The Games I Play

I've been holding off posting this because, as I've mentioned before, I don't like the possibility of being categorized as one of the screaming fangirl masses. Argh. Here it is anyway. And for those of you who haven't read the series, you can still read this post. =)

My original thoughts about The Hunger Games was mostly that it was a fad, a typical thing-that-everyone-was-into, and that while it's a great series, it wasn't all that deep.

And to an extent, that's still true. It really isn't like Plato or Lewis or even Kate DiCamillo. The second time I read the series through, I was hoping to glean brilliant quotes as I went, and there just weren't any. But there is one genius thing for which I must give Suzanne Collins credit, which I believe most of the screaming fangirl populous doesn't get...which is sickly ironic, especially since they've now made it into a movie.

I'm starting to realize how right she was in the whole series: about the Games. Apparently most of my intelligent peer group understood this way faster than I did...perhaps because I just let myself live in its alternate reality for so long.

My life...is a Game. I'm my own tribute in my own Hunger Games. Fighting to stay true to myself and my values while living in a world that is constantly pushing me to play by their rules while they broadcast false generalizations to the public in order to control the masses.

I have to submit to some form of government. I have to follow the rules when I sign a job contract. I am fighting, always fighting, to stay true to myself, to not be defined by anything else but my Creator. Living in a culture where looks can kill, in a place where media and technology pushes us to form a presentable self that is perfect and conformed -- but is not truly who we are.

Media is mostly a lie. Have you ever watched a video editor at work? Have you ever seen the kind of material they slog through in order to make a finished product? My brother makes movies, and as you know I'm a huge fan of them, so I'm definitely not bashing them.

But they're illusions. They're false realities. Do you know how many takes it took to get that scene right? How many voice overs, sound recordings, lighting changes, and script edits it took to make that 2-minute shot you see in front of you? The costumes, the makeup, the rehearsals. It's not what really happened. In real life they had dozens of cameras and sound equipment hovering over them while they pretended to fall in love or jump off that cliff (onto the cushy trampoline at the not-so-deep bottom).

Video editing -- putting it all together to make it look nice -- is a frustrating process. I've never done it, but I've been in close observation of people who do. You have hundreds of angles of the same shot to choose from, and the splicing and dicing and hours it takes to even get a single scene done can be agonizing.

We allow ourselves to be infatuated with this alternate reality and then become frustrated when our own doesn't line up: but the truth is, it will never line up, because the alternate reality simply is not true. Movies, media -- they are all false perceptions of reality that were jacked up to look fancy, to make us think our lives should be something that they are not.

Television, news, facebook, social media: it's all edited to what people think the world will want to see and hear. It becomes not only a false perception of reality, but a false perception of yourself.

And not only that, but we soon become a slave to it. I still fight my own slavery to the internet. I'm a compulsive email checker. It's like I have to check it every other half hour for some odd reason, in case I miss something awesome. I've probably clicked on the open gmail tab next to this post about 6-10 times in the last hour as I've been writing this post, despite the fact that I know a little (1) will show up if I really have a new email.

I'm a slave. I'm a piece in the Media Games.

We become slaves to false selves. To somebody that does not even exist. To a system that's making us numb, dumb, and complacent -- just like the people of Panem: blindly and hopelessly supporting an atrocious, disgusting game. What other terrible things am I blindly supporting?

Or perhaps worse -- what horrible things in this world am I refusing to take a stance on, to fight against? The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

In the Hunger Games, the gamemakers could do whatever the wanted to get the kids to kill each other. From materializing fireballs from nowhere to creating animals that screeched the voice of someone you knew, they cut the cameras away from the things that they didn't want the public to see, and only showed the gory fighting.

I feel like that's the culture I'm living in. Dressing up the media to make you think your life should be a certain way. Yeah, we don't kill each other -- but maybe we're even worse. We're building up false realities and ideas of perfection and labels and trying to fit everything into it. We're not murdering physical bodies, but we're destroying our souls.

But somehow...somehow, Katniss and Peeta managed to overturn the system. They refused to play the Capitol's Game.

What do we need to do to overturn the system of our culture? Is it even possible? This is the call for something beyond ourselves, the cry of our soul to our Maker. Somehow, none of this is possible without Him. I honestly don't know how yet, but that's the kind of quest that I'm on. The kind of purpose I was made for.

To discover the One who defines me and conform to His version of what my life should be: not my culture's. And then somehow...share that truth with the world that I live in.

Yet another beautiful reason why I love the word 'transcendence'. Watch this video again, or for the first time if you haven't yet. The message is so, so powerful.



It's that moment when you realize that your life has been lived in the face of a projector screen. And suddenly you feel that pull, that call: you were made for more than this. You have a greater purpose beyond letting everyone else just shine their light on you -- you have your own light to shine.

To fight the good fight, you need a drive. You need a purpose -- and it doesn't come from yourself. It doesn't come from your culture. It comes from your Maker.

It's my own, literal, real life Hunger Games.

I give into the fandom.

Oh snap, is this my 4th Hunger Games post in a row? I told you you'd be sick of it at some point.

Actually, the real reason behind the excessive Hunger Games fandom (besides the fact that it's amazing) is that I have been evading deep thinking lately, and so as a result, have allowed my brain to default to the easiest, most brain-free topic there is, which right now, would be the Hunger Games.

Not that it's a brainless, pointless series, but it's the kind of thing you don't need a lot of brain in order to process. If that makes any sense. Nothing like Shakespeare or Lewis or the Apostle Paul or anything, is what I mean.

Anyhow, I typically pride myself in not being obsessed with what everyone else is. I don't like screaming fangirls. I am not one of them. But this series was...absolutely amazing. So here we go.

