* warning, there are spoilers in here. if you want to be surprised, you may want to skip this post.
so i just finished the hunger games trilogy this weekend. and they were good, to be sure. riveting. i read them all in 3 days, one night staying up until 3 a.m. to finish. when i finished the last one, i found myself in a sort of perpetual fog, much like katniss actually, wandering around looking for what was real and not real.
here’s what i loved about them: it is way too close to home for me to think about all those people having unnecessary surgery and living in luxury in the capitol while most children starve. i don’t think of myself as a rich person. but i have a smart phone, a laptop, a place to live, an education (mine and for my offspring), and a car. and while not regularly, it does occasionally happen that i throw out old food. standing side by side with children from across the world, i am the pierced, tattooed cat woman with a modified figure in an effort to stay “fashionable.” and while all of those thoughts are uncomfortable for me, i am moved by them. i love that suzanne collins has laid out exactly the folly of the west, dependent in 2012 still on slave labor in a variety of forms.
ever since i was a kid, i have always been fascinated by stories of survival. i use to memorize ideas from books and movies about being stuck in the woods, determined that if it ever happened to me, i would be sure to know just what to do.
perhaps i identified with this idea of needing to go out and do whatever it takes to make it. i identified with the heroine each time she had to take on whatever enemy: hunger, a tribute, the capitol, the rebels whatever. the fight for survival is ingrained in all of us. it just appears differently to different people. some people fight for survival by trying desperately to control everything around them. some people fight for survival by trying to make everyone like them. some people fight for survival by gathering as much as they can whenever they can. hoarding is a huge problem in our world, and i’m not talking about the tv show.
things i didn’t like about the book were how katniss was mildly schizophrenic without the slightest drop of awareness. she got so angry at her mother for the various forms of neglect, but every time something difficult came up, she was kamikaze suicidal. at the end, when she talks about what she’ll tell her children, i thought, “what? you plan to talk to your kids? you can barely talk to yourself!” it seemed a little contradictory to me.
i also didn’t like how she finally made her “boy” decision after it was essentially made for her. that presents females in this sort of fickle light, driven by a biological need to be cared for.
here’s what i want: a heroine that is strong and independent. but who is also allowed to be vulnerable. women who are strong without vulnerability are a pain in the ass. but women who are only vulnerable are victims and have no idea that they don’t have to be.
and i don’t think i would react quite so strongly to this image of katniss except that this book was written for young adults. the heroine herself is only 17. that seems terribly unfair to a generation of female teenagers. we’ve given them twilight and the hunger games. how will they know their own strength? what if no one tells them that they can be beautiful (beauty is often vulnerable) AND smart (strong and confident)? why is it so hard for our society to value women in this balance? why are we interested in painting women in the extremes? are we afraid that a balanced woman might be a force to reckon with? a force that could actually change the world?
the problem is that the hunger games trilogy is not a cautionary tale. but rather a rally to fight the status quo and recognize that the leader of a country isn’t the most important piece of a country’s direction. it is the ordinary, day to day life of citizens who choose to do the right thing again and again that changes where a country is headed.
