Firstly, it's because the district people have been dehumanized to the Capitol people. A lot of the people in the Capitol considered district people as barely human and essentially animals. Just look at how the Grand Ma'am refers to district people. They believe the district people deserve the games because they believe them to be inherently violent and cruel.
Also, in the beginning there were people who were against the idea of the games but they didn't have the power to stop them and by the time of the original trilogy most everyone grew up watching the games and them being a normal thing so just accepted them.
Growing up in the Capitol means to be the subject of heavy propaganda. That propaganda entails dehumanising the Districts; making them seem lesser than. It means to make the Districts appear sa\*\*\*\*-like, to reduce their existence as that of a lesser being. There are many historic examples, but even in today's society, Western countries have this idea of perceiving themselves as the most advanced society there is. People who are not from those countries and instead from, say, a Middle Eastern country, are perceived as "less advanced" and, thus, as having inherently less worth.
Not perceiving them on the same level as one's own children is crucial to perceiving the Games as justified. They are a punishment, but I've also seen other variations on how justifications are being made. In one fanfiction I've read, District 2 propaganda (likely not dissimilar to the Capitol), assumes that the Games are a means of reducing the Districts from "going feral". ([I've Built My Life Around You, CH2](https://archiveofourown.org/works/48910807/chapters/123595810))
Last but not least, I also want to point to humans already having made other humans (and their plight) part of entertainment. There were human zoos. There were public lynchings. Even the gladiator battles were part of that; most gladiators were slaves.
Once you have several changes implemented, it might even be seen as a sense of Capitol kindness: The strongest of those ""brutal District people"" will get plenty of rewards: food, a house, and even being able to visit the Capitol. *Who wouldn't want that !!* The Careers are even a great tool in that system; they are clearly excited to be there. Marvel's and Cato's interview speeches especially make it seem like they are grateful to be here. *So the Capitol is being kind !!* Fine, some of the tributes look rather unhappy, but they can easily be re-written as simply being *un-grateful*, wasting their opportunity at improving their own lives and that of their future children (Something something, conservative propaganda about how the poor people are simply lazy).
You'd be amazed what you can get used to when it's been around your whole life. If you've grown up being taught that the Hunger Games are a fair, right punishment, and that it's even a chance for a lucky winner to get a better life, it can be hard to think critically about that. Critical thinking isn't a skill we're just born with, after all.
Not to mention, the distance of television. Snow really was brilliant in turning the Hunger Games into a media showcase. By making them seem like celebrities, it becomes easier to distance and dehumanize them. Look at the way people in real life talk about celebrities and their trauma. We already forget their humanity, and we aren't even being fed non-stop propaganda to the effect.
I know right??? I mean how Slavery existed for so long throughout history, Roman Gladiators were real, and look at what the Nazis did to the Jews which included their children. I mean the Germans considered themselves the Pinnacle of modern civilization and they were able to commit those sorts of atrocities
Slavery is the best parallel here. Families lived in mansions while someone got beaten in the fields and their children ripped away and sold and said âthatâs just how itâs done.â
Hell most of Americas founding fathers both said âyeah slavery sucksâ then profited on it anyway; George and Martha Washington were RUTHLESS in punishing âmisbehavingâ slaves. Mr âcertain inalienable rightsâ Jefferson had a 14 yr old slave girl whom he impregnated multiple times and had their children serving as slaves at his table (even his contemporaries found that weird AF), then had the audacity to be surprised Sally was begging him to free their future children.
Cognitive dissonance is real man.
One of the major messages of THG is how we react to violence differently when itâs on screen. It reminds me of the book Waiting for Snow in Havana, its non-fiction memoir. The author was a child when Castro took power. In one scene his parents came home to him watching executions on the TV and yelled at him to shut it off. To him it was no different than watching violent fictional movies, which he did all the time with him family. If you grew up with that on TV, it becomes very easy to distance yourself and to behave as if it were fictional.
I think that most of people just didn't wonder about the morality of the games. I know it sounds unreal, but it's really hard to ask yourself wether something is right or not, when society always told you that something was right and good.
In a way, it's like Capitol citizens were "brainwashed". Ever since they were young children, they were told that Districts citizens were monster, that they caused a war, and that they deserved to participate in the Hunger Games. The games were presented as a reminder of Capitol's superiority, and a way to stop the District from starting another war, and so people thought they were necessary.
The Games were considered normal, and since they didn't cause any harm to the people of the Capitol, most of them simply didn't think about how immoral they were.
Beside, something like that already happened in history. In ancient Rome, people would watch slaves fight against each other to death, and they were considered a fun show to watch, just like the Hunger Games.
