I'm an elementary teacher, and I work with gifted kids. When the Twilight series came out all of my 5th graders were reading it and my son (in 6th grade at the time) wanted to read it, so I read them to see what all the fuss was about. Yawn. I am not a fan.

But with The Hunger Games, I can say that this is truly a fantastic series. It's well written fiction, and I read the entire trilogy in one weekend because I couldn't put it down. Now my 12 year old is reading it, and he HATES to read. He resisted reading it, but once he started, he was hooked.

So to those of you who are avoiding it just because it is "popular", you should give it a try. Yes, there is violence, but overall it is a heartwarming story of good overcoming evil.

I can't WAIT to see the movie. I'm not enough of a night owl to brave the midnight showing, but my son is upstairs right now racing to finish it by tomorrow so we can go to see the movie tomorrow night.

Sometimes things just aren't a conspiracy...

I remember when Battle Royale came out, people were saying it just ripped off other movies with similar plots.

The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger, being one.

It's not really a new idea; forcing people to kill each other for entertainment.

I don't think that lowering our vibrations is going to be what happens - in fact, to me, the book is more about class struggle and political struggle.
When I read it, I thought it could ignite Occupy again, and/or political dialogue again.

You've got this big tick government and the people are poor and starving and being made to sacrifice their kids.

I don't see how tptb would like it, or it could be good for them in any way.

I thought it was a good book. I wanted my son to read it but he thought b/c it had a strong female character, it was for girls. I'm going to drag him to see it though.

I had never heard of it until clicking this thread.

Adblock FTW

Also, turn off your TV. Your brain will thank you.

I only caught the previews of this film and it isn't one that I can not understand why teenagers are so enthralled with it at all. This film strips away the very core of what it is to be human. It celebrates evil and it says that it is ok to forget about your morals and values and it says it is ok to watch humans die. I am not sure but, is it the government in control in this movie who is making these people fight for their lives?

This film is definitely another procedure of conditioning the human people into submission. I would not allow my child to watch it and If I had a child I would sit him or her down and explain how this film destroys morals and values that we were raised upon in order to survive.

The conspiracy in this film as I see it is conditioning the world for the way things will be in the future. That is why it is being promoted so heavily.

Also, are all those teenagers, who they show screaming their heads off toward the stars of this movie, paid to scream and act crazy like that? Have those teenagers ever seen these people before?

Seems like TPTB have bet again and this film is a winner.

I use the Internet every day, as it is a prime vehicle for my employment.

I have not been bombarded by advertisements for this film.






Adjust your ad-blocker.

Sounds to me like another slice of dystopian lit.

Except this book is geared toward teens, which I find interesting for several reasons. Mainly, the fact that teenagers have always been aware of these issues and books like these highlight something very real and primal that teens understand in their hearts.

Basically.......The world is a terribly cruel and vicious place and not everyone is going to be kind to you, mom or dad may not be able to protect you from the big, bad world and you must learn to fend for yourself, even under, especially under the most horrorific conditions.

Teens struggle with this reality, and it is a essential phase of psycho-social development for young people. This book sounds like it taps into this and exaggerates the fears of teens as they struggle to transition into adulthood. It also taps into the eternal hope of teens......namely that THEIR generation will be the generation that will CHANGE things......every generation thinks this when they are young.....

Truly there is nothing new under the sun........these are classic themes that humans have been fascinated by since people first began telling stories.

Books are considered classics or wildly popular only when they tap into a fundamental component of human nature, something that is timeless and crosses all boundaries and divisions.....

Seems to me that is why people are so hung up on the books.

The twilight books did this exact same thing except the fears they focused on were of a sexual nature. I hated the writing style of Stephanie Meyer.....I thought she could have made those stories so much more......her storytelling was mediocre at best IMO.

These books I plan on reading, but I am not rushing out to get them anytime soon.

As far as a conspiracy, I guess writers like Huxley, Orwell, C.S. Lewis, Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Burgess, and Philip K. Dick are all in on it because they have wriiten this type of lit for many years.

I think people write what the world around them reflects.....there is no conspiracy except the ones we create for ourselves.

Originally posted by Nephlim
Hunger games is a story of REbellioN against a CORRUPT GOVERNMENT!!!! it is one of the most well written and emotional young adult books. the language is simple enough for a 10 year old to read but it is still a good book. It is on the surface very similar to battle royale but if you actually read the book it is nothing like Battle royale.( haven't watched the movie)

has anyone actually read the series that so easily compares it to battle royale? they overthrow the corrupt government because of the forced hunger games, so it ends up being vastly different.

so no conspiracy theory.

Im sorry, but ive read this book, and if this is what passes as a great book in literary terms for our younger generations, then its no wonder we are seeing the dumbing down that we are seeing now......

People need to be reading more of the old books that require you to think more , that require you to use more imagination and critical thinking..........

There are plenty of old literary masterpieces out there, that teach volumes more then some of this garbage floating around out there our teens our reading.......

