Review and Impressions: The Hunger Games

So I had the opportunity to catch up on the first two Hunger Games movies. There is a spoiler or two.

No, I haven’t read the books.

Yes, I’m sure the books are better, or at least different.

Therefore my perspective will come from someone who is not comparing and contrasting the books and the movies.

I will simply be sharing my impressions.

I am a mostly peaceful person. I do not like or promote violence, but I do enjoy a horror flick or action movie with plenty of swordplay, gunshots or straight up bludgeoning with fists. Double plus good if the film has all these (like certain choice martial arts movies). That’s not why I like the Hunger Games, though.

The Hunger Games is a story about a person facing conflict of both her heart, and of course the more visceral conflict that accompanies killing people to stay alive. I watched The Hunger Games one day, and then caught up on Catching Fire the day after. As of this post, Mockingjay: Part 1 is in theaters, and I plan to see that fairly soon.

Consider me invested.

The drama between characters – fun as they are at times – is not what holds me though, to be honest. I have heard it said, and often I will recite to other people since I believe in it, that “Characters make stories, not the circumstances they find themselves in.” I believe I read that in Stephen King’s On Writing.

I book I would recommend to anyone pursuing the craft.

Anyway, I’m finding that what has me interested in The Hunger Games is, in fact, not so much the cast but, in direct contrast to that recitation, the setting and the circumstances.

Granted there are holes. “The System” in place feels crafted out of convenience; while we have a glimpse of the history and a rudimentary understanding of why things are the way they are, it seems like quite the jump. This is a “what if” book, much like Brave New World, or any number of dystopias, where we the situation, but not – to me – a clear or feasible reason for how it came about.

The films do not give much of an in-depth depiction of how each of the districts contribute to the plutarchy / plutocracy (take your pick); we have glimpses of what appears to be a Mining District, a Black District (though we don’t know what they do there except remain under very obvious segregation), and a bakery somewhere. I’m willing to let myself believe that the books go into more detail, or perhaps provide some descriptions, of how big these districts are and some more economic insight into how this system is plausible. The rich folk need droves of poor people to do dredge work, and the poor folks need the rich because… oh.

Well, this’s how revolutions start.

[The next line is a spoiler.]

Besides, the final moments in Catching Fire left me scratching my head. Was that really part of their master plan, the “flaw in the system” they were going to exploit? To have Katniss fire a lightning-charged arrow into the sky?

Why would the government green-light sending techno-geniuses into a technology-controlled environment?

Because Plutarch let it happen?

Seems a bit flimsy, as some of these movie-adaptations tend to be.

There’s plenty of criticism for The Hunger Games being some Battle Royale clone, and when you distill the plot down to one or two sentences, on the surface the two stories might seem quite alike. I wondered that myself, having known the basic premise of The Hunger Games since it came out – as people I’d known read it and shared summaries with me. Having seen Battle Royale, I can tell you that the only thing these two stories have in common is: a pile of unwilling people, many of whom are teens, pit against each other in an arena-like harsh environment.

Old relationships are strained, new relationships are formed, and you might go so far as to say that a person’s true self is revealed under such conditions.

After all, I am a firm believer in the human animal as just that. Another animal.

In any case, here’s what they say about the Hunger games being a copy of Battle Royale over at T.V. Tropes:

“The term has been used to refer to The Hunger Games — a book series with a similar premise to Battle Royale — in a derogatory manner by those who feel the later series was a rip off (the author of The Hunger Games maintains she knew nothing of Battle Royale when she wrote her books, and at any rate, there have been works before Battle Royale which use similar themes – even Stephen King has written two).”

So, with all that said, I’ll tell you what I do like about it.

I get fired up watching this. Revolution is something with which I’ve always had a fascination. It’s easy to hate the government in The Hunger Games, but considering these works are considered Y.A., so the generalization of a Bad Government is easy to allow. No worries there. Therefore it’s easy to feel sympathy for the characters under such a regime, but I find myself sitting there and wondering:

Why is it taking three-quarters of a century for people to rebel again?

Chances I would end up as one of the first people out of whom such a government would make an example to the rest.

That happens when you’re stubborn, you’ve got a big mouth, and have a problem with authority.

So in spite of the teen melodrama and love triangle stuff that – honestly – I get tired of watching really fast, it factors into the plot in a way that only would ever happen in a book. Or a movie. All I can tell you is that I’m thoroughly stoked to see the Capital burn.

Booktrack Studio Discovery

This is totally a shout out for a really interesting thing that, you’ll soon find, is completely up my alley.

If you’re anything like me, or have at least read my previous posts about sound or soundtracks while reading/writing, then you might find yourself as interested as I am.

Booktrack is an organization that specializes in integrating sounds and music into one’s ebook reading experience. In other words, they allow true ambiance to be heard as you read, which is seriously something I’ve been doing by myself for years. The difference, though, between me renaming my mp3’s for my personal amusement (and inspiration) and Booktrack’s methods is that Booktrack will allow for triggered events and synced sound — as you read whatever ebook, it’ll calculate your reading speed as you go, and the sounds you hear as you go will be heard at the appropriate times, based on what page and where you are in the book.

