The Hunger Games

Back in the dark, drunk days of high school, I had an class where we read Much Ado About Nothing. If you're not familiar with it, it's a Shakespeare drama about several parallel love stories in early16th century (or so) Sicily, notably the Claudio/Hero and Benedick/Beatrice pairings.  Claudio/Hero is VERY storybook. They swoon at the sight of each other, and spend a lot of time gazing longingly at each other's flawless beauty. The usual melodrama. In the entire play, there's only about a dozen lines or so in which Claudio and Hero actually say anything to each other. Contrast Benedick/Beatrice, both of whom are entirely too sharp, witty, wordy, and self-impressed for their own good. They start out hating each other, get tricked into admitting that they love each other, and spend the entire duration exchanging hundreds of lines of sharp, lively banter.

I distinctly remember the teacher in the at-issue 11th grade English class commenting on the chances of long-term success for each of those two relationships. B/B will clearly have no problem going on into perpetuity with with joking banter, teasing, good-natured insults, and perhaps the occasional full-fledged knock-down-drag-out-yelling-match-followed-by-amazing-angry-make-up-sex. On the other hand, C/H... Are they ever going to talk at all? What's going to happen when they actually have to interact in a way OTHER than just longing for each other?

Based on my (admittedly limited) sampling, most tweeny dramas are based on straight-ticket Claudio/Hero relationships, with similar relationship trajectories. I've posted in the past about how if you took out all of the Bella/Edward dialogue about how they really do love each other and really do want to be together, there's no other dialog left over. Edward puts up with Bella's drama, pretty much exclusively because she smells nice. Is that shit going to last when she's no longer a potential menu item? What else is there? Ever read/watch The Vampire Diaries? What exactly does that Elena chick have going on that these incredibly powerful, wealthy, gorgeous vampires are falling over each other for her? Imagine yourself as an immortal vampire in a teenage body. You've spent the last 100 years or so more or less continuously in high school. (Let's conservatively guess that Stefan - 162 years old per wikipedia - has had at least fifty trips through 12th grade prior to his current gig.) And now here's a little brunette chippy. Yeah, she's cute, and yeah, she's a dead ringer for a girl who screwed you over once up on a time. But cheerleader princesses usually go from smoking hot straight to battered handbag, sometimes before 30. In the end, how is this Elena chick anything more than just another high school small-town cheerleader princess?

This is what our young readers (and sometimes not so young) feast upon. Yay for us! Yay for the future!

But as always, there is hope. I just recently spent a week in the Bahamas with some of the inlaws (my sister in law SHE HULK, and her husband SUSHI CHOPS), over which I re-read Stranger in a Strange Land, and then polished off the Hunger Games trilogy. While I could do on and on about any noun listed in that sentence, I'll try to limit this post to commentary about Hunger Games.

I liked it, and I note that it follows the usual lines for a successful fantasy fiction work: a vivid world  (similar enough to ours that we relate, but different enough to be interesting) in which empathetic characters interact in a way to elicit an emotional response from the reader. But the emotional response elicited from these particular books is hardly something you'd expect to be as successful as it has been.

While the soft-core trashy romance seems to have infinite space on its bandwagon, the Hunger Games really don't fit in that category. These are not romance novels in any meaningful use of the term. I like what it says about our young adults that books are being bought and read from OUTSIDE the 'Teen Supernatural Romance" section of the bookstore. While there are distinct love interests, and the conflict between the various love interests is a central and recurring theme, its not the whole story.

Also, the central relationship is definitely not Claudio/Hero. There is impetus behind the romantic angles other than simple "Oh he's so dreamy!" While most of the dialogue is internal (par for a first-person narrative), our Hunger Games Heroine actually has conversations and interaction with her love interests. Amazingly, she does not quake and tremor or feel her knees grow weak when she feels their eyes upon her. Rather, she looks them in the face and treats with them as an equal. Bella Swan acts exactly like a self-centered idiot teen girl, ignoring all other factors (including the fact that Edward is a GIANT douchebag) to try and make the fairlytale work with the first guy she's ever been with. Elena Gilbert acts exactly like a self-centered idiot teen girl ignoring all other factors to pursue her own eternal fairytale, since at 17 and confronted with All This, she knows exactly what she wants. (Except for quite WHO it is she wants. Go figure.) In contrast, Katniss Everdeen does have this little situation of multiple suitors where she can't decide, but she hates the drama involved, and really can't deal with it right now anyway. She kinda has some other important shit going on, what with feeding and protecting her family, a pesky national revolution, and saving her own sweet ass to get to a point where whatever choice she makes actually matters

