I went to a store a few days ago. On the front door was a picture of an elderly woman wearing a red, plaid shirt. She was driving a car and part of her hair was dyed purple.
By the checkout, there were at least two magazines whose covers were about the Hunger Games movies. One of them had a large caption across the top that said "3 GIANT POSTERS." It also had a smaller caption that said "115 Hot Photos!"
"115 Hot Photos" of the elderly woman in her car? The picture on the front door was not even 50 feet away from the magazines.
I read all of the Hunger Games books last year. I liked the first one the most and thought that the third one was good, although it was painful to read because of what happened in it; not that any of those books should be considered light entertainment. I had trouble with the second one. I couldn't follow the plot. I also thought it was bad writing, for lack of a better way to put it, that Peeta gets everyone to believe that Katniss is pregnant.
When you write fiction, you have to make things plausible within the fictional world that you have created. The science of the Capitol of the Hunger Games is so advanced that it has things like:
-ointment that heals serious wounds overnight
-mutated animals that can do everything from remembering and repeating human conversations to making people hallucinate to running as a pack to capture and torture someone for hours for no reason other than to get television ratings. The last part of that description is not a tangent; I'm talking about the Hunger Games, not the conglomerate.
-totally restoring someone's hearing from a burst eardrum, healing all her wounds and scrubbing a lifetime's worth of scars off her skin in a matter of days while keeping her sedated so she has no idea what's happening until it's over
There are a lot of other discussions in the books about scientifically advanced things, and much of the plot depends on them.
In 2016, in the nonfictional world, anyone can buy a pregnancy test that doesn't require that the person who buys it has a reading ability more advanced than being able to tell a "plus" sign from a "minus" sign. The Capitol of the Hunger Games has total control over the bodies of the tributes, and monitors them. Katniss being pregnant is not a lie that could be believed by the Capitol or anyone else.
It's offensive that the conglomerate continues to try to create a sexual story between me and another celebrity every week. It could be that if no celebrity had ever thought I was beautiful, I'd have the part-time writing career that I hoped I could have when I realized that I was good at writing scripts. It's horrible that my refusal to be mistreated just caused disrespect to escalate to horrific abuse. 6 years later, I continue to be treated like a slavering, hypersexual cougar when it's the conglomerate's sexual incontinence that has caused me to be abused.
Copyright L. Kochman, January 9, 2016 @ 2:39 p.m.
