/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2474953]

Hey /lit/, I'm mostly around other boards, but I was wondering if you guys could tell me why every woman I know thinks The Hunger Games are the most amazing recent books out there, while all the men find it bland and so-so? I have not read the books myself, but the gender gap in how people discuss them with me is amazing.

Are the books really that imbued with feminism? Or do they just speak to women over men in that mysterious way that shitty romantic comedies do?

[Anonymous No.2474961]

because women are stupid and they like to read books for children

[Anonymous No.2474959]

>woman author
>women like it

its likely a shitty romance book with perhaps "feminist" nonsense in it.

[Anonymous No.2474984]

>Strong female protagonist
>Romance
>light reading
>popular

However I don't think these books are as gendered as Twilight was.

[Anonymous No.2474997]

Meh I guess it's because the protagonist is a girl and is oblivious to two hot guys liking her..

Like this dude is nice to her all the time and then she's fighting to stay alive and murdering other kids, but then this dude says he loves her and she's all like
>and then he hits me with this. Why do I never see this coming?
hurr

Men don't like to read that, women do.

[Mad Scientist Hououin Kyouma !!RBaVX6t0twu No.2474998]

Light reading for them I suppose when they're in the kitchen making sandwiches.

[Anonymous No.2475008]

>>2474997
this

Also, I think only young women who don't usually read would really like The Hunger Games. It's written in a simplistic manner, in an effort to sound as though it was written by the protagonist (a teenage girl), and uses basic vocabulary, and has somewhat two dimensional characters. For a young adult novel, the storytelling is superb and the plot is well written. I think that if you attempt to judge it through any other lens, however, then it comes up short in just about every way.

Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that sexism on the internet is about as funny as racism on the internet. It has its moments, but if it's overused (see: this thread), then it loses any comedic luster.

tl;dr fuck off and die ron paul 2012

[Anonymous No.2475009]

>>2474984
this
and
>>2474997
this + There isnt much descriptive text save for what the characters are wearing, but maybe I was the only one to react to that.

[Anonymous No.2475014]

"Also, readers of Battle Royale (by Koushun Takami), The Running Man, or The Long Walk (those latter two by some guy named Bachman) will quickly realize they have visited these TV badlands before."

[Anonymous No.2475019]

"The love triangle is fairly standard teen-read stuff; what 16-year-old girl wouldn't like to have two interesting guys to choose from?"

[Anonymous No.2475017]

Because women like simplistic stories about female protagonists who rule and kick ass and whom everyone worships and loves and wants to court, because the female brain is a tiny shitty pea-sized turd.

http://www.onfiction.ca/2011/02/actor-and-observed-man-and-woman.html

[Anonymous No.2475032]

I'm a 25 year old male with a B.A. in lit and I liked it. It's just mindless fun. Not everything has to be Gravity's Rainbow.

[Anonymous No.2475035]

Stephen King has it right. What Collins does is basically rip off in equal parts The Long Walk and The Running Man, and inject it with some lol lovetriangle bullshit.

[Anonymous No.2475036]

I'm a guy enjoying the book, but it is very obviously written by a woman. There's a beta guy that will follow her until the end of the earth, then there's an older guy who she's lusting for but the sitation isn't great blah blah
It's literally a teen romance love triangle from a parallell universe.
But ignoring that, the writing is bare, direct and easy so it won't waste much time and the story is good/well told. Worth a read at least.

[Anonymous No.2475047]

>>2475032
>Implying Gravity's Rainbow isn't fun
>2012
YKTR

[Anonymous No.2475046]

>>2475036
>teen romance
>love triangle
>writing is bare, direct and easy
>won't waste much time
>worth a read at least

doesn't sound like it's worth a read.

[Anonymous No.2475045]

I'm going to write my first book, about a teenage girl who saves the world and abstains from sexual intercourse, under a feminine pseudonym,
make my millions, and then I'll settle down and write my Nobel novel. Sound like a good plan?

[Anonymous No.2475049]

>>2475045

Stop stealing my plan.

[Anonymous No.2475050]

>>2475047

It is fun, but if it's mindless for you, I'm jelly.

[Anonymous No.2475052]

>>2475046
lol I forgot to mention it was a dystopian thriller with death games and bows and arrows.

[Anonymous No.2475053]

At least Eragon was bad because it was written by a teen.

Equally as enjoyable as The Hunger Games.
>Take that as you will.

[Anonymous No.2475058]

It's for the same reason that magazines like OK! and Hello are aimed at women - that is, they tend to have no taste. There are probably good evolutionary reasons behind this, perhaps to do with men fawning over them because of their looks and ignoring almost everything else.

Male-male homosexuality really is the best.

