Why Are We Such Big Fans of Children Having to Kill Each Other?

Yes, I know all the Christmas lights are supposed to be down by now, but for some reason, I feel like this giant mansion done up for the holidays as a reindeer nursery/prison is appropriate for this topic.

 I finally started reading Hunger Games. For those of you who aren't 30 yr old librarians or friends with said librarians, Hunger Games is a very popular YA book which takes place in a dystopian future. The United States has been replaced with 12 Quarantined Districts and a Capitol City. Every year, the Capitol exacts a tribute from each District of one girl and one boy, who are shipped off to participate in a survivalist game where they must hunt each other in the wilderness, last one standing wins. It's a trilogy, and I've only read the first one so far, but there's lots of starvation, sickness, arrows, pus, ect. It's bloody and sad, and it's exactly the sort of book I would have loved in middle school.

 As soon as the trailer for the upcoming HG movie came out, which every single one of my librarian friends posted and reposted enthusiastically, it begged comparison to another (sort of) well known movie about kids killing each other - Battle Royale. This movie is also based off a book, but I haven't read it yet. As soon as I'm done with HG, I will. It's long overdue in fact, because I am a huge fan of Battle Royale the movie. Huge. I keep a copy of the DVD in my car so if I'm ever over a friend's house and we want to watch a movie, I can volunteer it. It is one of my favorite movies ever, if not THE favorite. The plot of BR is that in an effort to quell school uprisings, the Japanese government randomly picks a class by lottery every year, and the entire class is shipped to an evacuated abandoned island, where they are fitted with explosive collars and also told to slaughter each other mercilessly until only one is left, or they all die. They are extremely similar plots, if not precisely the same. Even the way the Games are run, with broadcast announcements of daily death counts and random backpacks full of unknown supplies, is the same (except in Hunger Games the kids don't know most of the other kids, but in Battle Royale they are all fellow students, which in my mind makes it superior). In both worlds, the rest of the populations watches gleefully and celebrates the Games. It turns out I don't care about any copying, I'm thrilled in fact by details I run across that are identical.

 I'm just going to throw in this fun fact: Two of my other favorite books are Lord of the Flies and Enders Game.

 So question that I face is this - Why am I so entertained by kids hunting each other down like prey?

There are two possibilities:

  1) I Love Kids

 There are lots of other movies that explore the Reality Death Match idea - Mad Max and Running Man for instance. But not with children. I don't connect to those movies the same way, turns out I care very little about adults having to kill each other ( they do it all the time anyway). One of the main differences is that it's harder to forgive adults. In both Games, the villains, the really bad kids who are bullies and actually good at killing, are older children. They are the larger ones physically, sure, but they are also the ones closest to being real grown ups. They have lost their innocence and are well on their way to being the enemy. Adults are always the enemy. An adult who is not the enemy is an exception to the rule. So they have to die horrible deaths because they must be punished for being old.

 In YA books, the runt is always the best one. Think Boxcar Children and 5 Little Peppers, Little Women. Smallest means sweetest, nicest, kindest, bravest. Unfortunately, it also means you are probably going to get sick or die, depends when the book was written, but whatever. When we read over and over again as kids that we the children, we the littlest, were better people than all those nasty warmongering perverted greedy uncaring adults? That was absolutely true. That doesn't change. Children are always much more flexible, curious, resourceful, and unthinkingly loving....

  2) I Hate Kids

....because they haven't had to do anything their whole lives but absorb. The minute they get any real power ,like a weapon or a conch shell, they reveal themselves to be just a petty, vicious and selfish as any adult. Worse even, because they haven't got any concept of the world besides Self , they are incapable of empathy. Children as villains and murderers just helps confirm what we suspect about all the adults around us too, that they would totally eat us before the rescue dogs got there, assholes. Children are the most simplified purest version of the human spirit, and that very essence of humanity it turns out is blood and psychopathy. Yes, all of you fuckers kill each other off please. Interestingly enough, in both of these death matches, neither of the heroines really has to kill that many of the other kids, because the rest of them are all so busy immediately massacring each other from the get go. While that's a good narrative device to keep the list of supporting characters low, it's also a very direct illustration of survival of the fittest. And the message in both Hunger Games and Battle Royale is Fittest = Most Compassionate (Because Everyone Else is a Monster).

