Thoughts on Hunger Games
Here's my thoughts on the Hunger Games Trilogy. Everything is under a cut so no one will be spoiled. I also don't have it in any particular order. Also, it is long.
. . . at least the cat didn't die? Although the way in which the cat did not die was so freaking depressing that I'm not sure if that counts, but I will say that Suzanne Collins did not go for cheap pathos by killing the pet. Very, very expensive pathos, maybe.
The line "He frosted under heavy guard" is my favorite in all three books. Peeta Mellark: Badass with a Pastry Tube. No fooling, I absolutely love Peeta. I'm convinced that he's the moral compass of the books. He reminds me of Neville Longbottom in that way, and also that he is the kind of hero you could realistically be. Moral courage: a good thing.
I'm not sure anyone could still be alive, let alone looking reasonable, given all the injuries Katniss acquires. One of the things my Mom complains about in the HP series is what I'll call the "MOAR PAIN" motif. "And then Harry felt more pain than he'd ever felt in his life." "And then Harry felt even more pain than he'd ever felt in his life." "MOAR PAIN MOAR." (C.S. Lewis suggested once that if Jesus has a characteristic rhetorical trope, it would be the "fortior": " . . .how much MORE" . . .your Heavenly Father loves you, etc. Interesting point. He does use it a lot.) After a while, you do begin to wonder "ok, so how many times can Harry experience even more pain than he experienced before, which was more than before that? How much is left?" In Hunger Games, I'm particularly worried about the burns. By the end, it sounds as though Katniss has possibly third degree burns over so much of her body that she should be dead. Then she peels it all off, and then. . .they grow it all back, or what? Along similar lines, I couldn't follow what was up with Peeta's artificial leg. He has one in the end of HG, and then at the beginning of CF, he hasn't quite learned how to deal with it, and then I wasn't sure how he got through the last two books with it. The characters get chewed up, but they don't really seem to be injured in the way you might expect.
I did love the intersection of reality tv with outright brutality, and I enjoyed the parallels with Ancient Rome. Sometimes it was more subtle than other times. For example, I liked the way she used the concept of the retarius--a specialist gladiator with a fishnet and trident. It's absolutely true that they were often favored to win. The vomitorium--not so subtle. Also, I kept wondering why some names were so dead on intentional and then others weren't. "Seneca" was perfect, because he famously committed suicide when Nero asked him to; "Cato" almost made sense, because he was a particularly bloody-minded politician ("Carthage ought to be destroyed"); "Coriolanus" works as well; but why Octavia and Cinna and Flavius and Portia? Portia goes with Brutus, but her Brutus really is a brute and her Portia is a good person and--anyway, if you start a line of parallels, and then poo out on them, you may have a problem.
I love the central character, and I'm guessing that's where the popularity of the series comes from. I liked that she gradually became less focused on just a handful of people she cared about (Prim, Gale--not even her mother, in a way) and then learned to empathize more. Probably no accident that a lot of that centers around food--she assumes that Peeta must be allowed to eat all the bread and other stuff his family bakes (not until it goes stale) or that anyone from District 11 must have all the food they need, just because they grow it. This was why I didn't quite understand that moment at the end where she agrees that there ought to be just one more Hunger Games. I know she's frantic about what happened to Prim, but still.
No problems with the love triangle here. There were perhaps a handful of times where there was a whiff more sudden hard muscled masculine masculinity than a given situation called for, but they were always over after a quick eyeroll. The love and general relationship stuff was always subordinate to the main story or even better, tied tightly in with it. That also worked with the first person present tense narration: she makes each individual decision with what to do with Peeta because she's focused on staying alive. There's no time to think about "ok, what happens once I'm out of the arena? Or I'm going home? Just when does this sort of concocted for the media relationship end?" I know that at the beginning of Catching Fire, when Haymitch pointed out that the thing with Peeta was never going to end unless she wanted to bring down misery on her entire family, I actually gasped. "Oh, CRAP, now she's never going to know what the hell she wants!" The "triangle" thing was a bit less convincing. I never really thought she'd wind up with Gale, partly because we saw so little interaction with him. Blame that partly on that first person present tense narration, because all the Gale interaction was going to be flashback. Like the Jacob v. Edward thing, I don't understand how anyone could ship Katniss/Gale so hard that they'd be surprised and shocked when it didn't happen. It wouldn't have bothered me too much if it had. There was always a chance Peeta wouldn't make it.
