Hunger Games General Thread

Let us discuss The Hunger Games here. And may the odds be ever in your favor!

(Seriously, though. The only Hunger Games thread we have is bashing it. We need a REAL Hunger Games thread.)

I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.

So, The Hunger Games is pretty cool, huh? I hear it rips off Battle Royale, but I don't really care since I haven't read it. I think the first book is excellent, but the series starts to decline the moment Katniss and Peeta win at the end.

The second book is completely meh until about 200 pages in, and the third book doesn't really have much going for it except the arena-like progression through the Capitol.

"Steel wins battles. Gold wins wars."

I don't know. I think Mockingjay would have been much more interesting if it hadn't shyed away from the war and political aspects of the rebellion. But I guess that may have alienated the younger side of the target demographic.

"In the end a gentle heart may be worth more than pride or valor."

The thing is, I think that doing that just made Katniss more manipulatable. Coin just wanted to use her. Katniss thought her fighting was done, once she got to District 13, and then found out that the war would never end.

...What I'm saying is that all that makes sense from a character basis.

ophelia, you're breaking my heart

The worldbuilding was not well-thought out enough in this series to support an in-depth look at the politics or war.

The whole rationale behind the Hunger Games in general is based on a severe misunderstanding of what Bread and Circuses means*

, and there is so much bad reasoning behind all the politicking that it only holds up under the barest minimum of scrutiny. While it can be fun to read if you turn your brain off and just enjoy the action, zerky did not find that looking too closely at the background would have done anyone any good.

I suppose that's true enough. I guess if the world building had been a little less exaggerated, maybe it would have been more interesting.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy the Hunger Games series, but I'm not going to gush over it like a 13 year old girl.

@ everyone: Who is your favourite character in the series, by the way? I would say mine is Peeta, although I'm absolutely gutted that we didn't get to see more of his magnificent bastard streak.

edited 10th May '12 11:50:04 AM by Pattyunknown

"In the end a gentle heart may be worth more than pride or valor."

Bakers are now sexy. My male lead was a baker BEFORE this series was popular, dammit! -shakes fist-

I rather enjoyed the present tense and the prose (not all the time, though), and it influenced mine as well. I really only like the first book, though.

My favorite character is probably Haymitch. I wish some more of his backstory was put in the first book.

edited 10th May '12 8:05:48 PM by SnowyFoxes

The last battle's curtains will open on stage!

So I just read The Hunger Games, and have started on Catching Fire, and I absolutely love it!

I recently just finished the series and it was great. The first book was my favorite while the other two were very eh...not so good. My favorite character would probably be Katniss. I related to her in many ways and Jennifer Lawrence (the actress who plays her in the movie) is just lovely.

The ecology and economics bothered me from the first chapter. They're concerned about apex predators but can't find a deer, Katniss is worried about how much a gold pin could buy, but from who? The bakery is frosting cakes daily despite most people not being able to afford sugar. The world is like they live on the outskirts of a modern US city picking up the scraps of the rich and catering to the rich neighbors, but without the rest of the city.

Sex, Drugs, and Rationality

Yeah, the world building is very very shitty. If you are going to enjoy the series, I advise you try your best to ignore it.

Read my stories!

The first book was good. The second book sucked. I am reluctant to read the third book because of how much the second book sucked.

I didn't care for the overdone Love Triangle one bit, I was annoyed by the Viewers Are Goldfish stance in regard to what happened in the first book and I felt that the ending was a cop-out. Let us see the Capitol capture Peeta and Johanna, let us see District 12 getting firebombed. Instead we get an Info Dump. Doing it that way just felt very anticlimactic and emotionless.

Looking for some stories?

This series is so ripe for fan fiction its ridiculous.

Yeah, it kind of is. I'm planning a Doctor Who crossover based on the Facebook MMORPG.

Looking for some stories?

It's perfect for turning your brain off. When I picked it up, I wanted something with easy language that I didn't have to think too hard about to read or understand, which is exactly what I got. I enjoyed it. Catching Fire suffered from extreme Sequelitis, but there were some good moments. There were two things I liked about Mockingjay: I liked how it wasn't a clear fight between the hero rebels and the villain Capitol. It was real clear from the beginning that Thirteen wasn't going to be any better, and that was pretty cool. I also have a soft spot for Cold-Blooded Torture victims, so yeah, I liked that, too.

See, I think Collins has some very cool ideas. She just needs to collaborate with someone who's better at story structure.

And if I claim to be a wise man, well, it surely means that I don't know.

How would you modify the story structure?

I loved the first one, was ambivalent towards the second one, and disliked the third one. Mockingjay just felt like Katniss lumbering around and acting like a baby. I get that she's unbalanced and going through trauma, but my God could we at least have some well thought out action? That was one of the best parts of the first book!

My favorite character is Finnick because, well, he's just awesome. And he supplies one of the funniest moments of the series in Mockingjay. I hate how he died because it didn't seem dramatic enough. I wanted him to have a Dying Moment of Awesome, not just "Oh yeah, Finnick? Torn up by mutts. Oops."

no

My favorite character is Cinna, and has been since the line "And what do we do with coal? We burn it. You're not afraid of fire, are you, Katniss?"

