Enough with the Twilight vs. Hunger Games Nonsense!
The closer and closer we get to the theater release of The Hunger Games, the more and more the media compares it to Twilight. It has gotten really old really fast. To be honest, the comparisons really don’t make sense to me at all, and I’m not the only one who feels that way, Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson is just as lost.
"Honestly, I’ve always thought of them as very different animals," answered Jacobson when prompted about the comparisons at a recent Hunger Games roundtable discussion. "I think that they have actually very different fan bases and they are very different books. And so, honestly, I’ve never really understood the comparison and...it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, honestly, because I think they’re quite distinctive books. Very, very different."
Exactly, they are VERY different. Twilight is a giant sack of romantic escapism – it’s all about the romance between human Bella, vampire Edward, and even werewolf Jacob. There’s nothing wrong with romance novels, but that is was Twilight is. As for The Hunger Games, it’s not a paranormal romance, it’s set in a futuristic world and is about survival. The setting, the characters, and even the general tone of these two books are worlds apart.
"I think ['The Hunger Games' is] actually a very contemporary book," said Jacobson later. "And I think it speaks to the divisions between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, and I think it speaks to young people and their anxieties about the future that awaits them. And I think it’s a book that is very relevant to the times that we live in, a time where sort of celebrity and the gloss of reality TV and of the quest for fame overshadows larger social ills that people also need and want to talk about. And I think the fact that the book marries those things makes it very relevant."
The only things Twilight and The Hunger Games have in common are that both films are owned by the same studio and they are both based on popular teen books. That’s about it.
So why does the media feel the need to constantly compare the two? Or try to create an imaginary rivalry between them? I don’t understand it. Is it simply because they are both popular? I don’t know.
What are your thoughts on all this nonsense?
- Moonlight
I think it’s just the adult media’s way of dealing with “teen phenomena”. Oh, teens like books now? Those teens and their obsessions. Let’s just roll out some of the stuff we used from Twilight. We don’t know what else they’re reading now that Harry Potter is gone, so this is our only basis for comparison.
It’s crazy. I mean, yes, there is a love triangle in each book. Yes, each book is narrated by a teenage girl. But that’s about it. To be frank, the only basis for comparison that I can see is that I would rather have Katniss as a role model for my teen daughter than Bella Swan, but that’s not what is being hyped.
It’s just being hyped as a ‘battle between things that are popular with the kids now’.
It’s just really stupid. It’s worse than the comparison between Twilight and Harry Potter. Twilight has also been compared to Anne Rice and The Lord of the Rings.
It’s ruining everything. I hate Twilight.
I think twilight is much better than The Hunger Games.
You cant really compare twilight to movies like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.
It is interesting that since Harry Potter one sci-fi/fantasy book franchise or another and its live action adaptation has taken up much of the cultural spotlight: Harry Potter, Twilight, Millennium Trilogy (arguably, cyberpunk elements), Song of Ice and Fire, Hunger Games. While each is distinct from the other, they’ve fueled their own waves of similar franchises. In the last couple of years the paranormal romance wave has been eclipsed by the dystopian wave.
It is true that regular YA readers are among the first to clue into and spread word of mouth about a rising YA series, the pop cultural version of “early adopters”. Stephenie Meyer was interviewed by a Harry Potter fan site (angering some HP fans) very early on in the Twilight phenomenon. And Meyer praised The Hunger Games years ago, which got a lot of Twilight fans into the series. But the core fandoms of each franchise are as distinct as the franchises themselves.
I think it’s ridiculous for the New York Times to put YA in a separate ‘children’s books’ category for bestsellers since YA franchises have been at the forefront of the zeitgeist for a decade and a half now. Time to give YA genres more respect rather than slurrying them together as a singular teenybopper fandom or walling them off from ‘adult’ literature.