Huzzah here cometh the high profile spinoff

Anticipated and dreaded in equal measure, there is nothing quite so polarising as a high-profile spinoff. And it doesn’t get more high profile than the new Hunger Games spinoff.

I first opened the Hunger Games at a book-fair (aka, a small temporary stall) on the grounds of my school. It was hot, sweaty and crammed with innumerable elementary school students, each righteously using their god-given elbows to make heir way through the crowd.

I, as a wise and mature fifth grader, had arrived early, and was planning to take a quick look around, hurry away before those delinquent third graders descended, and then have a leisurely lunch.
 
There, among piles of Geronimo Stilton and the Wimpy Kid lay, surprisingly enough, a solitary copy of the Hunger Games. At that time, I was still trying to distance from myself from my sordid past of reading books about princesses, ponies and occasionally combinations thereof, an move on to reading more “grown-up” books, as in Harry Potter and Rick Riordon’s novels.

                                                    From this....                ..... to this 
 
Thus, when I read the blurb of the Hunger Games, what struck me the most was how wonderfully anti-princess/pony the premise- teenagers battling each other to the death- was. On this promise of an absence of tiaras and horseshoes, I turned to the first page, hoping to have a quick glance-over and leave before the third-grade flocks arrived.
 
And that’s how I ended up spending my entire lunch break reading the first fifty pages of the Hunger Games, standing up, pressed against a book rack, elbows defensively aimed outwards to ward off any third graders.
 
I was irretrievably, irredeemably hooked.
 
Upon reaching my house, I asked my mother to buy me the book. Upon reading the premise, my mother banned me from reading the book indefinitely, on the grounds that the violence it depicted would be terrible for my impressionable young mind.
 
So, the next day, my impressionable young self set off to the book stall again during lunch, and, blithely ignoring any side-eyes from the people

manning the stall, read the next fifty pages of the Hunger Games.
This continued for another two-half hour lunch breaks, but then alas, the stall closed down. Desperate to finish the book, I considered my alternatives: I could not borrow it from the school library, nor were there obliging relatives at hand to sneak me a copy,
Finally, I found that I could access it through my cousin’s Kindle Unlimited. Triumphantly, I devoured entire trilogy.
 
By the time I could articulate to my mother that she should in fact encourage me to read the Hunger Games because it was profoundly anti-war, it was far too late to make a difference.
But I was I different person for reading it, my heart was broken and forged anew and rebroken, my thoughts dissolved and recrystallised into new shapes and forms.
 
The impact of the Hunger Games
 
Indeed, beyond Harry Potter, what series has had as profound an impact on me, on my entire generation?
The Hunger Games is one of our generations’ cultural touchstones. It’s been consumed extremely broadly, assimilated either in book or movie form by most of my generation, but compared to other books we’ve all collectively read, usually classic novels like the Great Gatsby in high school, it’s fresh and contemporary and accessible.
 

Most of us read it when we were all young enough that our reading tastes hadn’t started to diverge too much. But it is many shades darker than the other series we can compare it to, the Harry Potters and Percy Jacksons, indeed it was probably the darkest novel we had read in our young lives when we read it. So thus, its themes of rebellion and war, callousness and tyranny, branded themselves
irreversibly onto our minds.
Fiction shapes our moralities powerfully. Beyond the maxims we learn at our parents’ knees, honesty being the best policy and not saying anything at all if we don’t have anything nice to say, we normally don’t have too much have much guidance when it comes to broader questions of societal ethics and justice.
 
Not all people look to religion, the most prominent source of guidance on issues of morality, and fewer still to the philosophy of Aristotle and Kant. But the media, books and television are almost inescapable.

However, the media demand our trust, each newspaper, each TV channel, claiming to be more trustworthy than the next, vying for a place near our ears and the keys to our inner workings.
Fiction, books, movies, make no claims on our limited trove of trust. They ask us nothing. And that is where their insidious power stems from.
 
History is replete with how books and movies have caused wide-swept social change, from popularising the abolitionist movement, to encouraging women’s employment.
 
Most of our discussions of how our society will evolve, or is evolving into at scale use fiction as a reference point

1984 is our model of tyranny so deep it pervades thought, Brave New World is our example of a society numbed by drugs and complacency.

And more recently, the Capitol and The Districts of the Hunger Games are what we point to when discussing crippling inequality, and now perhaps even the hit Korean show Squid Game.
 
Symbols from fiction are appropriated into the real world
The use of the three finger salute of the Hunger Games in protests around the world for democracy, from Thailand to Hong Kong, perhaps most clearly depict what a important place it takes in our societal consciousness of democracy and idealism.
 

Thus, the Hunger Games is undeniably, one of the most influential modern treatises on social justice.
 
So… the stakes and expectations are high.
 
aghhhhh but spinoffs
 
But spinoffs tend to be… almost universally disappointing:
Spinoffs typically come in three classes:

1.       Same events as the previous books, different POV. (Eg. Midnight Sun, Twilight retold from Edward’s POV)
2.       Backstory of a side character. (Eg. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, about the backstory of the villain)
3.       The future of a side character. (Eg. The Cursed Child, the story of Harry Potter’s son)

The new Hunger Games spin-off is a category 2 spinoff, telling the story Haymitch Abernathy, Katniss’s and Peeta’s mentor in the Hunger Games. Haymitch, when we meet him in the Hunger Games, is a bitter alcoholic with a sharp tongue, but is almost a parental figure to Katniss and Peeta and plays a major role in the movement to bring down the Capitol.

The problem with Category 2 spinoff’s is simply that we already know the all the endings and the outcomes. Though knowing the outcome of a situation can be used as a framing device to heighten tension, as in The Secret History, we also already know who the characters will grow to be, the characters are constrained to develop in certain ways throughout the book.
This is in addition to the numerous other problems with spinoffs, awkward, cringe-inducing cameos of important characters, forced symbolism, and backstory we’ didn’t need.

 
This isn’t the first spin-off of the Hunger Games either.
The other spinoff of the Hunger Games, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was written from the perspective of Coriolanus Snow, the ruthless president.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes wasn’t a terrible spinoff, as spinoffs go: Snow was an interesting enough character, and his path from anti-hero to straight up villain was fairly intriguing. However, the plot was shaky and contrived, there was no sense of anticipation, or tension, and the other characters, including the cipher Lucy Gray, weren’t well sketched out enough to be intriguing.
Furthermore, the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes also contained all the common problems
with sequels, contrived references, unnecessary lore etc.
 
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was also written from the perspective of the villain, whose backstory we don’t know much about.

Meanwhile, the new book is about a character whose backstory we’re already familiar with, and who is one of the heroes of the story, adding to the difficulty giving a fresh take on his narrative, since we’re so much more familiar with both the character and his story.
 
Overall, the source material is held almost sacred by millions of fans. Its heroes, Haymitch included, are so beloved the volumes of fan-art and fan-fiction about them would fill half a library, and thus people’s expectations of this book are great.
And perhaps because we consider the Hunger Games such an important work about morality, perhaps we irrationally extend our expectations of morality to the author,  and so we would feel even more betrayed if we perceived the book as nothing but a cash grab.

But because these books characters are so important to people, and so-well established, people will expect the characters, especially a character as beloved as Haymitch to act in certain ways and show certain personality traits. This immediately puts constraint on the scope of the novels, clashing with the Dickens-esque great expectations we have for the novel.

                                                                               Hence the dread.

 
 
Conclusion
 
So, am I going to be reading Sunrise on the Reaping?

Of course I am.