Originally published at: Hunger Games prequel trailer debuts | Boing Boing
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Oh, c’mon. Were the movies good, and did the plots make any sense? No. But you don’t forget the velvety croon of Donald Sutherland.
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She published that prequel book three years ago to strong sales and generally positive reviews, so it’s not like the movie adaptation was a big surprise.
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Unless they finally bother explaining what happened to the rest of the world outside of the tiny fragment that encompasses the districts and capitol (nuclear holocaust/pandemic/systemic collapse) I am not even remotely interested.
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I mis-remembered then; I thought the books claimed that only the central part of the former US was the setting.
Regardless, that sill doesn’t explain WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REST OF THE FUCKING WORLD?
Glad to know the irresistible need to ‘pick nits’ didn’t overshadow it, then.
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The books and movies state that most of the world’s population was killed off in a global conflict or series of conflicts some generations ago but those events are never explored in detail, much like the global conflicts that broke the world in the Mad Max franchise.
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And that’s my problem with her lack of world building.
Via flashbacks in multiple movies, it was pretty evident (to me) that some sort of nuclear tragedy happened; deadly mushroom clouds were visible in Max’s panic attacks. Additionally all the mutated inhabitants of that world speaks to high levels of irradiation.
There aren’t even any such hints in Collins’ original works.
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The trilogy is told from Katniss‘s point of view, so from her perspective World War 3 (or whatever) would have been ancient history that had little immediate relevance to her life. Which isn’t to say that it’s not an important story, it’s just not a big part of her story. It’s the Butlerian Jihad of the franchise—a quick throwaway line to explain the setting that the author really wanted to tell their story in.
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The comparison to Dune would be insulting if I were any kind of fanboy; Herbert might have relied on certain tropes on occasion, but his world building is on the polar opposite end of the spectrum from Collins’.
Also, we’ve had this conversation before; I’m not inclined to rehash it yet again, as my POV remains unchanged.
Lazy writing simply doesn’t move me, (and this franchise gets no more money from me.)
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Eh as prequel/spinoff/whatever’s go it wasn’t that bad. I’d take this over, say, the Rings of Power thing
Call me uncultured if you must - I just assumed the prequel to the films was a montage of supermarkets running out of toilet roll and artisan cheese. 5 minutes, tops.
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you don’t have to have Tolkien levels of detail about a world and it’s history and details to have effective levels of world building, as long as the world is internally consistent. science fiction is absolutely littered with great books that just drop you into a world and just ask you to accept it as it is.
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YOU don’t. Everyone is different and has different standards.
You make your own your choices; I’ve already made mine.
Good day.
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Mad Max is a series of documentaries about modern Australia.
Also see The Cars that Ate Paris
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I have friends that are interested in this, but I probably will pass… I think the dystopian teenagers killing each other thing is a bit too on the nose in the modern era.
As for the books, I was enjoying them until I figured out that they were EXACTLY 30 chapters each, each 10 chapters being an act in a 3 act play. And while I know formulas work for a reason, KNOWING that a big twist was happening at the end of Chapters 9, 19, and 29 were pretty… offputting to me. Like, once I knew that, I just guessed everything else in the book. Wasn’t surprised at all.
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But they replace that lack of context and detail in other ways - you learn about it through characters, or events, and so on. That’s what makes them great books. If the reader doesn’t feel like the world is “lived-in”, then you’re not ever going to feel comfortable there. There are a million ways to get there besides “Tolkien levels of detail,” but to @Melizmatic 's excellent point, “internal consistency” is irrelevant if, in three prior installments, you never feel like you really “know” a place, you know?
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Exactly; while reading THG, to me it felt like it took place in a generic, cookie-cutter world that could have been anywhere - so I never understood claiming that the setting was the former USA, or why it had to be this particular reality in general.
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Different people will focus on different aspects of a story, which is ok. I only watched the movies, and I personally didn’t care at all about the lack of a detailed history to the place. What bothered me was that so many aspects of the present made no logical or internally consistent sense within that world, regardless of any untold history. For example, District 12, which covers the area of several states, only had a population of about 10,000 people. And that was before being firebombed. How does that make any sense at all in a country that’s geographically so large? It took a long journey on a 250 mph bullet train just to get to the capitol from there. There’s no universe where it makes sense to have that level of infrastructure to get to and from a small town of 10,000 people, whether it’s a dystopian, totalitarian government or not.
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I’m trying to remember in the books if Panem was even mentioned as being formerly the US. So much of these maps are fan created if I recall correctly.
The game had the first map posted up above, but it’s inconsistent with what’s described in the books.
