reply to post by Xcalibur254
....and Battle Royale was clearly derived from The Running Man (except with felons) and The Long Walk (a cash prize and with volunteers.)
You can't pick and choose what is derivative and what isn't.
That said, there are a number of differences that make Hunger Games different from Battle Royale, though they clearly belong to the same sub-genre.
1. The series goes into much deeper detail about the nature of government and control of the populace. There is nothing groundbreaking here, since
she just ripped most of it from Roman history, but Battle Royale doesn't touch on this at all, other than to say that the government is ruthless.
2. The series does much more to blur the lines between good and evil. A central theme in the series is that good and evil are often
indistinguishable, as evidenced by the leader of the resistance and by what Katniss is forced to become in order to survive. This aspect of morality
is not developed at all in Battle Royale, other than to deal with the occasional feeling of remorse.
3. Age warfare is not a concept at all explored in Hunger Games, yet it is central to Battle Royale.
4. In Battle Royale, the battle is not for entertainment. There is no social commentary regarding pop culture and the desensitization towards
violence that is present in Hunger Games.
Battle Royale is a good read, for sure. However, it's not as developed intellectually as Hunger Games, and trust me, I never thought I'd say that
about a Scholastic Co. commissioned book.
If you want to be blatantly cynical about Hunger Games without facing an intellectual challenge, just say she ripped off The Lord of the Flies and set
it in a future dystopia which she ripped off from The Roman Empire. To say she ripped of Battle Royale, aside from the plot similarities present in
the entire sub-genre, means you probably weren't paying enough attention to either book.