Let's talk Panem

[SMJB]

Panem has, according to my admittedly-half-assed calculations, about a million people and claims all of North America. There is no known record of any sort of external threat, and I imagine that with that sort of population density they'd collapse like tissue paper in any real invasion. If anyone is out there (and either Panem doesn't know about it or the government is covering it up for some reason), they either don't know or don't care that this ripe target exists, which implies that either there is no one out there or whoever is out there is too busy with their own problems to do anything about this bunch of admitted child-murderers.

There are few evident cultural ties to America--the political map has been redrawn pretty much arbitrarily, without concern for anything related to history. I think North America, the Appalachian Mountains, and the Rockies retain their name, but I can't guarantee that's not apocrypha (fanon or based on where they shot the movies or whatever), but that's about it. Between this and the small population size I have to conclude that these people, in the districts at least, are colonizers, not survivors. I speculate that those who survived Whatever-It-Was did so in some subterranean bunker underneath what is now the Capitol, and as they found they needed resources sent colonies at need to acquire the needed resources in whatever location the maps said was optimal for that purpose, hence why every district has a gimmick and why they're so spread out.

If that is true, then it seems that in all of North America there was only one set of survivors and a small number of them at that. Perhaps they kept a stock of fertilized eggs to prevent themselves getting too inbred, and that's why there's still some semblance of ethnic diversity (though no one in the books ever says so-and-so is White while so-and-so is Black, I should point out).

All of this implies a die-off of mind-boggling proportions. And then there's the low birthrate. This is never mentioned in the books or movies, but that less than a million population count comes from a date 75 years after the Dark Days and who knows how long after the founding of Panem. I must assume that there's something in the environment that's curtailing their fertility rate. Nuclear fallout, maybe? Though I don't think "mere" nuclear war could explain the all-but-total die-off of human beings, at least not without doing the same to nature. So nukes weren't the only weapons. We know Panem lost a good deal of technology, and their genetic engineering capabilities are rather exceptional--and yet, they didn't use tailored viruses or anything of the like during the Dark Days. Bad memories, perhaps?

[Esquire]

It's generally considered good form to mention the book series you're talking about.

Also, 1 million people for all of North America? That's a population density of something like one person every nine square miles. How is this a single, centralized government?

[ray245]

It's generally considered good form to mention the book series you're talking about.

Also, 1 million people for all of North America? That's a population density of something like one person every nine square miles. How is this a single, centralized government?

Apparently only a few areas is actually occupied by human presence. There is only one major urban city and 13 rural/industrial districts.

[SMJB]

It's generally considered good form to mention the book series you're talking about.

Also, 1 million people for all of North America? That's a population density of something like one person every nine square miles. How is this a single, centralized government?

I assumed we'd reached the point where enough people had heard of Panem to get the reference automatically. Sorry. (And it's The Hunger Games.)

[madd0ct0r]

it could be the area Panem 'claim' is not actually empty - you could easily loose another ten panems into the size area and they'd never make contact.

[Thanas]

A good explanation might be that large parts of the state are now rendered uninhabitable. Plus, we got one huge city using a lot of the resources on wasteful spending so that is not going to help with quality of life.

Besides, given that at least some of the districts are underdeveloped slums where food is scarce, healthcare is low and mortality/pollution are high it might not be that unreasonable for those districts to be that underdeveloped.

[Spekio]

A good explanation might be that large parts of the state are now rendered uninhabitable. Plus, we got one huge city using a lot of the resources on wasteful spending so that is not going to help with quality of life.

Besides, given that at least some of the districts are underdeveloped slums where food is scarce, healthcare is low and mortality/pollution are high it might not be that unreasonable for those districts to be that underdeveloped.

Yet people have bakeries where decorating cakes is commonplace.....


Let's no pretend a country named in-universe after "Panem et circenses" makes any sense.

[Majin Gojira]

Honestly, one of my biggest problems with the Hunger Games series was just how poorly setup the government was -- to the point where I repeatedly question their competence. Part of this is, admittedly, intentional. The Mockingjay the series is named after is a sign of that, as are many other escaped Muttations they can no longer control even if they wanted to.

Still, having a death game created for the sole purpose of punishing a sprawling underclass is just asking for trouble. It's hard to believe that it's been going on for as long as they claim.

The game at least has better set up than some other death games I've ready in recent days . . .

[Thanas]

A good explanation might be that large parts of the state are now rendered uninhabitable. Plus, we got one huge city using a lot of the resources on wasteful spending so that is not going to help with quality of life.

