Primrose Everdeen, sister of Hunger Games trilogy protagonist Katniss Everdeen, was killed using similar tactics to those employed in some U.S. drone missile strikes

Note: This post discusses plot points from the Hunger Games trilogy, Harry Potter, and Song of Ice and Fires series.

The death of Katniss’ sister Prim is the emotional climax of the Hunger Games trilogy: She dies a martyr, caught in a wave of explosives designed to target first-responders while working as a medic on the front lines of the final clash between the rebellion and the government in the Capital City. While there’s some dispute about who was behind her death, and whether it was necessary, there is no question left in most readers mind’s that the tactic used was monstrous. And yet outside the realm of young adult fiction, U.S. drone strikes uses a very similar tactic known as the “double tap,” against terror targets.

A joint report from Stanford/NYU on U.S. Drone policy released in September noted:

“There is now significant evidence that the US has repeatedly engaged in a practice sometimes referred to as “double tap,” in which a targeted strike site is hit multiple times in relatively quick succession. Evidence also indicates that such secondary strikes have killed and maimed first responders coming to the rescue of those injured in the first strike.

The same pattern emerged in @dronestream’s tweets of U.S. drone strikes from 2002-2012. So, while whether or not the double tap is official U.S. policy remains unclear due to the secrecy surrounding much of the U.S. drone policy, all of the evidence suggests the U.S. repeatedly employed a tactic that results in first-responder casualties. And it’s not just a questionable tactic: UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings Christof Heyns calls the second strike in a double tap akin to a war crime. But while there are efforts to bring armed drone strikes “out of the shadows” for a larger conversation and widespread disapproval of U.S. strikes in the global community, there’s no sign of major changes to U.S. drone strike strategies on the horizon.

Of course, it’s not hard to understand why it’s easier to see the inhumanity of using tactics that hit first responders when the person in question is the protagonist of your favorite series’ sister (whose protection was the catalyst for the entire trilogy’s plot) than when those rescuers are people you’ve never heard of half a world away. By its very nature literature builds empathetic bonds between readers and sympathetic characters; we get to know them, care about them, and mourn for them if they’re lost. But literature can also explore our own humanity and help us have challenging discussions about the morality of the world we live in and the policies formalizing that morality.

And “double tap” is just one of many examples of the disconnect between the ideal morality we hold high (and try to teach our youth through young adult fiction) and the policies that define our culture. In the Harry Potter series using the torture curse, Cruciatus, carries one of the harshest penalties in the Wizarding world (though one that doesn’t appear to apply to our protagonist when he uses it in the name of good). But in our real world, the U.S. government used extraordinary rendition tactics a European Court recently said “amounted to torture” against a terror suspect and relied on “enhanced interrogation tactics,” the nasty euphemism for torture, throughout much of the war on terror.

Straying out of young adult fiction, A Song of Ice and Fire’s Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane is a brutal character living in a brutal world, but one of his most well known atrocities is the murder of two royal children during the collapse of House Targaryen. Even in this context, the moral characters such as Ned Stark think of the murder of the children (and the rape of their mother) as an ugly stain on Robert Baratheon’s rebellion, even if they acknowledge it as politically expedient. In our real world, most people’s gut reaction is that there is no context when the wholesale slaughter of children can be justified. And yet there are rumblings that children are being considered legitimate targets by U.S. forces in Afghanistan after a current military officer was quoted in a piece published in The Military Times titled “Some Afghan Children Aren’t Bystanders.”

There’s no question that these characters, and these bad acts, all provoke powerful moral reactions in readers. But it’s not clear yet whether these stories shape their fans’ opinions off the page as well as on it. As a generation of young adults grows up both on protracted American involvement in ugly conflicts abroad and fiction that tries to outline moral laws of war, it’ll be fascinating to see whether their moral imaginations stay fired after they close books and walk out of movie screenings.

