[ SECRET POST #2972 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2972 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.









Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 072 secrets from Secret Submission Post #425.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

13. http://i.imgur.com/CtLTjKU.png

[sarillia]

I just realized how long it's been since I've given my speech about how I like both The Hunger Games and Battle Royale for different reasons. The rip-off complaint used to bug me so much when the movies were first coming out, not because I'm really defensive of THG, but because of the shallow way originality is judged.

[seelolcanth]

At least you realize you were stanning too hard.

Some poor souls never learn.

[(Anonymous)]

There are no new stories, only new approaches. Once you get over an obsession with 'originality' it's easier to appreciate a book on its own merits, in my experience! (blah blah Shakespeare ripped off everything blah blah Homer fanfiction etc etc)

I like Hunger Games a lot more as a story than I like the books themselves...to me Collins' experience as largely being a screenplay writer is very clear, and it's extremely rough prose-wise. The movies are tremendous for me, then.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that the books definitely read more like scripts than novels, which is why I'm surprised that the movies (the first two; haven't seen the newest) aren't very good :\

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah the comparison never really made any sense to me tbh

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't assume HG was a ripoff and I somehow enjoy it but... I still like BR more?

Or maybe I should say I found the BR better constructed (in the sense I could see why the program worked; the games, though...) and the limited pov of HG made me have a hard time caring about most characters.

[(Anonymous)]

I always think that it's hard to judge and compare the quality of writing when one book is written by a native speaker and the other book is a translation.

The only time I bring up BR anymore is when people go "Oh but HG is SO original and a plot like that has never existed before!".

[sarillia]

People do that? Even if you leave out Battle Royale, HG is not the first story to have people forced to kill each other for entertainment in a dystopian future.

[(Anonymous)]

Some do. It's usually younger people or people for whom the Hunger Games books are the first brush with the dystopian future genre apart from some of the classics they read in school.

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder if there is a possibility that the HG author was aware of Battle Royale when she wrote the books? I also made the BG association the moment I heard of HG, but I wonder if it was coincidence.

[erinptah]

I read somewhere that, early in the writing/drafting process, there was a conversation like this:
Editor: Have you heard of this series called Battle Royale?
Collins: No, why? Should I check it out?
Editor: No! Absolutely not. Anything you know about it will screw up your ability to write this story without second-guessing whether every decision is original enough. Red card. Do not approach.

...which I could believe happened. The similarities are mostly really broad, general-premise-level things. It would be like accusing Firefly of being a ripoff of Star Wars because it involves a ragtag group of outlaws on a spaceship in a faraway galaxy, and two of them are brother and sister.

[(Anonymous)]

She claims (or at least has been told to deny it) that she'd never even heard of BR prior to writing HG.

I'd buy that she hadn't read or watched, but if you had enough of a passing interest in her subject matter to write an entire trilogy about it, I find it implausible that she'd never even heard of BR. If you express even the slightest interest in dystopian futures featuring a YA cast then it's impossible to avoid hearing it mentioned at the very least.

[visp]

Gladiators predate both Hunger Games and Battle Royale. By, like, Millennia. Also, the themes are very different. Battle Royale is a dozen studies of "What you are when you're a pampered kid who's had everything taken away and now you have to fight for your life" and Hunger Games is a study in one person and and concept of reality TV/fame/publicity/media gone bad.

Also, Battle Royale is good, but it ain't exactly some masterpiece of shining literature. It's not too many notches above hunger games.

[sarillia]

The difference between the two that stands out the most to me is that in Hunger Games it's much more about the wider world, where thoughts of the opponents are all about the reputations of the districts, but in Battle Royale it's about seeing how these long-standing relationships are affected by the situation when people who have known each other for years are forced into this. It could be that I haven't read it since 2008 but I don't remember the pampered kid who's had everything taken away thing at all.