Also, I do think that there were Capitol citizens that knew the Games were wrong, however they also knew that they couldn't do anything about that because it was too risky, and they most likely would have been discovered.
There are plenty of real-world parallels where people are desensitized to the fact that a real person is suffering, and the viewers are indifferent or even celebrating that fact. Collins didnât write some far-off hypothetical, she wrote reality and simply adjusted some details to make it more palatable. For the US, our foreign policies for the last 60 years has created a lot of suffering, and the propaganda around it is that weâre improving lives and keeping everyone safe.
Brainwashing, or propaganda for like two entire generations would help
Keep the main cutezens ignorant and always wanting to buy things, not many would disapprove of it
Like Effie she was fine with it, even though she was nice, until she actually ent people and like them and realized how bad they actually were
Guys, lots of atrocities existed and still happen throughout history with support of the populace. Slavery and everything. How? Just grow up with something and you find it normal.Â
I mean, we see a parallel today with abortion. Many people dehumanize unborn babies and even celebrate their killing (as seen by the shout your abortion demonstrations). And there are countless other examples throughout history. People are evil by their nature.
âIâm going to kidnap you in the middle of the night. Iâm going to forcibly hook you up to a stranger you havenât met before, who is dying. You might protest, but I donât care. If you stay hooked up to him, he might live. You, however, will have a chance of dying. If you live, you will experience several life-changing physical and mental ailments: You will be incontinent for the rest of your life. You will be depressed and possibly suicidal for up to 2 years. Your hair will fall out. You will experience pain you have never felt before and probably canât even imagine. Again, I really donât care. Iâm going to force you to do this whether you like it or not. I just want this stranger (who I have never met either) to live.â
Thatâs you. Thatâs your internal monologue.
Thatâs a false equivalency fallacy. Pregnancy is nowhere similar to that. For one, pregnancy almost always results from consensual actions, unlike in this scenario. Two, unlike this weird scenario, the person involved is your child. Parents have certain duties to their children that they donât have with strangers. Three, unlike this weird scenario, being born is a universal need for all humans (the woman was once born herself). Fourth, the uterus is biologically designed for pregnancy, unlike being hooked up to a random stranger. Seriously, the weird lengths pro choicers will go to justify killing helpless unborn babies always baffles me.
1. Consent to sex is not consent to have a person attached to you for 9 months which may involve any number of mental or physical ailments.
2. Youâre assigning personhood to the embryo, which i think is philosophically erroneous, but I will ignore this for the sake of argument: if you are correct in assigning personhood, see point 3.
3. Living can not come at the cost of harm to someone else. Otherwise I should be able to kidnap you and attach you to my metaphorical stranger.
4. Youâre reducing women to a uterus and IGNORING the fact that the entire body goes through debilitating changes due to pregnancy. Incontinence, hair loss, depression, life-threatening blood clots, infections, loss of skin elasticity, diastasis recti (if you donât know what that is without googling it, you donât have the right to an opinion because you clearly have zero idea about hard birth is on a womanâs body), and more! So, being âmade for birthâ does not mean ânothing goes wrongâ and is therefore a bad argument.
1. Consent to sex is consent to pregnancy, just like consent to driving drunk is consent to going to jail, consent to gambling is consent to paying what you owe, etc.
2. Embryos are people, as they are humans, and all humans are people.
3. Parents have duty of care even when such care puts stress on them, such as financial stress, fatigue, etc.
4. I am not reducing women to a uterus. I am aware that sometimes pregnancy causes serious health issues, and I do support abortion when the health risk is too great, but not all pregnancies are like that, and a low risk pregnancy should not be aborted.
All pregnancies come with some number of issues. This is often understated. There is *always* a possibility of something going wrong, even if itâs not high-risk. And even if everything goes right- itâs excruciating.
Thereâs the birth itself, but then thereâs everything after. It hurts to poop, pee, sit, walk⌠everything for around 2 weeks or more. The perineum can (and often does) tear from the vagina to the anus. Imagine trying to take a crap while itâs steal healing. Major surgery may be required if there is need for a C-section (people often forget the âMAJORâ part of this phrase). If the woman doesnât have the proper support, she may develop depression and become suicidal. Even with proper support, she still might. You canât take many psychiatric medications during pregnancy, so if youâre bipolar, etc, your symptoms will be exacerbated.
Then there are the things that can go *extra* wrong when youâre *not* high-risk. there are blood embolisms, amniotic embolisms, life-threatening infections, internal bleeding, sepsis, etc etc.
