Katniss in Mockingjay...

[fajrdrako]

kitgordon sent me the link to an interesting article that compares the Hunger Games trilogy to the Twilight books. My first thought is to wonder what links them: their fame and popularity? Teen-aged female protagonists? That they are - in very different ways - fantasies?

I haven't read anything by Stephanie Meyer, so I'm not in a position to compare them. I liked Suzanne Collins' writing very much: her talent for fast-paced action, both emotional and physical, is what kept me riveted. There were things I didn't like about the trilogy, but that didn't matter: it was the writing quality that kept me reading and enjoying every word.

Seems to me that the author of this article, Laura Miller, took some of the irony of the books at face value - then presents them as extratextual ironies when they are very much part of the text. Katniss is successful because she never buys into the myths she is forced to live - which includes the dramatic costumes (which I loved as much as any reader) and the manufactured romance with Peeta.

I thought this paragraph oddly ingenuous:

"I'm not just a piece in their game," is her habitual refrain, but except for a few climactic and highly circumscribed moments, she's often just that. What does Katniss really want? It's hard to say.

I thought it was blazingly clear what Katniss wants: she wants freedom, she wants enough to eat, and she wants to protect her loved ones, she wants a life without oppression or violence. Survival and success are secondary to that. By becoming a piece in 'their' game, she gained enough power to fight back - I didn't think there was anything subtle or unclear about any of that. And I think Miller is simply misreading the text if she thinks Katniss's passivity or ambivalence implies she wanted the clothes and the fame. They were a price she had to pay - weapons or tools, not rewards. The reader may like or want these things, but the reader (thank goodness) is not Katniss.

"Part of this," says Miller, "is a classic American ambivalence: We love violence, fame, the media and wealth -- all of the apparatus of power -- even if we claim to disapprove of these things." Yes. That's the point; and she seems to think Collins was making a different point, or making it by accident. I don't think so. She's ignoring or denying a whole level of social criticism. Katniss wasn't ambivalent because she really wanted incendiary clothes and gourmet food. She was ambivalent because her only alternative to luxury was outlawry and starvation. Perhaps Miller skipped the subtext in Finnick's more explicit whoring?

I'm not sure about Miller's paragraph on romance novels, either, which sounds a bit like a random attack on romances - and the Collins novels, whatever happens in the plot, are not romances by any stretch. They come perilously close to anti-romance, with a heroine who'd rather have friendship than love.

Katniss hungered for freedom. I thought that was clear in every paragraph.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

I've read both series and I actually like Twilight, but I don't think there's really any comparison between the two series other than that a lot of the same people like them. Which is not surprising, since they are marketed to the same people.

I think it was very clear why Katniss did everything that she did (and let's not forget, a lot of the time she did what she did not just because she wanted freedom and safety for herself, but also because she knew that failure to comply would result in the torture and death of her sister and the punishment of the entire district she came from).

I don't think the Hunger Games trilogy has anything at all to do with romance. I don't like genre romance novels as a general rule (Heyer and Austen hardly count, because they predate the formula and conventions of the genre, particularly the 'everyone must get exactly what they deserve' bits), but I also don't see criticism of genre romance as relevant in any way to Hunger Games.

Frankly it's barely relevant to Twilight--Twilight is creepy (and I say this as an unironic fan of the series) and has science-fictional weirdness that complicates it, which is one of the reasons romance critics tend to hate it--yes, if Edward were human he'd be a horrible person, but he hasn't been human for a damn long time, and 17 is a really unfortunate age to get your brain chemistry frozen in, then complicated with all kinds of vampire hormones and sensitivities, and yes, werewolf fixations are creepy as fuck, and the cause of much tragedy among the Quileutes, and just because the werewolves tell themselves comforting lies about how "wonderful" things are doesn't mean that Meyer thinks they're wonderful or that the readers should; the werewolves tell themselves comforting lies because they have to, because they don't have a choice about these fixations, they're not humans who need therapy, they are biologically different and it is tragic.

(I'm glad Meyer's other writing is science fiction. She is a terrible genre romance writer, but since genre romance really isn't my thing, I don't need her to be a good one as long as I like her story.)

Anyhow, if one hates genre romance, that would be in my book a recommendation for both series, not a strike against them. Twilight and the Hunger Games both completely lack any sense that the universe is fair and good people will face adversity but then be rewarded with all they deserve, whereas the bad will always get their comeuppance, and that sense of fairness or karma in the resolution is pretty much a requirement of the current romance genre. There's nothing easy or comfortable about the ending of the Hunger Games, and the stamp of PTSD on Katniss and Peeta is writ large; and while the Cullens themselves get a happy ending, the problems of that universe largely remain unsolved.

[fajrdrako]

I like romance; I have some conceptual problems with genre romance as it is published these days, but I still love it in theory. The Collins books are not romances of any sort; the fact that Katniss ends up with Peeta is incidental, and not written as a love story. No reason it should be; I don't know why Miller even raised the issue.