 I could start this off with a rhetorical question about your knowledge on the Hunger Games and its many dystopian young adult clones, but I don't need to. I can practically guarantee that you know exactly what I'm talking about already. Divergent, Legends, The Testing, Enclave, The Tree Makers, Glitch, Matched, Article 5, Under the Never Sky, Shatter Me, The Darkest Minds, The Moon Dwellers, Partials, The Country Saga, Save the Pearls, Shipbreaker, Breath, Delirium, The Maze Runner, Eve, Blood of Eden, Birthmarked, and many, many more. These started picking up steam around 2009, the year that the first Hunger Games novel released, and they completely dominated bookstores and bestseller lists for years afterwards. Perhaps more than Twilight knockoffs, there were a lot of these released and even more of them got made into movies. This makes sense if you think about it. Twilight clones were focused entirely on romance while these were strongly focused on romance, but they had some action and adventure stuff in there that attracted a wider audience. I've mentioned before that I keep looking for the elusive good Twilight clone with little success. The Hunger Games and its clones are a different story. See, I like the Hunger Games, though it has some notable issues. The clones are a very mixed bag, but there are a few out there that are enjoyable. I can read them without wanting to dig out my hippocampus at least. But we all got tired of these for the same reason teenage girls got tired of watching other teenage girls with no personality fall in love with bad boys who were also vampires or leprechauns or mermen or something. They were all the same. We saw so many teenagers overthrow tyrannical regimes with the power of love triangles that they soon became as vomit inducing as statutory rapist vampires. Not to say that being cliched automatically makes something bad, sometimes being familiar brings a level of comfort, the ability to just relax and take in whatever you're seeing. I know Far Cry 6 is going to be the same as Far Cry 5, but I'll still play the shit out of it when it comes out. So today I'm going through all the major parts of Hunger Games clones to explain how they're put together, what makes them appealing, and what made them such a big hit. And we'll do it in a numbered list. Number one, there must be an evil government. This one goes almost without saying. Ever since authors saw Katniss spark off a rebellion in Panem, they realized that revolutions make for an easy story template. All you have to do is make the setting a country that is extremely totalitarian and oppressive and keeps its people in poverty. Then the audience is already primed to watch the heroes grow their power and fight to topple the despotic regime of old white dudes who hold onto power with their army of faceless drones. Like when Panem's peacekeepers brutally attack unarmed protesters. Wait, no, that's New York. And that's Israel. That's France. That's Hong Kong. Look, you get the point. Most of the time this world will be our world after some sort of apocalypse. The exact details of this apocalypse are unimportant. All that matters is that some crisis caused the collapse of the world order. It'll probably involve climate change, a giant war, economic collapse, a pandemic, or some combination of the above. In the chaos that followed, an authoritarian regime came to power to make sure the people survived. This all makes sense, but then the authoritarian regime overstays its welcome. How has the regime managed to stay around so long or function at all in the present when the vast majority of the population hates it? What actions could the government take to dissuade rebellions beside violent crackdowns that would likely turn public opinion further against the rulers? What kind of internal factions and power struggles are there that might hinder their response? Are there any reformers in power who want to negotiate with the rebels to bring an end to the fighting? Are the rebels ever being unreasonable? The Hunger Games struggled with these very questions, but most clones simply ignore them. The government is just evil, and that means the rebels, for all their faults, are good. Because nothing bad has ever come from moral absolutism. Number two. The protagonist must be a teenage girl. You might think that having a story full of action, rebellion, and explosions would be male-oriented, or at least gender-neutral. Well, you'd be wrong. Hunger Games clones are aimed at an audience of young girls, meaning that the story must also revolve around a teenage girl. She has to be beautiful, but she can't know that she's beautiful, so she'll have to comment on how plain she is. After all, if she had to put effort into her appearance, that might make her look vain. Main character girl will also most likely be a member of the lower classes who lives in the slums, so that she has a reason to hate her country's rulers. This only happens about 80% of the time, though. The rest of the time, she'll be in a more privileged position, and only start hating the establishment when they do something that hurts her personally. That way, she can combine the fantasy of being a cool, angry rebel with the fantasy of being