[othellia]

Yeah, I almost wish themes weren't harped on as much as they are in school... or rather that they're taught a different way? Because it's like people get overexposed to everything NEEDING a theme and then they end up hating them and then ignoring them? And that sucks because so much of fiction actually is about themes whether they're conscious or not? I have no idea whether or not I'm making sense right now, but whatever.

Point is, like you said, even though BR and HG both focus on kid death arenas, they're completely different because the themes each author decided to explore are completely different. Even Suzanne Collins said she was inspired by flipping through channels and seeing game shows and war coverage right next to each other. The media/reality show portion of it is baked into the story's foundation. If anything, it'd probably be more closely related to the one mini-arc of Doctor Who that had killer reality TV shows as a form of entertaining/subjugating the human race.

And because people tend to go "ugh themes," it's harder to have that type of discussion and becomes the whole "well they both have kid death arenas" instead.

[(Anonymous)]

I definitely find it funny when people hold up BR as a masterpiece in order to tear down HG. It's really, really not.

[(Anonymous)]

I must be the only person who didn't like Battle Royale. People kept talking about how awesome it was, so I watched it on Netflix. I just didn't see the allure. Maybe it's because for me the most interesting part of the Hunger Games wasn't the games, but the larger dystopia in which they existed. In Battle Royale, it was just kids fighting to the death only because the gov't thought teenagers were jerks. And frankly, most of them were jerks and I didn't care enough about any of them to care what ultimately happened to them.

[(Anonymous)]

To be honest, I think the movie is really campy. But I had read the manga first, and that was... well, it was something. It was obviously trying to shock and disturb you, but it was so damn successful at that even though the agenda was clear. The crazy gore is almost an artistic choice. And in the manga, each character, each classmate, is also given a personality, and that couldn't really happen in the movie. Plus, the antagonist is different, and just creepy and terrifying without trying to be redeemable.

I hear people say the books are best but I haven't read them.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

People who claim that one ripped off the other appear to be ignorant of the classical canon, much less the dystopian sci fi wave that plundered the Theseus myth.

[(Anonymous)]

People who claim one ripped off the other tend to be poorly read and ignorant of fiction in general.

[lb_lee]

*shrug* Enh, my first exposure to the "people killing each other for entertainment in dystopian future" stories was Stephen King's The Running Man, which was published in 1982, so predates both Battle Royale AND Hunger Games. (And in my opinion, Running Man is creepy in part because it PREDATES reality TV, but really summons that feeling of how voyeuristic and creepy it can be.)

It's not exactly a cutting-edge, radical new idea.

--Rogan

[(Anonymous)]

I don't see how you could've read them and still think it's a rip-off. The only thing that's the same is that it's teenagers killing each other. That's it.

Transcript

[(Anonymous)]

Image: the Mockingjay pin

Text: I used to complain about the Hunger Games being a bad ripoff from Battle Royale and refused to read them for years because of this.

Recently I came across the books at a giveaway and decided to give them a try just to see what the fuss was about, since I had spare time. I actually ended up really enjoying them.

I don’t think they’re amamzing, but I had much more fun reading them than I did Battle Royale, and I felt much more engaged with the world and the characters. I don’t think it’s better written, but I feel almost like it’s a better story.

This makes me feel really guilty, but not because I judged them but because I don’ think I should have liked them and my feelingas about it being a ripoff are still there. Like,WTF, taste?

Secret because I sound so elitist and I know it.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm glad that you didn't let that association keep you from reading a book you might otherwise have been interested in OP.

Though I do have a bit of sympathy for your original position. Hunger Games is one of those books that apparently you're not allowed to be uninterested in reading. I've come to dread when people ask if I've read it, because the followup when I say "no" is rarely to drop it. Usually, they ask "Why?" And heaven help you if you don't have an answer that's good enough. I had one friend literally bring the book over and leave it on my desk after a movie night after being told multiple times I wasn't interested.

So I can certainly admit to being tempted to throw some "Battle Royale" and "The Long Walk" and "The Running Man" in their faces. I refrain. But I want to so badly sometimes.