 And then maybe also here is the real answer. Most of the literature I read as a child was full of blood, hunting and survival. Kids getting smallpox on the prairie, kids running away from evil wizards and witches, kids being locked in attics and bedrooms by old ladies, kids dying from horrible diseases, kids being trapped on other planets with giant alien brains, kids having to live in a fucking boxcar where they beg for scraps from strangers. Everything was trying to kill you, and if it wasn't actively trying to put an enchanted spear through you, it was manipulating you and starving you. I feel like that kind of visceral life or death desperation is really absent in a lot of adult fiction. Probably cause we all started having sex, and then immediately love mattered more. Also, you know, we're supposed to be smarter as adults, more thoughtful, more tolerant, and therefore "understand" the villains. When you grow up, it's not supposed to be all primal fear, it's supposed to be intellectual and civilized. Which as adults we learn pretty quickly is the ultimate farce. A shell which hides real evil and obscures real truth.

 So it's good we still write books for kids that teach them how to defend themselves when Civilized Intellectualism tries to round them all up and kill them.

Edit: So German Shepherd puppies have two "fear" stages, one when they are a couple weeks old, and one later at a couple months old. During these times, they are naturally more skittish, sensitive to sounds, cowardly basically. It's supposed to imprint them with bravery, make them chemically face up to exaggerated fear so they will be used to it when they are older. THAT's what childrens books do.

How To Write a VC Andrews book: bayou, blonde, lithe, rich, rape, father, incest. Done.

Why do you hate VC Andrews? No really, I never read Flowers in the Attic.

When I was a young pre-teen tweak in the making, I was well read. I was just one of those reader kids, and I was lucky enough to have parents who had good taste, and aunts who thought books were the best presents. I read everything in the house, and then I read it again and again.

I don't know if I got them from the library or friends, or who knows, maybe my parents, but somehow The Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High made it into the house. Babysitters Club was mostly harmless. The adventures of high school girl stereotypes as they maintain friendships and make money and have silly boyfriend and kid debacles was not literature, but it was mindless and mostly innocent. Sweet Valley High however was more insipid. The Twins were perfect blonde barbies with perfect boyfriends and cars and beaches, and the books made a point to mention over and over again how perfect their size 6 bodies were. Interesting and depressing side note: the more recent Sweet Valley books make the girls a perfect size 4. Thanks guys.

I was embarrassed to read these books even then, but they were my go-to books when I was home sick or just wanted something quick to read. Cause you could go through any of those books in an hour. It was my pre-teen equivalent of watching One Tree Hill reruns. Mostly I picked them up if I had nothing new to read that was better.

However when the Sweet Valley Twins hooked up with guys, it was kissing and mostly making out in cars. It was not having sex with your brother in an attic because your Super Christ Freak grandmother has you locked in the attic, because she thinks of you as inbred Devil Spawn freaks.

VC Andrews books were basically what the Twilight series is now, bad formulaic writing that makes copious use of the sexualization of young girls. It is pre-teen porn. Everyone good is beautiful and blonde, everyone evil is either ugly, or slutty. There is no subtlety, every moment is overblown and dramatic. The plots exist solely to railroad you through to the end, jumping from sexy scene to violent scene to sexy scene. But all with a veil of Wrongness draping over every Louisiana bayou scene. It is WRONG to do these things, it is WRONG to be sexy, it will lead to you being kidnapped, tortured, or murdered if you are sexy, being a young girl is Wrong and Dangerous.

VC Andrews was herself an anti-social cripple in her young life, just like Stephanie Meyers is a repressed Mormon. What they've both done is figure out a way to produce over and over again a representation of their own fucked up mental states in legalized child porn.