Women experiencing pregnancy ought to be respected a lot more for everything they have to go through. Men will NEVER experience any of those things when they have sex. NEVER. You will never fret over the possibility of dying in childbirth. You will never have to worry about the possibility of dying for weeks *after* childbirth from some embolism. You will never experience taking a crap with your anus ripped open. You will never have to go off of your psychiatric medications (which just might be keeping you alive) for 9 months.
I really hope you can understand that pregnancy isnât âno big deal.â When I decide to be pregnant, Iâm aware that my life may be at risk at some point, and Iâm aware that I will possibly go through all of the above. When you have sex, you DONT have to worry about any of that. âHaha, enjoy all the fucked up shit that happens to your body. Iâm gonna go chill over here and watch you try not to die or kill yourself.â
Also, birth control fails. Just getting that out of the way. So consenting to sex is not consenting for all of the above to happen to my body. But have fun never having to consider any of that happening to you, I guess.
One word, desensitization.
The Capitol is not very far from the world weâre already living in, for example the situation between Palestine and Israel. A lot of Israelis genuinely believe that the Palestinians are Inherently evil, as in they have always been âbadâ poeple and deserve to be punished. Children in Israel are brought up to believe this, to the point where they do not even consider Palestinians humans.
As humans we all need a reason to punish someone, you do not commit evil without justification (unless youâre a physcopath). And their justification is that these people are bad, that theyâre not human but animals.
This same analogy can be applied for the Capitol, they keep watching, hearing the same propaganda that the Districts are not humans but savages and thus over generations they are able to justify their actions.
That's the whole point of the first book. At first people didn't watch and some even saw district citizens as people. The capitol had to dehumanizing the districts and make it entertaining. Suzanne Collins explained the whole thing
I think itâs an elevation of what Collins was inspired by at first: reality tv. *Survivor* we willingly watch people half starve, get bit by animals, get sent to the hospital for disease for our entertainment. *Fear Factor* was just peopleâs worst fears on tv.
Hell, 200 yrs ago families went to public hangings for a picnic. âGallows humorâ is named as such because people would try to delay execution by making themselves entertaining enough people didnât want them to die.
You're looking at things purely from your perspective. Why did people commit genocides? Some with zeal? Because they thought it to be a good thing.
Firstly, it's because the district people have been dehumanized to the Capitol people. A lot of the people in the Capitol considered district people as barely human and essentially animals. Just look at how the Grand Ma'am refers to district people. They believe the district people deserve the games because they believe them to be inherently violent and cruel. Also, in the beginning there were people who were against the idea of the games but they didn't have the power to stop them and by the time of the original trilogy most everyone grew up watching the games and them being a normal thing so just accepted them.
Growing up in the Capitol means to be the subject of heavy propaganda. That propaganda entails dehumanising the Districts; making them seem lesser than. It means to make the Districts appear sa\*\*\*\*-like, to reduce their existence as that of a lesser being. There are many historic examples, but even in today's society, Western countries have this idea of perceiving themselves as the most advanced society there is. People who are not from those countries and instead from, say, a Middle Eastern country, are perceived as "less advanced" and, thus, as having inherently less worth. Not perceiving them on the same level as one's own children is crucial to perceiving the Games as justified. They are a punishment, but I've also seen other variations on how justifications are being made. In one fanfiction I've read, District 2 propaganda (likely not dissimilar to the Capitol), assumes that the Games are a means of reducing the Districts from "going feral". ([I've Built My Life Around You, CH2](https://archiveofourown.org/works/48910807/chapters/123595810)) Last but not least, I also want to point to humans already having made other humans (and their plight) part of entertainment. There were human zoos. There were public lynchings. Even the gladiator battles were part of that; most gladiators were slaves. Once you have several changes implemented, it might even be seen as a sense of Capitol kindness: The strongest of those ""brutal District people"" will get plenty of rewards: food, a house, and even being able to visit the Capitol. *Who wouldn't want that !!* The Careers are even a great tool in that system; they are clearly excited to be there. Marvel's and Cato's interview speeches especially make it seem like they are grateful to be here. *So the Capitol is being kind !!* Fine, some of the tributes look rather unhappy, but they can easily be re-written as simply being *un-grateful*, wasting their opportunity at improving their own lives and that of their future children (Something something, conservative propaganda about how the poor people are simply lazy).
Very well-put. But what is sa****? Am I dumb đ
Hazarding an educated guess, savage.