We dont need books simple enough 10 year olds can read it, thats part of the problem.............we need material that challenges them

A few points....

-Some of the "ads" for this film were not in the form of advertisements and thus would not be blocked by an ad blocker. Like the article on the Weather Channel website. What on earth does this film have to do with the freaking weather? lol.

-I'm an avid reader and I didn't think this book was very well written. It's better than Twilight but that's about all. The story is cliche and predictable, and time it could have used for deeper character development and exploring its own moral paradoxes, is instead used for gruesome violence. I'm highly empathetic and some of the painful images in this book will stick with me for the rest of my life. If that's what "well-written" means to some people, then fine, it was, from that point of view. But I read novels expecting them to be art, expecting them to ask questions about life and people and situations...not violence porn set in a clearly unoriginal fantasy world.

-How the kid characters in the story handle the situation is part of what disturbs me about the message being trumpeted. Why do the kids go along with this? Reading the first book, the whole time I'm expecting the kids to band together and rise up and at least TRY to escape the arena together. Instead, they willingly consent to kill each other, even our "hero" characters, seemingly without a pang of conscience, and the reader is made to feel as if its ok because #1) we have no choice and #2) the fellow combatants we're killing are bigger and stronger than "us" so our killing is in self-defense and thus justified.

-Anyone can publish a book these days, but absolutely no one can control the success of their book. It is utterly undeniable (IMO, from seeing how the industry works) that "they" control the perceived popularity of books. Who "they" are, is another question entirely. "They" could simply be the bigshots of the publishing industry, having no connection to a wider conspiracy to control our entertainment and media. But they are certainly in control. There are no "grassroots" publishing successes, there is simply the appearance of such. Who do you think decides what books are put in the front of the bookstore? Who do you think decides what books will be required reading in school and library and literacy programs? How do you think Harry Potter and Twilight became popular, did it just "happen" or was it because of deliberate prime placement in the bookstores, advertising focus (at the expense of every other book) by the publishers, and media coverage over the "controversies"? This is how it works: they say they are putting a book in front of your face because its popular, but in reality, it becomes popular because they repeatedly put it in front of your face to make it popular.

I understand why this story is appealing to many people, it's the classic little-band-of-rebels versus evil-empire story that is always being promoted in mainstream entertainment. While you're in the world of the story, it makes you feel like you're part of something important and portentious and heroic. It gives you the powerful cathartic effect of getting to the end and realizing that you survived, that you (and/or your friend(s)) are the only ones that survived, and for that you feel good even though everyone else died. And it's the fact that we the audience feel good about our survival, at the expense of the lack of survival of everyone else, that disturbs me.

reminds me of that scene in resident evil: apocalypse when the t-virus was taken away from the doctor who invented it to cure his daughter's disabilities, only to be turned into a doomsday device that decimated humanity.

i think the author was trying to accomplish 2 things: to warn the masses of what may happen if we don't stand up for ourselves, and also to conjure the spirit of "righteous rebellion" in us.

but the MSM took it away from her and turned it into a powerful piece of predictive programming propaganda (sorry for all the p-words), to get us ready and accepting of what they want to do to us.

I think anyone avoiding The Hunger Games is ridiculous. If anything, you would think the government would be the ones trying to PREVENT people from seeing it and if someone is pushing it on us, it is another entity.

For those of you who compare the story to Battle Royale, I get the comparison, but it is a ridiculous one and it is hastily made by whiners of Japanese film fans. The only similarities it shares is a life and death tournament between kids. THAT IS IT.

*Possible spoilers below.*

Does anyone else here know that The Hunger Games is the opening book to a trilogy of books that is about a revolution taking down a corrupted government, a government that is eerily similar to ours in many aspects? I don't want to spoil the story for anyone, but after the first book, the series becomes anything other than a "Battle Royale" rip off as some people like to throw around, but a look at hope for a revolution taking place in a society where nearly all hope is lost and government has supreme control over the masses, yet most of the people are too blind to even see it.

It goes to show that all it takes is one symbol of hope to rally the people behind it and lead an uprising to attempt to take down that government, and, that when pushed into a corner, a group in power will stop at nothing to try to maintain that power.

Not only that but it shows that even those who seem to be fighting for a better future and perhaps in the guise of freedom, may in fact only be searching to gain their own foothold into power and become their own leaders of tyranny in the place of the machine they work to take down.

In the end, the series does not have a happy ending. It is very bitter sweet and disheartening because it is a picture of our world. It is a picture of the United States today. Does the government choose 2 kids from each state to go off and kill themselves in tribute each year? No. But it manages to convince hundreds to thousands of them to go off and get themselves killed so that the people in the "capital" can live lives of luxury. It convinces the lower class people to continue to work to try to get a meager life while the pompous consumers at the top look down upon us and reap the wares of our work.

Hopefully, people can look at The Hunger Games as a little bit more than just some "scholastic violence fest" and realize the true literary value behind it, especially in today's modern world.