Seen enough marvel shlock, want something that isn't subversive within a system but directly fights against it and loudly
Keep your negative takes out please I've had it with the irony poisoned doomerism of late
Seen enough marvel shlock, want something that isn't subversive within a system but directly fights against it and loudly
Keep your negative takes out please I've had it with the irony poisoned doomerism of late
Hunger Games is an incredibly interesting series to me because it was written by a person who is almost unarguably (and self-admits) to being a liberal and yet gets "revolution" as a concept the least wrong of all the YA series that achieved some level of popular success. I was rereading it in my downtime, and watched the films, and yeah "2 movies for 1 book bad" and whatever but the series as a whole is a lot better than I remember. I dislike how much time is spent agonising over and over on the same few points in the last book but it's a series centered on Katniss and not the whole country and she's very traumatised so I can't earnestly complain about it.
But I like the part where the revolutionaries realize that even the ones who live in the Capitol aren't safe from the tyranny of their state, as they have their families killed or they're sold into sex slavery or their tongues cut out for speaking against them, so it's a bargain of "If we give the Capitol citizens all the treats we can muster, and in fact have the entirety of post-apocalyptic and post-reconstruction America funnelling treats into your maws and you can do subversive fashion as long as it's not actually subversive and so on, then they won't have any reason to disobey us.", which is obviously a play on current day norms with the third world and America itself.
And the obvious Roman themes to parallel modern America. They even do the 'vomitorium' thing but it's actually them taking pills to make them vomit so they can eat more food, which was what the myth said the Romans were doing rather than it just being an arena exit, showing how they're even more 'decadent' and wasteful than the height of Rome actually was.
I think overall Hunger Games strikes a curious middle point between a liberal understanding of what revolution is and what a socialist understanding of what revolution is. And the difference between individual acts of defiance (book 1) and broader uprisings (book 2 and 3) and how that's both very different to how it works in reality (the dam scene; basically the entire civil war) and yet mutually feeds off each other (the scene in the first half of book 2 with Rue's district). I think if you don't have a materialist socialist view of the world then you lose a bit of understanding, sure ("Oh, well Panem sucks but thank god we don't have it as bad as them right now and the events in the book prior to the revolution aren't happening right now as we speak! This could be our future if we aren't careful!") but it's also approachable enough despite its revolutionary undertones that it achieved basically household popularity, kinda like James Cameron's Avatar and a couple other things.
Yeah. I actually was a big fan of Collins from her previous series, Gregor the Overlander, and I given the context from that think the overall message she was going for was more anti-war than anti-capitalism. It was quite a ride for me actually following the series before the first book even launched lol.
The 3rd book (and then movies) definitely suffered from the publishing schedule, it felt incredibly rushed, and the message got pretty murky:
spoiler
Especially since the resolution of the obligatory love triangle involved pulling a marvel-realizing-a-villain-is-right on Gale, having him and his violent tactics be responsible for the rebel forces bombing a bunch of children and medics (including Katniss's sister) so that the message wasn't a clear cut "it's okay to use violence to overthrow oppressors." Then basically having Katniss settle down with the pacifist, petit-boug white boy.
I think the stuff with District 13 and President Coin was sort of interesting, because obviously everyone has an agenda and motives, but it got a little bit both-sides-y.
But yeah, on the whole it's a much better series than people tend to give it credit for — I think people tend to unfairly ding it because it sort of kicked off the whole YA dystopia genre, and judge it based on the works that followed.
Agreed.
I very much dislike the whole "Is the leader/revolution sometimes WORSE than the leader they're trying to overthrow!?!" Well I'll be, what an interesting plot point that hasn't been done before! But whatever, Collins is a liberal and I shouldn't expect much different from her ideological beliefs.
I do wonder if the cultural impact of the book has been a net positive or net negative though. One the one hand, I think it put an unnecessary amount of weight on a single act of defiance in its overthrow of a bad regime which I can't help but wonder has influenced many well-meaning people who might have otherwise gone full left into going "Well if I just manage to find this one act or habit that's SO subversive and defiant to US culture then I can be like Katniss and help end what the US is doing overseas!" and thus perpetuated individualism-but-left instead of realizing that it's imperative to talk to your peers and organise and strike and realize that collective action is how this capitalist regime will be overcome.
On the other hand, I don't think I'd prefer it if the Hunger Games didn't exist just because it's not a perfect representation of what revolutions are. I feel like it might be the closest a liberal like Collins could reasonably get to opposing the United States in its current concept and slowly pipelining people is valuable if frustrating.
Yeah, I agree that it's a net positive — it at least provides some common cultural ground for talking about revolution and class struggle with libs, which is def way more than most big YA series. It'd definitely be nice to see a less-lib series cover the same ground get the same level of cultural traction.