Besides, given that at least some of the districts are underdeveloped slums where food is scarce, healthcare is low and mortality/pollution are high it might not be that unreasonable for those districts to be that underdeveloped.

Yet people have bakeries where decorating cakes is commonplace.....

The two are not mutually exclusive.

[Spekio]

The two are not mutually exclusive.

I could explain to you how poor the world building of the author is, but fortunately Farla from dragon quill already did it.

[Thanas]

K, I'll concede that.

[Questioner]

A good explanation might be that large parts of the state are now rendered uninhabitable. Plus, we got one huge city using a lot of the resources on wasteful spending so that is not going to help with quality of life.

Besides, given that at least some of the districts are underdeveloped slums where food is scarce, healthcare is low and mortality/pollution are high it might not be that unreasonable for those districts to be that underdeveloped.

Yet people have bakeries where decorating cakes is commonplace.....

They had bakeries and cakes in Victorian England. They did not have industrial sanitation, antibiotics, vaccinations, central heating and air, industrial farming, and ecological controls.

I could explain to you how poor the world building of the author is, but fortunately Farla from dragon quill already did it.

This is bad. I mean really fucking bad. I get about a quarter of the way down the page and gave up. This isn't a breakdown of poor wordbuilding, this is a snitift. Collins referenced actual things that America was doing in Iraq at the time of writing to show the other districts were under occupation (eg can own weapons but can't be dealing in them, walling off huge areas to break up congregation and movement to make it easier to keep the peace, etc) and this writer is calling it "unrealistic".

Look, one of her criticisms is that Collins calls bears predators, and the writer insists that they are omnivores. Never mind that omnivores are still predators.

This is a heap of trash.

[Spekio]

I am typing this from my phone,so I'm keeping this succint: 1. You are a moron. 2. England was the center of an empire an an economic powerhouse, moron. 3. A work should stand on its on, so I don't care if a SHORT TERM OCCUPATION did that. The Capitol was controlling the districts for at least 75 years. It does not make sense in the story presented. 4. Bears would seek humans in the city when there is prey in the forest? Does not seem likely.

[FaxModem1]

This is where things like Unreliable Narrator comes into play, as the books only follow Katniss's perspective. Readers have wondered if Katniss is lying, incorrect, or just plain wrong about some things. We have the very real possibility that Katniss is an idiot on how some things work in the world, considering she's a rather uneducated teenager in a hick mining town.

[Simon_Jester]

She should, at a minimum, be well informed about the basic necessities and conditions of her own life. Teenagers today are often sheltered and ignorant about how to survive in the adult world, but they can afford to be because they have functional parents in a society rich enough that the average adolescent goofs off until some time in their late teens or early twenties.

Teenagers in a subsistence economy not so much. They are physically able-bodied, they will be expected to contribute labor, and to act sensibly and responsibly. Generally they get beaten on until they do so.

[FaxModem1]

Well, yes, she should know how to make cash or get enough food for her family to survive, but she wouldn't be an expert on District 12's politics or that of Panem or the Capitol, or the history of their nation. So when she gives us reasons for the Hunger Games or why things are done, she might be going with the reasons given to her or her best guess, not what is factual or the real reason.

[Questioner]

I am typing this from my phone,so I'm keeping this succint: 1. You are a moron. 2. England was the center of an empire an an economic powerhouse, moron. 3. A work should stand on its on, so I don't care if a SHORT TERM OCCUPATION did that. The Capitol was controlling the districts for at least 75 years. It does not make sense in the story presented. 4. Bears would seek humans in the city when there is prey in the forest? Does not seem likely.

None of this addresses my points. Concession accepted.

[Thanas]

None of this addresses my points. Concession accepted.

Oh God, don't be one of those newbs.

[Spekio]

None of this addresses my points. Concession accepted.

Please point out wich point I did not adress.

[Questioner]

None of this addresses my points. Concession accepted.

Oh God, don't be one of those newbs.

I've been here longer then you Thanas. I just came back to ask Publius some questions via PM, and couldn't remember my old password.

None of this addresses my points. Concession accepted.

Please point out wich point I did not adress.