!!!WARNING: if you have not read the books, PLEASE, for the love of reading a good novel, don't read this post!!! Perhaps, some other time, I will write a Hunger Games post specifically for those of you who have not read it, so as to use my persuasive skills as to convince you to do so.

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...there now. For those of you who are left...

First of all, I absolutely loved every minute of the Hunger Games trilogy. I don't really understand how people can "like the third book but not the second book" or something like that, because they all tell one story. You can't simply "like" one and not like the other. It only took me a timespan of....3 days to read all 3 books. It's been a painstakingly long time since I allowed myself to be completely lost in an alternate reality, and it felt really good to just curl up in a corner for hours.

Secondly, as far as I know, I am basically the only human being on the planet who is "Team Gale."

Yes, I'm sorry all you Peeta-lovers out there...I was rooting for Gale. After a long discussion with a friend on the matter, I have finally come to like Peeta quite well.

However, I just...really really hate perfect characters. Peeta literally has no character flaws whatsoever, and if that wasn't enough, he has like this unconditional love for a girl who deliberately shoves him around and loves someone else for a time. Even when he goes crazy, he's the one who's strong, he's the one who fights through it -- and it's not like it was his fault anyway.

I guess I'm just too firmly devoted to platonic love, and despite the fact that Gale only loved Katniss for 6 months, I feel like it was one of those moments where you just suddenly realize how much you love someone even though you've known them for forever. You know -- real lovers start out as real friends -- that kind of thing.

During the whole first book, I didn't get excited when Peeta and Katniss were kissing, but more of this achey sort of knot in the pit of my stomach for Gale as I imagined how awful it must have been from his perspective.

Given the amount of time that Suzanne Collins spent describing Peeta and the amount of time she didn't spend on Gale, I probably should have guessed Katniss would end up with him. But I'm just not that perceptive when it comes to reading books....

Anyways -- so despite how much I do really love Peeta now, part of me still roots for Gale somehow. He had this bond with Katniss that Peeta just didn't have. That best-friend love is something I will always fight hard for.

Thirdly, the whole series left me rather uneasy. I wanted just a few more sentences to know how Gale was getting on, whether there really was peace throughout Panem, whether the districts still existed to feed the capitol, if the capitol was a tyrannical terror to everyone, who mines coal now that District 12 makes medicine, and what in the world does District 13 do now? What type of government did they run, and was District 11 still a miserable place to live? Was everything still rural and run down or was it all modernized to be more like the Capitol and District 13? But perhaps that's the way Suzanne Collins intended it to be.

I was angry that Katniss was one of the ones who voted to have a final Hunger Games with the capitol's children. Seriously, I know she was losing her mind at that point, but had she really entirely forgotten why she was fighting this battle in the first place?

However, I do admit that it was entirely within her character, especially given that Prim had died. But I was annoyed that Katniss' love for everyone else was hinged on her love for Prim.

It actually reminded me a lot of Orual from Till We Have Faces -- in that her only reason for living was because of this overpowering love for Psyche. I guess I was just disappointed that Katniss' love for Gale was so thin that it would fade entirely, leaving nothing behind, with the mere prospect that his bomb could have been responsible for Prim's death.

Also, I didn't feel like Gale was so shallow as to simply move onto another district and probably be "kissing some other woman" so quickly. I won't sink his character so low that he would simply "move on" and forget Katniss like that. It was like Suzanne Collins had to get rid of him real quick so Katniss could be with Peeta, and that was the easiest way to do it.

However, I was very pleased that it didn't end "happily ever after." Despite how uneasy it made me feel, I was so glad that it wasn't a typical book. So many books end with this happy, all-is-right-with-the-world....but in reality, that's not the way it is. So maybe that uneasiness was intentional -- because that's the way it is in the world.

So yes -- I really liked the accurate picture it gave of the human condition and the whole political system in general -- that is: corrupt. That really, sometimes the only thing you can do in this life is not to let these things control or define you. It's never going to all work out in the world.

All in all, I think it definitely goes on my list of favorite fictional books. Even though it gave me this sense of despair at the prospect of the futility of the world in general...at the same time there's a renewed sense that fighting, even if nothing ever ends happily ever after...is worth it because of the people that you love.

So...fellow nerds? What have you to say? I long to hear your thoughts.

Oops.

I accidentally just posted another Taylor Swift/Hunger Games song.

But it's kind of amazing.



The tricky thing
Is yesterday we were just children
Playing soldiers
Just pretending
Dreaming dreams with happy endings
In backyards, winning battles with our wooden swords
But now we've stepped into a cruel world
Where everybody stands and keeps score

The Hunger Games.

First off, this post is long overdue. Very long.

If it wasn't for the fact that school, speech, debate, and piano kept me from writing more frequent posts of this nature, you probably would have been as sick of me ranting about this as you were with Narnia. (what, you liked hearing about Narnia every other post? that's sweet of you to mention it.) (I hope you caught the sarcasm there...)

Secondly, I'm really not quite sure I have words to adequately describe the hunger games. I'm about halfway through the second book, and yes, I just started it 2 hours ago. (hurray for spring break!)

I love letting myself become completely absorbed in books. It's like...for a moment in time, you can escape your own reality and allow yourself to be completely sucked into another's. And right now, my mind is off somewhere in District 12...

Suffice it to say...I don't often find myself on the edge of my seat or audibly gasping while reading a book.

And the movie...definitely does it justice. I'll geek out later, if I feel up to putting it into words. Granted, it's a book that's way more conducive to screenplay adaptation than say...Narnia or Jane Eyre. But it's so good.

That's all I really have to say right now. Don't you love it when a book/movie is so good you don't know what to say? I think that's why people create art - to draw others into an alternate reality and leave them speechless...yet somehow hopeful in the prospect of their own.