And you know, if adults want to read that stuff, fine. I don't even think there's a problem with smart well read kids reading it every once in a while. Everyone picks up a romance novel or a pulp horror novel sometimes. But when I was young, I was reading one, maybe even two books a day. Most kids don't do that. And when they are only reading a book occasionally, I don't think they should only be reading trash. Because it doesn't encourage them to read good stuff later, it just guarantees they will keep reading trash. Like bad CSI and lawyer novels, or NY Times paperback bestsellers.

And the really bad part about these books is that you don't learn anything from them. You don't learn about sex. You don't learn about people. You learn nothing about the real world, or science, or imagination. In fact, you don't even learn how to properly fantasize about sex or relationships, which is ridiculous, at least if the books did that they would have some defensible purpose. Maybe, MAYBE, you could argue it builds vocabulary. But they use the word bosom in Jane Eyre too.

There's this idea that as long as kids are reading, and it's a young adult novel (which of course is perfectly safe), then it's better than nothing. I hate that idea. What you read as a child impacts your life in such a heavy permanent way. It dictates what part of culture you're going to identify with, what you'll choose to read when you're older, and what kind of interests you develop. It changes how you'll do in high school, what kind of friends you'll make, what kind of conversations you'll have with strangers. It's fucking important.

So that's why I hate VC Andrews, and also why I will be the aunt who buys books. Just watch. You start popping out kids, I am going to sign you up for the Madeleine L'Engle book of the month club.

Ask me anything

What's Up With Alice Being Everywhere?

Children's books are one of those things we forget are important. Just as important as your parents, your childhood friends, your first crush, your first big injury. Whether or not you read them determines a large part of who you are; who you'll hang out with when you're older, what kind of things will interest you or motivate you. Will you believe in good and evil? Will you be a tomboy? Will you watch every dinosaur movie made even though they are as bad for you as romantic comedies?

SciFi makes me sentimental, and I have to wake up in 5 hours, so of course I can't fall asleep, so I'm going to lay in bed and read The Curse of the Blue Figurine by Bellairs. And not think about the fact that Alice has been purposely changed from a curious, sort of spoiled child into a representation of creepy dollhouse fantasies with scary terror eyes.

Here are some things I learned, and remember as the big lessons, from my favorite children's books.

1. The universe is very very big and very very small at the same time. Thank you Magic School Bus, Wrinkle in Time series, and that book I read where the kid shrunk really small and went on a journey through someones body. Maybe his own. It kills me that I can't remember the name of that one.

2. Orphans and old people have it worse off than anybody, because it's family that helps you tolerate being poor.

3. Sometimes people will be right when they tell you not to do something. But if you listen to them all the time, you will never know when they are wrong.

4. For gods sakes, don't eat anything just sitting out. Ever.

5. All ugly little girls grow up to be beautiful, and all beautiful little girls also grow up beautiful but pug-nosed.

6. Giant animals are your friends. Mice have more interesting lives than you know. Animals are individuals, like people, and they are capable of being just as cruel and evil. I read Animal Farm really early.

7. The lives of saints really really sucked.

8. Always look behind the clocks, or in the library. All libraries have secret messages somewhere.

9. Your parents could die at anytime.

10. Old people can be friends to kids.

11. If you want to lie all the time, write instead.

12. Just because you are small does not mean you are incapable. When things go bad, you must act tall. Most adults are not any smarter than you, they just know more.

13. It's heroic to play in the woods.

14. Time travel is possible, but not controllable. It can happen anywhere, for any reason, and it's not as much fun as it sounds.

15. It's really far to get anywhere walking. But do not get on randomly appearing trains, or talk to women who smile too much.

16. You must always arrive on time for tea.

17. Never go anywhere an adult is controlling the fun (museum trip, circus, camping ect.) unless you are with another adult or a group of friends. Let someone know where you're going, just in case. Always bring a pocketknife and a small compass.

18. Don't waste time gawking about how you can't believe what you're seeing. Believe it and move on.

19. Magical things will stop happening to you as an adult, unless you become a weird and strange adult. Which means you will probably be alone, but you will have much more fun, and you will always remember to stock soda and cookies.

20. Anyone and Everyone can become a friend.