I don't remember if the text specifically relates Rue to Prim, but I do not think it's coincidence that many readers found Katnis' relationship with Rue to be so platonic because Rue was so similar to Prim.
As a side note, I took "darker skinned" to mean something along the lines Spanish/Turkish/Persian. Some sort of olive/darker skin tone. We as readers fill in gaps with our experiences if the author fails to give a specific enough details.
Except Katniss is explicitly olive skinned, sooo
Katniss was purple?
The term "dark" seems to adjust for race and context. If you say both "dark" and "black," I expect someone from Sudan. If you say "dark" about a white person, I expect askenazi or Italian. "Dark" for the general population is, for me, short of black, like middle eastern or that maybe-kind-of-black seen with the Rock and Beyonce.
the rock is part black and Beyonce IS black. err wut o.O
So I just read the English translation of Battle Royale. I have previously read The Hunger Games trilogy, but I haven't seen the movies for either.
The rest of this post contains real-ass SPOILERS for both BR and THG trilogy.
Similarities:
1. Teens fighting (duh)
2. "Injury may be infected, oh god need medicine" subplot
3. Forbidden zones (BR) vs. the clock arena in THG2. Not exactly the same, but they serve the same narrative and stated purposes.
4. Psychopaths who dominate the game until climactic fight with the heroes (I can see this flowing from 1 if you come up with it independently, though)
5. Multiple survivors (I hesitate to say "winners" for obvious reasons)
6. Gaming the system via technical means to escape
7. The point of the exercise. Both are used to cow the population into a sense of fear/hopelessness.
Differences:
1. Cultural flavor. To be expected with Japanese vs. American authorship/setting/etc
2. BR is much more explicit in its anti-authoritarian message than THG1. THG's messaging in this regard doesn't really kick off until the Reaping in Book 2.
3. BR deals far, far more with teenage relationships than any part of THG. If this is what you don't like in THG, then you should really hate BR.
4. Shuya develops real feelings for Noriko over the course of the Program. Katniss (as has been discussed) doesn't harbor any serious feelings for Peeta until much later (or, arguably, ever). Honestly, showing girls that they don't have to derive their self-worth or image from a SO is probably the most important part of THG.
5. The Programs in BR are held in secret and the winner is announced in a quick thing on the news afterwards. THG are a super reality show spectacle - considering this is one of the main things the book is railing against, I'd say this is an important detail.
6. There are lot of differences in the details (number of contestants, means of selection, how often they are held, etc).
Overall, I used to be kind of ambivalent about the whole "Hunger Games is just a Battle Royale rip-off" as just an Internet being Internet thing. Now that I've read Battle Royale, though, it is really, really difficult to believe that it was absolutely no influence on or inspiration to The Hunger Games. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, however, and there are enough differences to where writing off THG as a direct rip-off of BR for the US YA audience is being far too reductive.
I honestly think The Hunger Games is a more enjoyable read because it is a bit more focused, though this may just be because I am not used to the Japanese writing style of Battle Royale. I also think THG would be much easier to adapt to film, as it is not nearly as dense as BR - the BR novel describing just the one Program is about as long as the first two Hunger Games books combined.
@CanadianWolverine the really long "wah I'm a teenage girl and don't know what to do about boys!" bits didn't tip you off to the young adult aim?
The PG13 rating makes perfect sense though, given that. Apparently they had to cut it down a lot to keep it from being R as well. Extended unrated version will probably be better fleshed out in the violence department but I thought they did well given their targets.
Casting you could argue that the hunting helped their nutrition quite a bit, plus it is difficult to make the lead roles look emaciated.
Shaky cam definitely sucked though.
Have we talked about how great Stanley Tucci was? Because he was great
Yeah, just in reading all three books in one go, within the context of the situation the character found herself in, the "I don't know what to do about giving this heinous government more targets to hurt me with" bits didn't tip me off. Sorry, but this really didn't strike me as that being the target audience. So the PG13 made no sense to me, I thought it cleaned up a lot of what made the setting so freaking horrifying and thought prevoking.
Oh well, if it takes a love triangle spanning three books to get teens to even remotely think about totalitarianism, that's not such a bad trade off.
But the movie is still utter shit for being so much like the books but just enough sexuality and shine as to almost completely gloss over the oppressive dystopian setting that thinks tribute of human sacrifice is just peachy keen that has been going on for decades. Oh well, at least they conveyed a bit of it with the reaping, Snow's dialogue, and Rue's district rioting.
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
Anyone want to get outraged over the people in the article's comment thread who thought, because of his name, that Cinna had "cinnamon colored skin"? 'Cus I'm ready for a good rage here.
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
Katniss's family has a goat because Katniss regularly and routinely breaks the law in order to feed her family and trade for things like that.
Peeta's family is well off because they're merchants in the rich/less poor part of town, which are all coal miners.
@CanadianWolverine the really long "wah I'm a teenage girl and don't know what to do about boys!" bits didn't tip you off to the young adult aim?
The PG13 rating makes perfect sense though, given that. Apparently they had to cut it down a lot to keep it from being R as well. Extended unrated version will probably be better fleshed out in the violence department but I thought they did well given their targets.
Casting you could argue that the hunting helped their nutrition quite a bit, plus it is difficult to make the lead roles look emaciated.
Shaky cam definitely sucked though.
Have we talked about how great Stanley Tucci was? Because he was great
Yeah, just in reading all three books in one go, within the context of the situation the character found herself in, the "I don't know what to do about giving this heinous government more targets to hurt me with" bits didn't tip me off. Sorry, but this really didn't strike me as that being the target audience. So the PG13 made no sense to me, I thought it cleaned up a lot of what made the setting so freaking horrifying and thought prevoking.
Oh well, if it takes a love triangle spanning three books to get teens to even remotely think about totalitarianism, that's not such a bad trade off.
But the movie is still utter shit for being so much like the books but just enough sexuality and shine as to almost completely gloss over the oppressive dystopian setting that thinks tribute of human sacrifice is just peachy keen that has been going on for decades. Oh well, at least they conveyed a bit of it with the reaping, Snow's dialogue, and Rue's district rioting.
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
The first book was interesting because it seemed that the people were being DELIBERATELY denied resources at a certain level to keep them a little bit desperate. Not so desperate that they would riot, but desperate enough that they could be controlled. Spoilers follow I guess
It seemed to me that the city didn't even need the districts, but that simply the exercise of control and authority over them had become it's own reward for the president and his cronies. That keeping the districts desperate and afraid allowed them to keep an iron grip on authority in the capitol. I had expected later on that we'd find out that the resources (coal, oil, food whatever) were just dumped somewhere and that the city was high tech enough that it didn't need any of it. Look at the technology level required to host the games. We're talking massive scale environmental control, the city didn't need coal dug up by some posse of miners in a low tech mine.
This was pretty much blatantly obvious to me. The environment beyond the walls had clearly recovered, and there was no need for the system. There were no food shortages or resource shortages other than those which President Snow and his cronies created. The ENTIRE world was just a contrivance for their amusement and power tripping, just like the hunger games were for the people of the city over the districts. The system was made to work just well enough to make you afraid of what would happen if it didn't...
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
Katniss's family has a goat because Katniss regularly and routinely breaks the law in order to feed her family and trade for things like that.
Peeta's family is well off because they're merchants in the rich/less poor part of town, which are all coal miners.
As for the people in district 12 attending school, in the second book Katniss remarks that no one is allowed to work in the mines until they're 18. She actually comments that this is another way that District 12 is screwed over in the Games, because no one in the district learns anything that could help them survive them until they're too old to be reaped anyway.
I don't think "didn't catch the one line describing the skin color of a person and thus is caught off guard when a character is not what one pictured for several hundred pages" counts as racist. Gawker media again shows their desire for pageviews over actual news.
How about this, then?
It's racist to be "surprised" that Thresh and Rue were black, even if Suzanne Collins didn't describe their skin color in any way.