There’s an excellent demonstration here, as well as an accompanying TED talk.

Turn the page and perhaps the scene changes from one character’s perspective inside a jail cell to someone else’s outdoors in the forest — one might hear dripping water, clanging iron doors and the distant footsteps of jailor’s boots. Turn the page, hear wind through the leaves, birds in the branches and crickets in the grass.

Do you have a playlist for your writing, or your reading? Do you pick and choose various bits of ambiance to have going in the background as you do, well, life? Well I do, and the fact that this sort of thing is becoming a thing really has me excited. The best audiobook experiences I’ve had were the ones that were more akin to audiodramas, with bits of music or occasional sound effects to really spice up the listen. When I read, when I write, when I create or otherwise experience life, I like to have as many senses engaged as possible, and while I’ve heard of people who prefer to read in complete silence, hey, more power to ’em — but I don’t get it, personally. Clearly, things like Booktrack are not for those folks.

I suppose it’s akin to listening to music with words while reading/writing — something I utterly cannot do — yet I’ve read and heard of folks who do so without issue. Stephen King comes to mind, stating in his book On Writing that he’ll have classic rock playing in the background while working. When I hear words, I generally can’t focus, or sometimes will end up typing the words I hear by accident. How he (and anyone else like him) can do that is beyond me, but then again most music that people listen to is beyond me anyway.

At any rate, Bookrack is something I really dig, and plan to get invested in in the near-future. They currently have a whole list of public-domain books available for download, so you can check out and see what it’s like most easily. In addition, they’ve got a feature that actually lets you try it out for yourself, either with a story already available or with one of your own.

I am so on this.

Today’s track, in the event that I apparently haven’t shared it in the past already, is a 40-minute-ish bit from Skyrim (also known as the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), one of the best atmospheric tracks I’ve found. Play this if you need a mood-setter for traveling in the wilderness, whether your character is a beast, a hunter, or nature itself.

Happy writing, dear readers!

Concept: Genetic Memory

So I’ve been reading Children of Dune lately, as per the recommendation of a comrade. I thoroughly enjoyed Frank Herbert’s Dune, but had reservations after reading Dune Messiah (2nd Book). I was told that Children of Dune gets better; though it seems that popular reception is that the series actually gets worse as more books are read. If this is true, I believe Children will be the last for me. We shall see.

Things in the ‘Duniverse’ are wide and varied, and no single blog post can do the book justice, let alone the series. Today I’m merely going to address one of the many themes that Frank Herbert illustrated in his work: genetic memory.

As it stands now, the concept of genetic memory is still a theory – one that doesn’t hold much water in fact, on account of it being unprovable. Pesky rules of science and all that. However, this does not stop it from appearing in fiction! But what is genetic memory? Here’s the opening line from wikipedia:

“In psychology, genetic memory is a memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over long spans of time.”

We see this in Dune, and described in as great a detail as I’ve ever encountered. Personally, I think any mortal human would lose their mind if given the ancestral memories of 10,000 years of generations, but I suppose as far as story writing and science fiction go, it could be argued that the pooled strength of these memories and consciousnesses could help the living descendant cope with the process anyway. The point is, characters in Dune have access to the sum of experience of their ancestors, up until conception of the next generation. It makes sense that the memories would not include how the previous forebear died (unless it was witnessed by a younger one).

Now if the genetic memory was a continues stream of life-experience after life-experience, we’re getting awfully close to a single, unified intelligence. We’re getting close to what is, arguably, immortality.

Not bad, Mister Herbert.

There are other examples of genetic memory in popular media, some either being the main plot or a scapegoat. The Assassin’s Creed games come to mind, in which a descendant of said assassin utilizes a machine called an Animus, which decodes the ‘archival history’ in their DNA and projecting the information onto a three dimensional feed; thus allowing players to relive the “memories” of their ancestors. Better than time travel, in my opinion, for creating a game set in various points of history – apparently going back far back into prehistory.

Now this is fun. There’ll be another post about this topic alone.

More often than not, genetic memory is a theme of science fiction, but it’s around. Ripley 8 from Alien Resurrection, who got her mixed genetic memories as a result of her human/xenomorph cloning process. But, one work that I thoroughly enjoyed, and wasn’t science fiction, was Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel, wherein…

“…Neanderthals were portrayed as having racial memories, which was supposed to both make up for their lack of verbal skills and imagination and keep them socially and “technologically” stagnant.” [Borrowed from T.V. Tropes.org, who phrased it better than I could.]

Now, as we can see, using genetic memory can either open a lot of doors for story telling, or it can come off as a cheap cop-out for why certain actors get to play the same character hundreds of years after they died. Or in the case of The 6th Day, well, seconds.

But then, that’s how it is with most concepts in science fiction.

Happy writing!