[Anonymous No.2475065]

>>2475058
god I love the homosexuality is better than pleb women guy

[Anonymous No.2475075]

>>2475058
better to be unhappy with a woman, then suffer eternal torment for the rest of eternity.

[Anonymous No.2475083]

I don't get the woman author backlash. Were there threads like this on /lit/ back when Harry Potter was the most talked-about thing in literature?

Does anyone really think that Hunger Games is worse than Twilight? At least THG has an interesting universe and good pacing for a YA novel (read: as fast as possible).

[Anonymous No.2475088]

>>2475075
>self-aggrandizing belief in own eternal being

[Anonymous No.2475098]

OP here, it's interesting you all cite the romance aspect. The biggest Hunger Games fan I know actually hates that part, she thinks it was shoehorned in and the main character should have been happy alone.

So then it all boils down to "strong female character". Are books with strong female leads really SO rare that everyone has to slobber over this ONE?

[Anonymous No.2475104]

>>2475098
yes

well, easy-to-read/digest books with strong female leads are rare. the majority of society isn't smart enough to read and enjoy real literature, which does, on occasion, contain a strong female lead

[Anonymous No.2475106]

>>2475098

I think that it's zeitgeisty for the zeitgeist's sake. I don't think it's popular because Katniss is female. I think it's popular because it was the first accessible YA dystopia to come out last decade, and the world climate made dystopia a desirable thing to read. The Passage was super popular around the same time, iirc, but HG sustains because it is easily digestible by everyone.

[Anonymous No.2475115]

But OP, let's all agree that anyone that talks about a book in a "this character should've" way can't be taken seriously when actually discussing /lit/.

[Anonymous No.2475120]

>>2475115
Of course, but it's a valuable tool for identifying which parts of a work contribute to it's popularity.

[Anonymous No.2475123]

>Are the books really that imbued with feminism?
Feminism is not some unctuous repugnant thing that causes men to flee vomiting. You need to learn to separate political rhetoric from truth.

[Anonymous No.2475133]

It's a light, easy read. The first one wasn't so bad. It wasn't anything spectacular, but enjoyable nonetheless. I didn't really like the rest of the books in the series, but there you have it.

A lot of it is fluff and romance. It's written in the first-person perspective of a teenage girl with two men rivaling the looks of Adonis chasing after her. Take that as you will. It's not as much pandering as Twilight was but the romance is definitely evident, and prominent at some points.

The protagonist is just an independent teenager, but with ties to her family. She really gave off the "strong independent woman who don't need no man" even when she was head over heels for bread-boy.

It's the sort of situation every woman would love to find herself in. I wouldn't call it bad because of that.

[Anonymous No.2475160]

>>2475123
uh
ya it is
feminist woman means "I have lots of std's and i fuck niggers, plus i'll cheat on you and then claim you abused me"

[Anonymous No.2475169]

I read the first when I was a 17 year old lifeguard, and I felt it was childish. Even being underage at the time, I viewed it as kid stuff. Did not read anything but the first. It was entertaining, but I must preferred Eragon for shits and giggles type reading.
And, as other people said, female protagonist-->females readers
These days I honestly don't read anything by a woman author. Say what you will, but there are so many books out there I can choose to be selective.

[Anonymous No.2475183]

>>2475133
you're right.

The Hunger Games isn't bad because it has a love triangle and wish fufilment, it's bad because it's a watered down, melodramatic, ripoff of Battle Royale with awful prose.

[Anonymous No.2475179]

>>2474953
>know women
>4chan

what is this I don't even

[Anonymous No.2475194]

>>2475169
have you read 'charlotte gray' by sebasian faulks?
it has a female protagonist
slightly redundant sex scenes, but thats faulks for you

[Anonymous No.2475198]

>>2475183
Exactly

Requirements for "good" literature:
- engaging story
- believable characters
- capable prose

Sound like Hunger Games has an engaging story, and that's it.

[Anonymous No.2475201]

sure is tvtropes in here

[Anonymous No.2475203]

>>2475194
No, I have not. Why would you even suggest it?
Currently trying to read all of Cormac McCarthy's books. I love his style, and the protagonists.

[Anonymous No.2475204]

>>2475045


Why not write a novel with a lot of prurient elements but with a strong feminist subtext so that you can get the PC women and the guys interested too?