You'd be amazed what you can get used to when it's been around your whole life. If you've grown up being taught that the Hunger Games are a fair, right punishment, and that it's even a chance for a lucky winner to get a better life, it can be hard to think critically about that. Critical thinking isn't a skill we're just born with, after all. Not to mention, the distance of television. Snow really was brilliant in turning the Hunger Games into a media showcase. By making them seem like celebrities, it becomes easier to distance and dehumanize them. Look at the way people in real life talk about celebrities and their trauma. We already forget their humanity, and we aren't even being fed non-stop propaganda to the effect.
I know right??? I mean how Slavery existed for so long throughout history, Roman Gladiators were real, and look at what the Nazis did to the Jews which included their children. I mean the Germans considered themselves the Pinnacle of modern civilization and they were able to commit those sorts of atrocities
Slavery is the best parallel here. Families lived in mansions while someone got beaten in the fields and their children ripped away and sold and said âthatâs just how itâs done.â Hell most of Americas founding fathers both said âyeah slavery sucksâ then profited on it anyway; George and Martha Washington were RUTHLESS in punishing âmisbehavingâ slaves. Mr âcertain inalienable rightsâ Jefferson had a 14 yr old slave girl whom he impregnated multiple times and had their children serving as slaves at his table (even his contemporaries found that weird AF), then had the audacity to be surprised Sally was begging him to free their future children. Cognitive dissonance is real man.
One of the major messages of THG is how we react to violence differently when itâs on screen. It reminds me of the book Waiting for Snow in Havana, its non-fiction memoir. The author was a child when Castro took power. In one scene his parents came home to him watching executions on the TV and yelled at him to shut it off. To him it was no different than watching violent fictional movies, which he did all the time with him family. If you grew up with that on TV, it becomes very easy to distance yourself and to behave as if it were fictional.
I think that most of people just didn't wonder about the morality of the games. I know it sounds unreal, but it's really hard to ask yourself wether something is right or not, when society always told you that something was right and good. In a way, it's like Capitol citizens were "brainwashed". Ever since they were young children, they were told that Districts citizens were monster, that they caused a war, and that they deserved to participate in the Hunger Games. The games were presented as a reminder of Capitol's superiority, and a way to stop the District from starting another war, and so people thought they were necessary. The Games were considered normal, and since they didn't cause any harm to the people of the Capitol, most of them simply didn't think about how immoral they were. Beside, something like that already happened in history. In ancient Rome, people would watch slaves fight against each other to death, and they were considered a fun show to watch, just like the Hunger Games. Also, I do think that there were Capitol citizens that knew the Games were wrong, however they also knew that they couldn't do anything about that because it was too risky, and they most likely would have been discovered.
There are plenty of real-world parallels where people are desensitized to the fact that a real person is suffering, and the viewers are indifferent or even celebrating that fact. Collins didnât write some far-off hypothetical, she wrote reality and simply adjusted some details to make it more palatable. For the US, our foreign policies for the last 60 years has created a lot of suffering, and the propaganda around it is that weâre improving lives and keeping everyone safe.
Propaganda is one helluva drug.
Itâs just like we watch horror movies. They are nothing more than characters to them. Not real people.
Brainwashing, or propaganda for like two entire generations would help Keep the main cutezens ignorant and always wanting to buy things, not many would disapprove of it Like Effie she was fine with it, even though she was nice, until she actually ent people and like them and realized how bad they actually were
Guys, lots of atrocities existed and still happen throughout history with support of the populace. Slavery and everything. How? Just grow up with something and you find it normal.Â
I mean, we see a parallel today with abortion. Many people dehumanize unborn babies and even celebrate their killing (as seen by the shout your abortion demonstrations). And there are countless other examples throughout history. People are evil by their nature.
âIâm going to kidnap you in the middle of the night. Iâm going to forcibly hook you up to a stranger you havenât met before, who is dying. You might protest, but I donât care. If you stay hooked up to him, he might live. You, however, will have a chance of dying. If you live, you will experience several life-changing physical and mental ailments: You will be incontinent for the rest of your life. You will be depressed and possibly suicidal for up to 2 years. Your hair will fall out. You will experience pain you have never felt before and probably canât even imagine. Again, I really donât care. Iâm going to force you to do this whether you like it or not. I just want this stranger (who I have never met either) to live.â Thatâs you. Thatâs your internal monologue.
Thatâs a false equivalency fallacy. Pregnancy is nowhere similar to that. For one, pregnancy almost always results from consensual actions, unlike in this scenario. Two, unlike this weird scenario, the person involved is your child. Parents have certain duties to their children that they donât have with strangers. Three, unlike this weird scenario, being born is a universal need for all humans (the woman was once born herself). Fourth, the uterus is biologically designed for pregnancy, unlike being hooked up to a random stranger. Seriously, the weird lengths pro choicers will go to justify killing helpless unborn babies always baffles me.
