Express Yourself! °Ephemernal°

the thing about criticizing the thg movies as an adaptation is like. i get the impression that some of the scenes/characters that were left out of the movies were deliberately judged as less important to the narrative as a whole (even though obviously some things need to be cut for time), so they're a specific take on what Matters about thg. that's part of what makes adaptations extra interesting to criticize, but i also often feel like way different things matter to me about the source material lmao. with thg some of the differences are superficial but some change or disregard the underlying meaning/allegories so there's Much to say! idk it's a lot

YES BESTIE YOURE SO RIGHT ON!!!!!!!!!! like whenever you're adapting or recreating a source material what gets brought out and what gets cut isn't just a random thing, it actually indicates what the creator of the adaption considers valuable within that source material and what they choose to emphasize actually says a lot more about the creator, their intended audience, and the medium of adaptation than most people like to imagine.

i mean for an extreme example we could look at the pjo movies! like the only things they took out of the books were "ok greek gods, he's the son of poseidon, water powers, las vegas. got it" and yeah sure we can trash it to hell and back but it's also an interesting thing to examine like, WHY did they find that to be the most important beats of the story? WHY did they add the weird pearl plot device -- is it because they found the original plot (you know, the one written for twelve year olds) to be too confusing? WHY did they age all the characters up if they were hoping to ride the ya wave in a post harry potter film landscape? there's so many interesting questions to dig into there!

and in the case of thg like YEAH i don't want to beat a dead horse any more than i need to but i think it's pretty clear that whoever was making, writing, and editing the film was perfectly fine cutting out the characters that exemplify the complexities and nuances of the need for solidarity despite the existence of a massive wealth gap between the poor and the elite, but they had no problem preserving the action movie feel and the competition element of the games. like YEAH no surprises that when hollywood adapted a fairly radical text they wiped out the majority of the social commentary in favor of the excitement and action that that very text itself was criticizing!!!!! GOD!!!

In the THG movies, they made so many changes that just...change the small things but those small things mean a lot to the fans.

1- You might've seen the 'my dad's a woman's size 4' joke about Katniss' father's jacket in the movie. It was a small thing but c'mon! can you not buy a damn bigger jacket because SC was very specific in the books with the phrase 'my father's hunting jacket' and her father wasn't as petite as her I assume.

2- The majority of CF was set in the quarter quell arena but in the movie there was hardly enough arena time there. It just aggravated me because they're changing too much damn stuff that means a lot to the fans.

3- Could they not fuckin hire two more actresses for playing Madge and Delly?! regardless that their roles were small (like Mrs' Mellark's in the movie) but those were very important roles. Why the fuck would Katniss want to BUY the mockingjay pin? How fortunate, Sae gave it for free, woohoo. But goddamn! Madge had history with the pin through her aunt Maysilee, it must have some sort of meaning for the deceased tribute. It could've been something and Madge was the best person to give that pin to Katniss and by doing so, in a way, uniting Seam and Merchant class in that one small district token.

4- There's Delly too. Putting Prim, who barely knows Peeta from just games and what she's heard in Delly's place was stupid. What does Prim know? Was she his childhood friend? how well does she know him? It was such a bad decision because it looks so biased for her to tell Peeta that HER SISTER isn't a bad person and he was hijacked. Delly was needed here! Delly, Peeta's childhood friend. Delly who knew how things were. Delly who Peeta remembered. Delly who used to be a cheerful, bubbly girl. If Delly tried, Peeta would've definitely tried to understand.

5- There was hardly anyway for us to see the class distinction between Merchant and Seam. There was hardly anything that indicated there were two classes who didn't got along. Why the fuck? This is a major detail that would've showed us where Katniss' emotions stem from and given the illusion of how much social injustice was going on.

6- The Hob. They should've shown more of Katniss and Gale spending time at the hob. There was only one scene where she bought the pin. Are you telling me the place Katniss may spend one third of her life wasn't important enough?

7- Excluding Cray and Darius was a sure way of showing how the movies, especially the first, lacked substance. We hardly see the peacekeepers in action in the first movie. we had to see how bad things were, how horrid Cray was, how Darius was a nice guy and possibly, a friend to Gale and Katniss.

8- I get the fact they showed the movie from more of third person POV but that left us with hardly knowing what Katniss was thinking, planning or how she feels about a certain thing. Don't get me wrong, some of the stuff like the control room and how the gamemakers were tracking them was nice to see and so was the part where the rebels destroy the dam. But everything else...I don't know what to say...

9- Also, major criminal offense was the lack of Everlark kisses in the movies. This is big! those kisses played big roles in the books and guess what they show more than Everlark kisses? Gale and Katniss' kisses. I think every single kiss she shared with Gale in the books was shown in the movies. Why the ever hell?

yeah these are all really good examples!! and i think they're all good examples of the way that seemingly small changes add up and end up undermining a lot of the messages that the book was trying to send. like, any one of these examples alone might not be enough to ruin the story and all these themes but when you add them all together you end up with something that just doesn't even scratch the surface of the depth of social satire that's present in the novels.

like, gutting peeta's character might not *seem* like a big deal, because oh the romance still happens and they still end up together. but what's so crucial about the romance in thg is not that they DO end up together, but WHY they end up together, and how that connects more broadly to the themes about hope, finding joy in life, solidarity, art for arts sake, kindness in the face of oppression, etc etc etc like IT ALL MATTERS.

anyway these are all really good examples and we could probably write an entire 10 page essay about any of them because they're all significant in the novels. like i always say, no word in the hunger games is wasted and so no matter how closely you read it you'll be able to find a connection to the social commentary and societal criticism. so even small changes in the wording of particular lines can have huge implications for the rest of the story.