The Old Familiar Stories

SPOILER alert for The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Battle Royale,  and Twilight (if anyone cared).

Most of the greatest writers in the world have been copycats. From Shakespeare to Suzanne Collins, authors are content to tinker with a few details, switch a few names, and voila! A best-seller. Let's look at the good and bad of copycats throughout history.

Before any of you Hungerians  get angry, I'm not attacking The Hunger Games, and I did enjoy the first book. However, the story of Katniss is going to play an important part in what I have to say about new authors using old tales.


Let's start with an activity. Look at these two movie posters, and tell me if they have anything in common:

 ...I didn't get much. They both have weapons of some kind. Each one has a girl?

Well, if you haven't already heard, the two stories are pretty similar, making everyone wonder if Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games, is a COPYCAT.

It's highly unlikely that you don't know the plot of HG, but just in case...this dictatorship forces each of its twelve districts to send a boy and a girl to fight to the death on live television. The story follows Katniss (they all have herb names. I don't know.) as she volunteers to fight in her sister's place. To survive, she stages a relationship with the male contestant from her district and has this whole "I love him. I love him not" inner dialogue with herself for most of the book and its two sequels.

Battle Royale is a movie from 2000, based off a book from 1999. I've only seen the movie on Netflix, so we'll go with that: this dictatorship chooses a class of schoolchildren to fight to the death for experimental purposes. We see what happens to each kid one by one, but the main character is a boy named Shuya.

Major differences:

HG                                                           BR
The kids are strangers.                          The kids are friends and classmates.
The people know this happens.              The kids are kidnapped while on a field trip.
It's for entertainment purposes.              It's for an "experiment."
They must fight to get supplies.              Each kid receives a map, supplies, and weapons.

Major similarities:

Teenagers fighting to the death.
The final handful of competitors figures out how to beat the system.
The kids are being tracked and monitored at all times.
Weapons and supplies to help them survive are offered to the kids.
Winners from a previous year must compete in the games. (Catching Fire)
At certain hours of the day, certain parts of the arena will be dangerous (CF)

Gladiatorial battles have been done, and the story concept (as Suzanne Collins tells it) itself is not original. Tributes of young men and women and governments demanding sacrifices is the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

You might know it from this show?

Anyway, the king of Crete demands that the Athenians pay him tribute of seven young men and seven maidens that he may feed to the Minotaur, a monster that is half-bull, half-man. Eventually, the hero Theseus volunteers to enter the labyrinth where the monster lives, and he kills it.

So nothing remarkable in the stories being similar, but the details correspond pretty well. The kids can try to plot and rebel, but Big Brother is watching (or listening to, in BR's case) whatever you do. Life and death rely on how well you use that backpack of supplies. The arena from Catching Fire is basically the island from Battle Royale. And while the Battle Royale is not televised, a brief scene at the beginning shows the winner of one of the battles being filmed by news crews.

Who knows? Maybe Collins had the idea on her own and had never heard of Battle Royale.
But, I think it's likely that she loved the idea of BR, but knew that it wasn't marketable to US audiences. So she toned it down a bit, made the characters more realistic, and in the wake of Twilight, added a love triangle.

Again, I'm only going off of Battle Royale the movie. The movie is Japanese, and unless you're already into Japanese films and/or Quentin Tarantino movies, you're going to see a lot more blood, melodrama, and girls in plaid skirts than you ever wanted to.

I'm short on time today, so my next post will detail a little more why Copycats are our heroes...