The Hunger Games is too similar to Battle Royale

^ You do know Lord Of The Flies is several decades older than Battle Royale, right?

Oh, sorry! I was taking that information from an article in the Macleans Magazine talking about how Dystopia stories like The Hunger Games are all the rage these days. Whoever said Battle Royale is the grandfather of this genre Did Not Do The Research. Oops!

Battle Royal isn't like Lord Of The Flies anyway. One is about a game, the other is about stranded refugees. One is an exploration on survival or something, the other is a series of insults to people who think kids are inherently good and to the secular society we've become.

Then hunger games, the whole thing is to punish the losers of a war? Why not be like normal people and raise taxes or make them work as slaves till the damage they did was paid off? I only saw the Hunger Games film, never head of the book until this thread, I could be wrong about something but indefinitely punishing someone for a war is just asking for another one.

@Cider

It's less of a punishment and more a way of insuring that the districts will never rise up again, it's better explained in the book.

edited 5th Apr '12 2:22:56 PM by LMage

Although a disproportionate amount of the Capitol's power is still implied to be behind the Hunger Games in the books. That said, most dystopian novels are unrealistic in one way or another.

Da, it mostly depends on whether something breaks your suspension of disbelief or not. For instance, BNW is completely unrealistic in terms of hard science...but the social commentary was what supported it. HG, for me, not so much. It has the unrealistic science and...nothing to support it.

Now, I've never read either The Hunger Games nor Battle Royale, but Cracked has an article that touches on this exact issue. Specifically Number 4 of this article.

Well, this is more of discussing it. No one is saying HG sucks inherently because of it. Or at least, I'm not.

Finished the novels. All of them.

Not bad. Not bad at all. Thought the story improved with every book. Characters developped interestingly.

It is one thing to say one work lacks in quality because it has the same basic plot and another when the two works share multiple plot points and "twists". In this case, I would say Hunger Games is different enough from Battle Royal(based on the film anyway) but are all the similarities really coincidental and is it wrong for someone who has read both books to say one is hard to enjoy if the other did many of the same things better?

But backtracking, it's jarring that it takes place in North America. Did the Canadians hold down the Aborigines or French Speakers who tried to leave the country? No, they did what they could to make sure they catered to them. The leaders of Veracruz didn't slaughter children in Mexico City, they moved there to spread good will.

And of coarse the US were the ones to say not to oppress Germany after the World War. They organized a reconstruction after their civil war. From there came a reverend who warned about oppressed becoming as evil as the oppressor. It seems like the last place on Earth the Hunger game would happen on given the modern history of the continent.

As for battle royal, the reason Government and Military get away with heinous things for extended periods is because people don't know about the details. I seriously doubt any human population could hate their children enough to watch them be kidnapped and forced kill one another for a poorly run experiment, kids who were putting their tax money to good use by staying in school and off the streets no less! Even if they did, eventually the kids would grow up and try to change things, complaints would get worse overtime instead of dieing away.

edited 7th Apr '12 9:26:02 AM by Cider

´American exceptiomnalism, huh?

The vomitorum is a very comon misconception, but thematicslly it's pretty powerful.

Yes, but Panem is hardly like contemporary America, by any stretch of the imagination. America was pretty much destroyed by nukes or war or... and then it's not really explained.

edited 7th Apr '12 5:33:45 AM by Pattyunknown

But it isn't like any other large nation on the continent either. Superficially, the games are like a gladiator's but those in the Colosseum were slaves(could go free if they worked off their debt or by crowd demand), criminals(who were going to be executed anyway, gladiatoring was an alternative) and paid volunteers(who couldn't get a better job or just wanted fame). Whenever plain citizens died it caused a fuss, one fuss shut the Colosseum down for good. The Colosseum wasn't against former enemies or for a military experiment, it was for gods.

The crowd was more likely to vote for a Gladiator to be spared when given the choice, if the Gladiator put up a good show. It was horrific, but they killed more animals and prisoners likely to die anyway than their own, hardworking, law abiding citizens.

So....you think that the idea of the games is the unrealistic part?

Wow....You put a lot more faith in humanity then it deserves.

America can change a lot, given the right historical divergences. "I am as corny as Kansas in Aaaaaugust..." It's all a matter of culture, you see.

And, from a Third Worlder's perspective, the Capitol and the West are pretty damn analogical to each other. A monstrous caricature, sure, but just ask Successful Third World Kid what he thinks about your new I Phone, the dog you keep and feed for company, or all that internet traffic and processing power that you spend on porn.

No new phones, I've wasted more on videos, mail and wikisless on reports or resumes but likely resentment over wastes that could be helping people, disgust with my apathy plights and envy over a pet that loyally guards the home, eats pests and show unconditional love and of the home itself with its running, filtered water and refrigerator.

