Looking at The Hunger Games through the Youth Lens

How the characters in the book, 'The Hunger Games' by Suzanne Collins experience being teenagers is very different from how being a teenager is experienced by American teenagers today.

American teenagers for one have many more opportunities than the teenagers in 'The Hunger Games'. The worries that the teens in 'The Hunger Games' are forced to focus on are so far removed from those that effect a teenager in this day and age that there is just no way that experiences are anywhere near the same. The Hunger Games teenagers do not fit within what America's concept of being a teenager involves today. It is potentially because of a lack of opportunity, and most likely also that culture is something that is not innate but is developed. How we treat each other, treat various stages- treat different individuals or groups of individuals is not something that people are just born completely knowing how to do in a well defined way. While biology does have influence and probably does help to point a group or individual in one direction- biological influence is inexact enough that it cannot create a strictly organized culture on its own. People are not biologically homogeneous- the experience of adolescence and the influence that genes have on that experience probably exists on some sort of complicated spectrum. Not every teenager makes the same choices, bad or good, so while they might be in some ways biologically predisposed to leaning towards a particular direction, influenced by that, the thought, the very rigid classification of just what being a teenager involves that America has created- is kind of problematic and kind of close minded in my opinion.

The characters in the Hunger Games- NOT influenced by American culture- are more left to rely upon their own instincts- their own personal need for survival. That takes precedence. Because they are focused on their own individual survival, there really has not been much time- or... togetherness, to condense a singular idea of what adolescence is. The characters are left on their own to develop- the biological changes that are going on within them influencing them to some extent- but not enough where they become almost FORCED to make some of the decisions that we consider standard for teenagers. Not enough to be able to point to a creation of an individual culture for teenagers- one that involves things that cannot be found in either older or younger individuals or groups. They make do- developing with what they have- and what that leads to is a very different teenage culture and personal development than the ideas we have created.

Anyways. The teenagers in 'The Hunger Games' experience their teenage experience differently than we do. This points to a lot of our ideas of being a teenager being a bit too... at the very least being a bit too narrow.