Hunger Games and Murdertainment

I took a two week period to read all three books of the Hunger Games series this spring. And yes, they are fun, quick reads. However, they are a total rip off.

I’m certainly not the first to levy this charge. There are undeniable similarities between HG and the Japanese book/film series Battle Royale. Just do a Google search for Hunger Games vs. Battle Royale and you’ll find dozens of articles and blog posts from people who are either diming out the HG series as unoriginal, or trying to draw ridiculously fine lines between HG and BR to prove they are different.

At the end of the day, both are about selecting teens to go to a remote game arena for the express purpose of killing one another. Who cares if one does it for entertainment purposes, and the other does it in secret? Or if one gives the teens training before letting them loose in the murder arena? The premise is the same, and even though Suzanne Collins claims to never have read the books or seen the movie, it’s just a little hard to believe she didn’t get at least some inspiration from the Japanese precedessor. It’s just way, way too close.

But if we’re really going to call rip off, aren’t Battle Royale and Hunger Games both a just a repackaged mash up of The Running Man, which came out decades ago, and Lord of the Flies? Take the kids and the remote setting from LOTF, add the game element, weaponry and entertainment factor from The Running Man, shake and serve.

The whole murdertainment dystopian genre is, in short, really stale now. We’ve seen it explored in countless ways with a whole variety of different characters sentenced to play the modern, government-mandated gladiator games. We even have zombie versions of this theme now – both Land of the Dead and The Walking Dead had zombie fighting game/gambling arenas for survivor entertainment. Not only is it not original anymore, but given how close reality TV is coming to pushing this envelope, it’s not that inventive or futuristic, either.

It’s a painfully obvious and a well explored idea to link oppressive totalitarian governments and a complicit populace that is amused by blood sport. Which, I suppose, is why these books are aimed at kids – you don’t need much beyond a 6^th grade education to read and “get” the heavy handed symbolism here. But let’s not pretend that Hunger Games is exploring new turf.