I would have liked some backstory on Cinna. He was obviously a rebel from way back, but how far back? And how did he get to be one? It would have been interesting.

Be not afraid...

Yeah... The books would be much better with more Cinna in them. Really, anything would be better with more Cinna in them.

In The Hunger Games Wiki page for Cinna, it says: "Weapon: Fashion"

edited 20th May '12 1:17:18 AM by deathpigeon

Is it weird that I actually liked the third book just fine?

Aside from the Romantic Plot Tumor, I loved the rebellion story line, the character development, and the twists and turns. I thought that it was a great culmination of all of the story lines and plots.

However, I will say that the first book is the best, hands down. I personally feel as though if you had just had Peeta and Katniss get together at the end of the book, and left the rebellion out as to give a melancholy ending, you could have had a great stand alone book.

ADHD? Bitch please, those are battle instincts!

That's about right.

Looking for some stories?

I'm surprised that a lot of people don't seem to care much for Cathing Fire. I know I'm in the minority here, but I actually liked it better than the first book. Don't get me wrong, the first one was still great. It was necessary to introduce the setting and the characters, and it did a good job with all that, but the whole point was really just for Katniss and Peeta to get to the hunger games, which is when it starts to get really good. My only real complaint is that some of the romance with Peeta was a bit sappy. I guess because I couldn't really buy into the whole "pretending to love Peeta to woo the audience" thing. Especially coming after Rue's death, it was also a bit anti-climatic.

Catching Fire, on the other hand, I found immensely enjoyable the whole way through. We got a strong sense of the growing unrest with the victory tour and then with the Capitol cracking down on District 12. The romance was also a lot better because Katniss started to genuinely love Peeta, and it also explored on her relationship with Gale, whom we didn't see enough of in the first book. I know some people found it dull and uneventful, but for me it was all part of good character development and a suspenseful build-up.

And then came the exciting twist that we'd get to see another arena fight. Seeing Katniss having to cope with the senseless cruelty of getting thrown back into the games after all she'd been through was really heart-wrenching. I also loved the clock arena; it was a really fascinating and original idea. I just wish it had lasted a little longer, but all in all, it's easily my favourite of the trilogy.

I liked Mockingjay overall, but not as much as the first two. Right from the start it just seemed to lose a lot of the tension, but my main complaint was how the first two thirds of the book dealt with all that anti-Capitol propaganda and the characters going on and on about the endless injustices of President Snow. It made the anti-war message seem too preachy and heavy-handed. I did like the revelatory twists at the end and the arena-like showdown in the Capitol, but it all felt like it was ending too quickly and it just couldn't match with the raw thrills of the first two books.

Overall, it's a good trilogy and I'm happy I got to read it.

edited 28th Jun '12 2:42:57 AM by DavySprocket

Found this thread again...

Catching Fire was actually my favorite of the books back when I read them. I liked the puzzle of the arena, the quick pace (I remember feeling like it was quicker once the arena parts started than the first book for some reason), and I really liked the Victor characters. There's something just a little more dangerous in working with survivors/veteran killers than with the hapless kids and some Careers in the first novel. And for some of them, it was sad seeing them "go back" to what they'd worked so hard to escape in the first place. I especially loved Wiress, Beetee and Mags. I have a thing for eccentric characters and for heroic sacrifice.

As my fiancee', who hadn't read the books pointed out with the movie, however...and I couldn't quite justify it by the book - President Snow held the Idiot Ball a bit. I was disapointed in the movie a little, too, for not showing Haymitch's arena. I liked it because it reminded me of a videogame.

In which I attempt to be a writer.

I didn't find Catching Fire to be a particularly good book because the pacing felt extremely off, as if the book didn't really know where it was going, and was simply filling time with a variety of twists and turns before Katniss had to go back into the arena. It didn't feel like a cohesive story in the way that The Hunger Games and Mockingjay did; instead, it felt like a series of disconnected events in between the first and third books, with far too many areas of the plot (the Victory Tour, Katniss's wedding planning, oppression in District 12) turned into montages. I did like the design of the Quarter Quell arena, though.

The film of Catching Fire improved it immensely by connecting the different events, showing how the shifts in events were the results of Capitol strategies and their reaction to Katniss's actions (e.g., the "wedding" begin dropped as soon as Katniss stood up against the peacekeepers and Snow realized that alienating her from the public by portraying her as one of the elite wasn't going to work). The entire narrative of the movie flowed far more effectively, with events connecting to one another and the path from the Victory Tour to the Quarter Quell, and the motivations for both Katniss' and Snow's choices becoming clearer.

These films are exactly what the books need - they've fixed the pacing where it was poor, they enable the story to be widened by showing events that Katniss doesn't see directly, and they remove the issue of mediocre writing style that pulls down the books. It's a rare example of an adaptation that improves upon the source material.

edited 29th Jul '14 7:40:49 AM by WarriorEowyn