The Hunger Games As Part of a Larger Trend

Would you be interested in reading/have you read other dystopias besides The Hunger Games?

Yes	46.7%	[ 7 ]
No	13.3%	[ 2 ]
I might	20.0%	[ 3 ]
gold~	20.0%	[ 3 ]
Total Votes:			[ 15 ]

[The Moon of Ceres]

I've been thinking about this a lot.Okay, let's start at the beginning.
I've noticed that although The Hunger Games series does have some older and younger fans. the majority of them are teenagers who were born sometime around the mid 90s. (Including me, he he.) Now, they probably don't remember much from the 90s, but you know what they do remember? The 2000s. You know what happened in the 2000s?
Harry Potter. Fantasy.
As kids in the 2000s, we watched as fantasy was exploding in popularity in almost all mediums; movies, books, art, video games. There were some more complex, adult oriented fantasy stories, but for the most part it all very kids oriented, more simplistic, more optimistic, good vs. evil kind of stuff, and we loved it. It was magical!
Now as we're growing up, dystopias like The Hunger Games seem to be becoming more popular. BUT we've had some... resistance.
Going from fantasy to a kind of, more sci-fi dark (even a bit political) dystopia is kind of natural when we think about it. We're more skeptical now, and a lot of us pay more attention to the news and what goes on in the world than some people seem to think.
When the last Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 came out... well, I saw that as kind of a finale of the popularity of fantasy. Personally, when I walked out of that theater, I was sad! Well, not sad exactly, but more bittersweet. I felt like a part of my childhood had ended.
It's been a while since then.
Now that The Hunger Games has sold so many copies and had a successful first movie, other excellent dystipian novels are FLYING OFF THE SHELVES!
Back to the resistance, I think simply because this genre is darker and doesn't have quite the same appeal to younger kids, (the millennials), we're getting some conflict here... mostly from parents and "concerned" people.
They ask, why are we interested in things like this? Well, I think I've already answered that, but what do you think?

[yaha1313131313]

well it is a different topic. We are so used to the scifi and fantasy, Hunger games brings out more realistic themes to the world of series. It's a refreshing change but the themes in Hunger Games are just too morbid. Unlike most other fandoms a lot of the series is about war, coping with death etc. The themes presented are much stronger. While one would argue that kids these days know soo much about killing, drugs, sex, etc. the themes would still be a concern for more protective parents.

[Klaark]

I'm older than you, and I see this in The Hunger Games:

1.It's a world that stopped pretending how things really work. A central power keeps the powers that feed it in line by pitting them against each other. The districts (In the first book, haven't read the others) are less concerned over fighting the central power and have turned towards training their tributes to win the game they've been forced to play. They have no thought of going against the technology superior oppressive power, at least not in any meaningful way, and are more concerned with getting through day-to-day, year-to-year, life, knowing that ultimately only a select few will have to die. Some of the tributes actively seem to dislike the others, relishing in killing them. Do they really like it, or are they lashing out at the only thing they can really hurt?

2. People like to watch others suffer and will justify doing so in different ways. The capital people see the districts as enemies, savages kept at bay, and have completely normalized watching children murder each other. Their lives mean nothing, they don't live in the same place or have the same lifestyle, they're not really human technically speaking. Do you give a s**t when a tsunami washes away a few thousand Asians? When a Predator drone blows up some towelhead's wedding? Maybe not, but you'll watch it on Youtube if there's video. Maybe you just like game shows where the object seems to be whether or not an angry British man can make someone cry.

Heck, even as a reader, rooting for any one of the tributes means you're hoping the others all die.



As for this being "YA," the only difference between YA and an "adult" book is a lack of the author's head being up their own a** and semen.

[x In_The_Works x]

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