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De la razón al caos
That not-awkward-at-all moment when you play Avatar: The Last Airbender to your sister so you can re-watch it yourself and also casually show her the trailers for The Hunger Games so she gets hyped on time and so you’ll have an excuse to go see it more than once when it’s playing on theaters. I’m not even remotely sorry for this. After all, there’s never a bad time to shape a young impressionable kid’s tastes and show them how to tell actual good stuff from Twilight or talking dog movies. ;)
toteswestcoast:katnissuprising:spaceorphan:
Cato’s theme has officially been released. It will be played during his final scene in the movie.
Well played, fandom. Well played.
oh my fucking god I can’t handle this shit
maybe it’s because i’ve been up since 5am but i fucking lost it
fandom, A+
You might want to check your speakers, though. It starts out loud.
Q&A with Suzanne Collins:
Q: How long would it take for North America to deteriorate into the world depicted in the books?
A: You’d have to allow for the collapse of civilization as we know it, the emergence of Panem, a rebellion, and seventy-four years of the Hunger Games. We’re talking triple digits.
Given the grand scheme of cultural collapse, anywhere from 200-999 years is absolutely believable for a nation like Panem to rise. However, it would take at least 300 years, on the best estimates, to see the major disaster or chain of disasters that come together to drastically change the orientation of North America. Therefore, in terms of the creation of the Panem map, we were more focused on the geological cataclysm – and it turns out that even “triple-digit” years is pretty short for the Earth to, literally, fall apart!
Only a few weeks after making the original map, the horrific earthquake and tsunami over Fukushima, Japan illustrated the fragility of human infrastructure. Katniss herself recounts geological catastrophe as a major part of the fall of North America:
“He tells the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land…” THG18
Since the three-book deal for The Hunger Games was signed to Scholastic in 2006, when the world was still reeling from the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, the 2004 tsunami at the Indian Ocean, record-low fatal freezing temperatures in Canada and the northern United States, and massive Pakistani earthquake, it is easy to see where all of our real-world events begin to be woven into Katniss’ story.
However, the missing piece is “the encroaching seas,” which is a common trope in scifi literature that takes place on Future Earths. One possible origin is the urban myth of “sinking California” – and that is, admittedly, what Meg and I used in making our original map of Panem. However, it’s more likely a combination of tectonic shifts in California causing tsunamis as well as global warming affecting the Atlantic that actually made the seas “encroach” on North America.
But really, either way, we decided that we were going to have to collapse the coasts of the United States, Mexico, and Canada enough to reduce landmass enough to result in “the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.”THG18 Combined with the racial tensions that drive much of Panem’s culture, for us, that meant most significantly reducing Mexico to create a futuristic border crisis. The polar ice melt would take care of much of Canada.
So, armed with frosting, ice cream, and overflowing love for Finnick Odair – as well as a mountain of research – we started making our map by looking at present-day North America.
The Sinking California theory is actually pretty much science fiction – which is okay, because so is The Hunger Games – but it does mean that we had a fair amount of leeway in how we wanted to pursue the various avenues of geological cataclysm. We decided to go with rational, but also clearly fictional, global warming scenarios as well.
First, an assumption about the timeframe of Panem: 400-500 years from the present. That allows for the 74 years of the Tessera-Games system, the First Rebellion, and a pre-existing Panem with District separation and Specialties to have been a full culture and begin its sociological and socioeconomic transformation (leading to said First Rebellion), probably another 60-100 years. So that’s already setting Panem in at least the 2200s. If you assume that one contributing factor to the fall of North America is the depletion of oil reserves worldwide (which will be discussed further in Chapter Two), then we’re around 2300.
Here comes some of the encroaching seas theory: between 1900 and 2000, the ocean rose 6-8 inches due to global warming (a global temperature rise of ½° C). Supposing the same rate for those 300 years, that’s another 18-24 inches of oceanic rise.
At that rate of rise, coastal cities all over North America and the world would be at risk of sinking – kind of like Venice is sinking now, by a few inches each decade – with southernmost Florida, the Louisiana coastline at the Gulf, North Carolina’s Pamlico-Albemarle Peninsula, along Chesapeake Bay, and Texas-Mexico east of Galveston being most at risk. Other threatened U.S. cities include New York/Newark, New Orleans, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Tampa-St Petersburg, and San Francisco. Part of the problem in those areas is that many millions of years ago, during the Ice Age, “around the periphery of where the glaciers sat, by contrast — places like Chesapeake Bay and the south of England — the land was actually squeezed upward during the Ice Age by the downward pressure nearby. The resulting ‘glacial forebulge’ has been sinking back ever since, also at an average rate of a few millimeters a year, so sea level rise is greater than average in these regions. And in some coastal areas — most notably along the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana — the land is falling as well: Thanks to massive oil and gas extraction, the continental shelf is collapsing like a deflated balloon.” If we conjecture that Panem was indeed partially caused by the depletion of oil and gas, that leads to major problems to the Gulf area.