Um, all of them? You decided to scream about me being a moron instead of responding to anything. That England was also the seat of empire has nothing to do with the fact that the impoverished classes not benefiting from the gains of imperialism were able to provide sufficient demand to support bakeries. Never mind that you had bakeries and cakes in many earlier and poorer societies, including those under the yoke of empire. You are defending the claim that occupiers don't wall off the population to control it in despite of real world examples, and trying to move the goalposts by claiming that suppressing movement somehow becomes less effective over time and thus don't make sense (a claim you didn't bother to support, and one belied by the fact that we have examples of occupations for decades doing the same eg Israel vs the West Bank, Soviet movement controls of the occupied Eastern states). You are defending her claim that being an omnivore and a predator are mutually exclusive by throwing up irrelevant crap about "bears won't go into the city" (never mind that bears routinely intrude on human space)

And more to the point, it is all a load of crap. This "criticism" is akin to complaining that The Giver is terrible because no one person could remember all of human history. The facts of the world are established and used in a consistent and logical way. Shrieking about "omnivores aren't predators!", "occupiers don't build walls!" and "owning a weapon but not being allowed to traffic in arms doesn't make sense!" doesn't change that. Even if those criticisms were true (and they aren't) so long as the world's rules are followed through you get a coherent world. FTL is impossible, that doesn't make any space opera using it have "bad worldbuilding".

Panem is the Naughty Aughts with the serial numbers filed off so that Collins can criticize our use of celebritainment to distract from real problems, criticize the revolutionary mindset, and point out that shifting parties is not enough to correct fundamental problems. Of course the world building works.

[Thanas]

None of this addresses my points. Concession accepted.

Oh God, don't be one of those newbs.

I've been here longer then you Thanas. I just came back to ask Publius some questions via PM, and couldn't remember my old password.

So? Don't be one of those guys.

[Crayz9000]

Um, all of them? You decided to scream about me being a moron instead of responding to anything. That England was also the seat of empire has nothing to do with the fact that the impoverished classes not benefiting from the gains of imperialism were able to provide sufficient demand to support bakeries. Never mind that you had bakeries and cakes in many earlier and poorer societies, including those under the yoke of empire. You are defending the claim that occupiers don't wall off the population to control it in despite of real world examples, and trying to move the goalposts by claiming that suppressing movement somehow becomes less effective over time and thus don't make sense (a claim you didn't bother to support, and one belied by the fact that we have examples of occupations for decades doing the same eg Israel vs the West Bank, Soviet movement controls of the occupied Eastern states). You are defending her claim that being an omnivore and a predator are mutually exclusive by throwing up irrelevant crap about "bears won't go into the city" (never mind that bears routinely intrude on human space)

And more to the point, it is all a load of crap. This "criticism" is akin to complaining that The Giver is terrible because no one person could remember all of human history. The facts of the world are established and used in a consistent and logical way. Shrieking about "omnivores aren't predators!", "occupiers don't build walls!" and "owning a weapon but not being allowed to traffic in arms doesn't make sense!" doesn't change that. Even if those criticisms were true (and they aren't) so long as the world's rules are followed through you get a coherent world. FTL is impossible, that doesn't make any space opera using it have "bad worldbuilding".

Panem is the Naughty Aughts with the serial numbers filed off so that Collins can criticize our use of celebritainment to distract from real problems, criticize the revolutionary mindset, and point out that shifting parties is not enough to correct fundamental problems. Of course the world building works.

I completely understand Collins' intended use of the story. She just failed in an epic way at actually setting up the backstory in a way that doesn't reek of a strawman.

Farla had some good points. That he messed up on some does not in any way detract from the rest.

Consider his point about dairy goats. Having had a goat myself, I can tell you that it's a lot of work to get milk from one, and the rest of the time it's just sitting there, eating everything in sight. Not a good thing when you're in an artificial slum out in what used to be Kentucky (or somewhere near the Appalacians anyway) and prohibited from going into the woods because... arbitrary reasons?

In short, Collins is a hack writer who wanted to send a message to society and be ranked up with Orwell and other visionaries. It's just that her plot was so contrived that she had to make an equally contrived backstory to explain it, and that is why I think she failed.

I have read the book. I also couldn't stop facepalming as I read it. The movie wasn't much better. I have no plans to read the sequels; putting myself through that once was bad enough. I may watch the sequels to riff them, but I will not spend the money to see them in a theater, or even a rental for that matter.

[Zwinmar]

Have to agree there. The books would have made far more sense if it was set in the Fallout universe. There is no real background as to why things came to be and, as such, it is not internally consistent.

