Ways in which viral marketing is defective

[en_ki]

1. I have heard approximately 200,000 things about The Hunger Games, some random SF thriller, by people in my social network. (The things I hear are the same things over and over again: apparently it is about a girl who is admirable because things happen to her, and some people in the movie are not white, and there are a lot of racist people on

Comments

[siderea]

The people describing THG's protagonist as "completely passive" have been, so far in my experience, all been male.

I have no idea if you would enjoy it.

[en_ki]

OK. So, female: do you believe that she has agency rather than just being Born Lucky?

I have no primary-source opinion on the matter, obvs.

[siderea]

Yes. (Duh.)

I mean, the point of the whole story is about an everywoman character (only with super powers of wilderness resourcefulness[*]) caught in a repressive totalitarian regime in which people of her class don't get to have agency, and proceeds to wreck the PTB's grotesque PR stunt by failing to be a cooperative victim. So a lot of things do happen to her, and she very quickly figures out that trying to solve things by hunting people down to kill them won't work because they're better killers than her. So her acts of agency tend to be very strategic, and more about blowing up the enemy's food supply than stabbing them directly, and manipulating viewer opinion via psychodrama rather than stirring speeches. I gather this is confusing for people who couldn't get past the idea this was an action-adventure flick, wherein the only thing that qualifies as an act of agency is hand-to-hand combat.

[* Which, btw, is thoroughly established as an earned skill, which she won through desperate practice being the sole provider for her

[en_ki]

OK, you seem to have been hearing from people who say "she doesn't have agency because she's not stabby enough". What I'm hearing is more "her successes are the result of deus ex machina" [e.g., a magic beehive appears where she can frob it and convenient kills exactly the people she wants it to kill] and "whenever she has to make a painful choice, deus ex machina appears and the pain goes away":

"But she chooses to commit suicide at the end!" That would have been a choice, but the book robs her of that as well, this is the point. The book does not allow her to make irreversible choices, it lets her believe she is making free choices and then negates them, again, just like a five year old girl with terrible parents. -TLP

i.e., that the movie is toxic on the order of tens of milliTwilights, which is well in excess my RDA.

I'm more likely to go and see this movie if you tell me what I've heard is full of shit, so if you say that, please don't go into spoilery detail about why yet.

[siderea]

No, I read exactly the same blog posts you did, evidently. I also slogged through umpteen zillion rebuttals, many of which were quite good, but which got quite repetitive.

Lastie is a smart guy, but he blew it on this one.

Now, that said, I don't think it's important that you see this on the big screen, or as a movie at all. The book is better, though I'll be the first to say there are some cringe-inducing flaws on the level of craft (i.e. "...we pause this plot for an emergency infodump..."). It's not a fabulous read, but a pretty good one.

I do wonder, from Lastie and from some of the other commentary I've read from well-meaning, feminist men who really profoundly seemed to not get what was going on, or its significance, whether the film is really accessible in any meaningful way to someone who wasn't socialized as a young woman sometime in the last 40 years. So: this movie may not work out for you.

[en_ki]

Best single rebuttal?

[siderea]

*shrug*

[en_ki]

OK. *Any* of the many good ones you mentioned? Or even the name of somebody who had a good one? Pretty please?

[en_ki]

(BTW, part of the context for this is that I would put the odds around 3:1 over the next ten years that I will be sharing in raising a girl and rather higher that I will be sharing in raising some kind of human; so if understanding what's up with this is so closely tied to understanding how our society socializes young women, it is worth quite some energy to me.)

[siderea]

I wish you all the best with that.