Tyler’s Comments (group member since Dec 14, 2013)

Tyler’s comments from the On Tyrants & Tributes : Real World Lessons From The Hunger Games group.

I think the choice vs. oppression dichotomy is pretty blurry--people definitely post an unwise amount of personal information online about themselves and then are angry when it comes back to bite them through the government or even private employers. Part of that is common sense.

At the same time, the choice to have privacy is increasingly non-existent nowadays when nearly every major tech manufacturer has been persuaded by the government to program in backdoor software on their devices to enable your phone or laptops' microphone or camera to be turned on even when your phone looks like it is turned off. For this reason a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs in important business meetings will leave their phones outside or take the batteries out of them so that there's no way for them to be monitored.

While a lot of people in reaction to Snowden's NSA revelations said that the agency's activities came as no surprise and that we should have known they were occurring all along, I think the fact that they were going on and that the government was lying about them should be very disconcerting period, even if many of us suspected they were going on already.

Hyun wrote: "What the hunger games reminds me of is South Korea in the past 60 years or at least from the 1960s-1990s. Korea showed great examples of a top down system of a tyrannical government that went utter..."

It is really interesting to see the ROK's transition from a pretty authoritarian state since after the war to one of the more liberal-democratic countries in Asia today. It's interesting to me that Park Geun-hye, the current President, is the daughter of Park Chung-hee who you mention in your above post and who came to power in a coup and basically ruled as a military dictator.

The large chaebol monopolies you also mention make me wonder just how free this democracy will be given the influence of those large conglomerates on the government and the crony capitalism that takes place. I definitely agree though that there would likely be tons of parallels between mid-late 20th century South Korea and Panem, especially in the way that people regained democratic power through protests.

I also agree that Coriolanus is quite apt first name for Pres. Snow--particularly given his anti-democratic inclinations and betrayal of the ideals of the Roman Republic.

Another classical motif that's pretty apparent but hasn't been touched on is the entrance of tributes into the arena on chariots at the beginning of each games. When I saw both of those scenes in both films, I immediately thought of the Roman (and later Byzantine) Hippodromes where chariot racing was a wildly popular sport that was a key component of the bread and circuses mentioned in the playlist. Watch this clip from the 1959 classic epic, Ben Hur, and you'll see the parallels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoyAV1...

One thing that stuck out to me in reading,"How Glorious Fall the Valiant: 'Careers' as Spartan Warriors," was the mention of Helots in ancient Sparta. I think this comparison is really quite apt to the impoverished districts--they engage in all the food and industrial production that enables the capital to focus on decadent lifestyles and for the career districts to focus on militarism rather than economic productivity. The same thing happened in ancient Sparta where the helots' role as farmers enabled the Spartans to make all of their men soldiers. Just as the Hunger Games' acted as a method of terror subjugation subjugation for the capital, the Spartans had an annual, institutionalized period of time every fall, known as the Crypteia, which youths who had finished their agoge training Kris referenced could participate in. These Spartans were given a knife and had to live off the land (much as in the Hunger Games). They were able to kill helots with impunity to get food and clamp down on sedition--both as part of their combat training, and as a way to teach the helots to live in fear of Spartan repression. Interestingly enough, as in the book series, the Helots themselves revolted against Spartan rule on various occasions as well.

Nathaniel wrote: "The theme that caught my eye most dramatically was that of righteous leadership, that is, why does one person have the right to rule another. This theme is also dominant in Game of Thrones and the ..."

I would have to agree that the callous, heavy-handed, manipulation of people's lives in spite of their individual, hopes and desires by an oppressive government is probably the main theme. I think this theme goes back to a larger discussion of the role of government in our lives and what ultimately we are willing to let it have the the power to do to us to provide for our "wellbeing."

Amy wrote: "Great question! I think the most relevant aspect of the trilogy is that it shows two different sides of the loss-of-liberty equation: those who have had their liberty taken from them through the fo..."

That's a good point about how people emerge on both sides who are sympathetic with the injustice of the situation. Part of what I liked about "Catching Fire" was seeing Effie's transition from a pure ideologue/propagandist of state-sanctioned murder to someone who felt real sympathy for Katniss and Pita.

I'm a junior in college, hoping, like Jeffrey to join the struggle against our expanding government, though probably more from a policy than legal angle. I'd probably like to end up working on the Hill or at a think-tank eventually. Still figuring it out though.

Hey everyone, I definitely agree with Ross that I enjoyed the Catching Fire tour sequence that Pita and Katniss went through. I really liked how the second movie took the gloves off in terms of portraying what a totalitarian government is willing to do to stay in power and the ways that the people resisted.

SPOILER ALERT: Also for the pure badassness of it, I loved the scene at the end of Catching Fire where Katniss overloaded the force-field by shooting an electrocuted arrow at the dome and destroying the facade of the virtual universe the game contestants were trapped in.