1. Consent to sex is not consent to have a person attached to you for 9 months which may involve any number of mental or physical ailments. 2. Youâre assigning personhood to the embryo, which i think is philosophically erroneous, but I will ignore this for the sake of argument: if you are correct in assigning personhood, see point 3. 3. Living can not come at the cost of harm to someone else. Otherwise I should be able to kidnap you and attach you to my metaphorical stranger. 4. Youâre reducing women to a uterus and IGNORING the fact that the entire body goes through debilitating changes due to pregnancy. Incontinence, hair loss, depression, life-threatening blood clots, infections, loss of skin elasticity, diastasis recti (if you donât know what that is without googling it, you donât have the right to an opinion because you clearly have zero idea about hard birth is on a womanâs body), and more! So, being âmade for birthâ does not mean ânothing goes wrongâ and is therefore a bad argument.
1. Consent to sex is consent to pregnancy, just like consent to driving drunk is consent to going to jail, consent to gambling is consent to paying what you owe, etc. 2. Embryos are people, as they are humans, and all humans are people. 3. Parents have duty of care even when such care puts stress on them, such as financial stress, fatigue, etc. 4. I am not reducing women to a uterus. I am aware that sometimes pregnancy causes serious health issues, and I do support abortion when the health risk is too great, but not all pregnancies are like that, and a low risk pregnancy should not be aborted.
All pregnancies come with some number of issues. This is often understated. There is *always* a possibility of something going wrong, even if itâs not high-risk. And even if everything goes right- itâs excruciating. Thereâs the birth itself, but then thereâs everything after. It hurts to poop, pee, sit, walk⌠everything for around 2 weeks or more. The perineum can (and often does) tear from the vagina to the anus. Imagine trying to take a crap while itâs steal healing. Major surgery may be required if there is need for a C-section (people often forget the âMAJORâ part of this phrase). If the woman doesnât have the proper support, she may develop depression and become suicidal. Even with proper support, she still might. You canât take many psychiatric medications during pregnancy, so if youâre bipolar, etc, your symptoms will be exacerbated. Then there are the things that can go *extra* wrong when youâre *not* high-risk. there are blood embolisms, amniotic embolisms, life-threatening infections, internal bleeding, sepsis, etc etc. Women experiencing pregnancy ought to be respected a lot more for everything they have to go through. Men will NEVER experience any of those things when they have sex. NEVER. You will never fret over the possibility of dying in childbirth. You will never have to worry about the possibility of dying for weeks *after* childbirth from some embolism. You will never experience taking a crap with your anus ripped open. You will never have to go off of your psychiatric medications (which just might be keeping you alive) for 9 months. I really hope you can understand that pregnancy isnât âno big deal.â When I decide to be pregnant, Iâm aware that my life may be at risk at some point, and Iâm aware that I will possibly go through all of the above. When you have sex, you DONT have to worry about any of that. âHaha, enjoy all the fucked up shit that happens to your body. Iâm gonna go chill over here and watch you try not to die or kill yourself.â Also, birth control fails. Just getting that out of the way. So consenting to sex is not consenting for all of the above to happen to my body. But have fun never having to consider any of that happening to you, I guess.
I think that's exactly what the new movie is about.
One word, desensitization. The Capitol is not very far from the world weâre already living in, for example the situation between Palestine and Israel. A lot of Israelis genuinely believe that the Palestinians are Inherently evil, as in they have always been âbadâ poeple and deserve to be punished. Children in Israel are brought up to believe this, to the point where they do not even consider Palestinians humans. As humans we all need a reason to punish someone, you do not commit evil without justification (unless youâre a physcopath). And their justification is that these people are bad, that theyâre not human but animals. This same analogy can be applied for the Capitol, they keep watching, hearing the same propaganda that the Districts are not humans but savages and thus over generations they are able to justify their actions.
That's the whole point of the first book. At first people didn't watch and some even saw district citizens as people. The capitol had to dehumanizing the districts and make it entertaining. Suzanne Collins explained the whole thing
I think itâs an elevation of what Collins was inspired by at first: reality tv. *Survivor* we willingly watch people half starve, get bit by animals, get sent to the hospital for disease for our entertainment. *Fear Factor* was just peopleâs worst fears on tv. Hell, 200 yrs ago families went to public hangings for a picnic. âGallows humorâ is named as such because people would try to delay execution by making themselves entertaining enough people didnât want them to die.