What pisses me off when I bring that glaring lack of logic up, and other people are all like, “It doesn’t matter what happened to the rest of the world; just go with it!”
Which is just fucking lazy, self-centered thinking to me… even for a kid’s novel.
A) If you want to suspend my personal sense of disbelief, it matters; because there’s no way a deeply entrenched power-addicted government body like ours ‘just goes away’ without some kind of major cataclysm happening. And if such a catastrophic event does happen, there’s no way that the other world powers don’t descend upon the remnants of the country to plunder it for resources… unless that same event has already rendered them powerless to do so.
B) It matters a whole fucking lot to the rest of the world, that they somehow no longer seem to exist.
I’ve only read the first book, and that was a while ago, but wasn’t it that the rest of the regions rose up against the region now known as “the capitol”, but the capitol had more resources and firepower and basically decimated all of them?
It’s as if there was a general uprising against Trump now, and he used the military to a) crush it and b) make sure it never happened again.
The Hunger Games don’t seem as farfetched as they were a year ago.
I watched the Norwegian film The 12th Man, about a lone survivor of a failed resistance effort to sabotage German bases during WWII, and was pleasantly surprised that there are still important stories to be told. I’m not sure how much of it was dramatized, but the hero really took some punishment in the movie, almost as bad as the guy in Jack London’s To Build a Fire.
Bonus: Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the villain.
That did happen, but ‘the Capitol’ regime is a distinctly different animal than the US government. The insurgency mentioned was in response to the citizens of “panem” being forced to fight their children to the death.
We’re meant to think that the hunger games universe is our own dystopian future… which means that something detrimental had to have happened to congress, the military, and the rest of our governing bodies that are currently in place.
Collins just never bothers to tell her audience what that ‘something’ was.
Somewhere upthread there was discussion about The Edge of Tomorrow, and it made me think.
I would pay good money to see Tom Cruise trade places and genres with Bill Murray between The Edge of Tomorrow and Groundhog Day.
The Edge of Tomorrow, comedy-romance: A weatherman fighting aliens gets to relive the same day over and over again, the day restarting every time he dies.
Groundhog Day, action-drama: A soldier finds himself inexplicably living the same day over and over again in Punxatawney, PA.
I got to the (fairly early) scene where Jessica Biel stabs someone, while not having had a visible emotion up to that point, and gave up. Did I give up too soon?
Generally I can’t relate to that particular actor in any role, so I’m wondering if there is something worthwhile a little later on, or if it’s just Jessica Biel continually failing to convey any emotion at all while things happen around her.
It was supposed to be his day off. A fluff piece: represent the military at some stupid community event. But when the soldier wakes up and finds himself repeating the day, he suspects enemy action. What he finds will change everything - because something else is repeating Groundhog Day over and over, something sinister… and only one of them can leave Punxatawney alive.
Phil Hammersley didn’t know why they wanted a meteorologist on the frontier, but he didn’t question it: the hazard pay would book him a trip to Riza for a month’s vacation. He didn’t expect to be drafted into the fight, and he certainly didn’t expect to get stuck fighting the same day, the same battle, over and over. What would you do, stuck in a war zone with absolutely no consequences? Anything you want.
I can see your argument about laziness, but this is supposed to be about a century after whatever the event was. Given the capitols attempts to ruthlessly control information (destroying the 13th district in their efforts) and the length of time that has passed since the original unraveling of society, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch that the events in the past would be vague.
And the story is told through the perspective of children. I think her goal was to explore the trauma children suffer in war time. Kids often don’t understand what’s happening in events that they get sucked into, even if they are deeply involved in them. I expect that the kids in places like the Sudan who ended up as child soldiers were probably pretty hazy on what was happening to them.
I would love if she did a book that focuses on the disintegration of the US that turned it into panem.
I just discovered another good Masterpiece series, called Unforgotten, where a British detective and her partner solve cold cases. A lot of classic Masterpiece actors in guest spots on this one.
That’s the thing; it was more than just vague - it was pretty much non-existent. A simple line or two about a nuclear holocaust or an epidemic that wiped out 90% of the world’s populace would have sufficed.
The last time I had this conversation someone brought up the Mad Max universe and how ‘we dont need to know the whole backstory in order to believe in Max’s reality…’ but even in that lore, there were brief flashbacks of mushroom clouds and many of the characters actually acknowledge the downfall of the pre-existing society;
“Who killed the world?”
Even the kids in Thunderdome had an inkling of an idea about the fall of civilization, even if they didn’t know all the deets.
That never happens with Collins’ work. It’s just boom - 7/8ths of the human species is gone; deal with it.
Then you have the shift from where we are now as a declining society to a world where people are being forced to have their kids fight to the death… something that drastic doesn’t ‘just happen’ - some major upheavals have to take place before one of the most primal instincts - protect your offspring - can be dampened, let alone suppressed.
Don’t hold your breath; she’s already got her residual paychecks from the franchise.
(I might be interested if someone else with a better imagination told that story, because it is a good idea.)
In North Korea today, by the nearest evidence anyone can manage, kids are taken from their parents when they start their education and live in dorms at the school. That’s a short step from the Hunger Games.
Besides in the HG it’s all a lottery. Parents just hope it’s not their kid that gets picked. And because they’ve suffered so much death already, that seems reasonable.
But is it the whole world that’s like this, or just the US? I guess I missed the detail, but in my head Panem was more like Gilead, with the other countries in the world just leaving it alone because engaging would not be in their best interests.