Try something like a dystopia where female children are "programed" through a combination of gene therapy, hormones and conditioning into specific roles that men see as appropriate for them.
They could be assessed at a certain age and "assigned" so that some of them would be made into sex slaves, some into domestic servants, some into soldiers some into "mothers" etc, with parts of their brains and motivational systems turned off or enhanced, and their natural attributes done the same way. Think of it as "brave new world" but just for women.
The whole thing could be done as a way of controlling population, and then adapted in such a way that women have become commoditized and "domesticated" like cattle. There are "variants"

Our heroine is a girl who has been chosen for one role, and it didn't take, and she's pretending to be various other things during a time of crisis while she attempts to escape her society and into another perhaps legendary one where women have some rights and engineering them is illegal (probably Canada)
You would be able to put in lots of gratuitous sex to show the horror of it, and how she can endure the degradations and triumph, and romance, where a man who thinks of women as commodities comes to .love and respect her, etc. Also, lesbian stuff with the soldier women, and lots of heavy handed satire of modern gender roles.

You could call it "Freemartin"

On second thought, I want to write it now. Dibs.

[Anonymous No.2475207]

>>2475198

The prose isn't bad. It isn't good, but it's not meant to be. The words are arranged so that each plot point hits as quickly as possible after the previous one. Maybe people on /lit/ don't like that, but it's an artistic choice; the idea, I assume, being that books now have to compete against faster-paced visual media.

[Richard Feynmann !Hwop/gspA. No.2475214]

at least you didn't call them females i guess

[Anonymous No.2475212]

>>2475204

weirdestboner.jpg

[Anonymous No.2475231]

>>2475212
that's exactly my point. I want everybody to be guiltily turned on by it. Sort of a combo of Dhalgren, Handmaids tale, Brave new World and Gor novel. Also something like "Planet of the Rapes" There'll have to be lots of sex, and lots of internal conflict in the heroine as she fights not only social gender roles but her own responses to the things that are happening to her, and her goals mature form simple escape and social justice things to personal ones as she becomes the "full human" she thinks she deserves to be, and weirdly it's the assaults, compromises and adaptions to what happens to her that make her into that person.

I don't see why it couldn't work.

[Anonymous No.2475238]

>>2475214
>faith

just fuck off
religion is the socially acceptable form of a comfort blanket and you know it

[Anonymous No.2475242]

Imagine The Most Dangerous Game and Lord of the Flies with a female protagonist, first-person narrative and a romance sub-plot.

[Anonymous No.2475244]

>>2475214
>Wait don't go whats your favorite dorito flavor?

every god damn time

[Richard Feynmann !Hwop/gspA. No.2475245]

>>2475238

you're anti-comfort?

[Anonymous No.2475250]

>>2475214

Is that Scaruffi?

[Anonymous No.2475327]

>>2475204
So basically The Stepford Wives on a bigger scale?

[Anonymous No.2475356]

>>2475327

Stepford wives was sort of a parody, but yes, though of course set in a world where it was unquestioned. Stuff like "In the Barn" or "Planet of the Rapes" is closer. I think it would be interesting for another reason too: The tendency to use a single "everyman" character as a stand-in for humanity is pretty prevalent in this type of fantasy (Orwell, Huxley, etc.) and women are mostly used to point up problems that would be specific to females. I think it might be fun to make the female character the "everyman", since femininity wouldn't be that relevant except at a superficial level. She'd be sort of Leopold Blum, or Lemuel Gulliver. It's just that to do it right I'd have to be half Phil Dick and half Mark Twain...

[Anonymous No.2475378]

>>2475327


Gives me a great pitch though: "The Hunger Games meets the Stepford Wives in a Brave New World!"

Gripping, vivid, an all-to-possible nightmare future where innocence has a price and sex is ...blah blah blah....

[Anonymous No.2475400]

>>2475123
>Feminism is not some unctuous repugnant thing
Your prose is, however.

[Anonymous No.2475424]

>>2475133
> It's written in the first-person perspective of a teenage girl with two men rivaling the looks of Adonis chasing after her.

Why do women like realistic humor but batshit-insane everything else?

[Anonymous No.2475436]

>>2475424


it's easier to explain the protagonists motivations and get the reader empathizing and identifying if the potential rewards seem great and the dilemma(since she has to choose one) seem like they would be real.

Lisa Simpson would not care as much about choosing between martin and milhouse. And Indiana Jones wouldn't be facing as many competitors and rivals for a treasure of purely academic significance. However many death traps guarded it. It's like in video games where we want the hero to win something great, even though "a winner is you" is just as valid in terms of what is "really" won.

[Anonymous No.2476289]

>read Hunger Games
>enraged with all this feminist bullshit
>throw the books away
later
>overhear classmates excited about the movie coming out
>walk over tell them I didn't like the books
>this is what I believe 4chan acts like irl
>if you can't read the Hunger Games without constantly thinking of it as horrendous man-hating feminism, then I'm sorry to hear about your mommy issues and unhappy adolescence.

I actually mostly disliked the first half of the Hunger Games.
I put it down after that. It's just an excitement-focused teen novel.