The Horrible Games

Huh. No readings this week. Guess that means it's time to blog about whatever I want.


So . . . Hunger Games! (There will be minor spoilers, if anyone still cares.)

This is the post I should have made instead of "Embracing the Darkness" a month ago. Except it wouldn't have really been appropriate because The Hunger Games isn't really a children's story, and we were talking about  children's media at the time so . . . anyway, Hunger Games is very, very dark. So dark that I remember the world of evangelical parents hating it when the first film was released. After all, it was about children killing children!! And that's horrible.

The vitriol seems to have died down now. I assume that's because the public finally realized that the author has a heart and put some it in the story. I could never understand all the resistance to this franchise myself. I mean, Lord of the Rings has a far higher body count, but Christians love that franchise. Is it just because Tolkien and Jackson never make children the target of violence and Collins does? Are we all OK with mass slaughter as long as it's only between adults and orcs?

Or is it the grey morality Christians are uncomfortable with? I mean the Avengers only kill/beat up evil people/creatures who threaten them or their world, whereas Katniss kills people who are technically just as innocent as she is, even though some of them are portrayed as rather blood-thirsty. (Though if I remember correctly, Katniss only kills 3 people in the first book, one of which was already dying a slow death, another of which was partly accidental.) Of course, it's not that Katniss wants to kill other teens. She just feels like she has no choice. If she doesn't cooperate she'll put her loved ones in danger. Better to kill 19 tributes than to risk the lives of one's whole district, right? Besides, is it really murder if someone forces you to do it, and you know your victims are gonna be killed anyway? What would you do in a situation like that? All very disturbing questions for which I do not have answers. Are storytellers not allowed to burden their characters with horrible moral dilemmas?

Or were people just turned off by the fact that when you ask someone what Hunger Games is about, the first thing they say is "teenagers fighting to the death"? And then people ignore the fact that there's probably more to the story than that because they can't get over how horrific the premise is? I mean, if you ask someone what Lord of the Rings is about, they'll say something like "There's this magical ring connected to the spirit of  a dark lord and the characters have to take it to this mountain to destroy it." Along the way, they fight and kill countless orcs, we sea elves and men cut down in several large battles, and some of the main characters don't survive. But all that death is a consequence of the plot, not the cause of the plot, so it's acceptable. Hunger Games is actually about killing people, therefore it promotes violence and is inappropriate.

Or maybe people understand all (or none) of those nuances perfectly well, but they still find the idea of a game showing about kids fighting to the death just too . . . horrible. Why would anyone write story about something so horrible? Why do so many teens want to read said horribleness? And why on earth would anyone want to put that on the big screen?

Well, if I may pretend I know what I'm talking about, I think there are some valuable themes and questions here that need to be addressed somehow. Yes, Collin's villains do have a particularly sadistic way of expressing their wickedness, but why not? People are jerks. (I apologize for that gross understatement, but I feel compelled to stick to PG language.) Jerks love to create horrible situations for each other. There are other people who would like to pass through this world without doing any harm. Unfortunately, we're all forced to live in the same world. Now how are good people supposed to deal with evil people? Good people are forced to do things they don't want to do or else let evil reign unhindered. But in the process, the people who are trying to be good wind up contributing to the violence. Violence is inevitable. We can't truly win in this world.

That is the real-life dilemma that Hunger Games brings to the surface. It just does so in an extreme manner that no one can ignore. Cruel people back our heroes up against a wall. How will they respond? How should they respond? Should they kill, or should they cling to their innocence and let their enemies kill whoever they want? Where should they draw the line? What do they do if their allies want to draw the line somewhere else? How do they make sure they don't become just like the monsters they want to destroy? All these questions are raised over the course of the trilogy. And while I certainly hope nothing like that ever happens in real life (but it already has, hasn't it?), those questions will be important in a lot of real-life situations.

As Professor Leeper would say, there's a discussion going on here. And I don't think a lighter story could start it off as well. Yes, it's horrible. Everyone knows that. That's the point! It speaks to the ugliness of the real world. Let's not let the initial shock make us turn away from a discussion.

And that's my twentieth post, so this is the last you'll hear from me! <Blatant lie.