wealthy and surrounded by futuristic technology. In some cases, the teenage main character girl will actually be a badass fighter and or competent leader, and to show off how much of a badass she is, she'll wear her father's old hunting jacket. Luckily, he was her size. But that's optional, since in many cases, she just sort of exists and is swept up in all these crazy events. In things like Legend, she'll be recruited for an important mission despite being a teenager with barely any experience in whatever she's trying to do. Then she shows up everyone else because she's there for wish fulfillment. In things like Enclave, she'll be a super amazing fighter who can take on monsters, robots, and grown men twice her size with no trouble, even if she's malnourished and too young to have much combat experience. Then through her sheer badassery, everyone will want to follow her and she saves the day. In things like Matched or Article 5, she's not special in any way, nor does she do anything interesting over the course of the story. This is to allow maximum projection on the part of the readers. After all, why would you want to get a different perspective on things when you could just play pretend instead? More important than all of that is the Love Triangle. See, the Hunger Games had a Love Triangle that the author didn't want to put in. The publishers forced her to add it. But she did it in an intelligent way, where Katniss was forced to play up her relationship with PETA to get the public to like her and improve her odds of survival, a pretty clear commentary on the nature of fame and celebrity worship. Most of the copycats didn't get the subtext and just threw in a Love Triangle because they thought it would sell, which it often did. To be fair, most of the fans didn't get the subtext either. You'd think that with everything going on around them, the main character girls would be less concerned with romance and kissing cute boys. You'd be wrong. The protagonist in this instance must be relatable to young women, not in the sense that they hold some universal human trait or experience that anyone can get behind. No, I'm talking about relatability in the corporate sense, where they pick a surface-level trait such as race or gender and slap that on. Then they can use that faux-wokeness for free advertising, since all the white liberals will use it as an example for why society is now fixed and all the reactionaries will screech about how it's an attack on Western civilization. Meanwhile, the corporate publisher will roll in money because they don't actually give a shit and are just trying to appeal to the largest customer base, whatever that may be. And there's my rant on capitalism for the month. Number three, society is structured in a weird way. There have been a lot of ways that societies and governments have been stratified and divided over the years, from mono-ethnic states that follow a strict hierarchy to countries where religious identification is the only important criteria to where you fit in and the government is mostly democratic. You could, in theory, construct a fictional society in basically any imaginable form and it would be justifiable. The keywords there are theory and justifiable. If you come up with a bizarre culture and social structure, I'm all for it, but it needs to follow some sort of logic in its construction, perpetuation, and eventual collapse. In the Hunger Games, everyone lived in 12 districts that were all kept isolated and ruled over by the Capital District. Then all those people were forced to send their children to fight in a death match every year, which they all hated, but they feared rebelling because the capitals might seem overwhelming. There are a few issues here, which I've talked about already, but overall there is a threat of logic to it. The clones often missed that. In the clones, people will often be divided into completely arbitrary categories. In Divergent, which is probably the most notable Hunger Games clone, people are divided into factions based on a single personality trait, like intelligence or kindness. In The Testing, you get a single chance to attend university and have a decent life. You just have to pass a test that involves killing a bunch of other promising young minds, which is clearly the best way to handle things. In Enclave, everyone is assigned a role as either a breeder, a hunter, or a builder. In Matched, everyone is in arranged marriages to promote social harmony, and so on. Unlike real dictatorships, the people here will all be oppressed equally. There won't be any ethnic groups or religions that the government uses as a scapegoat to drum up support among the populace, nor will women be placed into any subservient role unless that's the whole point of the story, like in Article 5. The categories will often be decided by some sort of testing that takes place in adolescence so that the story can begin with the main character girl preparing for it. Then she'll join whatever group has the coolest job so she can go off on adventures where she kills ghosts with a flashlight or whatever. Failing that, the categories will be assigned at birth. Either way, the story will spend a lot of time explaining how the categories