****Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t read The Hunger Games series, proceed at your own risk.****
I love it when kids get engaged with books, when they relate to the characters, dress as them for Hallowe’en, all that. My school must have had a dozen or more Katniss Everdeens walking the halls last October 31; some in Arena gear, some in dresses with sewn-on “flames” of gossamer material. Students are still showing up in Hogwarts gear as well. I'm delighted that such deserving stories as Harry Potter or The Hunger Games are such big hits with my students. Both series contain engaging plots and multidimensional characters, any of whom would be worthy of fandoms and the accompanying T-shirts.
Some of these T-shirts read “I Only Date Bakers,” “I Only Date Hunters,” or, borrowing from the recent blockbuster popularity of a certain vampire romance series, “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale.” It makes the fandom fun. However, to reduce The Hunger Games, a book series which depicts a future North America as a dystopian society with huge disparities between rich and poor, to a story of “a girl who has to choose between two hot guys” is like saying Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about a kid and an escaped slave who bond over their favorite sport of river rafting.
Unfortunately for the world of YA literature, too many authors are now resorting to adding a “love triangle” to their book because it’s a fairly easy way to ramp up the drama, the emotion, and the conflict. It worked extremely well for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. Unfortunately, too many readers lack the sophistry to realize they’re being played. Twilight could best be categorized as paranormal romance, completely different in tone and intent from the dystopian Hunger Games, a story that makes statements about war, violence, the media. And therein lies the problem. A forced love triangle may be completely irrelevant in certain genres, distracting from the original story rather than enhancing it. Instead of a developed or developing character working through an internal struggle or questing for the Magic Thingie, our hero/heroine is reduced to a character who is validated or invalidated by how attractive they are to potential love interests. Readers deserve better.
Next week: some characteristics of "love triangles" and why The Hunger Games's "love triangle" isn't.
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