In fact, even if Collins explicitly said they were white in the book, then unless their whiteness was somehow central to their character, I would still say that "surprise" here would reveal racism
No, no it fucking isn't
If someone is clearly described as Asian in a book, and then they are black or white in the film adaptation, you can definitely be surprised by that without it being racist. It is a diversion from the source material. It's something you're familiar with that has been changed. That's the goddamn definition of a surprise. Remember when Michael Clarke Duncan was cast as Kingpin in Daredevil? I was hells of surprised by that. I didn't despise the change or anything, but it certainly caught me off-guard that someone that had been displayed for decades as a large white man was now a large black man.
Please don't be an idiot.
As for those tweets, yes, they were terrible insofar as them saying that they cared less about the characters because of their skin tone. But that's it.
Let's say when I realized Rue and Thresh were black that I thought "Ha. That's racist--all the indentured farmers have to be black?"
Is that me being racist, or the movie?
Well, the author said she pictured District 11 as predominately black. So I guess you could blame the author or the fictional society.
I honestly forgot about the line with Rue's physical description, so I kind of thought she was white too. I wouldn't have been shocked or whatever when she showed up in the movie, though.
Anyone want to get outraged over the people in the article's comment thread who thought, because of his name, that Cinna had "cinnamon colored skin"? 'Cus I'm ready for a good rage here.
Anyone want to get outraged over the people in the article's comment thread who thought, because of his name, that Cinna had "cinnamon colored skin"? 'Cus I'm ready for a good rage here.
What the fuck? People really said that?
Wouldn't surprise me.
I thought of this. But I guess not everyone has listened to Dan Carlin's Rome audiobook :P
I failed pretty hard at actually catching the physical descriptions in the books -- I missed both mentions of Rue's and Thresh's skin color, and envisioned Rue as a dark haired version of Prim and Thresh as a large Asian kid, for whatever reason. I also kept seeing Peeta as Kit Harington.
I failed pretty hard at actually catching the physical descriptions in the books -- I missed both mentions of Rue's and Thresh's skin color, and envisioned Rue as a dark haired version of Prim and Thresh as a large Asian kid, for whatever reason. I also kept seeing Peeta as Kit Harington.
I kind of thought Peeta would kind of look like a younger version of Sean Astin for some reason. My picture of Katniss was tainted because I saw the first trailer before I read the books, though.
@CanadianWolverine the really long "wah I'm a teenage girl and don't know what to do about boys!" bits didn't tip you off to the young adult aim?
The PG13 rating makes perfect sense though, given that. Apparently they had to cut it down a lot to keep it from being R as well. Extended unrated version will probably be better fleshed out in the violence department but I thought they did well given their targets.
Casting you could argue that the hunting helped their nutrition quite a bit, plus it is difficult to make the lead roles look emaciated.
Shaky cam definitely sucked though.
Have we talked about how great Stanley Tucci was? Because he was great
Yeah, just in reading all three books in one go, within the context of the situation the character found herself in, the "I don't know what to do about giving this heinous government more targets to hurt me with" bits didn't tip me off. Sorry, but this really didn't strike me as that being the target audience. So the PG13 made no sense to me, I thought it cleaned up a lot of what made the setting so freaking horrifying and thought prevoking.
Oh well, if it takes a love triangle spanning three books to get teens to even remotely think about totalitarianism, that's not such a bad trade off.
But the movie is still utter shit for being so much like the books but just enough sexuality and shine as to almost completely gloss over the oppressive dystopian setting that thinks tribute of human sacrifice is just peachy keen that has been going on for decades. Oh well, at least they conveyed a bit of it with the reaping, Snow's dialogue, and Rue's district rioting.
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
I'm not sure you know anything about rural poverty. I've been to the poorest area in the ass-end of rural Tanzania, and let me assure you that there are pigs. Goats and sheep are more popular, but there are pigs. There are also local elites who can afford cakes and nail polish. Hell, why would you think that the administrators and peacekeepers from the capitol would also live in abject poverty or have all their food shipped in from the capitol, or that no one ever saves up for a rare luxury?
Hell, were you even paying attention to the book? It explicitly stated that the people betting on the outcome were the most morally depraved in the district, and that both Katniss and Peeta were stunted compared to the competitors who had been adequately fed so they could bring home the prize to the district.
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
Katniss's family has a goat because Katniss regularly and routinely breaks the law in order to feed her family and trade for things like that.
Peeta's family is well off because they're merchants in the rich/less poor part of town, which are all coal miners.
As for the people in district 12 attending school, in the second book Katniss remarks that no one is allowed to work in the mines until they're 18. She actually comments that this is another way that District 12 is screwed over in the Games, because no one in the district learns anything that could help them survive them until they're too old to be reaped anyway.
And yet, despite her law-breaking, they're still meant to be starving. So if the law-breaking, goat-owning family are starving, the rest of District 12 must be...dead? According to the book, their goat came from an old man who sold goats. Presumably other people were purchasing his goats? What happened to the goats foaled by Katniss' goat? I guess they ate them, instead of trading them for a larger quantity of food to people who also wanting a continuing supply of milk and, eventually, goat meat? If they're starving, why are Katniss and Gale picky about what they eat, to the point of thinking that some of the things cooked by the black market lady are icky? Starving people in the real world will eat anything they think they might be able to digest to keep themselves from dying; they don't leave the insides of animals in the woods to rot and then turn up their noses at some mouse-stew.
And how, exactly, does the merchant part of town become less poor? The miners are the ones producing an export good. Who is buying from the merchants, if not the miners? There is no inter-district travel. There's no tourism industry. Who is Peeta selling cakes to so as to afford pigs? The peacekeepers? They're apparently starving, too, since they're willing to break the laws they're meant to be enforcing by buying illegal meat from Katniss.
In what way is working in the mines good preparation for the Games? Have lungs full of coal dust isn't going to help you run. Breaking rocks and hauling carts isn't going to prepare you with any survival skills. If the kids can't work in the mines, why are they not at home helping with the house work and gardening/animal tending instead of wasting time at school? It's not like there's opportunity for social mobility through education, and they don't have a plethora of labor-saving technological devices.
The books do not depict an oppressed, starving society. The author tells you that it's an oppressed, starving society but shows you people who do not act like starving, oppressed people. The social structure, economy, and behavior demonstrated by the characters in the book do not look or feel like those of the society that the author tells you exists. All of District 12's population is in the same local region and inter-District travel is severely limited, but there exists a class of travelling merchants who have racially-distinct features. Where do they travel to? What do they sell? What happens to their money? Everyone in all of the districts is meant to be starving and oppressed; even the people in Districts 1-3 are supposed to be bad-off, just less bad-off than District 12.
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I read up on the book and movie and it sounds really unappealing to me.
That's pretty sad seeing how a friend tried to hype me for it.
Don't forget that the kids can actually buy supplies by putting their names in repeatedly for the games. This was touched on more in the book, but even in the movie they mention that Gale had like 40 entries in the drawing. And he has to illegally hunt on top of that, just to help keep his family fed. So there is another avenue for getting food, at a pretty high cost to the kids and pretty darn oppressive I would think.
So I just saw this last night. Never read the books.
I really liked it, except I had a minor problem with the
magic technology. It implies that the dogs at the end were materialized or teleported in. Whatever. I'm just going to assume that the dogs were released from cages and the scene in the studio that shows wireframe holographic dogs snapping and snarling was just a demonstration
But that was a really small thing. It was pretty solid overall.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
@CanadianWolverine the really long "wah I'm a teenage girl and don't know what to do about boys!" bits didn't tip you off to the young adult aim?
The PG13 rating makes perfect sense though, given that. Apparently they had to cut it down a lot to keep it from being R as well. Extended unrated version will probably be better fleshed out in the violence department but I thought they did well given their targets.
Casting you could argue that the hunting helped their nutrition quite a bit, plus it is difficult to make the lead roles look emaciated.
Shaky cam definitely sucked though.