[Guardsman Bass]

I could see a society like Panem surviving for a while, particularly in the absence of external opposition. There have been multiple societies in history where part of the population lived well off of the unfree labor of others, and several societies that exist today where a small population of people live off the labor of tons more people with little in the way of protected rights (the techno-feudalistic Persian Gulf countries). The Capital's citizens are the equivalent of the aristocracy/slave-owners/party elite, living well even if the overall society is significantly poorer than it otherwise could be. Even with that, Panem doesn't entirely work in-universe, and it not surprisingly collapses a mere 75 years into the current societal set-up. That's nothing in historical terms, short enough that there would probably be Capital citizens who were Katniss's age when the Hunger Games began who would be alive 75 years later (especially with the Capital's superior medical treatment).

As for the Dragon Quill article, it misses the point on a couple of things. Some of it is just pedantic - come on, you're criticizing the world-building because Collins had wild apples and strawberries? You could always just hand-wave that and say that they're "feral" varieties that survived the disruptions that led to the fall of the US and rise of Panem. And the whole "fence keeps the predators" out is pretty obviously bullshit propaganda - it was built to keep District 12 people from fleeing off into the woods, but since few of them do (and the sporadic wild foods brought back help to keep the peace), the Capital generally doesn't appear to give a shit if people go beyond it now and then. If they started fleeing en masse, or the outside gathering became too blatant, they'd crack down and actually start patrolling the fence.

[Covenant]

Well, part of the issue with the things like Apples and Strawberries is that it doesn't make any sense on really any level, and it should be an educational moment for any aspiring author to see why less is more when you're not sure about what you're writing. The author might not know much about apples, strawberries, or even the Appalachian region much, but a lot of other people do and will be having headaches from reading things that are just entirely incongruous.

Apple trees in a dense tall forest don't work no matter if they're feral or not, and big-berry cultivars are not hardy or aggressive enough to survive in a situation like this, though they could be wild versions--which again do not make sense given the "gallon" of berries they harvested. It is possible that the native Appalachian strawberry is what's being spoken of here, but that's what's called a "Frontier Plant" and it grows where forests have been reduced by chopping or burning, and does not thrive IN the forest except in tiny patches... not much more than a handful, maybe. Now, if the "forest" is actually less a forest and more a series of meadows with lots of plains between them, you could have a strawberry field with enough room to get a gallon. But if that's the case you could just burn MORE of the forest and turn an entire hillside into red berries. I like to pick wild berries in the forested regions near me so that kind of thing stuck out as annoying and contrary to the tone of "starvation and cold" that seem to justify the basis of the setting. It's like someone reversing the phase polarity or something. It's nonsense writing with real words and real meanings that are ignored.

I mean, the whole setup is about food and warmth (I presume that "oil" gained from the tribute slips refers to some kind of heating oil and not a cooking oil) and yet they are next to a source of abundant food and warmth, and with things like fish, game, blackberries and strawberries being mentioned its not even BAD food. You could turn this food into refined products with just a little work and sell that, keep the rest, and survive just fine.

You also could transplant some of the berry bushes and grow your own. If the apples are feral then why not grow your own apples too? It just all makes for more questions, becomes confusing, and undermines things in the text. The author should be criticized for it a bit because it would have been easier to NOT talk about berries, apples, and so forth. Authors should do a little bit of research or just send a mail out to someone who knows. Takes 10 seconds.

While the thing about "fence being propaganda" only works if we start ignoring parts of what our narrator is saying in order to defend the book's internal consistency. I would call that working too hard to defend an author from their own mistakes.

Plus, we hear not just that people "say" there are animals out there, but Katniss claims that the animals used to roam the streets and cause problems for the people. From the way it is described it almost sounds like it was something she had been aware of, and if not she puts a great deal of faith in the claims that animals used to stalk the streets. Her father, being a hunter, and she being a hunter now too, should be people who would know better than the average person and have a greater degree of skepticism if they saw no animals out there. She seems to believe that there are predators, and she has had experience with at least a Lynx and knows that wild dog attacks do happen. I see no reason to believe the animal population to be propaganda, especially when we see them eating it and dog meat being a not-uncommon element of the economy.

Why going into the woods is considered "poaching" rather than "just stupid and don't do it or you'll get rabies and die" makes no sense. The author chose to say the woods are horribly dangerous, there's a fence to make it safe, and yet going outside the fence is illegal and punishable and harvesting meat from it is poaching? And again, there's apples? In a forest?

It creates a very problematic situation. I either believe the narrator, and let the narrator's descriptions build the world for me, or I refuse to believe the ridiculous things being told to me (despite there not being any evidence from other characters or events for me to believe that the narrator is a total bullshit artist) and invent a world that makes sense. Even if I choose to question some actions, like selling fish for bread, I should not have to question the reality of the world being presented to me and not hold the author somewhat accountable.