#given how much it tends to undercut itself from its literal and metaphorical levels

[metanarrates]

you got that genre and gender essay for us 👀

i might talk about gender in the hunger games a different time but right now im ready to talk about genre in it (FINALLY. sorry gamers ive been in the sludge for a while)

so one of the things that really struck me about the hunger games while reading is that it did not function strictly as an action genre story during the games themselves. the genre it actually seemed to be dipping into a lot of the time is wilderness survival. this is weird, for a couple of reasons.

for anyone unfamiliar with the wilderness survival genre, the underlying conflict tends to be rather slow-movingly paced. this isn't always the case - some wilderness survival stories do have limitations that force the plot to speed up - but in the vast majority of works I've seen, the main force the main character is working against is the slow-moving course of nature. there is a lot of time spent hunting, crafting, building shelters, tending to injuries. occasionally there are bursts of action, but the story is much more concerned with the daily work of solving more longterm survival problems than it is with more temporary threats. it's typically a story about endurance rather than urgency.

now, I like the genre just fine. I would even say suzanne collins does it decently well. the problem is that it doesn't actually suit the premise of the hunger games.

the hunger games is, on premise, a death game. for at least the first two books, the main setpiece of the story is the promise of the arena. it is a televised match where children have to kill each other for the entertainment of a crowd. this isn't a crazy uncommon subgenre or even main genre for action stories - there's a lot of story potential in forcing combatants to battle to the death against their will. my favorite novel, omniscient reader's viewpoint, has death game elements. when done well, it is tense, exciting, and asks questions about the culpability of both viewer and participants. oftentimes, the story's major theme is forcing the audience think about the way they may treat violence as spectacle. this is certainly something the hunger games also wants to do.

this premise carries a lot of intrinsic tensions. in a story where people are hunting one another in order to survive, the protagonist almost always is under threat, or nearly under threat, of being attacked. the tension of potentially having to kill adds another layer of tension. the demands of audience, in a story about violence as spectacle, serves to add another layer. the protagonist always has to look over their shoulder, to make sure that their audience can't hurt them if they become dissatisfied with the protagonist, and to be sure that they can fend off attackers at any given moment. to do otherwise, at least without justifying it, would be to undermine the logical stakes the premise introduces.

the end result, when done well, is a fast-paced action story with consistently heightened tension. you'll notice that this doesn't blend well with a slow-paced genre with a consistently low but omnipresent baseline tension.

through both games, again to collins' credit, there are a lot of high-tension action sequences. katniss does spend a good deal of time fighting, running, tensely hiding out, and dealing with high-octane environmental factors. however, I was consistently a little disappointed by how quickly a lot of these sequences ended. more importantly, I was confused by how often it would lead back into katniss skirting around the woods. she spends a ton of time fishing, hunting, chatting with allied tributes, scouting, and waiting around in a cave for peetas injuries to heal. the threat of the other tributes finding and killing her slips into the background. the audience in the capitol only matters occasionally. the minuitiae of surviving in a wilderness takes up major screentime. the threats intrinsic to the actiony premise stop being an immediate concern.

this inability to follow through on the established stakes totally kills my suspension of disbelief in the gamemakers as threats. very few people would be actually interested in continuously watching days-long, unedited livestreams of teenagers hunting and fishing and occasionally kissing. it doesn't make sense as a story about entertainment, because the events on screen would simply not be logically all that entertaining. the only reason the gamemakers don't act to force katniss towards more action is that collins plainly does not seem as interested in writing action. and that's really the root of the first two books' weird genre problem.

since collins seems to want to focus on wilderness survival rather than action, neither genre can properly shine. as a reader, i'm always feeling antsy whenever katniss takes a break to nap for a day, and I'm always frustrated whenever an an action scene is cut short instead of staying excitingly tense. the action stakes never feel believable to me because it seems like they only exist when the plot remembers they should. the survival stakes just feel like a tiresome chore in a story that should have much more urgent concerns. it's just a really weird choice. why write a death game story if you're often disinterested in the stuff the premise demands?

I also don't think that the rebellion/war story is done well in book 3, for similar pacing and tension issues (that book DRAGS in ways that actively undermine what it seems to be trying to do.) but this little essay has run on long enough. this has been a really longwinded way of saying "these books struggle a lot with tension and pacing and it makes them feel weird in how they play to their supposed premises," but I did want to approach it from a genre angle because that's what I was thinking about while reading. what is genre, after all, but a shorthand to communicate expected aspects of setting, focus, mechanical structure of a story?