But I wasn't denying evils of "the west" on the rest of the world or my own participation in them, I was talking about the ways countries in books treat their own people being inconsistent with Real Life. There have been many horrific cultural practices, but not for the reasons or even in the areas depicted, at least not openly for everyone see. edited:for grammar errors

edited 12th Apr '12 10:40:46 PM by Cider

Horrific cultural practices like sending people to fight lions in a giant pit or torturing criminals? Both historical horrific cultural practices that were completely open to the public, the first was done in ancient Rome and happened in the Colosseum and similar places, and the second was done in medieval Europe and happened on the streets of most towns.

I already covered the Colosseum, most were, as you said, criminals. Many were paid to fight lions. Once an emperor decided to kill some army vets and cripples for kicks in the Colosseum, he was assassinated. Criminals(guilty or otherwise) were tortured in Europe. Criminals, not students in public schools(therefore wasted tax payer money).

No, the people who fought in the Colosseum were mostly slaves, often born into slavery, or captives from newly conquered lands. The fighters that weren't slaves did consist mostly of criminals, but there were others, such as the many Christians who were sent to fight in it.

I think some aspects of the Games make sense as a method for the Capitol to maintain control.

1.) The Games divide the districts against each other. Every year each district sees people from the other districts killing or attempting to kill their children. This would make the districts less likely to develop fellow-feeling and make a common cause.

1b.) The above is particularly important for District 2, which is the military centre and whose tributes are often Careers. A government falls when the military defects. If the outlying districts hate District 2 for their Careers, it makes it less likely they'll get along with Peacekeepers and the like from District 2. At the same time, District 2 gets to feel elite and superior to the outlying districts, so they have more to lose from rebelling, and less to lose from supporting the current system since their tributes win fairly often.

2.) Division between the Capitol and the districts. If the people of the Capitol are accustomed to seeing District children fighting and dying, and treating it as entertainment, they're unlikely to protest or care about anything else the Capitol does to the Districts.

3.) Demonstrating power. If the Capitol is strong enough to compel each district to give up two of its children to fight to the death each year, and to create "arenas" involving technology people in most of the districts can't comprehend, just imagine what it could do to any district who chose to rebel.

In short, it's a complex method of divide-and-rule mixed with intimidation, which has served a lot of empires and dictatorships well.

And people can get accustomed to pretty much any kind of oppression if they have no experience with anything else.

edited 7th Apr '12 1:52:06 PM by WarriorEowyn

Many gladiators were professionals and the odds of dieing were 1 in 10. As for Christians, being Christian was considered a crime. Their only crime was practicing religion differently that everyone else but then, they could easily stop practicing or lie about practicing. The superstitious Romans were largely trying to appease gods, if there was an earthquake, it must be because of that dirty new religion that won't accept Neptune right?

That's a little different than picking random people who may or may not have done anything or singling out people actually doing something you're paying for.

It was still overly brutal, and very public, and I'm not sure what else to say as I'm not sure what would be a good comparision since I've never actually read The Hunger Games, I'm just a Latin geek. :/

It's not really the fact that they're taking people at random that seems to be the problem with the situation in The Hunger Games. It is, unfortunately, not unrealistic to believe that an extremely powerful nation could just take members of its provinces and make them fight to the death to keep them subordinate, and its people might not have a problem with that. The real issue with Panem is that there is no justification for why the Capitol should be so over-powerful (it's only one city, after all), and it's quite clear that at least most of the districts truly hate them. If the Capitol were supported by more than just districts 1 and 2, then it might make more sense, but as it is, it's like Colorado deciding to go to war with the rest of the U.S. east of the Rockies (along with possibly Quebec, if that's where District 13 is supposed to be). I do get the impression, though, that the population of the U.S. has been pretty much exterminated by some series of disasters, so idk. Maybe the Capitol has an overwhelming majority of the population.

Still a good book, regardless, and the similarities with Battle Royale aren't so extreme that it's copyright infringement. Ideas aren't under copyright; the particular expression is. While you could pretty legitimately say that Battle Royale and The Hunger Games explore the same idea (or at least remarkably similar ideas), the expression is distinct. If ideas could be copyrighted, then we might have a real problem with ever writing anything.

edited 7th Apr '12 4:36:00 PM by DigitalMadness

The U.S. and E Urope take up a very small portion of land,yet they installed so many dictators on developing nations

I always thought of the Capitol as the Corportaions and the U.S. and the districts as the developing nations like Sudan or Burma or Nicaragua,the fact that distrcits have one product isn't all that different from how some nations have sweatshops that specialize in one kind of thing,in Latin America it could be fruit or clothes,China, really cheap stuff,etc.

So really it isn't all that unrealistic.

It's not that unrealistic at all

The Nukes. They talk about that a bit in Mockingjay.