Re: The Hunger Games
May. 24th, 2011 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkSo I finished the book yesterday...
And, to be honest, I didn't really like it.
It's not that original, yet neither is it a masterful take on an old trope (such as David Clement-Davies's Fire Bringer). It's fairly brutal--which is not to say that I'm squeamish about violence, but that, in my opinion, one of the most crucial things in DysLit is to get the reader to believe in the dystopia. It's difficult enough to get a reader to suspend their disbelief for a fictional world; it's even more difficult to get a reader to swallow a seriously screwed-up world. I never bought The Hunger Games's Panem. It's impossible for me to believe in a society where making kids fight against each other for survival is not considered barbaric. I wondered whether the Hunger Games were supposed to be some sort of allegory for reality TV, but in the end, Panem was no more real to me than Twilight's Forks, Washington.
And the lack of resolution to the romance was completely unsatisfying. The story ends on a downer despite Katniss's victory. As I'm sure I've already spent way too much talking about, I really disagree with the mindset that sad ending = realistic. Perhaps the brutality in The Hunger Games should have warned me about the tone of the ending, but after spending much of the book rooting for Katniss and Peeta, the downer ending felt like a slap in the face. "You wanted a happy ending? Well that's just too bad, hahahaha!"
And, to be honest, I didn't really like it.
It's not that original, yet neither is it a masterful take on an old trope (such as David Clement-Davies's Fire Bringer). It's fairly brutal--which is not to say that I'm squeamish about violence, but that, in my opinion, one of the most crucial things in DysLit is to get the reader to believe in the dystopia. It's difficult enough to get a reader to suspend their disbelief for a fictional world; it's even more difficult to get a reader to swallow a seriously screwed-up world. I never bought The Hunger Games's Panem. It's impossible for me to believe in a society where making kids fight against each other for survival is not considered barbaric. I wondered whether the Hunger Games were supposed to be some sort of allegory for reality TV, but in the end, Panem was no more real to me than Twilight's Forks, Washington.
And the lack of resolution to the romance was completely unsatisfying. The story ends on a downer despite Katniss's victory. As I'm sure I've already spent way too much talking about, I really disagree with the mindset that sad ending = realistic. Perhaps the brutality in The Hunger Games should have warned me about the tone of the ending, but after spending much of the book rooting for Katniss and Peeta, the downer ending felt like a slap in the face. "You wanted a happy ending? Well that's just too bad, hahahaha!"
