5 Reasons 'The Hunger Games' Is Creepier Than You Think

5

Children Have a Right to Life

Let's get this one out of the way first, because it is, to my eye, kind of the obvious issue here. The same way that dogs and mailmen have an innate right to life, children, too, have the right to not be killed for the amusement of the book-reading public.

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Because no one ever talks to them, few people know how bloodthirsty librarians are, a trait at least partly attributable to frustration that no one ever talks to them.

4

It Discriminates Against People Who Don't Have Arenas

OK. Let's say that hypothetically we have some children, and maybe their right to life isn't so great. Maybe the children are wicked or something. But that still doesn't mean it's acceptable to put those children into an arena we have lying around, because poor people don't have arenas and won't have that option open to them.

Obviously, there are limits to this kind of argument. Inequality is always going to be present at some level in our society, and in general we have no problem denying poor people, say, their yachting rights. But we don't deny them voting rights, either. And by that measure, the right to dispose of wicked children has to fall closer to the voting end of the spectrum as a fundamental, inalienable right. Allowing the wealthy to dispose of children in arenas ...

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3

The Children Will Haunt the Living Shit Out of Us

When conducting research for this article, for some reason I kept meeting people who live on the fringes of society. Among this population were a sizable number of so-called ghost experts, who all agreed on two points -- that you must pay up front to hire the services of a ghost expert, and that ghosts are more likely to haunt the living if they are killed in an arena. Opinions differed on why this is the case; some say the amphitheater shape of most arenas amplifies the natural energies of the recently deceased, while others state that people who are killed in arenas are just really angry with the living for some reason.

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"Why did you cheer my doom? WWHHHHHHHHHHHHY?"

2

It Costs Too Much

The costs of arena maintenance are of course substantial, and well documented elsewhere. But in this case, they're dwarfed by another, less obvious cost: the cost of the children themselves.

In the past, poets have attempted to assign a value to children based on hard-to-quantify notions like the warmth of their hugs, or the twinkle in their eyes, or the pure expression of delight on their faces when they see their first snowflakes. But later analysis has since shown that those qualities aren't actually worth anything.

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"Nope. Says here anyone can enjoy a snowflake. Except for scientists ..."

1

It Wastes Valuable Child Meat

The meat from children is incredibly illegal to actually possess or even really to type about, so everyone just be cool, OK? But that said, there are people, on the Internet certainly, and I'm also going to guess in mountainside European castles, who are very interested in both child meat and not wasting child meat.

Why these people place so much value on child meat isn't known -- all interview requests were angrily rejected. Were I willing to speculate -- and it turns out that I am -- I would suggest that tenderness is a particularly prized feature. They may also be very health-conscious, and perhaps interested in the lower levels of bioaccumlative toxins like lead or PCBs that would be found in child-flesh. Or they're simply so jaded and overly wealthy that they can't enjoy anything that doesn't involve destroying someone else.

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Donald Trump has fired his wife mid-coitus no less than 800 times.