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Reviewers praised the action, characters and violence

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Violence? It gets praised for violence? Is that a category worthy of praise now? "Thank you for submitting to the Magazine of Fantasy and Fairy Lights. I loved the story, the characterisation really got to me, the idea behind it was brilliant and you excelled in action. But I'll have to reject you story because it doesn't have any violence."

(Having not read the story, and it may be that the theme was anti-violence, but wouldn't wiki have made that distinction.)

Are we contributing to this by what we now expect in the story? Advice like "torture your character", does that heighten expectation towards violence? (Yes, I know, it's alogorical, but even the types of metaphores we use contribution to expectations.)

I walked into a store in the middle of a shopping mall this week - a type of store that wouldn't have existed twenty years ago when I was in the target agegroup. (Ok, it was a computer games store and its intended audience is teenagers.) About 80% was dedicated to violence, a lot of it explicit. If you had told me 20 years ago that we would have stores that encourage and demonstrate interactive violence, I'm not sure I would have believed you.

So, yes, violence in media is more so the norm in America than any other country I've been to. We are a country that often glorifies warfare and those involved in it to the extent that those who question it are labeled 'unpatriotic'. War is seems to be a necessary evil sometimes, but I think certain attitudes in America cast it in an inappropriate light.

I read an interesting Times/CNN review (link below). In a nutshell, it seems like the Hunger Games scenario is the logical conclusion to reality TV, where kids are the stars in a spectacle of violence. The reviewer effusively praises the book, despite the violence, seeing it as a work of art, and mentions other admirers, Stephen King and Stephanie Meyers (who don't necessarily admire each other).

The reviewer used a scene where a character is stung to death by hornets. Somehow, the writing transcended the violence, according to the reviewer, in so many words.

I've read elsewhere that dystopian novels are in with the YA crowd, now. However, I have little interest and writing such stories if the focus is on violence. In historical settings, such as war, some violence is appropriate, even if only done by inference. Otherwise, you leave the impression (as many video games give) that violence has no consequences.

That said, I am presently reading Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, and quite enjoying it (about halfway through). It's an alt-history WWI steampunk story. There are deaths in this war story, which are described obliquely, so far. My motivation for reading it is that I'm considering doing a steampunk-ish story in an entirely different setting.

It may be worth noting, though, that the Final Destination movies were generally reviewed not so much for story and character, but whether the causes of death were inventive enough. Unfortunately, that seems to be enough to get someone to pay for a ticket.

Unlike video games, whose target audience is the 35 year old male with expendable cash, Hunger Games is marketed as a Young Adult book. I have seen a trend in YA books to depict "tough as nails" girls who don't shy away from killing. Graceling is another book that comes to mind. The protagonist in that book was a rather angry and violent individual.

If you watch Youtube reviews of YA books often the teen reviewers praise the violence. They perceive it as some sort of neo-feminist empowerment, like Rapunzel and her frying pan in the latest Disney movie Tangled.

To me this is just recycled Waif Fu.

There's lots of entertaining escapist fiction in which characters engage in violence, sexual promiscuity and risk taking and are only rewarded for that behavior. This is not a new development, or a sign of declining moral values. It's always been that way. Humanity has always dreamed of an ice cream sundae with whipped cream on top, without the bother of feeding the cows, mucking out the stables, and birthing the calves.

That's one kind of fantasy, and I think it is more or less harmless as long as we don't confuse it with reality. But that's not the kind of fantasy story that sticks with you. The ones that stick with you are the ones that tell you life is about making choices that matter. If choices are to matter, they must have consequences both good and bad. So it's not that depicting, say, inconsequential sexual promiscuity in fiction is bad morality. It's bad storytelling, or at the very least inefficient. If a piece of a story doesn't accomplish something, it's wasted space.

I think Ender's Game is an interesting boundary case. Some have said it is a story about violence without negative consequences. I think that criticism misses the point. Even without taking later Ender stories into account, Ender's Game is not a story that glorifies violence; it is a thought experiment about the nature of moral accountability. We can take the elaborate ruses which rob Ender of moral agency in his actions at face value, but that misses the very real point that this *was* a kind of robbery.

It's much more bleak, depressing, and psychological than I expected.

They are all fantastic books. However, having read them, I'm now a passionate advocate AGAINST reading them for younger kids. A lot of times a popular book (Twilight, for ex) will pop and many younger will want to read it even though it's written with an older audience in mind. Younger people will read the book and either not get it, or get bored, or otherwise find that it's not for them. The problem with Hunger Games is that the first book might be okay for many younger readers (violence notwithstanding, since there is a fair amount of it), but the series goes on to get progressively dark, the main characters suffer extreme psychological damage at the hands of others (adults) and I find that to be a bit hard for younger kids (my personal recommendation is for 13 and up, but only those mature readers who are really comfortable with dark themes and content.)

