Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games
As an introduction a bunch of stories - I bolded the important ones:
Once upon a time people were sent into arenas to fight each other and wild animals. Contrary to well-no-longer-popular belief, they usually made it out alive. The fighters were the celebrities of their time, they had endorsement deals and groupies. To get them killed in the arena - while always a possibility - would have killed more than the fighter. It would have killed the investment he was. Later people got sent to the same arenas to get killed by the wild animals. Survival was impossible, it was an execution method.
- The Roman Empire (A few hundred years BC and AD)
- popularized by Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) and Scott's Gladiator (2000)
A man gets stranded on an island. He lives isolated for some time until he gets rescued.
- Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Only the poor savage realizes that the genetic manipulation and the drugs that take away people's choices make the utopia, people believe it to be, a totalitarian dystopia.
- Huxley , Brave New World (1932)
A man lives in an obvious totalitarian dystopia, everything is controlled, everything is under surveillance. He tries to rebel, fails.
- Orwell, 1984 (1949)
A bunch of young teenagers get stranded on an island, turn savage and against each other.
- Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
A bunch of convicts are turned into soldiers for a special mission with the promise that if they survive and succeed, they'll be free. Out of twelve men, only two survive.
Aldrich, The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Rebelling against a misbegotten government policy a man escapes a certain death sentence by running.
- Johnson and Nolan, Logan's Run (1967)
For a reality tv show in a totalitarian society a man becomes hunted for the promise that if he survives 30 days, he'll get a billion dollars. He doesn't succeed but takes the network that organizes that game down instead.
- King, The Running Man (1982)
Same as above but the Game takes place in a game zone instead and guy survives and gets a girlfriend.
- The Running Man, the movie version (1987)
A bunch of people are stranded on an island; believe they're the last people on Earth, try to procreate and instead turn on each other. Only the pregnant woman, the old woman and the dog survive that fight.
Gorris, The Last Island (1991)
A man is observed his whole life, unknowlingly, for a tv show. He escapes into real life in the end.
- Weir, The Truman Show (1998)
A bunch of people are put into a house for their whole lives to be observed by cameras for a reality tv show. There are some random challenges to be met. People are eliminated by vote.
- John de Mol Produkties, Big Brother (1999)
Five minutes in the future, in a totalitarian state that covers most of its continent and that is seemingly impossible to escape from, a yearly game takes place. A bunch of teenagers, randomly chosen, fight each other until only one of them is still alive.
During the game, the deaths are announced in intervals, weapons are given out randomly in the beginning but can be taken from the dead, the place the game takes place in is isolated, sealed off, contains no inhabitants and can turn deadly. The competitors are electronically monitored during the Game, their conversations and positions are always known to the people who control the Game - who can control the competitors at any time if they want to. This means they can stop any attempt to escape the Game. However after this particular Game goes awry, the guy in charge of the Game (not the entire Government though) is killed.
The purpose of the Game is to control the people through fear, a show-off of the absolute power the government has and sow mistrust by showing how even "friends" can turn on each other.
The Survivors after a few days are a pair of lovers, making them the exception to the "One survivor" rule. They knew each other from before the Game, one had a crush on the other, the other person was unaware (as they were unaware of all the other crushes other people had on them.)
They have a mentor, who's is really smart and who has won the Game before. Throughout the game they grow more and more attached to each other, only towards the end it turns fully romantic. Despite that in a random sample of people plenty of nice people should and do exist they kill none of them. Instead all the other nice people are killed by the sociopaths who conveniently decide to play the Game. (So no moral quandaries there.)
It turns out there might be an utopia of peace and justice and it's possible to get there.
- Takami, Battle Royale (1999) and Fukasaku, Battle Royale (2000)
A bunch of people are put into the wilderness then have to fight each other in order to not be eliminated from the game. The whole thing is broadcast as a reality show.
- Parsons, Survivor (2000) aka Expedition Robinson (1997)
A bunch of adults are picked randomly by a national lottery for a reality tv show, given weapons and told that only the person who wins three rounds in a row gets free. A couple find each other but only the guy makes it out alive. It's never explained how the background the whole thing works.
- Minahan, Series 7: The Contenders (2001)
A bunch of people get stranded on an island, weird shit happens, they fight each other, most of them die, one after another, in the end the ex-pregnant woman, the old woman, the dog and very few other people survive.
- Abrams, Lindelof, Lost (2004)
Five minutes in the future, in a totalitarian state that covers most of its continent and that is seemingly impossible to escape from, a yearly game takes place. A bunch of teenagers, randomly chosen, fight each other until only one of them is still alive.
