Am I the only one...
Oct. 28th, 2011 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwaterspark...who's kind of creeped out by the current The Hunger Games fetish?
To promote the movie, Lionsgate set up thecapitol.pn, where you can find out which District you're part of and tell the world through Facebook/Twitter/whatever. Okay, I get it, it's a marketing tactic. Still, are they ignoring the fact that these Districts are impoverished places where people are kept starving and are terrorized by the Capitol? Why would you want to live in a Panem District?
What I find even more disturbing is one person on the internet's desire to set up his/her own Hunger Games. Without, you know, the childmurdering. Except that kind of defeats the purpose of the Hunger Games, because, as farla puts it, the Hunger Games really should be called the Childmurder Games, and the name "Hunger Games" is really a cool-sounding (but irrelevant) euphemism.
This kind of reminds me of the way Bella and Edward's relationship in Twilight was taken as "romantic" by a lot of teenaged girls. For a story about a horrendous dictatorship and an appalling Coliseum-For-Kids, The Hunger Games is romanticized almost to terrifying levels.
So, okay, part of the fault lies with the author, since Collins herself romanticizes the titular Hunger Games by reducing it to a thrilling tale of survival with black and white morality. Oh, Katniss killed someone? Oh, that person deserved to die anyway. The one morally conflicted choice Katniss may have been forced to make was neatly taken care of [vagueness to avoid spoilers]. And Katniss suffers basically zero psychological consequence for killing other kids.
Still, it unnerves me that this is the kind of book that becomes popular. What does that say about our society, our values, our ability to empathize--or maybe just our ability to read critically? There's a whole host of other problems with The Hunger Games that I'm not going to get into now (the most egregious one probably being fauxfeminism), but frankly I don't have a lot of faith in popular culture if The Hunger Games is being praised to the high heavens.
To promote the movie, Lionsgate set up thecapitol.pn, where you can find out which District you're part of and tell the world through Facebook/Twitter/whatever. Okay, I get it, it's a marketing tactic. Still, are they ignoring the fact that these Districts are impoverished places where people are kept starving and are terrorized by the Capitol? Why would you want to live in a Panem District?
What I find even more disturbing is one person on the internet's desire to set up his/her own Hunger Games. Without, you know, the childmurdering. Except that kind of defeats the purpose of the Hunger Games, because, as farla puts it, the Hunger Games really should be called the Childmurder Games, and the name "Hunger Games" is really a cool-sounding (but irrelevant) euphemism.
This kind of reminds me of the way Bella and Edward's relationship in Twilight was taken as "romantic" by a lot of teenaged girls. For a story about a horrendous dictatorship and an appalling Coliseum-For-Kids, The Hunger Games is romanticized almost to terrifying levels.
So, okay, part of the fault lies with the author, since Collins herself romanticizes the titular Hunger Games by reducing it to a thrilling tale of survival with black and white morality. Oh, Katniss killed someone? Oh, that person deserved to die anyway. The one morally conflicted choice Katniss may have been forced to make was neatly taken care of [vagueness to avoid spoilers]. And Katniss suffers basically zero psychological consequence for killing other kids.
Still, it unnerves me that this is the kind of book that becomes popular. What does that say about our society, our values, our ability to empathize--or maybe just our ability to read critically? There's a whole host of other problems with The Hunger Games that I'm not going to get into now (the most egregious one probably being fauxfeminism), but frankly I don't have a lot of faith in popular culture if The Hunger Games is being praised to the high heavens.
