adult novels? i just want them to invoke the spirits of the greats, like mervyn peake and joy chant. so far, so good

remy, are you serious that you expect literary erudition to shine throughout young adult novels? i just want them to invoke the spirits of the greats, like mervyn peake and joy chant. so far, so good

absolutely, and i often find it. YA isn't the 'junk' genre it (largely) was 20 year ago. laurel wil back me up on this, i think, but there are a number of incredibly talented, capable, and innovative writers working in the field b/c its lack of pretension, willingness to bend genre and story conventions, and relative ease of getting published make it a good place to try out new ideas.

the girl who played mystique in the last x-men. that's who they cast, right?

Yeah, but I prefer to think of her as the girl from Winter's Bone, which makes her seem more promising, tbh.

well i avoided twilight so i might give these a go i guess

― thomp

Those two things need to be decoupled: Everyone should avoid Twilight no matter what you plan to do later in the day/month/year/life.

xp remy is right! Don't lower your standards for young peoples' sakes, they don't need it!

i don't consider young adult fiction junk or i wouldn't be reading it. but have you ever read harold bloom's young adult fantasy novel, 'a flight to lucifer'? yuck

remy, are you serious that you expect literary erudition to shine throughout young adult novels?

Also this is a patronizing and makes you sound like a jerk. Don't do that.

I don't see how a lifelong reader/critic not turning out to be a great YA author in the genre of fantasy is proof of anything, btw. False dichotomy, or at least an extremely lazy one.

the girl who played mystique in the last x-men. that's who they cast, right?

Yeah, but I prefer to think of her as the girl from Winter's Bone, which makes her seem more promising, tbh.

Yeah she really has nothing to prove in the confident-lead department.

like harry potter, i think these stories may succeed better as movies than books: there's very little in the story besides a kind of reportorial narrative.

laurel do you like hunger games

laurel & r.bean recommend two or three good YA novels i should read for contrast to 'hunger games', if i read 'hunger games'

Haven't read 'em. Storyline seemed a little too pat, and then they got the commercial success to match so I just didn't make the effort. remy is saving me from having to try again.

Remy already did!

Rick Yancey in his Will Henry series – 'The Monstrumologist' & 'Curse of the Wendigo'

@thomp, for the sci-fi/horror/gore/monster angle i'd recommend rick yancey's 'the monstrumologist.' it isn't really my cup of tea, but i think it is a well-written book and a good read for a certain type of kid. it introduces a lot of great elements, and ties well w/ frankenstein, lovecraft, etc.,

for total contrast w/in the genre i recommend peter cameron's 'someday this pain will be useful to you' for great, deceptively simple, characterization.

i've recently enjoyed green & levithan's 'will grayson, will grayson' and paolo bacigalupi's 'ship-breaker'

halfway through ellen klages 'the green glass sea' if historical fiction is your thing

Yay, Ship Breaker!!

so good, right?

thanking u

just out of curiosity, how would you rate the possibly-not-as-ubiquitous-as-i-think-they-are franchises:

i. artemis fowl
ii. diary of a wimpy kid
iii. skulduggery pleasant

Sorry, actually quite busy so reduced to being cheering section. Also in terms of new stuff, I get most of my reading from work these days and our YA is extremely "commercial" so apart from SB'er and some others, most of it isn't what you're asking for.

you attacked me for reading 'the hunger games.' then you call me a jerk? sorry if i offended you somehow

(my vested interest here is that my nephew is being put off reading by being deluged with brightly coloured FOR THE KIDS type books that people get him which largely appear to be .. kind of awful, and it is a lot harder to go into the bookstore and buy YA books than it was to buy picture books)

there's a general-purpose YA thread somewhere, isn't there? maybe i should revive that one

you attacked me for reading 'the hunger games.'

You can keep thinking that's what I was "attacking" you for, or you can re-consider about how dismissive you were about the literary "merit" of books for kids/young people.

thomp, honestly I haven't read any of any of those three. They give me the lip-curl when I see them around...hadn't realized Skullduggery Pleasant had become a thing?

