21st Century Hunger Games: My Take on Violence in Pop Culture

Like it or hate it -- Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy changed the face of young adult literature as we know it.
The classic dystopian trilogy, focusing around a future where children are forced to fight to the death on national television, prompted the 2010's YA market to be dominated by the dystopian genre. It prompted hundreds of Hunger Games wannabes to surface and flood the market with a whole new kind of young adult novel. 
Even if you haven't read the series (though I'm sure most of us have, at this point), you've at least heard of The Hunger Games. You've heard of its success.
And you've probably also heard of it's being challenged by parents and school districts, most prompted by the violence displayed in all three books of the series. Do parents and caregivers have a right to be concerned by the levels of violence within the series?

The short answer? Yes. Parents should be able to screen books for their children, and do have a right to be concerned about the growing levels of violence in books, movies, video games, and TV shows. It's only natural, and I don't feel that it's wrong for a parent to hold back a book that they feel their child isn't developmentally ready for.

However, (you guys knew this was coming right?) I do have a long answer as well. And because I'm already talking about The Hunger Games, let's just get this out of the way -- I don't think The Hunger Games is the thing we should be most concerned about. Now, please let me explain. I'm not saying we should be handing out copies of The Hunger Games to eight year olds. Far from it. But in terms of violent content, The Hunger Games actually handles it far better than other examples of popular culture, which leads me to my main point. It's not so much the violent content itself. It's how that violent content is portrayed. 

Confused yet? I hope not.

I watched The Hunger Games movies myself only about two years ago, and read the books a short time later. Going in, I expected violence. After all, this was a series about kids killing each other. On national TV. Bound to be gruesome. And honestly? It was. There are some truly disturbing scenes in The Hunger Games -- a girl is stung to death by genetically modified wasps; characters are stabbed, shot, and burned; children hunt other children down and murder them. Even the main character, Katniss, kills other kids to keep herself alive. But for me, none of the many disturbing and violent scenes in the movies disturbed me quite as much as another scene in a well-known film franchise -- I speak specifically of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2. 

Let me explain. I have a lot of problems with many Marvel movies in general, and the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are up there with some of the most problematic I've seen. But I'm speaking specifically of one scene in vol. II where several characters are trying to escape their captors on board a spaceship. You know the scene. The one where rock music is playing in the background while our "heroes" open machine gun fire on their captors and slaughter them without the least bit of remorse. To make it worse? The scene was itself played off as humorous. And it's disgusting.
But maybe you disagree with me. Maybe you're sitting there thinking, I mean, these guys are the good guys, right? And if they're only killing bad guys, what's the harm? 

My answer? So much harm. Because here's the thing -- if that scene had been real, if all of those people had been real -- would you have laughed? Would you have found the slaughter of so many people -- even "bad guys" something to joke about?
The thing is, these kinds of "humorous" scenes devalue human life. And it makes us slowly, subconsciously, start to believe those lies. As long as we're killing "bad guys" it's okay. As long as these people are faceless, nameless shadows, it's perfectly acceptable for them to die at the hands of supposed "heroes". 

Human life is not a joke. No human life is so worthless that the best it can do is elicit a laugh from an audience. 
My point here is not to make you feel guilty -- far from it. But I feel like we should not only examine exactly what violent content a specific piece of media contains, but also exactly how it portrays violence and death -- does it make light of war and death and destruction? Or does it show us the horrors of those same things?

Coming back to The Hunger Games, I feel like it was, in fact, trying to make its own point about violence in our culture today -- and what it could turn into. In the books, the people in the Capitol treat the Hunger Games like it's nothing but fun. To them, it is a game -- just another mindless piece of entertainment. But Suzanne Collins' shows us, through Katniss's story, just how twisted that is. Violence is not entertainment. Death is not a joke.

Which is why, I will conclude by saying this -- The Hunger Games was violent for a reason. There was a purpose to the deaths and horror that was portrayed in these stories. There was a point. 
But was there a point for it in Guardians of the Galaxy? And if there was, what kind of point was it making? 

Please leave your (polite) thoughts below in the comments! I'd love to hear from you all!