This is my third to last not twilight, hunger games post, bcus i only have two more things to say lmao
THE HUNGER GAMES MOVIES ARE THE MOST FUCKING META THING I HAVE EVER LAID EYES ON AND THE MAKERS HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA THAT THAT IS WHAT THEY’VE CREATED
First of all, by aging all the characters down, it’s not absolutely fucking horrifying anymore. As far as I know (forgive me, I’m bad at math), Amandla Stenberg was 14 when she played Rue, which is a wholeass TWO years older than Rue’s actual 12. You might be wont to say, “two years isn’t that much” but the difference between 12 and 14 is like 6th grade-7th grade to 9th grade-10th grade. It’s middle school vs. high school underclassman.
All the characters being aged up makes it so that when we watch the movie, we are watching grown children/teens kill each other, rather than actual children. That already sanitises the bloodbath and makes the games easier to view as enjoyment.
Second, let’s look at the promotional posters.
Does this look like, “I am a frightened child who is being forced to fight to the death by an authoritarian government” to you? Or does this look like a poster that the Capitol would shoot to show us the hype of the Hunger Games. Does Katniss look like she does not want to be a part of this, or does she look stoic and confident? Cato is the only one in character, and he is brain-washed by the Capitol and ends up dead because the Capitol convinced the districts this was a way to win honour and victory. Even then, in the movie, they took out the way that Cato dies, which I can’t sleep thinking about.
Does this poster say, I have PTSD, and I spent the first two movies locked in a loveless relationship feeling trapped by everything, and moving on to being a sad, traumatised, disposable puppet in the last two by another authoritarian government? Or does it look like a Propo shot by 13.
I think you can figure it out for yourself. I don’t need to explain why the movies are clearly the height of Capitol logic, BUT NEVERTHELESS I SHALL. The story of the Hunger Games is not about RESILIENCE AND POWER. It’s about having no other options. It’s about Gale and all these other teen soldiers realising that they have two options: live as slaves or quite probably die creating a better future. People who go out of their way to break the law in order to survive (Gale’s poaching for ex.) aren’t suicidal. They’re willing to lay down their life because this is the ONLY PATH TOWARDS FREEDOM. Johanna is not walking into the Quarter Quell, axing ppl because she is brave or courageous. She has no other options. The movies aren’t here to give us helplessness turning into a revolution. They’re here to sell us the glamour of what fighting for something can mean. They’re profiting off of these children killing each other, by making them look brave and badass. Height of Capitol once again.
Third, we know how many times they revised the movie to get a lower rating, we know how much they removed and hid. There are so many moments in all the movies where they could show us something clearly, the blood, the guts, the loss of life, but instead they show us weird blurred shots that end as soon as they start. They quite literally sanitised the movie to make more money. They hid the true horror, so that we, the audience, could be the largest demographic possible, and also we could sit there and enjoy it as much as possible. This movie is now, not only aged up, badass-ified, but also nearly completely non-violent.
I have pretty severe anxiety, my friends need to vet the movies I watch because I’m so deeply impacted by violent imagery and scenes, and I’m a Korean American actress who has yet to watch Parasite because all my friends have told me that I’d be crying in therapy for the next year. I am the most delicate piece of garbage in the world and can’t stand to watch human suffering. The Hunger Games was not hard to watch. I never had to look away, bcus there was nothing to look away FROM. They took away all the horrifying bits and just showed us the remainder. It’s a gameshow. Isn’t it exciting! Let’s make bows as memorabilia. Let’s sell posters of each of the tributes looking as cool as possible. HEIGHT OF CAPITOL.
And last, the whole Team Peeta Team Gale thing was REALLY played up by the movie makers. That I feel like is more justifiable, because that has less to do with Capitol directly, but it does reek of star-crossed lovers in the Hunger Games. Just go look at promotional posters for Mockingjay. They’re either of Katniss looking cool as hell, or Katniss looking cool as hell in the middle of Gale and Peeta. Another thing that really bothered me is how they overlayed Finnick talking about being a sex slave since he was 14, and they overlayed that with Gale and Peeta about to die. They took a plot point about pedophilia, and made it the soundtrack to a rescue mission. In the books, Finnick is clearly triggered by presenting all this information, and they have to make sure he’s ok multiple times, but in the movie Sam Claflin looks directly in the camera, sexy as hell, level voice, a little bit of vocal fry, “I’m very sexy and I got sexy information.” It was really gross and disturbing. It genuinely made me very upset. I’m so upset about it, and I’m still processing it, so finding the words to describe why it was so profoundly disturbing is hard, but as a person who has been raped, I was really angered by it. It was a narrative tool for a love triangle rather than a character’s story. It was spectacle, rather than a man who’s been deeply traumatised and abused repeatedly. There is something really fucking slimy and disgusting about how they played that.
At every point in the making of the movies, the movie makers saw the most Capitol option they could take and RAN towards it, arms wide open, ready to embrace ANYTHING if it meant they made more money. There is nothing more deeply indicative of Capitol than that. They made a movie series that could be used as a metaphor itself, and BE the allegory, and they had no fucking idea. Or maybe they did, which would be quite a bit worse.
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