There is an excellent YA sf/f thread somewhere but it's probably like 700 posts.

artemis fowl are kind of silly –- they've got some good ideas, but they seem a little too calibrated (?) cynical (?) for my taste. there's definitely an audience, but they're so commercial that they sometimes seem more like a product than a series of books in their own right. whenever i'm reading artemis fowl, i sort of wish i were reading diane wynn jones

diary of a wimpy kid is fluff, but its formatting is obv. very appealing for struggling readers (marginalia, text design, illustrations, limited words/page) and it's pretty funny, i think. they series isv. easy, and doesn't go to any depth or characterization so the books don't have a cross-generational appeal in the way they might the format was used to better, and more interesting effect in tom angleberger's 'the strange case of the origami yoda' which came out last year.

i haven't read skulduggery pleasant; it hardly made splash over here. i've got an ARC of it sitting on the sofa and i'm meaning to get to it.

sorry abt. poor editing above ^^^

@thomp: how old is your nephew? how is his reading?

I think the really good stuff ends up coming out in areas that aren't popular at the time, it just goes unnoticed a bit until things quiet down. I don't think the repetitive and increasingly sensational sf/f that's everywhere right now is going to be the stuff of this era that lasts -- not when we've got Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and some gender-bendy/LGBTQ "issue" books by Julie Peters and others that are also v good and will probably burrow into kids' thinking more deeply and, one hopes, lastingly, but aren't going to make headlines now.

And I normally dislike like "issue" books, I'm just sayin'.

i sort of wish i were reading diane wynn jones is basically my motto in life.

when was i ever dismissive about the literary merit of books for kids/young people? i haven't said a single negative thing on this thread . . . that i revived! how very district one tribute of you

i'm sorry. i said something negative about harold bloom

well, help yourself to that. he's kind of a turd.

Artforum:

"What are The Hunger Games books, and now movies, really about? Exactly what it looks like: war. ...

Two things are certain in America: War and sequels."

http://www.artforum.com/film/id=44211

i went with mr veg to see this today -- haven't read the books...i was kinda bored through most of this. dug PSH but mostly just because he was just being PSH without a mohawk ponytail or a tophat or stupid circus clothes

well of course

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Course-Hunger-Games-Has-Digitally-Recreate-Philip-Seymour-Hoffman-Mockingjay-41552.html

It's a good thing we have important satirical works like The Hunger Games to remind us of the horrors of a possible future where human life and death become irrelevant to the needs of narrative in a palliatory mass-media spectacle.

that's not what hunger games is about at all!

i love the voice of cinema blend

it's in there! xpost

so I got into a semi-argument the other night about this. I haven't read the books because I am not a 13yo girl; watched the first movie at the urging of my wife and a friend of ours. Friend was over on the weekend and we got to talking about it - basically I find the whole fascist police state conceit reactionary and that ruined everything else about it for me (the Minotaur myth parallels, the Jon Armstrong-style pop/fashion oppression parodic bits etc.) My problem with it is that if you're going to go the sci-fi dystopian route than your dystopia is only as effective as far as it mirrors actual current conditions/threats/fears. But the whole fascist police state thing is out-of-date - fascist police states aren't a threat in America, and the only people who think so are Tea Party reactionary idiots who think Obamacare's gonna take away their guns and give them to illegal immigrants etc. So why contruct a dystopia where an authoritarian state is the boogeyman? The current threats to our society are more explicitly capitalist in nature. Oligarchy, destruction of the ecosystem, corporate surveillance - the state is primarily a tangential player/enabler in these threats, it's not the driving force at all. So placing the state at the center of it and then building this silly pop culture scaffolding around it to support it doesn't really speak to any kind of fear I have, if anything it seems like misdirection by a right wing crank, which makes me suspicious of the whole enterprise.

I get that this doesn't even register w most people, who just want to see girl kick ass ooh look silly meta-media commentary and oh which guy will she end up with but it irritates me to have this reactionary crap out there in the broader culture. It seems like a misuse of the dystopian trope.

and then there's the Battle Royale thing, a book/movie that I preferred and seemed to be more relevant and w a more interesting angle

But... the angle of Battle Royale was also the reinforcement of the power of a fascist police state so I'm not sure how it's more relevant? (Better executed absolutely, but the Hunger Games story does twist in upon itself in some very interesting ways by the end of the third book.)