I also didn't have a problem with the Epilogue. I thought it was about as much of a happy ending as the books were going to have. In fact, I thought it was really optimistic, considering. Moving on with your life, baking stuff and catching food and raising two children, not too sucky. Also not bad advice sometimes, to keep focused on the present.
I wrote earlier that I found Mockingjay to be just too overwhelming and triggering to deal with. As I suggested, I'm coming at some of this from the inside here, which is all I really want to say about that. I actually lost my temper about this: I kept thinking what gave her the right to carry on about PTSD, when she obviously didn't know, and yet there was all this damage. I could not handle being shoved into one character's first person present tense PTSD stuff while at the same time experiencing someone else's from the outside. It was so bad that I don't think I'll be able to handle reading Mockingjay again. "False or real?" was devastating. At the same time, some stuff felt wrong. I can't believe a person wouldn't remember what color they liked best. Think that one through. That's about "what color do I like?" It's just not a question I can imagine coming up. I can imagine "oh, yeah, did we have this conversation about favorite colors? Did that happen? What did I say? HUH." I don't know. Maybe it will make some people realize that you absolutely can't really just suck it up and pretend bad stuff like that has no effect, and maybe the military will stop handing out a couple of BusPar and shipping people back to Afghanistan, but I doubt it. And even if they do, no one is going to start to get it about non-combat PTSD. That is really depressing to think about.
Haymitch. Loved him, too. Great character development, and unfortunately she's probably dead right about what would happen to someone who'd survived what he had. Just in general, she created some memorable characters, too many even to count, like Rue, Cinna, and Finnick. It's also definitely a page turner. It was hard to stop reading. Lots of cliffhangers.
I'm not just saying this because it was hard to bear, or because I wish she hadn't killed Finnick: I think she could have accomplished what she wanted to in the last book with a smaller body count and less graphic description. A good one was when they had to leave a couple of people behind and realized they were dead now. That seems right. There just isn't time for all the melting faces and lizard men. I'm not just saying this because Harry Potter is the font of all that is true and good, but I suspect that when a lot of stuff happens in a battle, you don't have time to notice every little detail, plus for me, when I see a lot of deaths, they start to lose their impact. In Deathly Hallows, Fred's death is a kick in the gut, but she saved what you might think of as her death chips for a good one: it's sudden, he's a favorite character, he literally goes out on a laugh, you don't have to be told to know that it's a particularly bad loss because George will never get over it. Now imagine if you saw Tonks and Lupin and all the others die, one by one, in detail. To me, it makes more sense that when they count up what happened after the battle, during a lull, that this is when Harry looks around and thinks, "oh God, so many of them died."
Prim's death: also maybe not so good. When I was able to look at it, I realized that yes, it set in motion some other important things, but it also kind of erased what Katniss began trying to do. It could have expanded into "now I realized I cared about everybody," but there wasn't time. It just felt like a pointless downer. It wasn't necessary to do that in order to explain the rift between Katniss and Gale. By the way, I did not find it unrealistic that they never really talked again. I don't think you would. I don't even think you'd have to know that it was Gale's bomb. It would be enough that it was exactly like the kind of bomb he was talking about before, that kind of sick psychology. I don't think you can even have a conversation after that. You couldn't talk about it, and you couldn't not talk about it.
The first person narrative style became gradually a bit less effective as the books went on. In the first book, the focus is just her, right this second, trying not to die. In the third book, the issues start to become more global, moving out to their whole continent, so the tight focus becomes more of a problem.
Also: muttations. ? I know what they are. She explained what they are, but while the mockingjays made sense, weird homicidal lizardmen that pop up from nowhere?
In some ways I liked the movie more. The books have immediacy, and there are things that weren't as well explained, but on the other hand, I loved those scenes in the control room as they go about creating the perfect games and unleashing sheer misery--and then what that feels like when the misery is coming at you. Also, evidently when you get to a dystopia hundreds of years from now, they force you to live in the 1940s.
Anyway, I did like them. I'm hamstrung because I might not be able to read Mockingjay again. I don't know if they are the greatest things in the universe, but I enjoyed them and I can see what the fuss is about, and I'll probably see the movie again. Before May, when Avengers comes out.
