I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and arenât actually part of the original.
Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical âunqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reasonâ. The entire point is that sheâs not leading the rebellion. Sheâs a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, âNo, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.â Sheâs not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to doâsheâs a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. Itâs much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as âstereotypical YA dystopianâ gives it credit for.
And the misconceptions donât end there. The Hunger Games has no âstereotypical YA love triangleââyes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. Thereâs a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boysâitâs about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect âhot love trianglesâ in their YA.Â
The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because sheâs cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia thatâs âsimilar to the Hunger Gamesâ. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really sayingâand itâs nothing so comforting as âwe need to fight the evil people who are ruining societyâ. The Capitolâs not just the powerful, greedy bad guysâthe Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.
Thereâs a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. Thereâs a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators canât capture that same genius, largely because theyâre trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and youâll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldnât make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.
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