I was going through some old books Emmy siblings and I owned, and I came across hunger games. I’m older now, so YA fiction mostly strikes me as a bit boring or cringy overall, but I remember liking it way back when I first read it so decided to give it another read. Im surprised that it’s such a well written book. Hunger Games is one of the most popular YA books, and it’s influenced so many others to have protagonists just like catniss, except just way worse. Catnis isn’t a special chosen snowflake, but an actual person with her own flaws, and struggles. She’s shown to be, empathetic and kind, but not unbelievably, and her relationships are actually interesting. Her not being madly in love with Pita but faking it makes their interactions feel so much more meaningful when they’re genuine and not played up for the camera. The society of Hunger Games is also interesting. The society is dystopian, and we’re able to see that even during the games with the need to play up emotions for sponsors, and them actively discouraging playing safe. The people fighting and dying in the arena are reality tv stars; they’re supposed to be interesting and memorable characters, not real people. A flaw with the story is catniss’ perspective kinda gets in the way of the story sometimes, and I felt the story would have been better in 3rd person. Overall, the hunger games is a good book, and I can see why it’s so influential to the YA genre. Way better than most wannabes I’ve read ( Divergent)
I actually like that everything was in Katniss’s POV. It makes it clear as the series goes on that she’s suffering from massive amounts of PTSD and disassociating hard by the time the end of the series rolls around.
IMO it made the epilogue stand out from HP’s “babies ever after” epilogue- because she’s so clearly suffering and struggling throughout the last book, seeing her years after, having eked out a little corner of joy in a cruel world felt more rewarding to me
I agree, and it’s my biggest complaint about the movies. It’s precisely what rocketed Jennifer Lawrence to fame, in that she did an incredible job of portraying the complex emotions of the character, but there’s only so much you can do with body language.
The fact is, Katniss is an incredibly stoic and guarded individual. It’s very important to the story that the reader sees both the turmoil going on inside her head and the emotionless (or acted emotional) facade she presents to the world.
Especially in her relationships with Peeta and Gale. You simply could not do it justice in third person. How do you show that turmoil of acting in love and cynically using them, but also trying to convince herself that she’s not actually in love, questioning her own motives, all while wrestling with guilt of using them for her own ends.
Katniss is a character that constantly has to convince herself that she only cares about herself and Prim (because that’s all she can afford to care about) while in reality she cares so much about everyone else and the injustices of the world. First person PoV is the way to go to sell that one.
The movies had so many questionable decisions. They insisted on trying to make the president coin betrayal a surprise when her being sketchy AF and using Katniss as a propaganda figurehead with little support was a large part of Katniss’s struggles.
The insistence on shoving in a love triangle into the movies because Twilight when the political situation of the world and how it actively was a detriment to her relationships, platonic and burgeoning romances. The slow drift away in Katniss’s mind from her initial closeness with Gale and more towards Peeta as the plot continued on was (imo) much better portrayed in the books as well.
As it is, movies will inherently have a disadvantage to books when it comes to character internalizations. If the books had been in 3rd person, it largely would have been similar to the movies in missing nuanced character struggles and mental shifts