Have we talked about how great Stanley Tucci was? Because he was great
Yeah, just in reading all three books in one go, within the context of the situation the character found herself in, the "I don't know what to do about giving this heinous government more targets to hurt me with" bits didn't tip me off. Sorry, but this really didn't strike me as that being the target audience. So the PG13 made no sense to me, I thought it cleaned up a lot of what made the setting so freaking horrifying and thought prevoking.
Oh well, if it takes a love triangle spanning three books to get teens to even remotely think about totalitarianism, that's not such a bad trade off.
But the movie is still utter shit for being so much like the books but just enough sexuality and shine as to almost completely gloss over the oppressive dystopian setting that thinks tribute of human sacrifice is just peachy keen that has been going on for decades. Oh well, at least they conveyed a bit of it with the reaping, Snow's dialogue, and Rue's district rioting.
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
I'm not sure you know anything about rural poverty. I've been to the poorest area in the ass-end of rural Tanzania, and let me assure you that there are pigs. Goats and sheep are more popular, but there are pigs. There are also local elites who can afford cakes and nail polish. Hell, why would you think that the administrators and peacekeepers from the capitol would also live in abject poverty or have all their food shipped in from the capitol, or that no one ever saves up for a rare luxury?
Rural poverty, with communities of subsistence farmers, is not the same thing as a society of people who are forced to starve. The book demonstrates that there is ample food available in the neighboring woodland but that the Capitol's laws are meant to be keeping the society in a state of starvation. Real-world societies don't reach the point that we're meant to believe District 12 is at, generally, because starving your populace is bad for running a country. The only exceptions I'm aware of are in a small handful of dictatorships where the populace are legitimately starving and dying. North Korea. Parts of Africa. Do you think that many of the North Koreans who are literally starving to death because all of the food goes to the government and military have enough spare food to keep pigs? How about the families in Africa who subsist on a diet rich in cookies made out of literal dirt? Sure, dirt-cookies are a cultural tradition, but they are dying of malnourishment because there is no other food to fill their stomachs besides dirt-cookies. Perhaps the folks living on piles of refuse in other parts of Africa and Asia? Eating spoiled food and garbage because they have no food? Are they keeping goats?
I think that the administrators and peacekeepers are impoverished because we are told that the peacekeepers are as desperate for food as the rest of the District, which is why they buy illegal game from Katniss. We are never shown anyone who didn't come direct from the Capitol who is not supposed to be poor.
Hell, were you even paying attention to the book? It explicitly stated that the people betting on the outcome were the most morally depraved in the district, and that both Katniss and Peeta were stunted compared to the competitors who had been adequately fed so they could bring home the prize to the district.
Except that Katniss says that she is naturally small, rather than stunted, and Peeta is strong enough to impress the trained kids from the central Districts with his feats of brawn. District 11 is supposed to be nearly as bad off as District 12, or possibly worse, it's not really clear, yet Thresh is over 6' tall and hugely strong. Rue is fit enough to leap between trees. If you rounded up a crop of 18 or so actually starving children from Africa and North Korea and threw them into an arena with 6 trained, fed 18 year olds they would die. Immediately. They couldn't run. Couldn't put of a fight. They're starving. These are the Hunger Games, where the reward for risking your life by putting your name in the hat is food, because everyone is so poor that risking your children's lives is worth it for a little more grain.
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
Katniss's family has a goat because Katniss regularly and routinely breaks the law in order to feed her family and trade for things like that.
Peeta's family is well off because they're merchants in the rich/less poor part of town, which are all coal miners.
As for the people in district 12 attending school, in the second book Katniss remarks that no one is allowed to work in the mines until they're 18. She actually comments that this is another way that District 12 is screwed over in the Games, because no one in the district learns anything that could help them survive them until they're too old to be reaped anyway.
And yet, despite her law-breaking, they're still meant to be starving. So if the law-breaking, goat-owning family are starving, the rest of District 12 must be...dead? According to the book, their goat came from an old man who sold goats. Presumably other people were purchasing his goats? What happened to the goats foaled by Katniss' goat? I guess they ate them, instead of trading them for a larger quantity of food to people who also wanting a continuing supply of milk and, eventually, goat meat? If they're starving, why are Katniss and Gale picky about what they eat, to the point of thinking that some of the things cooked by the black market lady are icky? Starving people in the real world will eat anything they think they might be able to digest to keep themselves from dying; they don't leave the insides of animals in the woods to rot and then turn up their noses at some mouse-stew.
And how, exactly, does the merchant part of town become less poor? The miners are the ones producing an export good. Who is buying from the merchants, if not the miners? There is no inter-district travel. There's no tourism industry. Who is Peeta selling cakes to so as to afford pigs? The peacekeepers? They're apparently starving, too, since they're willing to break the laws they're meant to be enforcing by buying illegal meat from Katniss.
In what way is working in the mines good preparation for the Games? Have lungs full of coal dust isn't going to help you run. Breaking rocks and hauling carts isn't going to prepare you with any survival skills. If the kids can't work in the mines, why are they not at home helping with the house work and gardening/animal tending instead of wasting time at school? It's not like there's opportunity for social mobility through education, and they don't have a plethora of labor-saving technological devices.
The books do not depict an oppressed, starving society. The author tells you that it's an oppressed, starving society but shows you people who do not act like starving, oppressed people. The social structure, economy, and behavior demonstrated by the characters in the book do not look or feel like those of the society that the author tells you exists. All of District 12's population is in the same local region and inter-District travel is severely limited, but there exists a class of travelling merchants who have racially-distinct features. Where do they travel to? What do they sell? What happens to their money? Everyone in all of the districts is meant to be starving and oppressed; even the people in Districts 1-3 are supposed to be bad-off, just less bad-off than District 12.
Maybe they're selling to the peacekeepers from the capitol who are mentioned every ten pages as being willing to buy venison.
Think about what you're saying in the real world for all of one second. Are you trying to claim that colonial Africa wasn't that bad because the Maasai were still able to raise cattle and everybody was able (read: forced) to attend indoctrination mills? Those lucky native Canadian kids, with their "public schools."
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
Katniss's family has a goat because Katniss regularly and routinely breaks the law in order to feed her family and trade for things like that.
Peeta's family is well off because they're merchants in the rich/less poor part of town, which are all coal miners.
As for the people in district 12 attending school, in the second book Katniss remarks that no one is allowed to work in the mines until they're 18. She actually comments that this is another way that District 12 is screwed over in the Games, because no one in the district learns anything that could help them survive them until they're too old to be reaped anyway.
And yet, despite her law-breaking, they're still meant to be starving. So if the law-breaking, goat-owning family are starving, the rest of District 12 must be...dead? According to the book, their goat came from an old man who sold goats. Presumably other people were purchasing his goats? What happened to the goats foaled by Katniss' goat? I guess they ate them, instead of trading them for a larger quantity of food to people who also wanting a continuing supply of milk and, eventually, goat meat? If they're starving, why are Katniss and Gale picky about what they eat, to the point of thinking that some of the things cooked by the black market lady are icky? Starving people in the real world will eat anything they think they might be able to digest to keep themselves from dying; they don't leave the insides of animals in the woods to rot and then turn up their noses at some mouse-stew.
And how, exactly, does the merchant part of town become less poor? The miners are the ones producing an export good. Who is buying from the merchants, if not the miners? There is no inter-district travel. There's no tourism industry. Who is Peeta selling cakes to so as to afford pigs? The peacekeepers? They're apparently starving, too, since they're willing to break the laws they're meant to be enforcing by buying illegal meat from Katniss.
In what way is working in the mines good preparation for the Games? Have lungs full of coal dust isn't going to help you run. Breaking rocks and hauling carts isn't going to prepare you with any survival skills. If the kids can't work in the mines, why are they not at home helping with the house work and gardening/animal tending instead of wasting time at school? It's not like there's opportunity for social mobility through education, and they don't have a plethora of labor-saving technological devices.
