In the Hunger Games, 24 kids are placed in an area as a punishment to the districts for rebelling. Whereas in Lord of the Flies, you have kids who have crash landed on an island with no adult supervision what so ever. One group was prepared to fight and win or die trying, the other didn’t know what was coming. These two scenarios sound similar at a first glance but are they really?
In story of the Hunger Games 24 children between the ages of 12- 18 are sent into an arena to kill one another till one is reaming. The process of choosing the tributes for the games is completely randomized, one guy from a district and one girl a district. In the Lord of the flies, young children have crash landed on a deserted island with no adults. The people one the plane were random yes but they had the choice to get on the plane or not, so is it really random? In the scenario of the Hunger Games, it was the responsibility of the tributes to kill one another to get to the end and survive. In Lord of the Flies however they started going slightly mental, they hadn’t been properly fed, they weren’t getting the sleep needed, and they were forced into a leadership position that no adolescent should have to go through. It pushed them until they cracked. In both of these situations kids are killing kids but if you look at them in depth there reasons for doing it are so very different.
By the middle of the Hunger Games you are caught up in the suspense of who is going to die next and it has turned into a game for you also. You lose sight of the reality of the book due to how it is written. The only time anyone truly felt the emotion was when Rue the tribute from district 11 died. You never truly get to know characters in the book or the movie. Whereas in the Lord of the Flies you feel the darkness and the fear that everyone is going through. You can’t help but feel the heartbreak when a character you’ve grown close to dies. The difference in the writing of these books changed the entire mood of them. If Susan Collins had written The Lord of the Flies, I wouldn’t have near the amount of attachment to characters that I did. The tone of the books and the movie where set by these writers. When you look into these stories you see similarities in places but because of how they were written you can’t see past that.
The Lord of the Flies is book about children crashing on a deserted island and going insane because of lack of necessities and care. The Hunger Games is a book that was turned into a movie because the story of children killing children for the enjoyment of the capitol was a New York Times best seller. The writing style between these two stories is so different. All you see is how alike they are, until you start looking at: character situations, the plots, and the time periods. These books have similar attributes but when you looks at the big picture of it all you are faced with the truth that these stories are very different.