Also unlike pretty much every other popular tweeny heroine, Everdeen is a legitimate badass. Bella's appeal to Edward is that she smells nice. I'm not sure what Elena really has going for her that ropes in these guys who should know better (my theory involves beer-flavored nipples), but God knows what it might be. Everdeen has confidence, competence, and will. Actual skills that she uses to save her own life, and the lives of others. If you're a Heinlein fan, Katniss Everdeen and Friday Baldwin are nearly the same character, just at different ages and in different worlds. Her appearance has pretty much nothing to do with her love life, and not just because she spends substantial portions of the book dirty, starving, burned (by acid or by fire), bleeding, and/or generally beat to hell. She's gorgeous because she fights through all that shit, fights well, and takes shit from nobody along the way.

She is in no way a princess, and her character has points that are directly shocking (like where she relates in all seriousness her regrets about her failure to drown her sister's cat). But interestingly, the hardness of Katniss' character does not make her inhuman. Rather, her hardness comes across as the necessary solution to the world she inhabits, which is much MUCH harder than you'd ever expect to see in a tweeny bestseller.

The overwhelming sentiment you'll get from these stories is that these books are fucking DARK. A dystopian police state. Serfdom and enslavement. Starvation. Graphic death in more or less literal gladiator games. (Google 'Minotaur myth.') Murder. The story the presentation are NOT cheerful. They're downright macabre. And unlike pretty much every fantasy fiction adventure work ever written (very few exceptions, but they do exist), the Hunger Games series gets one thing absolutely right: people who spend any appreciable time in combat end up batshit, irrespective of whether they're among the killing or the dying. The Hunger Games' central characters - including Katniss, all her strength and capability notwithstanding - do in fact go insane over the course of the series, from constant exposure to the gladiator games they're forced to play.  Under constant fear, stress, and worry over their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they get bent, or outright break.

Stark though it is, I find this a hugely refreshing change from fiction's usual treatment of death and dying, particularly among the Hunger Games' young-adult target demographic. We're talking about the generation raised on action movies that put "First Blood" to shame, as well as graphic video games, like Grand Theft Auto. (That's the one where you steal cars, kill people, and enjoy regular blow-jobs from hookers.) These are things kids have been raised on recently. Of course, GTA - as the halcyon example - was never intended for exposure to anyone underage, especially when it was first released way back in 1997. But at least one member of everyone's social group had (or has) an older brother, inattentive parents, or both. You remember him. Hell, sometimes the only reason we tolerated that kid at all was BECAUSE older siblings or absentee parents granted him access to shit like Grand Theft Auto. Result: glorification of violence and/or killing. While I don't subscribe at all to the video-games-lead-to violence school of thought, it's tough to argue that gore is glorified to unhealthy levels these days, and it's not unreasonable to believe that such things may tend to desensitize people to violence and the actual effect of violence on the human psyche. (Google 'On Killing,' by Dave Grossman.)

Hunger Games, I have no doubt, draws at least some of its success from the suspense angle intrinsic to life and death human combat. The effects of such things on Katniss is a central part of her development. But she's a participant against her will, and the violence is in no way glorified. Quite the contrary: we see lots of 'good guys' - central actors and likable characters - shuffling off the mortal coil, occasionally in slow, painful fashion. All in all, I suspect that Hunger Games presents its young-adult readers with something they've never really experienced in fiction before: a passable take on watching friends and family members being killed. It's quite well done, and very much NOT what you'd expect to find in the 'young adult' section.

All in all, I liked the stories a great deal, especially the portrayal of a female lead as a capable, rational victim of circumstance, rather than a swooning princess helpless beneath circumstance. The stark hardness of the characters and the world is unsettling, but the exact opposite of glorification.

If I ever have daughters, they will be openly and repeatedly forbidden to read the Hunger Games until they're at least 16.

That's the best way I can think of to guarantee that they'll read it as soon as they can sound out the bigger words.