Entry tags:
Hunger Games (books)
One of my favorite kinds of character relationships, that tap-dances all over my id, is "badass teen girl and surly older male mentor". Best of all possible worlds is if they're both surly, distrustful, and broken, team up with extreme reluctance, and spend as much time fighting with each other as uniting against a common enemy. Frances Hardinge is good at these; it's one of the reasons why I like her books. (See also: Manji and Rin in Blade of the Immortal.)
It took me awhile to realize that it works if the mentor is female too; it's just that you don't usually get female versions of that kind of character. The Luideag in the October Daye books fits the "surly mentor" role perfectly, though her relationship with Toby is really too equal to hit this particular button in my head, not that I don't really enjoy them. (If someone saddled her with an angry teenager, though, the needle would probably go off the charts.) But basically, this kind of relationship is one of my favorite things.
.... aaaaanyway, yesterday I finally got around to reading the first of the Hunger Games books, and while I was enjoying it enough to keep reading, it wasn't until about halfway through the book that something in the back of my brain went "*zing*" and then "♥ ♥ ♥ OMG ♥ ♥ ♥" and, er, then I basically read the entire series in about a day and a half. I had no idea this series had one of these in it, especially one which turned out to be pretty close to my Platonic ideal of that kind of thing.
AND NOW EVERYONE IS STILL ALIVE AND LIVING NEXT DOOR TO EACH OTHER OH HELP MY HEAAAAAART. One of the reasons why I love being unspoiled is because I get a deep delight from those rare occasions when I really, truly believe that everything is going to end horribly and then it doesn't. Not that there wasn't a huge amount of horrible in the last book, not that the characters don't end up terribly shattered, and I do have lots of thoughts on how the books handle revolution and terrorism (especially since I just got done reading the Dalemark Quartet books, which also deal with revolution and terrorism) but right now I'm still stuck on happy-mode because of the ending being so much less depressing than I thought it was going to be, and I am just going to wrap up in that like a warm blanket. (I was braced for everyone other than Katniss to die and for Katniss to end up as some sort of puppet of a new dystopian government, so, you know, anything was a step up from that. I wasn't that surprised that at least one of the love interests survived -- though I didn't expect both of them to make it. However, I would never in a million years have guessed Haymitch would make it all the way to the end of the series; I'd pegged him for "most likely to die" from the very beginning.)
I have such issues with the worldbuilding, though. SUCH ISSUES. It's frustrating because on an individual-character level, I think the books -- from my perspective, at least -- deal really well with damage and psychology and so forth ... the characters are very human. But on a societal level, they just AREN'T! The only thing that makes the whole society work is that THE PEOPLE DON'T ACT LIKE PEOPLE. It kind of reminds me of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
xparrot's headcanon that the entire Pegasus galaxy in Stargate Atlantis can only be explained if the humans were engineered by the Ancients to build their societies in certain proscribed ways, because otherwise, it just doesn't work because people don't do that. I had the same problem here. And yet, on an individual level, the characters are fine; it's just macroscopically that everything disintegrates.
I don't really want to get into this in excruciating detail (although maybe I'll write up a longer post on it) but mostly it's issues like the lack of any sort of resistance/underground media/organized escape route to somewhere else (what on earth DID happen to the rest of the world, anyway?), or the fact that North America in the books appears to be about 95% empty space (I mean, one 8,000-resident town in ALL OF APPALACHIA?) which also must contain oodles of abandoned cities/mineshafts/subway tunnels/farms/etc from the before-times and therefore should be excellent for villages of refugees, rebels, and raiders, and yet inexplicably it seems like Katniss and Gale are the only people who recognize the wilderness as an exploitable resource. Or the dystopic regime being really really terrible at PR, because the way successful totalitarian regimes work (at least the ones that don't get toppled in a few years) is by giving the oppressed masses the illusion that they're part of something bigger, not to constantly remind them that they aren't part of it, or uniting them against a common enemy (like the communists' successful strategy of allowing the poor and hungry to tear down a scapegoat in the form of those people designated as the capitalist moneyed class); in this case, the only common enemy being offered to the starving masses is the Capitol, which is exactly the OPPOSITE of what you want.
The Hunger Games should be merchandised out the wazoo in the districts, not just in the Capitol; people should be deeply indoctrinated into the idea that being chosen is a huge honor, cheering their champion on, encouraged to hate the other districts because they're The Opponents (divide and conquer!) etc. Instead the whole system is basically designed to provoke unrest. The books name-check the Romans' "bread and circuses", but the problem is, the people in these books aren't getting bread OR circuses; it's more like starvation and entertainment that everybody hates.
I think I'd buy the general passivity of the populace a little better if the Capitol were better at surveillance or brainwashing or both, but it doesn't seem to do much of either one; there's little indication that people are heavily monitored, or that there's much indoctrination in education. Or it might be less weird if everyone was crowded into a small area and the food shortages were due to a lack of farmland, but again, there's nothing like that at all; North America is vast and none of the districts seem to contain more than a few small towns (I mean, again, ONE VILLAGE in the entire Tennessee/Kentucky/West Virginia area). There are places where the worldbuilding is almost there (like with the black market in District 12) but then if you leave the town, it's gotta be something like 600 miles of total wilderness to the next town, and why is nobody trying to colonize or utilize that space?