However, given what we know about D12 and D13’s location along the Appalachian mountain ridge and D11’s location in the Deep South, some adjustments had to be made for purely canonical reasons (and since most “rapid continental sinking” scenarios are scifi, that’s okay!)
Given the immense change in geography and political landscape, Panem most likely needed to recreate its entire infrastructure to accommodate its needs. The phi spiral would give each District the unique amount of space it would need to cultivate its Specialty without having so much room that pockets of dissent could form in “off-the-grid” communities (which is also why we did not leave massive amounts of space between the Districts. Like Katniss’ forest in D12, there is clearly fenced off “forbidden area” within the Districts themselves, not between them – aka, not outside of Capitol jurisdiction. Think of modern-day North America, where all of the land is held accountable to both state and government law even if it is not inhabited or even inhabitable.)
(via two corpses, everything’s fine - In which badguys and I attempted to make a map of Panem)
I’m late, but in my defense I was on planes much of the last five days.
So a quick prefatory comment: I’m quoted on the back of The Hunger Games for nice things I said about the first book in the New York Times Book Review when it came out, so obviously I like the book. Back then, I remember thinking that if a movie adaptation ever happened (it seemed unlikely to me; I didn’t yet know it would have a huge audience), it would make me sad, because so much of what the novel expertly examines is the fraught relationship between viewers and the viewed in a world dominated by screens. But in fact I thought the movie did a really good job of this, largely because Jennifer Lawrence’s performance was to my mind so intricate and complex and nuanced and just good.
In the years since I wrote that initial review, my opinion of the book has risen steadily. (This is also true for another book I reviewed in the NYTBR, The Book Thief.) Like, if i could go back and review The Hunger Games now, I would probably be even more breathless and enthusiastic than I originally was about the book, because in retrospect it was smarter and more interesting than I noticed in my first couple readings.
What I find most interesting about both book and movie is not whatever lame/obvious things THG has to say about reality television or the exploitative relationship between producers and consumers of everything from coal to entertainment.
What is very, very interesting to me is the ways in which the plot of both book and movie explore the extremely complicated and ethically fraught relationship between observer and observed—the way resource-laden Person X paying attention to the plight of resource-deprived Person Y shapes both the lives of Person X and Person Y. (The most interesting moment in the movie to me is when Katniss gets the salve from a sponsor that allows her to survive: Lawrence’s complicated thank you in that moment is maybe even more evocative than in the book. Katniss is benefiting from the generosity of the rich, but she only needs this generosity because the social order that created the wealth is also the social order that put her in the games.)
Like, what Collins explores with real brilliance is that most social orders are more or less designed to be unjust because they are less concerned with justice than they are with stability.
And when you yourself are the victim of this injustice, you’re aware in a heightened way of what gets sacrificed in the name of stability. But the vast majority of people benefit from stability, or at least feel that it is better than taking a chance at instability. (And in this respect, we’re not entirely wrong. Like, it’s still unclear whether the radically unjust but relatively stable rule of a Hosni Mubarak, for instance, will be replaced by something better.)
On this front, I thought Jennifer Lawrence brought a lot of complexity and ambiguity to Katniss: As viewers of the movie, we are never quite sure of the extent to which her love for Peeta is shaped by the morally fraught relationship between observer and observed. I thought this couldn’t work on screen, but in the end it does, because even more than in the book, we as viewers are aware that we are participants in the observer:observed relationship.
It’s not only the people of Panem who are watching The Hunger Games.
For a moment while reading TV Tropes, my fandom wires crossed and I considered JK Rowling the worst human being alive. Then I reread the whole thing and giggled nervously.
okay so I watch little bear regularly and
In which Little Bear is entered in a contest to decide which species will get to be King of the Forest by pitting two cubs from each species against each other in a televised fight to the death until only one remains.
Stirred controversy for overuse of the phrase, “you stink.”
(via always-sleeping-in)