are all dumb and the system doesn't work so that the main character girl will get the chance to show off how she's special and can't be put into a box, just like the person reading about it. As stupid as this often is, it contains some of the only genuine social commentary that these clones ever made. When you think about it, our society's divisions don't always make sense either. Race doesn't make sense because we're all a mix of various things. Religion is something you can change at any time. Location is meaningless, and yet they're all considered important. Beyond that, when you're young, you can feel like every decision you make will forever alter your life's trajectory, especially given how much emphasis we put on standardized testing and what college you go to. Having someone tell you that's all bullshit is cathartic. Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit and they were all just playing a big game of literary telephone. Number four, you should probably have a POV switch at some point. The vast majority of the story will be told from the perspective of the main character girl, which makes sense since she's supposed to be the most interesting and most important person in the story, but at some point we'll have to see inside another character's head for... reasons. Who will the other POV character be? Most likely her main love interest. Yep, we'll spend some time viewing events through the lens of the muscular white boy with either blue or green eyes, unless he's meant to be ethnically ambiguous. Then he's a muscular boy with olive skin and either blue or green eyes. This POV switch might allow the author to show events that the main character girl is absent from, or possibly give a different perspective on things that emphasizes how her viewpoint is skewed. It probably won't, though. It's most likely there because the author realized they didn't have enough events in the plot to fill an entire series, so they just threw in a few pointless scenes with the dreamboat. Number five, trilogies are the only way to structure the series. Some of you might be thinking that there are a lot of ways to structure a series. After all, there are book series that last 3, 4, 10, even 12 entries. Some go even longer, like Animorphs. The Hunger Games was a trilogy, though, meaning everyone who wanted in on that market had to do the same thing without understanding why. A trilogy is the simplest way to structure a series because it's the most basic. Each book is the beginning, the middle, or the end. The first one introduces the world, characters, and conflict to draw the audience in. The second one is the escalation, where the antagonist gains ground while the heroes go through personal crises. The third one is the big confrontation where the final twists are revealed and everything comes to a head with some sort of big face-off where the villain is defeated. For clones, there's no need to think about that. Just think up your evil government, throw your main character girl into it, split it into three, and release one per year. No need to consider structure or pacing at all. Sometimes the story is already finished by the end of the second book, and the third one has to come up with an entirely new plot just to fill time, like in Legend or Divergent. Sometimes the first book is only there to introduce the fact that this world exists and the story doesn't even begin until the second book, like in Enclave or The Testing. Sometimes there's an okay small-scale story that the author decides they have to expand into yet another series about war, like Article 5. Discovery writing can work out fine for a single novel, but a series has to be planned out, at least in broad strokes. Otherwise you'll wind up with too much or too little content to work with. Here's looking at you, Rothfuss. Number six, the story revolves around rebellion. Revolting against an evil regime is a tale as old as time, and there are plenty of different ways you can approach it. You can show it from all angles and make it a morally gray, complex story. You can make it a simple war story where the focus is just on the action and the villain is unimportant. You can show it from the perspective of an unremarkable civilian who gets swept up in the tide of history. You can have a protagonist who is utterly committed to the evil regime before a terrible event changes their mind. The Hunger Games went with a somewhat unique perspective. Katniss sparks off the rebellion by attempting suicide in the arena. She wasn't trying to make a statement, she was just refusing to kill her friend. Yet it created something much bigger than her, and from then on her main value to the rebellion was as a symbol of their propaganda, not as an action hero who leads the troops on the Capitol. The clones took that idea of the main character girl being unimportant and ran all the way with it. She will be a plain, ordinary girl from the slums who is still inexplicably beautiful and dislikes the government but is afraid to oppose them. Then she's just sort of important after that. Since the setting is ruled by an evil government with a 0% approval rating, the time is ripe for them to be overthrown. Early in the story there will be some sort