/overthinking
It took me awhile to realize that it works if the mentor is female too; it's just that you don't usually get female versions of that kind of character. The Luideag in the October Daye books fits the "surly mentor" role perfectly, though her relationship with Toby is really too equal to hit this particular button in my head, not that I don't really enjoy them. (If someone saddled her with an angry teenager, though, the needle would probably go off the charts.) But basically, this kind of relationship is one of my favorite things.
.... aaaaanyway, yesterday I finally got around to reading the first of the Hunger Games books, and while I was enjoying it enough to keep reading, it wasn't until about halfway through the book that something in the back of my brain went "*zing*" and then "♥ ♥ ♥ OMG ♥ ♥ ♥" and, er, then I basically read the entire series in about a day and a half. I had no idea this series had one of these in it, especially one which turned out to be pretty close to my Platonic ideal of that kind of thing.
AND NOW EVERYONE IS STILL ALIVE AND LIVING NEXT DOOR TO EACH OTHER OH HELP MY HEAAAAAART. One of the reasons why I love being unspoiled is because I get a deep delight from those rare occasions when I really, truly believe that everything is going to end horribly and then it doesn't. Not that there wasn't a huge amount of horrible in the last book, not that the characters don't end up terribly shattered, and I do have lots of thoughts on how the books handle revolution and terrorism (especially since I just got done reading the Dalemark Quartet books, which also deal with revolution and terrorism) but right now I'm still stuck on happy-mode because of the ending being so much less depressing than I thought it was going to be, and I am just going to wrap up in that like a warm blanket. (I was braced for everyone other than Katniss to die and for Katniss to end up as some sort of puppet of a new dystopian government, so, you know, anything was a step up from that. I wasn't that surprised that at least one of the love interests survived -- though I didn't expect both of them to make it. However, I would never in a million years have guessed Haymitch would make it all the way to the end of the series; I'd pegged him for "most likely to die" from the very beginning.)
I have such issues with the worldbuilding, though. SUCH ISSUES. It's frustrating because on an individual-character level, I think the books -- from my perspective, at least -- deal really well with damage and psychology and so forth ... the characters are very human. But on a societal level, they just AREN'T! The only thing that makes the whole society work is that THE PEOPLE DON'T ACT LIKE PEOPLE. It kind of reminds me of
xparrot's headcanon that the entire Pegasus galaxy in Stargate Atlantis can only be explained if the humans were engineered by the Ancients to build their societies in certain proscribed ways, because otherwise, it just doesn't work because people don't do that. I had the same problem here. And yet, on an individual level, the characters are fine; it's just macroscopically that everything disintegrates.I don't really want to get into this in excruciating detail (although maybe I'll write up a longer post on it) but mostly it's issues like the lack of any sort of resistance/underground media/organized escape route to somewhere else (what on earth DID happen to the rest of the world, anyway?), or the fact that North America in the books appears to be about 95% empty space (I mean, one 8,000-resident town in ALL OF APPALACHIA?) which also must contain oodles of abandoned cities/mineshafts/subway tunnels/farms/etc from the before-times and therefore should be excellent for villages of refugees, rebels, and raiders, and yet inexplicably it seems like Katniss and Gale are the only people who recognize the wilderness as an exploitable resource. Or the dystopic regime being really really terrible at PR, because the way successful totalitarian regimes work (at least the ones that don't get toppled in a few years) is by giving the oppressed masses the illusion that they're part of something bigger, not to constantly remind them that they aren't part of it, or uniting them against a common enemy (like the communists' successful strategy of allowing the poor and hungry to tear down a scapegoat in the form of those people designated as the capitalist moneyed class); in this case, the only common enemy being offered to the starving masses is the Capitol, which is exactly the OPPOSITE of what you want.
The Hunger Games should be merchandised out the wazoo in the districts, not just in the Capitol; people should be deeply indoctrinated into the idea that being chosen is a huge honor, cheering their champion on, encouraged to hate the other districts because they're The Opponents (divide and conquer!) etc. Instead the whole system is basically designed to provoke unrest. The books name-check the Romans' "bread and circuses", but the problem is, the people in these books aren't getting bread OR circuses; it's more like starvation and entertainment that everybody hates.
I think I'd buy the general passivity of the populace a little better if the Capitol were better at surveillance or brainwashing or both, but it doesn't seem to do much of either one; there's little indication that people are heavily monitored, or that there's much indoctrination in education. Or it might be less weird if everyone was crowded into a small area and the food shortages were due to a lack of farmland, but again, there's nothing like that at all; North America is vast and none of the districts seem to contain more than a few small towns (I mean, again, ONE VILLAGE in the entire Tennessee/Kentucky/West Virginia area). There are places where the worldbuilding is almost there (like with the black market in District 12) but then if you leave the town, it's gotta be something like 600 miles of total wilderness to the next town, and why is nobody trying to colonize or utilize that space?
/overthinking
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And yes, Pegasus doesn't make sense either! I'd love to read a rant on that if you have a link.
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*nods* Yeah, I think this is probably accurate. Someone else in the comments (I can't remember where, either in the LJ version of this or on my other HG post) pointed out that it's probably at least partly that the author simply isn't interested in that aspect of it; she's focused on the psychology of the characters, not the cohesiveness of the world. Which is fine; not everyone is going to want the same things out of fiction. But I get hung up on the worldbuilding because that's one of my big focus areas ...
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