The Hunger Games REALLY is a rip-off of a Battle Royale, and a bad one at that.

By anchor3239

Yeah, spoilers and all that—I've read both of them, and not just once. People keep waving off the “it’s a rip-off” idea by going, “Well, the whole kids killing each other thing isn’t original anyway,” like it’s already in stuff such as *Lord of the Flies*, *The Long Walk*, or even older myths. Sure, the broad idea exists. But that’s not actually where the similarities end. Because when you look at *how* the story is set up, it lines up way too closely. In an alternate/history kind of dystopia, you’ve got a fascist-ish government that puts teenagers through a yearly event—randomly selected, kidnapped, taken somewhere secret, and forced to fight until only one is left alive. The whole point is to scare everyone, make them distrust each other, and stop any rebellion. They hand the kids random weapons, the organizers are watching the whole time, and the environment is basically rigged to push them into each other—like sections of the “arena” being shut off or made way more dangerous. And there are even bets placed externally. Same kind of cast too: a boy and a girl, with one of them carrying most of the POV. They’ve got that survivor/previous victim helper vibe with a ton of rage built up against the government. There’s also a long-running secret crush/love thing between the supporting protagonist and the main one, and the main character is all mixed up—has some interest elsewhere, but it kind of shifts toward the other kid without ever going fully into “open love.” Then there’s the injury subplot with the leg getting messed up and needing antibiotics fast. And later, there’s that whole communication idea using fires and bird calls (even though the helper character dies pretty soon after). Meanwhile the main antagonists are also a boy and a girl, with the girl being written as kind of nasty and the boy as this almost unbeatable war-machine type who finally goes down last after a brutal fight. And the ending? The protagonists survive by messing with the game rules, but that immediately makes the government label them as dangerous rebels and come after them. So if I just asked you to tell me what specific book I’m talking about… could you actually guess it? If not, that’s kind of the point. Also, if someone like Tarantino or HBO tried to do a big American remake of *Battle Royale*, would people really pretend nobody would call it a lazy ripoff of *The Hunger Games*? Be real. Even the movie version of *BR* has the game being televised like it’s a real TV show, broadcast yearly as punishment for rebellious teens. There’s no way Collins didn’t notice that when she was writing. At the very least she probably looked up “kids killing kids in dystopia” or whatever. And it wouldn’t even bother me as much if she admitted it and owned her influences like Takami does (he’s open about inspiration). But instead she leans hard on the idea that it came from videogames and the Iraq War and that *THG* is “more about rebellion than survival,” even though *BR* also has rebellion stuff and feels more grounded and adult about it. Basically, if someone genuinely thinks Collins didn’t take from *Battle Royale*, they either didn’t read it closely—or they’re just trying not to see it.