Battle Royale was way more entertaining - but as I remember the backstory is never really explained very well. Hunger Games is supposed to be a spectacle at least, but Battle Royale was done in secret, wasn't it? The kids seemed to have no idea about it.

found the evil government painfully relevant tbh in the first 2 movies. it's much more about the way power reinforces itself and how it operates from the individual outwards than it is about critiquing a particular formation of government.

the parallels to Battle Royale aren't that close either. the gov in BR is much more frightened of/repulsed by its teenage victims. HG's gov's relationship with youth is more celebratory, and it sacrifices them to get at their families, not because it fears youth itself.

Battle Royale also takes place on the Korean peninsula iirc

xp

BR - the first one, anyway - at its heart is a neat inversion of the sentiment behind Lord of the Flies

HG seems more about how a hypermediated environment eats up youth to serve adult ends

The Battle Royale precedent is really not that bothersome to me tbh - I will say that given China and North Korea and the uniquely weird conservative bent of Japan's gov't and their history as an actual fascist state, the Asian fascist police state dystopia seems more resonant/relevant.

But Hunger Games takes place in America. and it's an America that is by and large completely unrecognizable to me, apart from the ludicrous gameshow window dressing.

xp

i don't think the gameshow is window dressing, seeing as it gives the series its title and the plot revolves around it - hence also the Roman names - the whole thing is about bread and circuses

An unpopular opinion, I know, but I really hate Battle Royale. If it's a satire, what exactly is being satirized? If the adults are the villains, why introduce some evil kids if not solely for the purpose of a big Lethal Weapon-style showdown? That Hunger Games essentially looks like a watered down copy of something I already disliked is the main reason why I've stayed away from that whole thing.

kids in battle royale aren't aware they've been chosen until they're there (w/ a few exceptions). there is awareness in the media, you have the media swarming around a 'winner' at the beginning but it's not a tv show like the hunger games iirc. the program there is some sort of deliberate anti-youth thing, obv echoes of columbine w/ it but the paranoia it's tapping seems more similar to the early 90s fear of 'superpredators'. battle royale 2 probably closer thematically to hunger games w/ it's war on terror metaphor. hunger games pretty openly and somewhat on the nose response to iraq war, poor youth being sent to their deaths in a spectacle for the benefit of the rich. the fascist state is anti-bush crit though my understanding is the politics of the books are more nuanced and cynical than that (my understanding is the rebels are revealed to be fairly worthless as well, meet the new boss same as the old boss).

xp

as i say BR is quite specifically Lord of the Flies reversed, and thus satirizes and not wholly unpopular opinion amongst a section of adults: kids are naturally wild beasts. BR turns that on its head by having an adult world that goes to elaborate lengths to transform its kids into wild beasts, simply to exorcize that underlying fear. not so much satire as documentary.

Hunger Games is obviously a mashup of a lot of tropes and clichés, but at heart it wants to be a epic of The Hero. The Evil Government trope is just there to give the Hero a nemesis, to throw obstacles at her and her fellow heros, and to be an evil counterpart to all that is Good and Clean and Loving and Human. Οὖτις has every right to find the HG a particularly unthinking and reactionary misuse of the trope of Evil Government, but the number of 13 year old girls who are into the politics of HG as opposed to the Hero Quest aspect (with super cool archery feats!) are probably not numerous enough to be worth worrying over.

ah great some ott misogyny

w/ it's war on terror metaphor. hunger games pretty openly and somewhat on the nose response to iraq war, poor youth being sent to their deaths in a spectacle for the benefit of the rich

idg this. American troops weren't forced to fight each other, they were fed a bunch of fictitious lies about a demonized, external enemy.

I don't think that word means quite what you think it means, balls.

I remember reading an interview with the author where she said the inspiration for HG was flipping the channel between Iraq War news reporting and a reality game show like Survivor... So I think it's meant more of a comment on poor kids killing poor kids, TV entertainment, and the rich and powerful using the reality of the poor's struggles as political theatre which they sell back to the poor as heroics... maybe a bit more a mix of ideas than a direct analogue to either Iraq or now.

I don't think that word means quite what you think it means, balls.