A number of people have passed along Sarah Mesle’s essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books which argues that our recent young adult novels have failed to serve boys particularly well. The essay’s occasioned a number of thoughtful responses, particularly Malinda Lo’s argument that Mesle’s peddling a rather suspicious idea of an essential and inherent masculinity that we ought to be seeking narrative support for. While I’m firmly in Lo’s camp in believing that the strength of young adult fiction is not that it can teach boys or girls a sole way to be men and women, but to offer multiple and affirming ways to shape those identities, I do think there’s something to be said for a question Mesle is asking about whether we’re serving boys well, whether in the way that she imagines, or the way Lo posits. Mesle writes:

The contemporary uncertainty towards young men snaps into focus when we compare recent texts to their literary ancestors — nineteenth-century novels for young readers. Hope Leslie, Jo’s Boys, Northwood, The Lamplighter: these novels heralded the end of boyhood as a happy ending, the beginning of a triumphant journey into a powerful manhood. But today’s YA boys approach their manhood with trepidation. And they should. The adult men who populate YA fictional worlds are often careless, corrupt, incompetent — sometimes even cruel — and only rarely kind.

I agree that boys and young men need good literary role models as much as girls and young women do, and that in our conversations about how to create great female characters, we don’t often have corresponding discussions about how to serve boys with the same intelligence and complexity. Some of that is because there already exist a great many excellent stories about deeply textured young men—having your needs met first has its benefits. But I also wonder if some of what’s at stake here is not that we aren’t creating great stories that foreground the transition from boyhood into manhood. It’s that some of those stories exist, but they’re told through young women’s eyes and from young women’s perspectives that we haven’t yet trained boys to embrace and share.

In much of the classic young adult literature I read as a child, I learned to see myself as boys and men would see me. In The Giver, Lois Lowry’s story of a dystopia, I saw Fiona, a gentle a girl who was blind to the fact that her care for the elderly involved learning to euthanize the oldest among them, and whose ignorance was a source of great pain for Jonas, the novel’s main character. In The Outsiders, Ponyboy’s realization that Cherry Valance’s status as a Soc doesn’t define her as a person guided my interactions with some of the more popular girls who became my friends in middle school and high school. As an ambitious girl on a largely female policy debate team, I hoped my teammates would see me like Petra Arkanian, the only girl good enough to fight alongside Ender Wiggin in Orson Scott Card’s alien invasion novel Ender’s Game. And as an irrepressible nerd, I both hoped and feared that I would end up like Harry Potter‘s Hermoine Granger.

It’s not a bad thing to learn about yourself from how others see you, as long as that’s not the only opportunity you’re given to examine yourself. In fact, it’s one I think more boys should have. So often, male perspectives in these situations are treated like they’re a default norm, while books with female main characters are assumed to be for girls rather than aimed at and available to everyone.
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I suppose Joel Stein thinks he’s being rather clever and sophisticated in his riff for the New York Times about why grown-ups shouldn’t read literature aimed at young adults (something he conflates with picture books). He sniffs:

I appreciate that adults occasionally watch Pixar movies or play video games. That’s fine. Those media don’t require much of your brains. Books are one of our few chances to learn. There’s a reason my teachers didn’t assign me to go home and play three hours of Donkey Kong. I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

Where to begin? First, with a bit of history. Adolesence as we understand it is a rather new invention, and more to the point, the idea of literature aimed squarely at children or at young adults is a relatively new phenomenon in narrative fiction. The first picture books begin trickling out in the 1600s as a combination of instructional or pleasurable reading. And the distinction between children’s, young adult, and plain literature doesn’t come until 1802 when British critic Sarah Trimmer proposed two categories of books, one for those younger than 14, another for literature specifically aimed at those between the ages of 14 and 21, a time when children transitioned into formal adulthood. In other words, those 3,000 years of fiction include an awful lot of writing intended for audiences of mixed ages, whether it’s Jane Austen’s novels or lives of saints, which can be decidedly R-rated.