. . . at least the cat didn't die? Although the way in which the cat did not die was so freaking depressing that I'm not sure if that counts, but I will say that Suzanne Collins did not go for cheap pathos by killing the pet. Very, very expensive pathos, maybe.
The line "He frosted under heavy guard" is my favorite in all three books. Peeta Mellark: Badass with a Pastry Tube. No fooling, I absolutely love Peeta. I'm convinced that he's the moral compass of the books. He reminds me of Neville Longbottom in that way, and also that he is the kind of hero you could realistically be. Moral courage: a good thing.
I'm not sure anyone could still be alive, let alone looking reasonable, given all the injuries Katniss acquires. One of the things my Mom complains about in the HP series is what I'll call the "MOAR PAIN" motif. "And then Harry felt more pain than he'd ever felt in his life." "And then Harry felt even more pain than he'd ever felt in his life." "MOAR PAIN MOAR." (C.S. Lewis suggested once that if Jesus has a characteristic rhetorical trope, it would be the "fortior": " . . .how much MORE" . . .your Heavenly Father loves you, etc. Interesting point. He does use it a lot.) After a while, you do begin to wonder "ok, so how many times can Harry experience even more pain than he experienced before, which was more than before that? How much is left?" In Hunger Games, I'm particularly worried about the burns. By the end, it sounds as though Katniss has possibly third degree burns over so much of her body that she should be dead. Then she peels it all off, and then. . .they grow it all back, or what? Along similar lines, I couldn't follow what was up with Peeta's artificial leg. He has one in the end of HG, and then at the beginning of CF, he hasn't quite learned how to deal with it, and then I wasn't sure how he got through the last two books with it. The characters get chewed up, but they don't really seem to be injured in the way you might expect.
I did love the intersection of reality tv with outright brutality, and I enjoyed the parallels with Ancient Rome. Sometimes it was more subtle than other times. For example, I liked the way she used the concept of the retarius--a specialist gladiator with a fishnet and trident. It's absolutely true that they were often favored to win. The vomitorium--not so subtle. Also, I kept wondering why some names were so dead on intentional and then others weren't. "Seneca" was perfect, because he famously committed suicide when Nero asked him to; "Cato" almost made sense, because he was a particularly bloody-minded politician ("Carthage ought to be destroyed"); "Coriolanus" works as well; but why Octavia and Cinna and Flavius and Portia? Portia goes with Brutus, but her Brutus really is a brute and her Portia is a good person and--anyway, if you start a line of parallels, and then poo out on them, you may have a problem.
I love the central character, and I'm guessing that's where the popularity of the series comes from. I liked that she gradually became less focused on just a handful of people she cared about (Prim, Gale--not even her mother, in a way) and then learned to empathize more. Probably no accident that a lot of that centers around food--she assumes that Peeta must be allowed to eat all the bread and other stuff his family bakes (not until it goes stale) or that anyone from District 11 must have all the food they need, just because they grow it. This was why I didn't quite understand that moment at the end where she agrees that there ought to be just one more Hunger Games. I know she's frantic about what happened to Prim, but still.
No problems with the love triangle here. There were perhaps a handful of times where there was a whiff more sudden hard muscled masculine masculinity than a given situation called for, but they were always over after a quick eyeroll. The love and general relationship stuff was always subordinate to the main story or even better, tied tightly in with it. That also worked with the first person present tense narration: she makes each individual decision with what to do with Peeta because she's focused on staying alive. There's no time to think about "ok, what happens once I'm out of the arena? Or I'm going home? Just when does this sort of concocted for the media relationship end?" I know that at the beginning of Catching Fire, when Haymitch pointed out that the thing with Peeta was never going to end unless she wanted to bring down misery on her entire family, I actually gasped. "Oh, CRAP, now she's never going to know what the hell she wants!" The "triangle" thing was a bit less convincing. I never really thought she'd wind up with Gale, partly because we saw so little interaction with him. Blame that partly on that first person present tense narration, because all the Gale interaction was going to be flashback. Like the Jacob v. Edward thing, I don't understand how anyone could ship Katniss/Gale so hard that they'd be surprised and shocked when it didn't happen. It wouldn't have bothered me too much if it had. There was always a chance Peeta wouldn't make it.