During the game, the deaths are announced in intervals, weapons are given out randomly in the beginning but can be taken from the dead, the place the game takes place in is isolated, sealed off, contains no inhabitants and can turn deadly. The competitors are electronically monitored during the Game, their conversations and positions are always known to the people who control the Game - who can control the competitors at any time if they want to. This means they can stop any attempt to escape the Game. However after this particular Game goes awry, the guy in charge of the Game (not the entire Government though) is killed.
The purpose of the Game is to control the people through fear, a show-off of the absolute power the government has and sow mistrust by showing how even "friends" can turn on each other.
The Survivors after a few days are a pair of lovers, making them the exception to the "One survivor" rule. They knew each other from before the Game, one had a crush on the other, the other person was unaware (as they were unaware of all the other crushes other people had on them.)
They have a mentor, who's is really smart and who has won the Game before. Throughout the game they grow more and more attached to each other, only towards the end it turns fully romantic. Despite that in a random sample of people plenty of nice people should and do exist they kill none of them. Instead all the other nice people are killed by the sociopaths who conveniently decide to play the Game. (So no moral quandaries there.)
It turns out there might be an utopia of peace and justice and it's possible to get there.
- Collins, The Hunger Games (2008)
A bunch of college students fight an elimination game with paintball. The last man standing will be the winner and gets priority- the MacGuffin. A couple hooks up, a higher up tries to influence the game in his favor.
- Harmon, Cutler, Lin, Community "Modern Warfare" (2010)
All these stories have inspired and influenced each other. However, one story is more than merely inspired. I think you can spot the copy and paste job I did there.
You know what's funny about this list?
Koushoun Takami says his inspiration was Stephen King. Suzanne Collins says for her it was the Roman Empire's gladiator games.
...
Okay, I'll say it and I'm far from the first person who said it: The Hunger Games is a gigantic Battle Royale rip-off and the fact that Collins doesn't admit it makes it more than just merely a rip-off. Yes, I think the word with the big P.
Am I too harsh? Am I cherry-picking the similarities between the two stories… well, let's look at this rationally:
Did Collins had the opportunity to rip-off Battle Royale?
There's a nine-year window between the publications of the two novels. This gives Collins plenty of time to have come across Battle Royale or even just a plot summary of it. It seems even less credible considering that she just didn't just research her novel, she gave it to her agent, publishers and editors - and no one mentioned the similarities to Battle Royale which languishes in such obscurity that Quentin Tarantino named it his favorite movie since he started making movies?
Battle Royale is always a google search away and Collins is supposed to have never come across it? This stretches my credulity.
What did she take?
She took plenty. Now you might say that some of the similarities are necessary consequences of the plot, like the psychos killing the nice contestants, so the protagonists don't become unsympathetic. But here's the rub: if someone steals three chords of a popular song and then takes another three little unimportant and even necessary notes, the suspicion of theft doesn't lessen. All it does is making song B sound even more like song A.
Collins not finding an original solution to the nice contestants conundrum, doesn't make her using Takami's solution any less suspect. Her not finding original answers makes her look even less original than she does already.
How unique is what she took?
It's easier to be unique than you think. You make up a sentence, a short sentence, 13 letters and six words long and have it consisting of nothing but the most common words in the English language: be, to, not, or - and end up with a sentence so unique that you cannot steal it because everyone's gonna think you're quoting Shakespeare anyway.
Being unique is easier than you think. Search for a sentence (with quotation marks) in Google and around the eighth to tenth word, the number of original sources for that sentence will grow shockingly small.
Plot is of course slightly different than mere words - but for so many of Takami's elements to find their way into Collins story goes beyond mere coincidence. And stretches my credulity once again.
How substantial is what she took?
If you take out every element of The Hunger Games that's also a part of Battle Royale, you end up with a female protagonist of an undetermined age that whines about being poor and likes to hunt - for two books.
The central plot device of Battle Royale is so necessary for this trilogy that Collins didn't just use it once - she used it twice.
If you took out the Battle Royale elements out of that Community episode - actually if you took out the entire episode, you would still have a show that contained 24 episodes that could stand without it. Collins has nothing without Battle Royale.
But couldn't it be all a coincidence, who says it was intentional?
Aside from the statistical odds?
You know what the legal difference is between taking a lipstick from a store, never intending to pay for it, and simply forgetting to pay for it?
None. You can never prove the latter is not the former. Collins can deny knowing Battle Royale until she's blue in the face, her books' content says otherwise.
Intent is not necessary that has to be proven to prove intellectual theft - if you emerge from your song writing session with "Let It Be", then the Beatles will take your royalties. You say you never heard that song despite it being written a few decades ago? Cool story, bro.
Until the day Collins can prove that she didn't steal from Battle Royale (which is never) she'll be the person who stole another author's hard work to me.
So don't buy her books. Oh, and Cassandra Clare's, too, while you're at it.