Yuffie's Writing How-To's

Why The Hunger Games fails at worldbuilding

There is a big reason I couldn't get more than 20 pages in The Hunger Games before I rolled my eyes and put it back on the shelf.

It absolutely FAILS as a believable dystopian civilization. Everything about the Games just... it's impossible and wouldn't hold up in real life.

"But Yuffie!" you exclaim. "It's fiction! It doesn't need to happen in real life!"

Ah, young padawan, that is where you're wrong.

The best dystopians—Brave New World, 1984, etc.—are so celebrated and time-honored because the premise of a dystopian civilization presented is something we can believe may happen. There is real fear in that becoming a reality. While fictional dystopians may exaggerate certain aspects and liberally use hyperbole to make a point, there is still truth in the base concepts that reveals something about our lives, usually offering a social criticism or commentary.

A story doesn't have to be set in reality, but it has to be BELIEVABLE (go read the how-to chapter on believable vs. realistic for a refresher on my argument on this). The story has to stick with its internal logic and the laws of that world, and that's where mainstream YA dystopians such as The Hunger Games and Divergent fail on an astronomical proportions.

They break the internal logic they set up and don't portray realistic or believable societal reactions to the events occurring in the books.

If you tell me District 13 is full of starving children and then have them all walk independently to stand at the Reaping, not one of them crippled, fatigued, or diseased from complications of malnutrition and lack of proper health care, I will raise my eyebrows. If you tell me not one of those children have cancer, CP, hydrocephalus, Down Syndrome, or a plethora of other disorders that will affect their participation in the Reaping, that's stopping my suspension of disbelief. That's poor world building because there are huge holes that need to be addressed.

It's implying the world follows the laws of physics, and then all of a sudden you have a character creating new mass out of nothing. There are "laws" of how societies work and interact, and while those aren't specific or named like Newton's Laws, seeing them broken in a novel is just as off-putting as the author getting the science wrong.

This isn't a rant against THG. This is how you need to gear your brain toward your own stories and world building. Whatever type of society you're trying to make, look to our earth's history and find something similar. See how and why things worked the way they did.

If you still don't believe me when I say the Hunger Games fails in terms of world building and creating a believable and engaging dystopian society and dictatorship, read what this guy has to say:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-movies-always-get-wrong-about-dictatorships/

(Google: "5 Things Movie Dystopias Get Wrong About Dictatorships")

This article looks specifically on dictatorships and how they operate and stay in business for so long, and why THG failed in those aspects. A society like the Districts of THG would never have come to be because there are so many fallacies and gaps in logic with how the society is set up, the Games themselves, how society will react to events, how nefarious governments and dictators stay in power, etc.

Read this article. It's eye-opening.

Disclaimer: I'm not going to say what the author of the article wrote is 100% true. I have no idea if it is. But my point with sharing this article is that if you're creating your own world and government and society, you have to think deep, really deep, on why your fictional society is the way it is and how those elements work together with the people that populate it. You need to create believable, human, reactions and actions, believable causes and effects.

So this chapter's purpose is to get you thinking in a different direction than you probably were used to. You have to do RESEARCH, not just in details like the clothes they wore in victorian london or the type of stone used in the Taj Mahal, but in the way societies and groups of people interact with their governments. This holds even if you're writing a fictional world. Look to our history for parallels and similarities to your world and build off them, use them as a guide, and that's how you'll create more believable worlds.

It's things like this that made me scrap SuperHero, because you'll see it doing the same things this article frowns upon, and I knew that (well, I didn't know it as I was writing it back in the day, but i figured it out eventually). None of you seemed to catch all the fallacies in the SuperHero world, so I figured this is a good piece of knowledge to impart on you all. Be more critical of what you're reading. Analyze whether the set-up of the world makes sense, because Panem really doesn't make any sense whatsoever. From what I know of Divergent, same goes there. The article also cites Maze Runner, though I have no idea what that's about.

Analyze them for yourselves.

2nd Disclaimer: I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy THG/Divergent/etc. If you love it, keep loving it! I love a lot of books, movies, tv shows with huge flaws because there's some entertainment factor that makes me forgive the flaws. Arrow is hella cheesy and has physically impossible action stunts and gaps in logic, but the entertainment value is so big for me that I keep watching. Pacific Rim is one of my favorite movies ever, but there is zero justification for building Jaegers when they could've saved billions of dollars an just put the plasma cannons next to the crack where the aliens came out of and control them remotely. VENGEANCE does the exact same thing :P There's no logical reason mechs should exist other than they are freaking awesome, but for me that's enough for me to forgive the gap in logic. But for others, that definitely isn't the case and they can't stand mech stories.

If there's something about one of these books that you love so much that you don't care about the logical fallacies of the world building, that's fine! I don't judge you in the least if you keep enjoying it, and I want to make that clear. You can enjoy whatever you want to enjoy and hate whatever you want to hate. My intent with sharing this article is to get you thinking more critically about what you're reading and applying these concepts to improve your own writing, not to bash THG or its readers. Follow? :)