Another reason you should read the book is because I see a pretty big misconception in this thread. The entire book is an indictment AGAINST violence, war, fighting, conflict, strife, particularly the contrived sort. While the author doesn't draw specific parallels to today's political environment, it's there underneath for those who look for it.

The fact is, to criticize war and killing and violence, the author had to dramatize it. Or more accurately, THIS author must have felt she had to dramatize it.

It makes for an extremely compelling story, one that is hard to put down. It's worth your time, particularly if you plan to try to market a novel in children's lit anytime soon, as this is what all the editors are talking about.

The violence in the books is not gratuitous nor is it as excessive as many movies. I didn't think it was done irresponsibly, but as Kayti said, it is not for a younger audience.

I have read more violent stories where the violence does seem excessive and even glorified like Terry Goodkinds Sword of Truth series and the Eragon Inheritance series.

So I don't know why Hunger Games gets so much criticism for being violent. Is it because it is more marketed to girls instead of boys?

I've read HUNGER GAMES and agree that it is a story against violence, but it is also very violent. I have heard enough about the sequels, however, that I don't know if I want to read them. HUNGER GAMES was gut-wrenching enough, thank you very much.

Edited to add:

I have also read GRACELING, and I submit that it is not as violent as HUNGER GAMES. It's a book about someone who believes her "talent" is to kill people, but she doesn't enjoy having to do that, and she learns, in the course of the story, that killing people is not her "talent," but something else, something misunderstood. And when she learns that, her whole approach to things changes. I'd read a sequel to GRACELING gladly (and in fact, I have read one, sort of--though it's set in a different part of the world and only has a tiny bit of overlap).

1) Any more people dying today in movies and TV than in the golden age westerns and pulp mags?

2) If there is more in media, does it raise the sum total of societal violence? For example, is there more real violence now than when boxing was something church groups practiced and everyone tuned into the championship bouts?

3) What are the violence ratings of a wide array of YA books? It seems to me that what we have today that we didn't even a decade or two ago is a wild multiplication of market segments. I expect that to continue. A few decades ago we had relatively fewer gate keepers. A few movie and TV studios with strict FCC controls. Then came cable and sattelite. Now the erevolution. I'm confident some of these markets will become incredibly violent. But will the violence dominate all segments or just a minority?

4) As for violence as a editorial mandate, I can certainly see some lines, as they develop for specific market segments, doing just that. Just as some romance lines currently mandate you have sex scenes of a certain type in them.

Just my 2 cents...

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Going back to Brendan's point, it is rather troubling that certain books, movies and video games actually get praised for their violence. Lately, it does appear to be a selling point and desired by consumers.

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Is it really troubling, or just the natural extension of relaxed censorship? And is that so awful? There has always been a certain amount of entertainment from the uber-real or the I-can't-believe-they-just-did-that type of explosion, joke, or comment. It doesn't seem all that much different to me than allowing more market-based censorship w.r.t violence, sex, or language.

I recently played Fallout: New Vegas, and absolutely loved it. Part of the enjoyment certainly comes from engaging in acts I would never do in real life (a bigger part comes from the incredible writing and voice-acting), and I don't see that as such a problem. You can even gain a "perk," a special ability, that causes more violent explosions, so that half the time when I shot one of the Ceasar's Legion slavers, their entire body exploded in a shower of gore. It never got old, though sadly I was forced to incinerate Ceasar himself into a pile of ashes b/c I had to use a different weapon to beat all his guards.

The US definitely has some absurd contradictions in what it considers obscene when measuring violence versus other "dirty" things, but I'm not particularly concerned about the proliferation of violence in entertainment. As mentioned earlier in the board, it's quite possible that we simply have more of that in digital form, or are more inclined to put it into stories, than we did in the past. On the other hand, I've never attended a real boxing match, and don't actually know anyone that has. Have we lost violence or just moved it?

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So, like Brendan asked, is violence a prerequisite for books now? Are a good story, good characterization, and good prose no longer enough? Must a writer include violence to a story in order to get noticed?

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Violence isn't a prerequisite at all, but you have to have conflict. Speculative fiction lends itself to great battles, but there are certainly great stories almost devoid of them. Movies are easier to remember for me, and off the top of my head Philadelphia comes to mind (Tom Hanks as a gay AIDS patient suing his old employer for discrimination). I don't think there was any actual fisticuffs in the film. There are plenty of books that thrill in other ways.

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“In old-fashioned melodramas, the jeopardy was often grotesque — the hero was tied to a log heading into the sawmill; the heroine was bound to the railroad tracks as the train approached. But the audience eventually realized that there was no chance (in those days) that the storyteller would ever allow the hero to be cut to ribbons by the saw, or the heroine to be spattered along the tracks by the train. Contemporary standards of decorum simply did not allow such things to be shown in a story.”

“Writers of melodrama, aware that grotesque jeopardy had finally become unbelievable — and therefore laughable — switched tactics. Instead of trying to find ever-more-horrible threats, they used very simple threats, but they made them come true.”

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