So I ask myself – What world have we come to when Bella Swan is voted the best feminist heroine in literature? Well, the same world where the Hunger Games is praised by men and women aged between 20 and 30 and Katniss Everdeen is voted a female heroine.
I should have known as soon as I saw the review on the cover by Stephenie Meyer saying that the trilogy was good that it was going to be three long books of a completely pathetic plot. Of course, I couldn’t be more right.
Now before I go on to complain about the plot itself I would like to bring the blurb to light. Usually I find that the blurb never does a story justice but in this book’s case I find that things have reversed. The blurb promised me a girl who was ‘forced’ to enter the Hunger Games. Well, I didn’t see anyone put a knife to her throat or drag her to the stage by the hair and pull the words out of her mouth. No, she volunteered. She willingly took her sister’s place. Furthermore, it said that Katniss ‘had been close to death before and survival was second nature’ when the most dangerous thing she did was climb over gates that weren’t charged with electricity when they should have been and go hunting with her closest friend Gale Hawthorne.
I was truly happy when I read the blurb. I mean seriously, it finally looked like the world was going to see a female heroine who wasn’t completely pathetic. It finally looked like there was going to be an absence of female dependency on ridiculous overall male dominance which was heavily advertised in the 50’s and is commonly seen in the world’s favourite classics .
I thought another plus to this book was that it was a female writer. I personally thought it was finally happening. There was finally going to be a female character truly worthy of looking up to for all girls out there who is better than some stupid image of female stupidity and desperation for love.
Well, I thought that until I saw Stephenie Meyer’s review and my hopes died down instantly. I mean you only write what you enjoy. Trust me, I would know. And only a mind idiotic enough to plagiarize every well-renowned romance novel and series in this world would be ‘obsessed’ with a plot just as stupid as her own plot, but for now I should stop my rant on Stephenie Meyer. I have a whole review just for her and her saga.
Anyway, this gripping blurb also promised that the ‘Hunger Games’ was a story ‘set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present’ which is just a fancy way of saying there are similarities between this future and us. This point though brings me to my first issue with this book. I get that this is fiction – the whole ‘Hunger Games’ reality T.V show proves that – but what really irritates me is that these people are just as human as we are hence the whole similarity to our present. It’s the one thing the author (Suzanne Collins) emphasizes on numerous times. They are just as emotionally vulnerable, they bleed easily, they make completely idiotic decisions, they follow a set of oppressive laws because they have no other choice, they are ruled by a bourgeoisie (higher class), they barely scrape by for food and live in constant starvation and people die in the harsh winters, from diseases which they do not have the means to cure which is a close replica to the modern day third world country or a country ruled by dictatorship. The key though, the thing that makes them most like us is their ability to die, or their mortality if you will.
This enforcement of death in the book is a recurring theme. Everyone dies, very easily. A life lost is a common thing, death occurs every day, it can happen quickly, slowly, unexpectedly, brutally or even nicely. My point is, it can happen anywhere anyhow. And Suzanne Collins is sure to get her point across in the Hunger Games trilogy as it seems to be the one thing everyone awaits, whether they are in the Hunger Games or not. But somehow (and it is inevitable that I mention this) Peeta manages to survive. He survives a deep wound, a broken leg and hypothermia even though he stays for days under cold wet mud.
Remember what I said about them being the same as us in that they die in the same ways or just as easily? Well, hypothermia kills you in hours if you don’t seek warmth straight away but somehow this idiotic pansy managed to survive days. The Baker from district ‘who cares’ survived. This complete and utter fool who doesn’t know the first thing about having guts since he couldn’t even bring himself to tell Katniss that he liked her when they were kids survived. I really wasn’t impressed.
Not only that, but throughout the trilogy we are constantly reminded that he purposefully burnt bread from his parent’s bakery when he was little so that Katniss and her family would have food to eat which therefore somehow makes Katniss forever indebted to him.
The only good thing I can say about Peeta is that he is one good manipulative bastard. I mean he effectively got the girl of his dreams by convincing Haymitch, (their coach) that the only way both he and Katniss could survive the games was to create a little romance. Now, this is where the author decides to make our little protagonist heroine even stupider. All authors do this, no matter where you go, so I don’t know how far I can go in blaming her for following the ‘crowd’ if you will. All writers have this annoying need to make all characters ridiculously oblivious to all things that do concern them or somehow involve them. For instance, Gale clearly likes Katniss, all the characters are aware of this as well as the readers upon first reading about him. It is also very clear that Peeta likes her and that Katniss’s little sister Prim or whatever is intelligent and a lot stronger than anyone gives her credit for. These are all important facts to Katniss yet somehow she manages to miss all of these things around her.
Why? Well, because it makes for a ‘good’ story. That way Katniss is blissfully unaware of the love triangle she is stuck in so that we have more complications later on and so that she can nominate herself in a Game that is supposed to secure her death.