I also didn't have a problem with the Epilogue. I thought it was about as much of a happy ending as the books were going to have. In fact, I thought it was really optimistic, considering. Moving on with your life, baking stuff and catching food and raising two children, not too sucky. Also not bad advice sometimes, to keep focused on the present.
I wrote earlier that I found Mockingjay to be just too overwhelming and triggering to deal with. As I suggested, I'm coming at some of this from the inside here, which is all I really want to say about that. I actually lost my temper about this: I kept thinking what gave her the right to carry on about PTSD, when she obviously didn't know, and yet there was all this damage. I could not handle being shoved into one character's first person present tense PTSD stuff while at the same time experiencing someone else's from the outside. It was so bad that I don't think I'll be able to handle reading Mockingjay again. "False or real?" was devastating. At the same time, some stuff felt wrong. I can't believe a person wouldn't remember what color they liked best. Think that one through. That's about "what color do I like?" It's just not a question I can imagine coming up. I can imagine "oh, yeah, did we have this conversation about favorite colors? Did that happen? What did I say? HUH." I don't know. Maybe it will make some people realize that you absolutely can't really just suck it up and pretend bad stuff like that has no effect, and maybe the military will stop handing out a couple of BusPar and shipping people back to Afghanistan, but I doubt it. And even if they do, no one is going to start to get it about non-combat PTSD. That is really depressing to think about.
Haymitch. Loved him, too. Great character development, and unfortunately she's probably dead right about what would happen to someone who'd survived what he had. Just in general, she created some memorable characters, too many even to count, like Rue, Cinna, and Finnick. It's also definitely a page turner. It was hard to stop reading. Lots of cliffhangers.
I'm not just saying this because it was hard to bear, or because I wish she hadn't killed Finnick: I think she could have accomplished what she wanted to in the last book with a smaller body count and less graphic description. A good one was when they had to leave a couple of people behind and realized they were dead now. That seems right. There just isn't time for all the melting faces and lizard men. I'm not just saying this because Harry Potter is the font of all that is true and good, but I suspect that when a lot of stuff happens in a battle, you don't have time to notice every little detail, plus for me, when I see a lot of deaths, they start to lose their impact. In Deathly Hallows, Fred's death is a kick in the gut, but she saved what you might think of as her death chips for a good one: it's sudden, he's a favorite character, he literally goes out on a laugh, you don't have to be told to know that it's a particularly bad loss because George will never get over it. Now imagine if you saw Tonks and Lupin and all the others die, one by one, in detail. To me, it makes more sense that when they count up what happened after the battle, during a lull, that this is when Harry looks around and thinks, "oh God, so many of them died."
Prim's death: also maybe not so good. When I was able to look at it, I realized that yes, it set in motion some other important things, but it also kind of erased what Katniss began trying to do. It could have expanded into "now I realized I cared about everybody," but there wasn't time. It just felt like a pointless downer. It wasn't necessary to do that in order to explain the rift between Katniss and Gale. By the way, I did not find it unrealistic that they never really talked again. I don't think you would. I don't even think you'd have to know that it was Gale's bomb. It would be enough that it was exactly like the kind of bomb he was talking about before, that kind of sick psychology. I don't think you can even have a conversation after that. You couldn't talk about it, and you couldn't not talk about it.
The first person narrative style became gradually a bit less effective as the books went on. In the first book, the focus is just her, right this second, trying not to die. In the third book, the issues start to become more global, moving out to their whole continent, so the tight focus becomes more of a problem.
Also: muttations. ? I know what they are. She explained what they are, but while the mockingjays made sense, weird homicidal lizardmen that pop up from nowhere?
In some ways I liked the movie more. The books have immediacy, and there are things that weren't as well explained, but on the other hand, I loved those scenes in the control room as they go about creating the perfect games and unleashing sheer misery--and then what that feels like when the misery is coming at you. Also, evidently when you get to a dystopia hundreds of years from now, they force you to live in the 1940s.
Anyway, I did like them. I'm hamstrung because I might not be able to read Mockingjay again. I don't know if they are the greatest things in the universe, but I enjoyed them and I can see what the fuss is about, and I'll probably see the movie again. Before May, when Avengers comes out.