A heavily detailed post about The Hunger Games

Hi, folks, yo here. I found NECA's Hunger Games figures today, so this seemed like a good opportunity to share with you everything I know about the series.

  1. It's a book. Or a series of books. I think. I'm pretty sure that it's being adapted for the upcoming movie, and that means it has to be adapted from something. A book seems most likely.
  2. It has some kind of phoenix thing going on. I got that from the poster. There's a bird, there's fire... there's also a ring, so I expect Frodo will need to carry it to Mount Doom.
  3. Literally every person I've ever heard mention The Hunger Games has been a woman*, so this book may be another Twilight.
  4. There's an archer girl. Because girls are always archers.
  5. The characters have really stupid names.
  6. And apparently they're hungry?

That's it. That is the sum total of what I know about The Hunger Games. I don't know if it's fantasy or sci-fi, if it's medieval, modern, futuristic, or post-apocalyptic... nothing. I hadn't read a single word of Harry Potter before seeing the movies, but I still had at least a passing familiarity with it: it was about the magic man at the magic school. This, though? It's a total ghost. The first time The Hunger Games ever breached the surface of the pop culture ocean was when it was optioned for a film. Or heck, maybe it was when NECA announced they were doing figures. This property was a total non-entity, but if they had deemed it worthy of toys, then there must be something to it. We've said before that NECA can sell you toys based on games you've never played, and now apparently they can sell you toys based on things you've never heard of...

--yo

*Discounting movie news sites, of course: "Hunger Games casting news", "Hunger Games poster revealed", etc. don't count for the purposes of this list item, because that's not someone talking about The Hunger Games, that's just a news item. The people who care about the book have two X chromosomes.

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8 Responses to A heavily detailed post about The Hunger Games

  1. Soundwinder says:

    Someone once described it to me... all I remember was the description was exactly like Battle Royale.

  2. Will says:

    I'm hoping it's like The Biggest Loser - just fat people in an Olympiad Death Match over the world's last remaining food.

  3. J.P. says:

    I'm forced to assume that all the time hunting for toys tends to keep you all from ever entering a bookstore, yes?

  4. Luis Dalida says:

    my sister has the books, read them when I needed to something pass the time, till I got my copy of lovecraft's Necronomicon. It is kinda like Battle-royale, but less bloody, IMO.

    Something about a tyrannical government, that makes a boy and girl from a district fight each other, every time an attempted revolution fails.The girl(kathis/katniss, whatever her name was) then takes the place of her sister, which was kind of young as the participant.during the games boy falls in love w/ girl,( girl thinks its all a ploy) during said games, w/c raises ratings or something. so the government thinks, why not make a couples free-for-all. along the way the boy and girl managed to join a new rebellion that was brewing and manages to overthrow said govt. and in the end, the boy and girl get married/together or something.

    and that is all I remember of the three books that comprised the trilogy.

  5. Stephen says:

    I skimmed the first one and read the summaries for the latter two. It's sort of Battle Royale crossed with fairly generic "evil post-apocalyptic authoritarian government" themes from 1984, but for a lot of people that type of thing is unique. Plus, female readers are more likely to be drawn to a book with a female lead, which explains the popularity amongst women.

    I thought it was about as well-written as the later Harry Potter books (you know, once Rowling became editor-proof and just started vomiting out pages of text with a plot point squeezed in once per chapter), but essentially it's just an average YA novel with a good marketing campaign.

  6. Pete says:

    It's a post-apocalyptic series wherein society is divided into districts, and every district has to pay a 'tithe' of a contestant to these games. The contestants are dropped into an arena and told to kill one another; the survivor becomes a celebrity and his/her district basically gets more food for that year.

    It's actually pretty solid. It's a light, quick read, but it's a pretty great book. It amuses me that people keep talking about how it's a "women's" book when it's essentially a bunch of kids brutally murdering one another in a game of survival.

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