I haven’t quite finished with Peeta. He was supposed to die in that first book so that I wouldn’t have to deal with seeing him in the next two as he wagged his tail and tried to impress everyone with his one trick – loving Katniss. It’s really not a great trick when you look at it this way really. But no, he didn’t die because it seems the only thing powerful enough to cause a revolution is true love. *eye roll*
What no one seems to realise is that the little sister Prim could have caused a revolution too by saving that girl Ruth whom Katniss gave a proper little ceremony in her honour to as her first act of rebellion. Which of course she didn’t really realise was an act of rebellion as she just did it in spite for the Capitol. At least her little sister would have been intelligent enough to understand what she was doing and why, had she had the chance to go instead. Though, if Prim had gone instead, keeping Ruth alive would have been a good act of rebellion in itself. That however, would not have pleased anyone. There would be no great romance between Katniss and Peeta and the book wouldn’t have been as successful, because really that’s all hormonal teenagers are looking for and apparently hormonal adults like Stephenie Meyer too. Come on, we all know that if there was no relationship the book wouldn’t have gotten so big. It would have made for a better book, a better female heroine. Even feminists would have worshipped her, but not for more sales.
But instead we’re stuck with a puppet, a girl who follows all instructions with complete ignorance to the significance of her every move. The world gets another representation of female stupidity as society perceives it to be. We get a young woman who is emotionally dependent on a man.
In this case I also think Suzanne Collins has gone too far in her trilogy. You’d think a girl would be repulsed or at least scared by the guy who’s been brainwashed into killing her. Katniss, the girl who came out of her first Hunger Games a completely changed person and then out of her second completely scarred was not at all phased by the guy who has no other motive other than to kill her.
I thought it couldn’t get worse. I knew reading the Epilogue would be a bad idea. I hadn’t wanted to read it, but my friend had convinced me that I should just get it over with. So I did. I mean I had gone through all three books, I might as well have read the last few irrelevant pages.
And all I wanted to do when I was finished was burn every copy of Hunger Games ever printed and in stock all over the planet. Because who the hell in their right mind marries someone who has random urges to kill them?!?! Someone please answer that because I can’t come up with a good enough answer. And don’t you dare tell me that Katniss just loves him that much that she is being blinded by her irrational love for him. Let me tell you, she does not love him that much. Sure she was being all retardedly Bella Swan depressed when she thought he was dead but she wasn’t that upset.
The Epilogue also tells us about Katniss’s dumbass worries about how she would have to explain to her children what happened. Yeah, I can see how hard it would be to say to your children ‘Hey guys, I know dad might sometimes come at me with a knife or start strangling me from time to time but it’s not his fault. See when we were seventeen he was brainwashed into killing me after we went to our second Hunger Games – which is a game where a whole bunch of people from different districts are put together in one place to kill one another (yeah I know, we were put in there twice and that’s why I’m an emotional wreck) – and we tried to reverse it but it didn’t completely work. It’s okay though, he won’t hurt you’. Yeah, that would be a great conversation, but then she would ruin it by breaking down and crying because of course she’s been completely traumatized.
God, I’d hate to see what the rest of the rebellions are like after going through so much more as she resides in her big house in her district. Yes, that’s right. Katniss retires from being a rebellion to go back to her district and live in peace – well as much as she can get with Peeta who occasionally tries to kill her – while everyone else deals with the mess she helped create.
Yep, because the one thing that really pushes Katniss over the edge is her sister dying. For that I can’t really blame her. I had a fit myself when I saw that Prim died. Why bother making Katniss go to the Hunger Games to save her sister’s life only to kill her in the end anyway? The author has defied the point. She might as well have let Prim play in the Hunger Games, cause a rebellion and then let her die honourably in the process as she created an uproar in all the oppressed districts. She could have died as a respectable martyr the way she should have. What was Suzanne Collin’s point?
I was discussing this with a girl in my English class and she suggested the idea that maybe it was to show that no one can escape death. I argued that that can’t be it. Otherwise Peeta would have died in the first or at least the second book, but he didn’t even bloody well die in the third. He stayed alive, after having faced death more times than the average person.
Was it done to show irony? Because it’s not effective to show what became an insignificant character (by the third book anyway) die. It would have been more ironic to have had Katniss die in that blast – the face of the rebellion going up in flames – which was basically her image after her costume designer made her a costume that literally went up in flames.
But then there’s the money making issue right there. I feel like this plot was compromised to make money, because of course every love sick reader across the world would have had a coronary if Peeta died. And if Katniss died it would have caused everyone to get angry and recommend others not to read it. So I guess next came Prim, someone who was liked but not enough for anyone to have a care. Besides, it did a good job of throwing Katniss over the rails once and for all. A character who had so much potential became just as stupid as all the others.
Well done Suzanne Collins, you managed to make a book that is nothing more than a complete waste of time and that represents your own gender as inferior, stupid, idiotic, fragile and just overall incompetent.
