Why the Existence of Battle Royale Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Like the Hunger Games

(Yes, it’s Monday, I know. Sorry. Dissertation stuff not over yet! Allow me to appease you by offering: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Go read it.)

Over the past year, I’ve found myself unintentionally becoming a YA novel hipster. As my friends and family get hooked on Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and its sequels, I hear myself saying things like, “Oh, yeah, I read those when they came out, which was three years ago” and “You can’t wait to pick up the sequel? I know how you feel — I had to wait a year until it was published.”

But since the production of the fantabulous Hunger Games movie, I’ve been out-hipstered!

“*yawn* A movie about teenagers killing each other for entertainment? Yeah, I enjoyed it back in 2000 when it was called Battle Royale… Are people still into that?”

See, here’s the thing about hipsters. They/you/we are the butt of everyone’s jokes because they are super-duper annoying.

It’s not because hipsters’ opinions are different from other people’s — well, OK, that’s occasionally the case, because there are individuals of every stripe, hipster and non, who can’t tolerate other people thinking things with which they don’t agree. But in general, Hunger Games fans (for example) aren’t getting irritated at someone who says they wouldn’t like Suzanne Collins as much if they’d only read Koushun Takami (for example) because they can’t deal with someone saying their favourite story is not the best story in the universe.

Instead, it’s because it’s really exasperating when the discussion you want to have is, “What’s good/bad about this story?” and the only discussion the person you’re talking with wants to have is, “My favourite story is better.”

There is a huge difference between saying, “This is what I don’t like about book/movie/game XYZ. For an example of a book/movie/game that avoids this problem, check out ABC. Instead of doing these problematic things, it does these great things. XYZ could have incorporated them in the same way.” and saying, “XYZ sucks because ABC is similar, and I liked ABC!”

The latter is a valid criticism only in circumstances where the artists are deliberately trying to create a version of ABC that audiences will like better than the original, and even then, it’s a poor argument. I didn’t like the Matthew Broderick live-action Inspector Gadget (or The Seeker as an adaptation of The Dark Is Rising, or the Walden version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) any more than you did, but I can elaborate on the things I liked better about the original version, and the things that disturbed me about the values implicit in the way the artists responsible tackled the remake, and, most importantly, I can concede that if you have different tastes, you might like the remake better.

Back a few years ago, when I liked The Hunger Games (or the works of Diana Wynne Jones… or Susan Cooper…) a lot and no one around me seemed to have heard of it, sure, I recommended it to people. But if they said they preferred Harry Potter or Twilight, well, that was their prerogative. If they wanted to discuss it, we could. If they didn’t, we didn’t have to. I’m used to liking things other people don’t like or haven’t heard of — that’s kind of what academics do, and, hipsters, take note: nobody outside an Indiana Jones movie thinks we’re cool.

Yeah, I would’ve had more favourable reactions to others’ opinions on Rowling’s writing or Twilight‘s plot if I knew they were comparing them to the same stories I was (for instance, J. K. Rowling compared to R. L. Stine is different from J. K. Rowling compared to C. S. Lewis is different from J. K. Rowling compared to T. S. Eliot). And I honestly think Suzanne Collins is a better writer than Rowling or Meyer. But that doesn’t mean people are wrong to enjoy the Harry Potter series or that the popularity of Twilight is in some way threatening to that of The Hunger Games.

Because the underlying point is, even if there’s a book that does all the things a book I like does, only a million times better? It’s still okay for me to like the book I like. Stories are not like fairies: they do not fall down dead every time someone doesn’t believe in them by preferring something “inferior.” Just like I can be friends with more than one person at the same time, even if they have similar personalities or interests or haircuts, I can like two similar books simultaneously.

The other reason hipster-like attitudes are annoying is because sometimes they aren’t really about the movie or the book or the music at all. They’re about making yourself seem superior to other people based on liking a particular story first.

Again: if that’s important to someone, well, who am I to judge? De gustibus non est disputandum. I’ve disliked things for silly reasons and liked them for even sillier ones (like, say, being in Latin). The problem with the way that priority is often expressed is the implicit suggestion of why liking something first (or something similar that came first) is better — because it shows that you like the item in question for itself (whatever that means) and not because you know other people like it.

Taking a snooty tone about enjoying The Hunger Games before the series became popular (guilty as charged) or loudly preferring to stick with Battle Royale because it came first is as obnoxious as using the word “sheeple” without irony. It implies that the speaker believes he or she is the only person in the room capable of thinking independently. Worse, it implies that the people who do like The Hunger Games now that they’ve read the book or enjoyed the movie do so not because, you know, there’s something about the story, plot, characters, visuals, etc. that appealed to them once someone else brought it to their attention but because everyone else enjoyed it, and they wanted to be part of the crowd.

It’s true that it’s a lot easier to get upset by something you dislike when it’s popular, and there are lots of people who don’t seem to realise how bad/trite/hackneyed/etc. it is. But it doesn’t follow that the thing in question isn’t popular for a reason.

For instance, I don’t have the most positive opinion of the Harry Potter or Twilight series. But I understand that other people enjoy them because they like things I don’t. These stories make them feel things and think things and think and feel things, and just because I don’t like those things or don’t think and feel the same things doesn’t mean that all these people are making up what’s going on in their heads or pretending to be fans of those franchises because all their friends are.

So, yes, Battle Royale is on my to-read/see list. But I still like The Hunger Games for a lot of reasons. And it’s okay if you don’t. Or if you do. Or whatever. As long as we both agree to accept that neither position makes either of us inherently superior to the other.