Second, the ideas that children and young adults are only capable of digesting mush, or that the only way to discuss sophisticated themes is to include explicit sex and violence are pure hogwash. Young people are capable of fairly sophisticated reasoning, of empathy, and even of significant evil, and many of them can rise to meet fairly high bars as readers. A series like the Hunger Games franchise can keep Katniss a virgin throughout the majority of the three books and still communicate the horror of surrendering your sexual and romantic autonomy. Harry Potter may be the first encounter a generation of readers has with the evils of torture and nasty class bias. Tamora Pierce’s Provost’s Dog series is an unflinching exploration of crime and poverty. Simply because these novels are also appropriate for younger readers doesn’t mean the ideas in them are stupid or the prose is unworthy. Not all things written for younger readers are masterpieces, of course. But there’s plenty of bad trash, insipid prose, and deeply stupid ideas in books written for adults. Joel Stein is welcome to it.

The bridge is yours (and apologies for yesterday, it has been busy!).

-The hats of Downton Abbey.

-Todd VanDerWeff defends slow television.

-Honest posters for Oscar movies.

-I adore this Hunger Games movie tie-in.

-This is so true, and so good, and so sad:

Tyler Perry Expands His Fan Base With New Films About Sassy, Chinese Grandmother

In a piece checking in with some of the more flagrantly ridiculous reality show stars of recent years, Spencer and Heidi Pratt, of The Hills notoriety, Kate Arthur seems to confirm that the pair’s final fallout from MTV came when show producers tried to get Spencer to hit his sister, who has addiction issues, on camera:

He had gotten into a huge fight with a producer named Sara Mast, whom he said tried to get him to cause his fellow castmember and sister, Stephanie, who has had on-again, off-again alcohol and drug problems, to “hit rock bottom.” In his version, Mast tried to get him to punch Stephanie. “Her exact quote: ‘That Snooki effect,’” Spencer said, referring to a Jersey Shore episode in which castmember Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi was hit by a fellow bar patron.

“That’s when I snapped,” Spencer said. “To the point when I said—and this is when the producers got scared of me—‘You want me to punch my sister in the face? Are you trying to get me to kill you?’ I didn’t say, ‘I’m killing you.’ If I did, MTV would have had me arrested.”

A source close to production who requested anonymity, and is no friend of Spencer’s, confirmed his version of what caused the fight, but also added that Spencer was, in fact, quite scary about it. Through her agent, Sara Mast declined to comment for this story. Creator DiVello’s PR representative was told specifically about this claim and did not respond. MTV would not comment either.

I’m not incredibly sympathetic to people who can’t make the calculation that getting plastic surgery you don’t actually want to get a short-term payoff isn’t actually worth it. But if that actually happened, it’s a pretty disgusting thing to ask anyone to do, no matter how far. I try not to get moralistic about what kinds of popular culture get produced: as distasteful as I find, say, the existence of the Saw movies, I don’t think Eli Roth should be enjoined from making them. But there’s room for a real conversation about what it means that we’re really excited to see real women get punched in the face, whether by previously-anonymous gym teachers, or by their own brothers that doesn’t dismiss these shows as stupid, ironic flashes in the pan that we can afford to treat as if they’re unimportant. It’s incredibly easy to treat the genre as if it’s just a place where already odd people exhibit themselves, that would exist with or without our custom, an odd blind eye to the powerful capitalism that governs the rest of the industry.

We keep getting very excited about art about reality television—I was surprised to find, when I looked it up, that The Truman Show, which is about the morality of raising someone purely as a reality television experiment even if you give him as nice a life as possible, made $126 million domestically. And people have purchased millions of copies of The Hunger Games, which is more broadly about what it’s like to live under a murderously repressive dictatorship, but explores that theme largely through a reality television show, though it confines itself almost entirely to the question of what it’s like to participate in the production of that show and not to what it’s like to watch it. But the coverage of the adaptation of that series is focused much more on sexy bakers and brooding hunters and how good Jennifer Lawrence looks wielding a bow and arrow. We’re awfully good at making things phenomena while ignoring the parts of them that inconvenience us.