The books do not depict an oppressed, starving society. The author tells you that it's an oppressed, starving society but shows you people who do not act like starving, oppressed people. The social structure, economy, and behavior demonstrated by the characters in the book do not look or feel like those of the society that the author tells you exists. All of District 12's population is in the same local region and inter-District travel is severely limited, but there exists a class of travelling merchants who have racially-distinct features. Where do they travel to? What do they sell? What happens to their money? Everyone in all of the districts is meant to be starving and oppressed; even the people in Districts 1-3 are supposed to be bad-off, just less bad-off than District 12.
I wouldn't say they are depicted as starving. They were starving right after her dad died and her mom was super-depressed (hence the whole bread thing with Peeta), but at the time the story begins I wouldn't say they're even meant to be going hungry, much less starving. It is stated that there are occasionally hard times when the food shipment from the Capitol comes in spoiled or under the normal amount, but I never got the impression that this went on for extended periods of time.
The Peacekeepers buy the illegal meat to supplement the nasty (and inconsistent) food from the Capitol with something more flavorful - if they were desperate for food, they would just take it since there isn't any real check on their power.
And yes it is racist to be uniquely and profoundly surprised at a totally irrelevant racial deviation from source material especially if no other deviation was just as surprising to you. Haymitch, for instance, is portrayed somewhat differently in the book. Much more differently than the completely irrelevant distinction of Rue's skin color. If you're not sitting there "surprised" at every deviation as much as you are at totally irrelevant racial ones, then yes, you damn well fucking are a racist.
Rue was depicted in the books as looking scarily like Prim except with dark hair
I therefore expected her to look a lot like the actress they cast as Prim
I was therefore surprised
Apparently I am now racist?
Um...no she wasn't. She was depicted as having dark skin (and I think even dark brown skin). Maybe it wasn't clear enough to suggest to everyone that she was black (though the author has said in interviews that in her head the District 11 peoples were African-American), but certainly not just Prim with dark hair.
I really don't remember that at all, but I did read the books very fast. As I said, what I got was "Prim, dark hair." Was therefore surprised.
Maybe they're selling to the peacekeepers from the capitol who are mentioned every ten pages as being willing to buy venison.
Which we are told is because they are as desperate for good food as everyone else, implying that they, too, are going hungry. Meaning that they don't have a lot of money to throw around.
Think about what you're saying in the real world for all of one second. Are you trying to claim that colonial Africa wasn't that bad because the Maasai were still able to raise cattle and everybody was able (read: forced) to attend indoctrination mills? Those lucky native Canadian kids, with their "public schools."
No, I'd say that colonial Africa was so bad for the Maasai because the colonial powers tried to force them to stop raising cattle. They weren't starving to death when they were able to keep their herds the way that they wanted to. The more the government and private industry take over Maasai land, the less they're able to herd and the less food they have. But so long as they are keeping cows, no, they aren't starving to death. Compare them to other people in Kenya, or in Ethiopia, or Somalia, or Haiti, or North Korea, where skeletal people are falling over dead in the street because there is nothing to eat.
The Maasai have it bad (in terms of food) because the government is preventing them from properly maintaining their food supply. Starving people in other parts of Africa and the rest of the world don't have a local food supply that is difficult to keep going due to government intervention. Much like in the book, what little food people get in these places comes from a government dole. And government corruption keeps that dole from being sufficient. These people can't farm or raise animals because there isn't arable land and they don't have enough spare food to feed to animals, or grazing land to graze them on. That's the case, we are told, in The Hunger Games. But the people in the Hunger Games don't seem much like the starving of Ethiopia or Haiti to me, or even like the Maasai.
And while the schools may be indoctrination camps, that isn't said in the first book. It's just school. Katniss is apparently able to read and write and knows some history. I suppose she might have learned it all from her dad along with the woodcraft, but since she's not mentioned as being unique in that regard I don't see why we'd assume it. If they're all going to indoctrination camp from a young age on a daily basis, I would expect them to be enamored with the Capitol and its citizens rather than mocking their customs and appearance. Look at North Korea. Everyone there goes through life-long indoctrination and worship their leadership, despite that they're starving to death so that they can live in opulence.
I'd thought the district 11ers were latino, because the districts seemed to be broken up into very simplified slices of American cultures. District 11 works orchards and seemed to be somewhere around Georgia. District 12 were obviously Appalachian and so I’d always imagined them as rural, Appalachian folk.
Also, I decided the capital was in Denver, though I don’t remember exactly what led me to believe this other than that it was decently far away from the Appalachian neighborhood and in the mountains.
Maybe they're selling to the peacekeepers from the capitol who are mentioned every ten pages as being willing to buy venison.
Which we are told is because they are as desperate for good food as everyone else, implying that they, too, are going hungry. Meaning that they don't have a lot of money to throw around.
Think about what you're saying in the real world for all of one second. Are you trying to claim that colonial Africa wasn't that bad because the Maasai were still able to raise cattle and everybody was able (read: forced) to attend indoctrination mills? Those lucky native Canadian kids, with their "public schools."
No, I'd say that colonial Africa was so bad for the Maasai because the colonial powers tried to force them to stop raising cattle. They weren't starving to death when they were able to keep their herds the way that they wanted to. The more the government and private industry take over Maasai land, the less they're able to herd and the less food they have. But so long as they are keeping cows, no, they aren't starving to death. Compare them to other people in Kenya, or in Ethiopia, or Somalia, or Haiti, or North Korea, where skeletal people are falling over dead in the street because there is nothing to eat.
The Maasai have it bad (in terms of food) because the government is preventing them from properly maintaining their food supply. Starving people in other parts of Africa and the rest of the world don't have a local food supply that is difficult to keep going due to government intervention. Much like in the book, what little food people get in these places comes from a government dole. And government corruption keeps that dole from being sufficient. These people can't farm or raise animals because there isn't arable land and they don't have enough spare food to feed to animals, or grazing land to graze them on. That's the case, we are told, in The Hunger Games. But the people in the Hunger Games don't seem much like the starving of Ethiopia or Haiti to me, or even like the Maasai.
And while the schools may be indoctrination camps, that isn't said in the first book. It's just school. Katniss is apparently able to read and write and knows some history. I suppose she might have learned it all from her dad along with the woodcraft, but since she's not mentioned as being unique in that regard I don't see why we'd assume it. If they're all going to indoctrination camp from a young age on a daily basis, I would expect them to be enamored with the Capitol and its citizens rather than mocking their customs and appearance. Look at North Korea. Everyone there goes through life-long indoctrination and worship their leadership, despite that they're starving to death so that they can live in opulence.
Who said the indoctrination had to be successful? It's not like it is outside of North Korea in this world.
You don't graze goats, as they will eat damn near anything. That's why they're so popular in the areas of rural Africa that can't support cattle. They eat the woody plant matter that the human body can't absorb, making them an ideal source of subsistence protein. The starving people in places like Somalia are due to a drought destroying all productivity. People there still have the occasional goat or camel because, as already said, they can turn nutritionally useless plant matter into protein. Additionally, the Maasai aren't being blocked from shit by their current government, at least in Kenya. While they have had issues finding practical ways for the Maasai to communally own land in a legally consistent manner, that hasn't prevented grazing.
For the peace keepers, it's said that they buy her better meats, like venison, but can only sell stuff like squirrels to locals. If that doesn't show the peacekeepers expressing choice of food, I don't know what does.
I'd thought the district 11ers were latino, because the districts seemed to be broken up into very simplified slices of American cultures. District 11 works orchards and seemed to be somewhere around Georgia. District 12 were obviously Appalachian and so I’d always imagined them as rural, Appalachian folk.