of event that sparks enough outrage to find the convince the people to rise up like the gamers they are. Or maybe the event will come later in the story, the exact timing is unimportant. Main character girl will catch the romantic attention of someone important like in Save the Pearls, or maybe she'll just be important because the author says so, like in Matched and Article 5. If the setting has characters with some sort of superpowers like Shatter Me or The Darkest Minds, she'll have the rarest, coolest powers available, whatever those are. None of that is important, all that matters is that she will side with the rebellion by default. After all, real-world rebel groups have always been the good guys. What if the story all takes place over the course of a couple of weeks? Who cares? That's how long the fomentation, creation, and build-up of the rebel group takes before they immediately overthrow the evil rulers. Rebuilding the authoritarian regime into something better will be so easy that the story doesn't even need to talk about it. The thing about the Hunger Games is that, despite all the propaganda stuff, Katniss was still a proactive action hero. In the first book, she survived the arena through intelligence and skill, and while she was generally swept up in world events in the rest of the series, she still does things of her own volition. She still gets chances to participate in the action that drew many people to the series in the beginning. In most of the clones, the main character girl will also get caught up in the rebellion through an unlikely series of events, and she'll also join up with them as some sort of important figure. The action hero stuff will be taken out and replaced with absolutely nothing. The commentary on propaganda and the nature of celebrity will be replaced with main character girl being a, quote, inspiring leader, by which I mean she makes a speech or two that inspires the people to overthrow the evil regime. In the rare cases that the story does not revolve around rebellion, it will be about fighting some sort of mutant creatures. Zombies, things that are kind of like zombies, but not really, and... Well, no, that's about it. Things like Enclave and, to a lesser extent, Partials and the Maze Runner don't focus on the evil governments, though that's often a part of it, rather they're about fighting off the not zombies. In this case, main character girl gets to be an action hero again. Sometimes. Number seven. Rebel infighting is non-existent. Real world rebel groups are rarely homogenous. If a regime is bad, then it will make a lot of enemies, and those enemies will hate it for a hundred different reasons. Niche political interests like desire for a more democratic system, religious fundamentalism, ethnic self-determination, not starving, or any of a thousand other motives are usually behind any uprising. As a result, when the rebellion kicks off, those fighting against the regime tend to be an amalgamation of various factions. Revolutions that fail often do so because these factions are unable to get along. Successful ones either come up with some sort of compromise to share authority during and after the fighting, or they collapse into infighting right after the common enemy is gone. An exception would be the Spanish Civil War, where all the major rebel leaders were killed early on except for Francisco Franco, which helped him unite everyone behind him. Another is the Russian Civil War, where the Tsarist regime fell quickly and the Bolsheviks were able to fight off the other factions before they consolidated. In Hunger Games clones, rebels are all fighting for the exact same thing. Freedom. Yes, even the starving peasants living in slums without running water, proper food, or electricity are fighting for abstract ideas rather than tangible economic benefits. The middle classes aren't upset by their lack of representation in the current government. They want freedom. The upper classes aren't rebelling because there's a faction of them that wants to seize power for themselves. They want freedom. Like we said before, everyone is oppressed equally, so there aren't any ethnic groups looking to break off and form their own country, or religious fundamentalists looking to establish a theocracy. And of course, freedom and equality are very vague words that people disagree on the definition of and may cause friction between the various factions, both during and after the fighting. None of that here, though. Usually the rebels are all lower class, including the leaders, but that doesn't keep them from knowing exactly how to run a war. Growing up in a slum makes you an expert in the tactics of modern war, as well as the strategy, because those are the same thing, right? And after the war ends, there aren't any purges in the new government. After all, why would budding authoritarians want to get rid of violent malcontents with combat experience? There are two big reasons for all this. The first is to avoid making the story too complicated. A lot of people act as though a story being simple means it's bad, and I strongly disagree. It's just a different type of story for a different audience. There's plenty of novels out there that focus on complex political shenanigans if you're into that sort of thing, but Hunger Games clones aren't about that. They're about more straightforward depictions of good and evil. Rebel infighting would complicate that. The other is to avoid making the world seem too bleak. It's essentially saying, sure, the old regime is horrendous, but the average person is good, and they're willing to fight against injustice for themselves and others. Or maybe it's just laziness. Number eight, the characters must go to Denver at some point. In Legend, Denver is the capital of the Republic of America, and if you remember my video on how dystopian worldbuilding sucks, you'd know that it's entirely covered by a giant retractable roof to protect it from air raids rather than anti-aircraft weaponry, which would be cheaper and more effective. In The Hunger Games, the capital is strongly implied to be built on or near the ruins of Denver. The Maze Runner has a sequence in the last book where the cast heads off to Denver, one of the last cities that still functions as anything other than crumbling ruins full of totally not zombies. A few other examples also go to Denver at some point. I have no clue why this is such a common thing. Number nine, a happy ending is a must. What awaits our brave main character girl at the end of this conflict? A shattered nation without rule of law? A new authoritarian regime much like the last one? A lifetime of disability from wartime injuries combined with post-traumatic stress disorder that leads to substance abuse and suicide? Of course not. She gets to live in a newly fixed country with her new BF, exactly what she wanted the whole time. This is quite a bit different than classic dystopias, which are known for being extremely grim up until the last sentence. It's also different than The Hunger Games' ending, which was depressing, if a tad hopeful. Legend ends with everything being awesome. Enclave ends with main character girl finally settling down and not being on the verge of committing violence anymore. Divergent ends with the main character girl dead, but her man has come to terms with that, and so on. They're all either 100% happy or 90% happy. I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, having the overwhelming evil system be thoroughly defeated without any remaining vestiges causing trouble is unlikely at best. Plus, it ignores how awful war is even when the, quote, good guys win. On the other, it gives things a hopeful flair. With something like 1984, people might think that world is inevitable and give up trying to fix slash prevent it. With a crappy YA dystopia, they'll come away thinking, hell yeah, let's do this shit. It makes the point stronger, in a weird way. It says that as long as we're determined, and our enemies are idiots, there's nothing we can't overcome. We've all felt the squeeze of large institutions and those who abuse their power over us. Whether it's a boss, a shitty teacher, a cop, or a government agency, we all know that stink, and perhaps even more importantly, we know about places where other people have it worse. We all know the urge to rise up and throw off whatever yolks we wear or imagine that we're wearing. Something that shows other people doing the same thing is cathartic. It's a simple hero-villain story that feels familiar to us. The appeal isn't hard to figure out. This genre is less blatant about being wish-fulfillment than Twilight clones, mostly because they have an actual plot outside of their romantic tangles, usually. As a young lad, I read plenty of both, and I enjoyed a few Hunger Games clones. I'm still searching for the mythical good Twilight knockoff. Not to give too much credit to them, of course. I'd say only around 15% of the YA dystopias I read were good, the rest ranged from bad to tolerable. That said, the dystopia boom wouldn't have happened without Twilight. Publishers saw how much money there was in romance aimed at teenage girls and threw all their weight behind that, and when people wanted something new, they just combined the old supernatural romance stuff with the dystopian idea. The new combo was easier to market, meaning that there were more movies made, some of which were good, and some of which weren't. Here's looking at you, kid. Girls didn't have stupid action franchises aimed at them before this. Men had plenty. And that's what it comes down to. Katniss is just snake-pliskin for girls. That's my hot take. Subscribe and stuff. Thank to all patrons, including $10 up patrons, Appo Savilainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotis, Carolina Clay, Christopher Quinten, Great Griebo, Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Liza Ritakova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Microphone, Sad Martigan, Samuel Nevin, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, and Vaivictus. You guys are the best. If you want to get your name on here and get your things in other videos, vote on other videos, become patron, give, give money. I need money to live, to eat, to pay rent. I need money. Please help me out here. If you can't, then rate, comment, subscribe to channel. That's also good. Thank you for watching. 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