I’ve enjoyed the spate of articles praising Hermione Granger as a total rockstar that have come out as the Harry Potter series have come to a close, though I think Sady Doyle goes a little overboard in chastising J.K. Rowling for writing under her initials and choosing to have Harry as a main character. Harry’s respect for Hermoine, and the fact that they manage to forge an extremely durable friendship without any awkward will-they-or-won’t-they questions is a really useful argument for the idea that boys should value girls and women for multi-dimensional reasons. Not every story has to be about girls to be feminist, and in fact, some kinds of feminist arguments might be better delivered by male protagonists.

But more to the point, I think Doyle misses the point of Rowling’s series. Both the Harry Potter series and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books are about what happen when you use young people as mascots and as instruments for larger causes. The reason Harry Potter is the main character in the series isn’t that he’s awesome — to the contrary, he’s a fairly average kid, and Snape’s assessment of his overall abilities as a wizard is probably correct. The idea that he’s extraordinary — and really, that extraordinary things can happen in the cause of righteousness — inspires other people to rise to and above their potential. Harry provides a motivating impulse for the Order of the Phoenix, and for Dumbledore’s Army. The most interesting moment in the entire series is when he’s presented as dead to the people who have been fighting for him — and they keep fighting, in particular Neville Longbottom, who exists as an illustration of the arbitrariness of Harry’s prestige, and who rises to the occasion, killing the hell out of Nagini even when he’s been set on fire. Ron dashes down to the Chamber of Secrets and just pretends he knows Parseltongue, and it works: again, Harry’s not magically special, but the special things he does inspire people to try crazy and unusual things. Hermione Granger might have been the smartest witch of her age even if Harry Potter had never come to Hogwarts, but Harry and Ron encourage he to become something more than an academic know-it all with rigid behavioral rules. All the characters need each other. It’s not a matter of Rowling having chosen the wrong main character, it’s understanding how that character functions.

If we understand Harry as a mascot whose function is ultimately to surrender, it’s interesting to consider The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen in the same terms. Katniss, who is a totally badass hunter, is probably more talented by the standards of her society than Harry Potter is in his. But the elevation of her as a mascot for rebellion against the leadership of Panem actually illustrates the weaknesses of the movement that elevates her. Despite her talents, Katniss is unsociable, and basically an unstable person. The leadership of District 13 never does a particularly good job of getting her on board with their specific program: they mostly just aim her and hope things come out okay. She’s good at being a general motivator, but at the end of the day, Katniss doesn’t fall in line when the movement really needs her to, and she ends up being cut out of future conversations about reform.

In the end, both of these stories are about what happens when political movements choose pretty vulnerable figureheads. It turns out that surrounding that figurehead with a strong educational system like Hogwarts and a mentor like Albus Dumbledore is a safer bet than forcing kids to work for a living and giving them a drunken veteran of a kill-or-be-killed contest. The anti-Voldemort movement has a more limited task — it’s easier to keep someone from rising to power than to topple and entrenched government — but they also do a much better job of organizing for it over the long term than the District 13 folks, who are isolated from most of Panem, hindering long-term insurrection planning, and who end up choosing Katniss kind of on the fly. Movement-building’s hard work. And in both of these franchises, but especially with the Hunger Games books, I’m actually more interested in the people who plan the grand architecture of insurrections rather than those who are the public faces of them.

-Are TV watchers sick of shows that rely on guest stars?

-”A toy to an executive is an avatar to a child. And connecting those two mind-sets is key to storytelling as a screenwriting grown-up.”

-If this NFL brain injury lawsuit makes it into open court, it’s going to be brutal.

-The competition between Amazon Prime and Netflix gets more intense.

-I’m curious to see whether the Hunger Games movies can avoid PG-13 ratings, and if so, how many parents will make exceptions to let their kids see them: