I'm ignoring the firestorm of snark and outrage on my Twitter feed about OWS. Sorry, but I just don't give a shit any more.
What I do care about is the new trailer for the Hunger Games.
Noah Berlatsky writes that grown ups like me, who wrestle with their teens for these books, love them, because Katniss is embodiment of Second-Wave feminism.
And then there's Katniss: an extremely competent, tomboyish young woman who is athletic, focused, responsible, and able to take care of herself. She's not especially interested in boys and doesn't have sex, or even really think about sex for almost the entire series. She's also politically engaged, especially as the story moves on. She is, in other words, the ideal second-wave feminist daughter; smart, fierce, independent, and sexually restrained.
Laura Miller of Salon thinks that Katniss is actually a very weak character, who pretends that she is not interested in power and ambition.
Underlying Katniss’ unacknowledged mixed feelings is the trilogy’s own profound ambivalence about desire and power. In some ways, Katniss is more passive than Bella, allowed to have all kinds of goodies but only if she demonstrates her virtue by not really wanting them in the first place.
I never read the Twight series, so I can't weigh in on the comparisons between the two characters. I am thrilled that a popular book series features a strong, kick-ass-and-take-names female character. I am thrilled that boys are reading a book where the main protagonist is a woman.
In era of Kim Kardashian and the bimbos of the Bachelorette, I think that there's a hunger for strong, athletic women who would rather run through the forest, than spend two hours flat ironing their hair.
Apt. 11d 
I feel that Miller’s criticism is unfair. There is no one individual who can fulfill all the possible paths of female strength. Can we find a real person who’s ideally balanced on all of these elements that Miller evokes? No. Can we find literary characters? Not any realistic ones.
Katniss has some strengths from the outset but she grows in other ways during the books. She comes up against the reality of sexual desire, an element she’s somewhat consciously kept herself clear of at the outset, She learns to read people’s politics over the course of the books, too. That’s what makes for an interesting journey for the character and the reader.
I think it’s a particularly gendered issue in fiction where no heroine can be good enough because she doesn’t hit all the buttons. Miller complains that she can’t be assertive without being labelled a bad girl. I’d counter that she can’t be human and growing over the course of the story without being condemned as a disappointment to some of the critics.
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When I am done with finals, I plan to read all the meta/criticism on The Hunger Games that I can, so keep the links coming. That trailer really took my breath away, and I’m pretty excited about the movie though also know it will never measure up to the book (the only movie ever that was better than the book was Last of the Mohicans, and let’s just say Twain was right about Cooper).
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I have read both Twilight and HG and so has my husband. We both prefer Twilight but really enjoyed HG. I think we found twilight more enjoyable because it was how we remember being a teen, whiny, devastated, obsessive. Katniss seems almost too responsible, a martyr and I think that is why people prefer her over Bella who is completely irresponsible/immature.
Issue I have is the people in the Hunger Games movie are just too pretty/clean. Come on, I expected them to be poor, malnourished and dirty. Oh and Peeta was suppose to have white blonde hair/eyelashes.
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Katniss is in a process of growth. She’s never as passive as Bella (could Bella have stood going against the law into the woods to hunt food for her family?) in fact I wouldn’t even call her passive as much as just not there yet. She hasn’t had to deal completely with all these issues yet, and it takes her some time to get there. Much like any teenager/college student growing up. Sometimes there are things that are just beyond one’s level at the time. But Katniss doesn’t stay there – Katniss does grow – and that’s what differentiates her from Bella.
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(the only movie ever that was better than the book was Last of the Mohicans, and let’s just say Twain was right about Cooper).
The Wizard of Oz.
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I didn’t like Twilight because it did seem like an unaware description of teendom (whiny, devastated, obsessive). Actually, seeing it as purposefully reflecting universal — and inaccurate perceptions might make me think it was a better book. But, I don’t believe that.
Katniss isn’t surprising as a non-whiny teen. She’s a hardscrable teen, one growing up in the refugee camps of palestine or the slums of mumbai or in the congo. The winy self-obsessed teens die, leaving the ones who go into the woods to hunt for their families.
I very much enjoyed the complexity and moral ambiguity that appeared in the last book, and felt that it was very inline with Katniss’s character. I think she’s realistically portrayed as someone who has responsibility (and fame and greatness) thrust upon her, and not as one who seeks power. That does support the popular myth that anyone who wants power is necessarily going to abuse it, but I don’t see it as being a feminist issue, more of a don’t trust the politicians issue.
I think it’s cool that the boys are reading the book. It is indeed a tremendous success of a book to get boys to read about a female protagonist — I don’t think there are many examples.
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I would add (to the great comments already here) that Katniss is one of the first female characters that comes close to the Ripley (from Aliens) female character – in strength, fortitude and the get-it-done attitude…while never negating the love that drives the character.
I also disgreed with Miller’s commentary on Katniss, the strength of the characterization is the fact that Ms. Collins allows the readers to not only see how Katniss grew and how strong she was – but to also see the damage that the events had on her and her choices.
I know that many fans of the series hated the ending of the books, but I found it to be one of the most hopeful (and most realistic). The idea of marrying and having children (for Katniss) is the greatest act of radical optimism that character could have shown. She didn’t want power, she didn’t want to rule in the new government. She wanted peace. And I thought the ending showed her willingness, even with all the knowledge of the evil that can be, to have hope and believe that her children would never have to endure a Reaping. That takes strength unimaginable to me.
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(the only movie ever that was better than the book was Last of the Mohicans, and let’s just say Twain was right about Cooper).
Also, Daniel Day Lewis at the peak of his form, and a great soundtrack.
I’ve not read the books and don’t plan on it (nothing against them- just too much else to read), but I’m curious about the stuff about sex in the books (or lack there of) above. How old are the characters? Is it the sort of story where it’s curious that people are not interested in sex? (If there were not the serious sexual undertones in the Harry Potter books, for example, it would have been very odd indeed.) My feeling is that sex is great, and that people shouldn’t pretend teenagers are not interested in it, or that it’s necessarily bad for them. But it shouldn’t be shoe-horned into a book to help people get past boring parts, either (as is done in many bad movies.)
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I’m in the minority amongst those who have fallen for the Hunger Games trilogy; I think the story because increasing implausible and uninteresting as it went from book to book. The first one was, I grant, a fun and provocative (and often horrifying and gruesome) adventure story, with scattered bits of satire and politics (and, note well Matt) and mysterious sexual tension throughout. The subsequent books slowly but surely lose those elements, as everything comes to revolve around a somewhat ham-fisted combination of romantic indecision and conspiratorial melodrama where you can see the good guys and the bad guys from miles away. Collins ups the ante by repeatedly killing off beloved characters, but you care less and less, or at least I did. By the end of the series we’re supposed to be feeling Katniss’s suffering, yet by then she’d long since become the least interesting character in the whole plot.
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OWS is starting to look like the Hunger Games..
“A River Runs Through It’ was the only movie I thought better than the book, which was itself excellent, unlike the Mohicans.
I couldn’t read Twilight, the prose hurt; also the plot, theme, style, and characters. Sparkly vampires, the My Little Pony vampires.. pshaw.
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“If there were not the serious sexual undertones in the Harry Potter books, for example, it would have been very odd indeed.”
As I recall, the snogging stuff got to be pretty tedious in at least one of the Harry Potter books. A lot of that seemed perfunctory and two-dimensional, although Harry’s own crushes may have been somewhat more credible.
On a related note, I remember somebody from Planned Parenthood or some such complaining some years back that Rowling was missing an opportunity for sex education in the Harry Potter stories. They didn’t really think that one through, because in HP, birth control would be through magic, that being the technology in use with the wizarding community. You’d have HP fans getting knocked up through having taken the formulas too seriously, which would be lawsuit material here in the US.
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because in HP, birth control would be through magic
Would “Accio gametes” work post hoc? Or would that cause all kinds of problems depending on the range and whether or not it attracted gametes in the gonads? Would “Accio Y chromosomes” work for sex selection?
And I’ve always assumed that birth would be accomplished by Side-Along Apparition, hopefully done by specialists for fear of spilching.
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serious sexual undertones in HP? Has my eight year old detected something in hp5 that I didn’t, causing him to put it down? (He currently has an ideological objection to snogging).
And I had thought it was the dark undertones.
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MH,
Eww.
bj,
I don’t blame the kid. I think it’s all downhill from the fourth book.
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LOL, I suffered through the 4th HP book and then increasingly loved the series. 🙂
Ragtime, I haven’t *read* The Wizard of Oz, but I’d buy it as a candidate only because the movie is so good.
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The movie of The Wizard of Oz can’t be better than the book because the movie doesn’t have the book’s focus on bimetalism. Once you pull monetary policy out of stories, the children are the ones who suffer.
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The Oz book doesn’t have the framing sequence at all. The Scarecrow isn’t “really” the farmhand, and the Wizard isn’t “really” the traveling fortune teller, because there is no farmhand or fortune teller.
So, in the end, there was no “Is it real, or was it a dream?” moment. It was real.
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I thought the Wizard was William Jennings Bryan.
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Or maybe the lion?
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This is Tanya, de-lurking here to add my two cents… I enjoyed two of the Twilight books and really disliked the last one. I gave all the books away- they were just a one shot fluff for me and I have no intention of recommending them to my now pre-school aged daughter some day. But the movies themselves have been some of my favorite guilty pleasures- the first one being my favorite due to the casting, the color schemes, the direction and the score. On the other hand, I’ve kept The Hunger Games trilogy and I would gladly hand them them over to my daughter. The sci-fi world Katniss lives in is more intellectually interesting and the supporting characters more complex than in Twilight,(but not close to HP, of course), and Katniss isn’t throbbing with desire for sparkly skin and topaz eyes on every other page. I just hope the movies are coming from someone with a unique vision.
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I think the Twilight books are generally underrated for a few things I don’t find in most other YA: female gaze and a relationship in which the young woman expresses her sexual desire without punishment.
Bella is actually the strongest character in the books, and she repeatedly manages to get her way in spite of every male character trying to force her to do what they think is right.
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I only saw part of one of the movies, but if her way is having two guys fight over how to save her from Ron Howard’s daughter, she was certainly getting it.
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