Also, I decided the capital was in Denver, though I don’t remember exactly what led me to believe this other than that it was decently far away from the Appalachian neighborhood and in the mountains.
she explicitly said it was in the rockies; district 2 definitely has a
pigs are what the poor keep/eat for a specific reason: they eat trash. why a lot of cultures consider them too dirty to eat
same with goats. don't need a ton of grazing land.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Just got back from the film, and I haven't read the books, but the film was really underwhelming, especially considering it's a tentpole release picture and the running time is about two hours and thirty minutes.
Getting straight to the point, the film's biggest flaw (and from what I understand, one shared by the books) is that conceit that the film is based on, namely the suppression of the 12 districts by the Capitol, doesn't hold up by any logic or precedent shown in the film. And when you can't reasonably suspend disbelief for the film's central conceit, the rest never comes together. Why do the Districts go along with this scheme? Why does the Capitol need to do it in the first place? What, dear fuck, is the titular Hunger Games even about?
And that's the short of it. What is the Hunger Games? The film never answers this question in a logically consistent fashion. Is it a punishment for the rebellious districts? Maybe, but we're talking about a war that happened almost a century ago. And why would the districts not continue to rebel? What are the stakes to them?
Once we get to the Capitol, we're shown two states of being that are almost diametrically opposed: 1) the people of the Capitol are very intelligent, artistic, empathetic, and technologically advanced, and 2) the people of the Capitol are wholly insane, preoccupied with decadence and pageantry, not to mention the murder of very small children. They welcome the Tributes to their home and shower them with gifts and luxury, only to cheer as they are sent to their deaths. No part of this makes any sense. To make matters worse, the film never actually shows anyone in the Capitol outside the HG command hub who actively gives a shit about the Hunger Games while it's on TV; the only people the film shows watching are people in the other districts, who obviously have stake in the outcome. The central fucking conceit of the film is that The Hunger Games is the vitally important unifying thing that entertains the Capitol and subjects the Districts, yet we see nothing of this!
The overarching structural problem with this film is that it feels like Act 2 in a larger film. We are given almost zero context for the events that took place years before that established the Hunger Games as such a vital institution, and we are given no denouement for the obvious issues the finale brings up. This film should be asking the question, "What happens when the subjects refuse submission?" But the larger issues of oppression and sedition are almost totally ignored, which means that the movie literally has no commentary to offer whatsoever. It poses the question, "Hey, what if the Hunger Games happened?" and then dusts its hands like it has already done enough work. It's empty, it's hollow, and frankly it's derivative without offering anything novel or original in return.
Oh, and the story. How contrived. Katniss basically survives the Hunger Games because she has plot armor; every time she's in danger, or needs a key item, or is at luck's end, someone else comes along or something else happens that resolves the situation with little active involvement on her part. Katniss trapped up a tree? Don't worry, Rue will be along shortly to point out the very convenient tracker-jackers (ugh) poised directly over your sleeping enemies. Burnt by fire? Don't worry, Haymitch will send you some miracle salve. Being stalked by others? Don't worry, Rue will catch spears for you. About to have your throat slit open? Don't worry, the girl with the knife will give a 10-minute Bond Villain speech before she kills you, giving the guy from District 11 plenty of time to randomly show up and save you. Inconvenient characters still lingering around? Don't worry, the cyber-dogs are on their way. She's is one of the least involved people in the whole movie, and it's her film.
Also, the film looks like it cost about eight dollars to make. The CGI is impossibly terrible, and I've literally seen better on TV or DTV movies routinely. The constant use of shakey-cam is novel, until scenes like the rebellion in District 11 where you quite actually can't tell what's going on. The film also constantly uses middle-ground coverage, probably to hide how shitty the sets are. I was really taken aback by how cheap everything looked. Just awful.
I'm sure I've got more, but I'm taking a break for a little while.
Clearly a number of you and I just have a difference of opinion about what 'starving' means.
If it's possible to have goats then I contend that a society should not be starving unless they are forced to starve. Since nobody is taking the goats away, I don't understand why anyone is starving. Especially in a small community who should, logically, be pressed into a tighter-knit social group than they otherwise would be by mutual dislike of their oppressors. Pigs, on the other hand, eat human food. If you have food to throw away because you don't want to eat it then cool, pigs are great. If you're starving then I don't believe you have food to throw away. Burnt bread is edible bread, and someone in a starving society wants to eat it.
The folks in District 12 are poor, but they don't appear to be starving. And this is meant to be the worst-off of all the districts. If a meager year's supply of cheap grain for one person is the reward for doubling your odds of being called in for the murder games and doesn't seem like a necessary risk for the majority population here, in the worst place, why would it be common enough in the rest of the districts to even be a thing?
The book is just full of stuff that sounds okay if you either don't think about it at all or you can maybe sort of muster an explanation for if you do enough mental contorting. Why people are starving if there are goats available. How the local economy could possibly work. Why more people don't break the law given how easy it appears to be and how great the benefits apparently are. Why the entire population puts up with annual child sacrifice rather than staging annual riots, or at least passive-aggressive civil disobedience at Reaping time. The Capital's cartoonish villainy. Dodgy woodcraft. Completely retarded strategic decisions by supposedly trained killers. Outrunning a forest fire. Ass-backward game design for entertainment by people who should be better at it after most of a century's practice. Ridiculous genetically-modified creatures with obvious and horrible flaws in their implementation given their stated design goals. The starvation thing isn't even the worst or most glaring flaw; it's just that it's right there in the title.
Quick answers for some of your issues (this is book stuff):
What are the Hunger Games?
A way for the Capitol to show that they owned your ass so hard last time you rebelled (74 years ago) that we can make you send your children to fight for our amusement.
Why do the districts participate?
1) They get more rations if one of their Tributes wins. This is important because none of the districts are self-sufficient.
2) The Capitol will kill the shit out of them if they don't.
What ended the rebellion?
The Districts were defeated militarily.
Okay, smartass, but why don't they keep rebelling?
The Capitol still has "peacekeepers" in the Districts who are essentially enforcing martial law. They are allowed to execute/punish people without trial for sedition. I guess this is actually shown more in the 2nd book, which is a failing on the author's part.
The plot armor stuff is straight out of the books, unfortunately. It's also unfortunate that they don't provide any of this context in the film, but I guess they didn't really have time to do an exposition dump to explain it or the people involved with the film thought everyone already knows it (which would be duuuuumb).
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Completely retarded strategic decisions by supposedly trained killers. Outrunning a forest fire. Ass-backward game design for entertainment by people who should be better at it after most of a century's practice.
And it that regard, how the hell is there any public support for the games when the rules are so arbitrary and the HQ can basically just kill people at whim? When they sent the forest fire after Katniss, it was a combination of her athleticism and pure luck that it didn't kill her, and it still injured her gravely. Who cheers for that shit? "Oh sorry, District 11, your last remaining champion succumbed to the stresses of a wild pack of fucking killer super-dogs that we released for the sole purpose of murdering people who are already murdering each other. Maybe next year."
I haven't seen it yet, but your post does sort of confirm something I suspected - that a film can't really capture what makes the book good. The book is written in first-person present tense, and it's about Katniss' mental state as all of these events are occurring. The issue of how the world came to be the way it is is a problem I noticed right off the bat, but somehow it seems less egregious in the first-person perspective, because Katniss doesn't care about how District 1 came to power. Maybe I'll toss this into spoilers, but it's on the inside of the second book jacket:
She's more concerned with what she can do to help bring it down. It's still guilty of the kind of thing we let videogames get away with all the time (she's preternaturally good with a weapon despite her age), but the story seems more concerned with the traumatic effects events like these can have on a person. And the characters are a bit more complex. Katniss isn't so "Strong Female Heroine" that her actions are predictable, Gale (serious fucking spoiler)
kinda becomes a dispicable person without a trite Face Heel Turn
Clearly a number of you and I just have a difference of opinion about what 'starving' means.
If it's possible to have goats then I contend that a society should not be starving unless they are forced to starve. Since nobody is taking the goats away, I don't understand why anyone is starving. Especially in a small community who should, logically, be pressed into a tighter-knit social group than they otherwise would be by mutual dislike of their oppressors. Pigs, on the other hand, eat human food. If you have food to throw away because you don't want to eat it then cool, pigs are great. If you're starving then I don't believe you have food to throw away. Burnt bread is edible bread, and someone in a starving society wants to eat it.
