I Suddenly Remembered My Charlemagne

(This is totally random, but I've been thinking about it all week. Forestry Archaeology, ladies and gents: great for thinking, bad for timely lj posting.)

I've now seen quite a few of those "It gets better" shorts. And most of them made me cry. In the case of Tim Gunn's, I had to STOP WATCHING IT halfway through, because I was so upset that people have to go through crap like that. (Obviously, I knew people go through crap like that all the time, but it was TIM FREAKING GUNN and I was UNPREPARED.)

But there's this little voice in the back of my head that just doesn't buy it. And the other day I figured out why.

I hate Sue Sylvester. This is not a secret. For some reason I cannot comprehend, Sue Sylvester is the most popular character on Glee. She might even be the most popular character on TV right now (possible exception for Eric Northman, but probably not, since not enough people watch the show). Sue Sylvester is mean. She's mean to her colleagues, she's mean to her boss, and she's mean to children.

Sue Sylvester is a bully. And she is one of the most popular women on television. Where is Jane Lynch's "It gets better"? Why has she not chimed in to say "Sue Sylvester is a terrible woman. You should all spend every day of your lives trying not to be her, and praying you never meet anyone like her."? How, in this time when we are supposed to be so tolerant and encouraging and kind, can this character be held in such regard?

It drives me crazy. I can only hope it gets better.


(I am leaving this post public for now, in case it's worth linking, but at the first sign of idiocy, I'm shutting it down.)

As I expected (and feared), TWoP posted a thread about how reality TV shows would be improved if they incorporated elements of The Hunger Games. Some day, I will learn my lesson with this website, I promise. ;)

Anyway, in the comments of the post, someone commented rather harshly about Suzanne Collins having "cribbed" her ideas from Battle Royale, and how it was so obvious, and that it would be better if she just admitted it. I was already aware that Battle Royale existed (when I recced the books to speedy_leen, she got her roommates to read it by saying that they were similar), but the comment made me angry, so I did some more research.

Collins claims to have had the idea based on the myth of Theseus, wherein Athens is required to send 14 children ("children") to Crete every year so that the Minotaur can eat them. It makes sense when extended through the book. In Battle Royale, the "death match" is a form of social control. In The Hunger Games, it's the enforcement of abject terror and misery. I think that difference is small, but it's also key.

In any case, I do believe that it's entirely possible for Collins to have written the entire thing without ever having heard of Battle Royale. For starters, BR was only translated into English in 2003. The Hunger Games was first published in 2008, but she was probably working on it for longer than that.

Let me give you some personal examples. When I wrote the first draft of "The Stone Thief", I called the city Valdemaar. On December 1st, I found out that Valdemar is actually a country written about my Mercedes Lackey. I've read some of ML's stuff, but not those books. And when I typed Valdemaar the first time, I just threw letters on the keyboard until I saw something I liked! Similarly, I have thought of my "untitled wing!fic" as "Knife" from the very beginning. When I wrote the short story, I thought the name was too obvious, but now that it's novel-sized, it works out. I didn't meet rj_anderson until months later.

There's also a chance that one of Collins's test readers had read/heard of Battle Royale and mentioned it to her, and then she purposefully stayed away from it. I have yet to read Tamora Pierce's "Melting Stones" because I am currently writing books about people who do magic with stone. I've signed that book out of the library THREE TIMES and talked myself out of it on each occasion.

I suppose my point is this: there is a somewhat limited pool of ideas out there, and most of them come from older myths and legends anyway. It's the plotting and the character arc that make the story, and these are two areas in which Suzanne Collins excelled. No one writes in a vacuum, but it is possible to create a vacuum around you on purpose when you're writing. I'm about as unprofessional as it gets, but when I am writing I a) stop watching Legend of the Seeker (on account of it being fantasy), and b) stop reading Tamora Pierce (WHICH IS HARD TO DO!). Mostly, I just wish people would THINK before they talk about stuff on the internet.