The other night, my brother-in-law was talking about the ending to The Hunger Games series. This is something both him and my dad have said before, but it was brought up about the recent movie. Both mom and I recently saw, and he felt it necessary to point that the whole series up to the second half of the both were brilliant, but that the end was crap.
And I was perfectly happy to accept this judgement until he brought up the Inheritance Cycle. Both he and I have read that series, and I loved it from start to end. The only disappointing part of Inheritance is the fact that it was four and not three books as previously promised. And in fact, I’d imagined all three books would be one-word titles beginning with e, and that kind of balance was one thing that attracted me about the series.
But I also understand that sometimes authors have these sorts of moments, that things just evolve out of your control, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s the growth of the series, and to avoid that growth is to do your story a great injustice. Certainly, four books is better than two, better than to simply not finish the series at all. But more than that, to abridge the events of the last two books into one condensed version, and to suppress the higher conscious revealed by the new writing would be to cut down the writing into something less advanced. Even with a clear beginning and end, there would be something essential missing.
To bring up another example, there are plenty of people who are disappointed in even the final Harry Potter book. Many Potter fans choose to simply ignore it as canon because something they wanted to happen didn’t, or because so many people died in it, or some other reason. I am not one of those people. I believe ignoring canon isn’t right; that level of denial isn’t something I can condone, because it means ignoring reality, and no matter what things happen there, denial of reality doesn’t make it any less real.
The point is this: despite all the bad reviews of the end of Hunger Games, I’m still looking forward to the final movie, looking forward to see what happens, whatever it is. I’m not going to let a few bad opinions affect my opinion of the Hunger Games overall anymore. It is what it is.
