So I read the new Stephen King

[cleolinda]

...because the two or three weeks after Christmas are my traditional Book Wallow. And I really like Stephen King's short stories, which tend to be more high-concept and less tangential than his novels. That is to say, you get a handful of really interesting ideas, rather than one idea that goes on for three hundred pages longer than it should. Full

Comments

[leia1912]

Just a head's up: The Hunger Games also features teams. Where there is the Next Big Thing, there's a Team, I think. (Cap instead of lowercase because the idol-worship demands a cap.)

[cleolinda]

Yeah, I actually know how the Team thing ends up on that one. It's the one I guessed, too.

[sour_idealist]

The Teams aren't really the point, though. Or at least, that certainly isn't how I read it.

[renaissanced]

They shouldn't be the point but that seems to be what fandom focuses on. :\

[sour_idealist]

Yeah. It's a story about war and death and the extremes to which people go when faced with them and the ways in which people are twisted by desperation and hate. Fandom? LET'S TALK ABOUT THE BOYS! It's actually kinda misogynist, when you think about it: discarding everything Katniss is aside from her love life and treating the male characters as the focal point of the novel.

[elsajeni]

I've actually seen a lot of people express dismay that it starts out good and ends up "about a love triangle," though -- I'm guessing either people who were exasperated by the Mockingjay marketing, which (at least at my local bookstore) included handing out "Team ______" buttons, or people who were primed (possibly from reading Twilight) to throw their hands up in despair at the first hint of A Choice Between Two Boys.

[sour_idealist]

In what strange alternate universe was Mockingjay about a love triangle? It's about PTSD and war and desperation and more PTSD. Even the choice between Peeta and Gale is mostly symbolic of a choice between healing and vengeance, or at least that's how I saw it.

[r_a_black]

This. In the back of my mind I was definitely wondering, "So is she going to end up with this guy or that one?" but at the forefront I was like, "AHHH WAR IS HORRIBLE!"