Introductions!
Battle Royale is a stand-alone work written by Japanese author Houshun Takami in 1999. It takes place in an alternate version of Japan called The Republic of Greater East Asia, a totalitarian state that each forces one class of junior high school students to fight to the death.
There are a number of measures taken to ensure that the students fight. First, they are outfitted with explosive collars (remember this because this is important). Then, they each select one bag containing a weapon, a map, maybe some other stuff, I don't really remember (the map is important too!) The weapons provided range from machine guns to hatchets to poison and I think someone may have gotten a spoon.
Now, the explosive collars ensure a few rules. If no student is killed in 24 hours, all of the collars explode and there is no winner. Certain areas of the location become off-limits, and anyone who wanders into an off-limits area or happens to be there when it becomes off-limits, the collar explodes. If a student tries to remove his or her collar, it explodes. If a student tries to escape, his or her collar explodes.
The map is necessary to provide the layout of the location (in this case, an island) along with a grid that represents the "areas." Of course, one by one these areas become off-limits, so don't lose your map.
The Hunger Games is the first in a trilogy by Suzanne Collins. If you don't know the plot of The Hunger Games, you are an anomaly. Congratulations! For the anomalies and the misinformed, Hunger Games takes place in a futuristic North America called Panem and it is also a totalitarian state. Panem is split up into twelve (formerly thirteen, but we won't get into that) districts ruled by the Capitol. There had been an ineffective rebellion against the Capitol years ago, and after it was taken care of, someone had somehow figured out the secret to preventing future rebellions; forcing 24 children to fight to the death until only one survivor remains. This televised fight to the death is called the Hunger Games.
One boy and one girl from each district between the ages of twelve and eighteen, called Tributes, are chosen at random to fight to the death in an arena. Volunteers are allowed, and are common in the richer districts where competing in the Hunger Games is considered honourable. For every other district, being chosen as a Tribute is practically a death sentence.
Once the Tributes are selected, they are sent to the Capitol for two weeks to train, to be assessed, and to be interviewed on television. This is crucial because Tributes are allowed to get parcels from sponsors during the games, and this time is used to attract them. Sponsors could be betting on the tributes or they could be members of the Tribute's district trying to help them out. The parcels could contain anything from food to medicine, and are sent to the Tributes via parachute.
At the beginning of the game, the Tributes are provided with weapons and other accessories like blankets and pots for cooking (the games could last weeks, so cooking is a necessary skill.) However, these items are acquired dodgeball-style in a 3-2-1 GO chase. Only instead of chancing getting hit with a ball in the face, you chance getting hit with death to the face.
There are people overseeing the games, and they can control the arena's climate, weather, and can cause fireballs to shoot out from the ground if things get too dull.
Similarities
There are many striking similarities in both Battle Royale and Hunger Games. They're both about children killing each other, they're both set in a totalitarian setting, and they both have a main theme of rebellion because (*spoiler alert*) they both cheat the system and there is more than one winner. If you were to write a three-sentence summary of both books, they might be identical.
So, if the Hunger Games is so similar to Battle Royale, is it a blatant rip-off?
No. Here's why.
Differences
The intended audience is different. I was sitting on the train on my way home and there was a boy sitting across from me- he couldn't have been older than ten- reading the Hunger Games. When I got home, my forty-nine year old mother had just finished reading it and loved it. It's graphic, but not so graphic that it would warrant a criticism by my mother.
Battle Royale, on the other hand, has a much smaller audience. It is graphic, it is gory, it explores other mature themes (aside from- you know- children killing each other), and is it ever foul-mouthed.
Battle Royale is like a Quentin Tarantino film, and the Hunger Games is like a good Steven Spielburg film- stylistically speaking. Both are great, both cover mature themes, but while my mother would enjoy a Spielburg film like, say, Saving Private Ryan, she would not watch Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. It's all in the way they handle the gore and how the content is handled.
... Also, if Tarantino directed an adaptation of Battle Royale, that would be amazing. Kill Bill style Battle Royale? I would be all over that.
Another striking difference is the narrative and character development. The Hunger Games has a few really well developed characters, and the rest are not very developed. In Battle Royale, most of the characters are developed to the point where I actually cared when they died. In the Hunger Games, I only really cared when one Tribute died. The rest were just "meh," because I didn't get to know them. I understand that the perspective that Collins wrote in made it impossible to get into the character of anyone that the protagonist, Katniss, didn't know on an intimate level, but I wanted to feel bad when the Tributes died. That's the main problem with writing in the first person- you can only become invested in a few characters. In Battle Royale, I felt bad when even the antagonist died because he had a backstory. Battle Royale was written in the 3rd person perspective, and follows many different characters throughout the story. I was emotionally invested in many characters, and I knew they would die, but I had hoped they would live anyway.
I should take this opportunity to say that I have no qualms with either book. In fact, it's just the opposite. I really enjoyed both! If you ask me which one I prefer, I don't know which one I would chose. In conclusion, I guess you could say that the themes and plot are very similar, and I guess you could argue that one is a rip-off of the other. But I would have to disagree.
... and one last note, did Katniss not remind anyone of Susan from The Chronicles of Narnia (especially the fourth book, Prince Caspian)? She was a teenager with long dark hair that was often braided and was a great archer who shot an apple from far away to prove her skills. That's about as far as the similarities go, but still.
Honourable Mentions
The Running Man, The Lord of the Flies, The Condemned (don't watch. It sucks)
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