The folks in District 12 are poor, but they don't appear to be starving. And this is meant to be the worst-off of all the districts. If a meager year's supply of cheap grain for one person is the reward for doubling your odds of being called in for the murder games and doesn't seem like a necessary risk for the majority population here, in the worst place, why would it be common enough in the rest of the districts to even be a thing?
The book is just full of stuff that sounds okay if you either don't think about it at all or you can maybe sort of muster an explanation for if you do enough mental contorting. Why people are starving if there are goats available. How the local economy could possibly work. Why more people don't break the law given how easy it appears to be and how great the benefits apparently are. Why the entire population puts up with annual child sacrifice rather than staging annual riots, or at least passive-aggressive civil disobedience at Reaping time. The Capital's cartoonish villainy. Dodgy woodcraft. Completely retarded strategic decisions by supposedly trained killers. Outrunning a forest fire. Ass-backward game design for entertainment by people who should be better at it after most of a century's practice. Ridiculous genetically-modified creatures with obvious and horrible flaws in their implementation given their stated design goals. The starvation thing isn't even the worst or most glaring flaw; it's just that it's right there in the title.
The problem is that you want this book/movie to be consistent with the world as it is today and modern human behavior. The rest of us are just asking it to be consistent with itself, and it does an OK enough job with that for us to put it aside and focus on the action.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Quick answers for some of your issues (this is book stuff):
What are the Hunger Games?
A way for the Capitol to show that they owned your ass so hard last time you rebelled (74 years ago) that we can make you send your children to fight for our amusement.
Except no one in the Capitol appears at all bothered with the games. No one is shown watching them on TV, and during the interviews Cinna and his cohorts are shows to be actively apathetic.
Why do the districts participate?
1) They get more rations if one of their Tributes wins. This is important because none of the districts are self-sufficient.
2) The Capitol will kill the shit out of them if they don't.
1) The film in no way shows this or even really implies this.
2) The film also shows each district being patrolled by, like, a dozen dudes with rifles. District 11 seemed to hold their ground alright. And seriously, guerrilla warfare anyone? Pretty easy when your district is endless miles of mountains, trees, and caves.
What ended the rebellion?
The Districts were defeated militarily.
Again, the Districts have both the numbers and the leverage against the Capital. Not seeing the logic.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
The problem is that you want this book/movie to be consistent with the world as it is today and modern human behavior.
Why is this a "problem?" This is like saying "your problem is that you want things to make a certain amount of logical and consistent sense, while the rest of us are above that kind of triviality."
The movie handwaves and shorthands a lot of stuff from the real world; TV shows, coal mines, photography, even the style of dress that people affect. You can't use cultural scripts for your shorthand and then act like the obvious incongruities those things imply in your story are just trivial.
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
But the Capital is obsessed with the games. It's like American Idol to them, except it's common for the winner to be solicited out for sex and or entertainment. I mean, what do you want? A in movie mention of the view count?
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the rock is part black and Beyonce IS black. err wut o.O
The rest of this post contains real-ass SPOILERS for both BR and THG trilogy.
Similarities:
2. "Injury may be infected, oh god need medicine" subplot
3. Forbidden zones (BR) vs. the clock arena in THG2. Not exactly the same, but they serve the same narrative and stated purposes.
4. Psychopaths who dominate the game until climactic fight with the heroes (I can see this flowing from 1 if you come up with it independently, though)
5. Multiple survivors (I hesitate to say "winners" for obvious reasons)
6. Gaming the system via technical means to escape
7. The point of the exercise. Both are used to cow the population into a sense of fear/hopelessness.
Differences:
2. BR is much more explicit in its anti-authoritarian message than THG1. THG's messaging in this regard doesn't really kick off until the Reaping in Book 2.
3. BR deals far, far more with teenage relationships than any part of THG. If this is what you don't like in THG, then you should really hate BR.
4. Shuya develops real feelings for Noriko over the course of the Program. Katniss (as has been discussed) doesn't harbor any serious feelings for Peeta until much later (or, arguably, ever). Honestly, showing girls that they don't have to derive their self-worth or image from a SO is probably the most important part of THG.
5. The Programs in BR are held in secret and the winner is announced in a quick thing on the news afterwards. THG are a super reality show spectacle - considering this is one of the main things the book is railing against, I'd say this is an important detail.
6. There are lot of differences in the details (number of contestants, means of selection, how often they are held, etc).
Overall, I used to be kind of ambivalent about the whole "Hunger Games is just a Battle Royale rip-off" as just an Internet being Internet thing. Now that I've read Battle Royale, though, it is really, really difficult to believe that it was absolutely no influence on or inspiration to The Hunger Games. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, however, and there are enough differences to where writing off THG as a direct rip-off of BR for the US YA audience is being far too reductive.
I honestly think The Hunger Games is a more enjoyable read because it is a bit more focused, though this may just be because I am not used to the Japanese writing style of Battle Royale. I also think THG would be much easier to adapt to film, as it is not nearly as dense as BR - the BR novel describing just the one Program is about as long as the first two Hunger Games books combined.
The setting in the books is conceptually horrifying and thought provoking, but (at least in the first book) isn't actually terribly horrifying. The author tells us how bad things are and how everyone is starving, but there is no actual demonstration of this. The kids are big (other than Katniss who, we are told, is naturally small; not stunted by starvation), fit, and nothing about District 12 really screams 'starving, oppressed citizenry' in the book. I mean, Katniss' family has a goat. Peeta's family keeps pigs. Pigs are a massive resource drain. The bakery sells cakes with sugar frosting that they make enough of to show in the window. The starving, oppressed people of the districts have enough free time for the children to all attend (free, public) school on a regular basis and enough money to fund an orphanage. The only actual evidence of government oppression on offer is the existence of the games, which, in the book, everyone except those directly involved and Gale appear to be pretty much okay with. The District 12 crowd in the book is cheering and betting during the reaping.
The movie at least managed to dispense with enough of the ridiculous bullshit from the book to make the story not glaringly, fundamentally flawed from a logical standpoint. It's still fundamentally flawed, but it's more fridge-logic flawed than immediate, "what the fuck was the author even thinking" flawed.
Katniss's family has a goat because Katniss regularly and routinely breaks the law in order to feed her family and trade for things like that.
Peeta's family is well off because they're merchants in the rich/less poor part of town, which are all coal miners.
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The first book was interesting because it seemed that the people were being DELIBERATELY denied resources at a certain level to keep them a little bit desperate. Not so desperate that they would riot, but desperate enough that they could be controlled. Spoilers follow I guess
This was pretty much blatantly obvious to me. The environment beyond the walls had clearly recovered, and there was no need for the system. There were no food shortages or resource shortages other than those which President Snow and his cronies created. The ENTIRE world was just a contrivance for their amusement and power tripping, just like the hunger games were for the people of the city over the districts. The system was made to work just well enough to make you afraid of what would happen if it didn't...
Katniss's family has a goat because Katniss regularly and routinely breaks the law in order to feed her family and trade for things like that.
Peeta's family is well off because they're merchants in the rich/less poor part of town, which are all coal miners.
As for the people in district 12 attending school, in the second book Katniss remarks that no one is allowed to work in the mines until they're 18. She actually comments that this is another way that District 12 is screwed over in the Games, because no one in the district learns anything that could help them survive them until they're too old to be reaped anyway.
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Funny enough, guess who voiced Kingpin?
Is that me being racist, or the movie?
Well, the author said she pictured District 11 as predominately black. So I guess you could blame the author or the fictional society.
I honestly forgot about the line with Rue's physical description, so I kind of thought she was white too. I wouldn't have been shocked or whatever when she showed up in the movie, though.
What the fuck? People really said that?
Wouldn't surprise me.
I thought of this. But I guess not everyone has listened to Dan Carlin's Rome audiobook :P
I kind of thought Peeta would kind of look like a younger version of Sean Astin for some reason. My picture of Katniss was tainted because I saw the first trailer before I read the books, though.
I'm not sure you know anything about rural poverty. I've been to the poorest area in the ass-end of rural Tanzania, and let me assure you that there are pigs. Goats and sheep are more popular, but there are pigs. There are also local elites who can afford cakes and nail polish. Hell, why would you think that the administrators and peacekeepers from the capitol would also live in abject poverty or have all their food shipped in from the capitol, or that no one ever saves up for a rare luxury?
Hell, were you even paying attention to the book? It explicitly stated that the people betting on the outcome were the most morally depraved in the district, and that both Katniss and Peeta were stunted compared to the competitors who had been adequately fed so they could bring home the prize to the district.
And yet, despite her law-breaking, they're still meant to be starving. So if the law-breaking, goat-owning family are starving, the rest of District 12 must be...dead? According to the book, their goat came from an old man who sold goats. Presumably other people were purchasing his goats? What happened to the goats foaled by Katniss' goat? I guess they ate them, instead of trading them for a larger quantity of food to people who also wanting a continuing supply of milk and, eventually, goat meat? If they're starving, why are Katniss and Gale picky about what they eat, to the point of thinking that some of the things cooked by the black market lady are icky? Starving people in the real world will eat anything they think they might be able to digest to keep themselves from dying; they don't leave the insides of animals in the woods to rot and then turn up their noses at some mouse-stew.
And how, exactly, does the merchant part of town become less poor? The miners are the ones producing an export good. Who is buying from the merchants, if not the miners? There is no inter-district travel. There's no tourism industry. Who is Peeta selling cakes to so as to afford pigs? The peacekeepers? They're apparently starving, too, since they're willing to break the laws they're meant to be enforcing by buying illegal meat from Katniss.
In what way is working in the mines good preparation for the Games? Have lungs full of coal dust isn't going to help you run. Breaking rocks and hauling carts isn't going to prepare you with any survival skills. If the kids can't work in the mines, why are they not at home helping with the house work and gardening/animal tending instead of wasting time at school? It's not like there's opportunity for social mobility through education, and they don't have a plethora of labor-saving technological devices.
The books do not depict an oppressed, starving society. The author tells you that it's an oppressed, starving society but shows you people who do not act like starving, oppressed people. The social structure, economy, and behavior demonstrated by the characters in the book do not look or feel like those of the society that the author tells you exists. All of District 12's population is in the same local region and inter-District travel is severely limited, but there exists a class of travelling merchants who have racially-distinct features. Where do they travel to? What do they sell? What happens to their money? Everyone in all of the districts is meant to be starving and oppressed; even the people in Districts 1-3 are supposed to be bad-off, just less bad-off than District 12.
That's pretty sad seeing how a friend tried to hype me for it.
I really liked it, except I had a minor problem with the
But that was a really small thing. It was pretty solid overall.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Rural poverty, with communities of subsistence farmers, is not the same thing as a society of people who are forced to starve. The book demonstrates that there is ample food available in the neighboring woodland but that the Capitol's laws are meant to be keeping the society in a state of starvation. Real-world societies don't reach the point that we're meant to believe District 12 is at, generally, because starving your populace is bad for running a country. The only exceptions I'm aware of are in a small handful of dictatorships where the populace are legitimately starving and dying. North Korea. Parts of Africa. Do you think that many of the North Koreans who are literally starving to death because all of the food goes to the government and military have enough spare food to keep pigs? How about the families in Africa who subsist on a diet rich in cookies made out of literal dirt? Sure, dirt-cookies are a cultural tradition, but they are dying of malnourishment because there is no other food to fill their stomachs besides dirt-cookies. Perhaps the folks living on piles of refuse in other parts of Africa and Asia? Eating spoiled food and garbage because they have no food? Are they keeping goats?
I think that the administrators and peacekeepers are impoverished because we are told that the peacekeepers are as desperate for food as the rest of the District, which is why they buy illegal game from Katniss. We are never shown anyone who didn't come direct from the Capitol who is not supposed to be poor.
Except that Katniss says that she is naturally small, rather than stunted, and Peeta is strong enough to impress the trained kids from the central Districts with his feats of brawn. District 11 is supposed to be nearly as bad off as District 12, or possibly worse, it's not really clear, yet Thresh is over 6' tall and hugely strong. Rue is fit enough to leap between trees. If you rounded up a crop of 18 or so actually starving children from Africa and North Korea and threw them into an arena with 6 trained, fed 18 year olds they would die. Immediately. They couldn't run. Couldn't put of a fight. They're starving. These are the Hunger Games, where the reward for risking your life by putting your name in the hat is food, because everyone is so poor that risking your children's lives is worth it for a little more grain.
Maybe they're selling to the peacekeepers from the capitol who are mentioned every ten pages as being willing to buy venison.
Think about what you're saying in the real world for all of one second. Are you trying to claim that colonial Africa wasn't that bad because the Maasai were still able to raise cattle and everybody was able (read: forced) to attend indoctrination mills? Those lucky native Canadian kids, with their "public schools."
I wouldn't say they are depicted as starving. They were starving right after her dad died and her mom was super-depressed (hence the whole bread thing with Peeta), but at the time the story begins I wouldn't say they're even meant to be going hungry, much less starving. It is stated that there are occasionally hard times when the food shipment from the Capitol comes in spoiled or under the normal amount, but I never got the impression that this went on for extended periods of time.
The Peacekeepers buy the illegal meat to supplement the nasty (and inconsistent) food from the Capitol with something more flavorful - if they were desperate for food, they would just take it since there isn't any real check on their power.
I keep thinking we read different books.
I really don't remember that at all, but I did read the books very fast. As I said, what I got was "Prim, dark hair." Was therefore surprised.
No, I'd say that colonial Africa was so bad for the Maasai because the colonial powers tried to force them to stop raising cattle. They weren't starving to death when they were able to keep their herds the way that they wanted to. The more the government and private industry take over Maasai land, the less they're able to herd and the less food they have. But so long as they are keeping cows, no, they aren't starving to death. Compare them to other people in Kenya, or in Ethiopia, or Somalia, or Haiti, or North Korea, where skeletal people are falling over dead in the street because there is nothing to eat.
The Maasai have it bad (in terms of food) because the government is preventing them from properly maintaining their food supply. Starving people in other parts of Africa and the rest of the world don't have a local food supply that is difficult to keep going due to government intervention. Much like in the book, what little food people get in these places comes from a government dole. And government corruption keeps that dole from being sufficient. These people can't farm or raise animals because there isn't arable land and they don't have enough spare food to feed to animals, or grazing land to graze them on. That's the case, we are told, in The Hunger Games. But the people in the Hunger Games don't seem much like the starving of Ethiopia or Haiti to me, or even like the Maasai.
And while the schools may be indoctrination camps, that isn't said in the first book. It's just school. Katniss is apparently able to read and write and knows some history. I suppose she might have learned it all from her dad along with the woodcraft, but since she's not mentioned as being unique in that regard I don't see why we'd assume it. If they're all going to indoctrination camp from a young age on a daily basis, I would expect them to be enamored with the Capitol and its citizens rather than mocking their customs and appearance. Look at North Korea. Everyone there goes through life-long indoctrination and worship their leadership, despite that they're starving to death so that they can live in opulence.
Severus is clearly a boys name.
Also, I decided the capital was in Denver, though I don’t remember exactly what led me to believe this other than that it was decently far away from the Appalachian neighborhood and in the mountains.
Who said the indoctrination had to be successful? It's not like it is outside of North Korea in this world.
You don't graze goats, as they will eat damn near anything. That's why they're so popular in the areas of rural Africa that can't support cattle. They eat the woody plant matter that the human body can't absorb, making them an ideal source of subsistence protein. The starving people in places like Somalia are due to a drought destroying all productivity. People there still have the occasional goat or camel because, as already said, they can turn nutritionally useless plant matter into protein. Additionally, the Maasai aren't being blocked from shit by their current government, at least in Kenya. While they have had issues finding practical ways for the Maasai to communally own land in a legally consistent manner, that hasn't prevented grazing.
For the peace keepers, it's said that they buy her better meats, like venison, but can only sell stuff like squirrels to locals. If that doesn't show the peacekeepers expressing choice of food, I don't know what does.
she explicitly said it was in the rockies; district 2 definitely has a
same with goats. don't need a ton of grazing land.
Getting straight to the point, the film's biggest flaw (and from what I understand, one shared by the books) is that conceit that the film is based on, namely the suppression of the 12 districts by the Capitol, doesn't hold up by any logic or precedent shown in the film. And when you can't reasonably suspend disbelief for the film's central conceit, the rest never comes together. Why do the Districts go along with this scheme? Why does the Capitol need to do it in the first place? What, dear fuck, is the titular Hunger Games even about?
And that's the short of it. What is the Hunger Games? The film never answers this question in a logically consistent fashion. Is it a punishment for the rebellious districts? Maybe, but we're talking about a war that happened almost a century ago. And why would the districts not continue to rebel? What are the stakes to them?
Once we get to the Capitol, we're shown two states of being that are almost diametrically opposed: 1) the people of the Capitol are very intelligent, artistic, empathetic, and technologically advanced, and 2) the people of the Capitol are wholly insane, preoccupied with decadence and pageantry, not to mention the murder of very small children. They welcome the Tributes to their home and shower them with gifts and luxury, only to cheer as they are sent to their deaths. No part of this makes any sense. To make matters worse, the film never actually shows anyone in the Capitol outside the HG command hub who actively gives a shit about the Hunger Games while it's on TV; the only people the film shows watching are people in the other districts, who obviously have stake in the outcome. The central fucking conceit of the film is that The Hunger Games is the vitally important unifying thing that entertains the Capitol and subjects the Districts, yet we see nothing of this!
The overarching structural problem with this film is that it feels like Act 2 in a larger film. We are given almost zero context for the events that took place years before that established the Hunger Games as such a vital institution, and we are given no denouement for the obvious issues the finale brings up. This film should be asking the question, "What happens when the subjects refuse submission?" But the larger issues of oppression and sedition are almost totally ignored, which means that the movie literally has no commentary to offer whatsoever. It poses the question, "Hey, what if the Hunger Games happened?" and then dusts its hands like it has already done enough work. It's empty, it's hollow, and frankly it's derivative without offering anything novel or original in return.
Oh, and the story. How contrived. Katniss basically survives the Hunger Games because she has plot armor; every time she's in danger, or needs a key item, or is at luck's end, someone else comes along or something else happens that resolves the situation with little active involvement on her part. Katniss trapped up a tree? Don't worry, Rue will be along shortly to point out the very convenient tracker-jackers (ugh) poised directly over your sleeping enemies. Burnt by fire? Don't worry, Haymitch will send you some miracle salve. Being stalked by others? Don't worry, Rue will catch spears for you. About to have your throat slit open? Don't worry, the girl with the knife will give a 10-minute Bond Villain speech before she kills you, giving the guy from District 11 plenty of time to randomly show up and save you. Inconvenient characters still lingering around? Don't worry, the cyber-dogs are on their way. She's is one of the least involved people in the whole movie, and it's her film.
Also, the film looks like it cost about eight dollars to make. The CGI is impossibly terrible, and I've literally seen better on TV or DTV movies routinely. The constant use of shakey-cam is novel, until scenes like the rebellion in District 11 where you quite actually can't tell what's going on. The film also constantly uses middle-ground coverage, probably to hide how shitty the sets are. I was really taken aback by how cheap everything looked. Just awful.
I'm sure I've got more, but I'm taking a break for a little while.
If it's possible to have goats then I contend that a society should not be starving unless they are forced to starve. Since nobody is taking the goats away, I don't understand why anyone is starving. Especially in a small community who should, logically, be pressed into a tighter-knit social group than they otherwise would be by mutual dislike of their oppressors. Pigs, on the other hand, eat human food. If you have food to throw away because you don't want to eat it then cool, pigs are great. If you're starving then I don't believe you have food to throw away. Burnt bread is edible bread, and someone in a starving society wants to eat it.
The folks in District 12 are poor, but they don't appear to be starving. And this is meant to be the worst-off of all the districts. If a meager year's supply of cheap grain for one person is the reward for doubling your odds of being called in for the murder games and doesn't seem like a necessary risk for the majority population here, in the worst place, why would it be common enough in the rest of the districts to even be a thing?
The book is just full of stuff that sounds okay if you either don't think about it at all or you can maybe sort of muster an explanation for if you do enough mental contorting. Why people are starving if there are goats available. How the local economy could possibly work. Why more people don't break the law given how easy it appears to be and how great the benefits apparently are. Why the entire population puts up with annual child sacrifice rather than staging annual riots, or at least passive-aggressive civil disobedience at Reaping time. The Capital's cartoonish villainy. Dodgy woodcraft. Completely retarded strategic decisions by supposedly trained killers. Outrunning a forest fire. Ass-backward game design for entertainment by people who should be better at it after most of a century's practice. Ridiculous genetically-modified creatures with obvious and horrible flaws in their implementation given their stated design goals. The starvation thing isn't even the worst or most glaring flaw; it's just that it's right there in the title.
What are the Hunger Games?
A way for the Capitol to show that they owned your ass so hard last time you rebelled (74 years ago) that we can make you send your children to fight for our amusement.
Why do the districts participate?
1) They get more rations if one of their Tributes wins. This is important because none of the districts are self-sufficient.
2) The Capitol will kill the shit out of them if they don't.
What ended the rebellion?
The Districts were defeated militarily.
Okay, smartass, but why don't they keep rebelling?
The Capitol still has "peacekeepers" in the Districts who are essentially enforcing martial law. They are allowed to execute/punish people without trial for sedition. I guess this is actually shown more in the 2nd book, which is a failing on the author's part.
The plot armor stuff is straight out of the books, unfortunately. It's also unfortunate that they don't provide any of this context in the film, but I guess they didn't really have time to do an exposition dump to explain it or the people involved with the film thought everyone already knows it (which would be duuuuumb).
And it that regard, how the hell is there any public support for the games when the rules are so arbitrary and the HQ can basically just kill people at whim? When they sent the forest fire after Katniss, it was a combination of her athleticism and pure luck that it didn't kill her, and it still injured her gravely. Who cheers for that shit? "Oh sorry, District 11, your last remaining champion succumbed to the stresses of a wild pack of fucking killer super-dogs that we released for the sole purpose of murdering people who are already murdering each other. Maybe next year."
The problem is that you want this book/movie to be consistent with the world as it is today and modern human behavior. The rest of us are just asking it to be consistent with itself, and it does an OK enough job with that for us to put it aside and focus on the action.
Except no one in the Capitol appears at all bothered with the games. No one is shown watching them on TV, and during the interviews Cinna and his cohorts are shows to be actively apathetic.
1) The film in no way shows this or even really implies this.
2) The film also shows each district being patrolled by, like, a dozen dudes with rifles. District 11 seemed to hold their ground alright. And seriously, guerrilla warfare anyone? Pretty easy when your district is endless miles of mountains, trees, and caves.
Again, the Districts have both the numbers and the leverage against the Capital. Not seeing the logic.
Why is this a "problem?" This is like saying "your problem is that you want things to make a certain amount of logical and consistent sense, while the rest of us are above that kind of triviality."
The movie handwaves and shorthands a lot of stuff from the real world; TV shows, coal mines, photography, even the style of dress that people affect. You can't use cultural scripts for your shorthand and then act like the obvious incongruities those things imply in your story are just trivial.