ninaricciarelli

Great list! I first got into Steampunk Literature when I read Around the World in 80 Days and The Time Machine. If you enjoy Steampunk, you should listen to the Dolls of New Albion. It is a Steampunk Opera.

I think what has come to be expected of YA film adaptations is that there will be passion, romance, sexual tension, angst, and action (depending on the film). People expect that an adaptation of a YA movie will be a hormonally fueled festival of teenage emotions. The Hunger Games are not books about teenagers and their feelings. It is about a war that happens to feature teenagers as the protagonists.

Mockingjay Part 1 is slow, but it is slow for a good reason. Anyone who has read about war (or paid attention in History) will know that people do not start fighting the day after a war is announced. There is a build up. A sort of tension that bubbles beneath the surface. Mockingjay Part 1 literally featured tension bubbling beneath the surface with district 13.

I think that our society nowadays expects movies about war to be the type that begins conflict immediately, but that is not how that works. Even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows shows this. There is a significant portion of time spent setting up for the war. Mockingjay is doing exactly that. They are creating the clouds before the storm.

Mockingjay was my least favorite book in the trilogy. I thought it did not reach the potential that it could have. Mockingjay Part One is my favorite of the movies thus far because they took everything that Suzanne Collins failed to do and did it. They showed the harsh realities of what war does to a person. How skewed the lines of truth and lies are. In the books we are limited to seeing what Katniss sees. We have a very unreliable view of how the world is working around her. The movie shows everything. We see things how they are. We see Katniss as fallible, which is the point.

In truth, I was disappointed that they were splitting the movie, but now I can see the benefits of it. By splitting Mockingjay, they can take the time that they need to set up the climax of the entire series.

The great thing about the Hunger Games is that it shows how ambiguous war can be. To me, it’s not really a message about what the world could be, but rather what it is right now. It shows how war is not about good and evil, black and white. It’s a story about how everyone can do terrible things in order to save the people they love.

Katniss is not infallible. She is not pure. She is willing to kill in order to save the people she loves. She drops a nest of tracker-jackers on the Career Camp. She kills the people she needs to kill to get what she wants. She is not the hero. She is a person.

In times of war, there is no such thing as the “good side” and the Hunger Games exemplifies this. In many ways, Coin is far worst than Snow, especially in the third novel. Anyone who has seen the first portion of Mockingjay can see the Communist undertones of District 13. From the clothing, to Coin’s salute. Coin herself is reminiscent of Hitler in the times of Nazi Germany. I would argue that Coin herself is allegorical of any Communist leader. Yet, we see her as the “good guy” because she is fighting to bring down the tyrannical reign that Panem is currently in. They are trading a dictator for another dictator and we are left wondering which alternative is better.

Katniss answers this. She understands by the ending of the third novel that there is no “good” alternative, but there may be a more peaceful one.