― Aimless, Monday, June 16, 2014 7:35 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah that's the correct usage

I just watched this. I kind of liked the set up and all the TV stuff, Truman-show-esque as it was. Ending is basically 'oh the people in charge changed their minds' and not really because she did anything mind-blowing or outwitted them particularly? just 'they probably won't like this because TV' - so a massive anti-climax. And yeah, she never really has to make a morally challenging decision. But I'm also glad there was no 'wake up sheeple!'.

much bigger problem during the action scenes is that when peetah and that vicious psychopath kid were fighting at the end they looked so much alike i couldn't tell who was who (blonde buff young caucasians all look the same to me i guess)

i could tell them apart but this was the only time the shakeycam got annoying for me too, because it was so jerky that you couldn't tell what katniss actually shot such that she'd hit cato without him taking peeta with him.

(i looked it up afterwards, she shoots cato's hand so he's forced to release peeta as he falls backwards.)

― lex pretend, Thursday, 29 March 2012 09:34 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See this is one of the very few bits of obvious 'strategy' or something: Peter spends ages pointing to that spot on his hand and gesturing!

Just watched Mockingjay Pt 1 last night, and holy hell, how in the world did this film get made? 2 hours long and virtually no action and very little happening at all. I liked the first two quite a bit and am amazed that they messed this one up so badly. Katniss, who was a great character in the other films, comes off in this one as basically useless. Why in the world do they stretch books into two long movies when the first one is nothing but set up for the second?

just standard operating procedure for these things - spin the last book into two films, the first one of which will always be fucked because it makes no structural sense. watched Part 1 when it came out and it's exactly as you describe, but exactly what i expected.

sorry, shd've just said "it's the money"

also tbh the second two books probably could have been one book and chopped out three or four story arcs and ten characters that didn't really add anything.

i never read the books, it was my daughter that persuaded me to watch the movies but i liked the first two. even tho she won't believe me that all the handsome young men look the same to me and i can't tell who the hell is who.

i have napped through all of these movies so far

reading this for the first time
do they have to list every time katniss goes to sleep

it's pretty good on the whole tho
i decided kids probably like it so much because, developmentally, they feel like their actions & their crazy new feelings are the focus of worldwide scrutiny, so it's a good parable for adolescent feelings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_audience)

there are a lot of 'refrigerator moments' in these books for me, like, why does everyone go along with the games in the first place? what kind of government does this society have? why are there cars & hovercrafts & omniscient sky cams but no guns or lazers, only oldschool weapons (except the night vision sunglasses)?

i do like that it all take place in the woods -- i am imagining really scrappy crummy woods like burnt down yellowstone circa the late '80s, or new mexico's white mountains, or flagstaff. ariz. i want more descriptions of the climate & biome but i think all my criticisms just mean i'm a nerd

also a plus, i think it is cool that katniss's feelings for her sister (& affection xfer to rue as a result) are way more fleshed out than the boycrush feelings.

Tried to see Spectre tonight but the theater was a madhouse and everything was sold out so we did the opening weekend plunge on this one instead. I can see this ultimately resonating like a nu-school Star Wars for a younger generation. Except that they get a Star Wars that doesn't just peter out with a long wet fart full of teddy bears. I went very begrudgingly into the first movie but I've liked it and every installment since quite a bit. The ending was ultimately a little pat but satisfying nonetheless. The acting carries an awful lot of water, but it's a well-made package overall. Remains to be seen how it'll all hold up on a repeat viewing (although I'm looking forward to doing just that since I've spent too much time during every sequel trying to remember what had happened previously).

i've never realised how hateable the name 'peeta' is before

The character/actor himself is kind of a limp noodle and easily the weakest part of the film series. Perhaps the books provide more clarity as to why he wasn't mercifully chucked into a canyon as early as possible.

I've never read the books, but I have seen the movies multiple times, because of one of my teens, and they've grown on me, particularly the sequels. They're pretty well conceived and executed, especially the last one, which was iirc sort of dismissed at the time as being more conventionally action-y than the others but is actually full of long stretches of quiet or introspective bits. I assume it's from the source material, but some of the turns of the final installment are particularly dark and heavy, and ultimately subvert a lot of tropes in these sorts of dystopian films. I like that the surviving heroes all clearly end up damaged, and that there is no real sunrise over a new day conclusion.

This is all in the source material iirc! You might enjoy the books. I'll admit by the end I was getting a little weary of just how endless the conveyor belt of trauma and recovery seemed, but maybe I'd think about those themes differently today. And maybe I just read them in too quick a succession.

Aren't the books told in first person or something? I can imagine that being less effective. Or maybe just effective differently.