"All I know it suits Tom Sawyer."

[tzikeh]

As many of you probably know, The Hunger Games is the hot project in the pipeline in Hollywood right now. This excellent YA trilogy's main character is a sixteen-year-old girl named Katniss Everdeen. She is a strong, savvy, practical, intelligent, capable young woman who had to grow up too fast, and does the very best she can with the shitty hand her family was dealt. Here is how author Suzanne Collins describes Katniss (in Katniss' own thoughts) in the first few pages of the book:

I watch as Gale pulls out his knife and slices the bread. He could be my brother. Straight black hair, olive skin, we even have the same gray eyes. But we're not related, at least not closely. Most of the families who work the mines resemble one another this way. (emphasis mine)

That's why my mother and Prim (sister), with their light hair and blue eyes, always look out of place. (emphasis mine)

So here we have (from what we know just in these first few pages) a place where people who have dark hair, olive skin, and grey eyes are the majority, and those with blonde-and-blue-eyed coloring are clearly in a very small minority.

I've been working with middle- and high-school students a lot recently. The Hunger Games books are huge in the YA world. Many of the adolescent Latinas who are reading/have read the book get very excited when they note that Suzanne Collins created a heroine who "looks like me"--and several of them go one observation further by pointing out that this girl who looks like them is the main character in a novel that is aimed at the mainstream YA audience, and not at the YA Ethnic niche. (The students don't put it in those terms, but that's what they mean.)

I think we can all agree that, when adapting novels to the screen, if the characters are described in the book, it's not always the case that the features and coloring of the actor need to be to-the-letter the same as the character. But, given that description, I think it's fair to say that actress cast as Katniss ought not to be the clichéd All-American Girl.

Ladies and gentlemen,



But seriously, who gives a fuck what these kids see when they go to the movie. Why can't they just admire Katniss for how awesome she is, AMIRITE?

Source: Variety.

Comments

[usakeh.livejournal.com]

1. I really want to read that series; everybody seems to be recommending it to me.

2. I'm even more psyched, as someone of mixed race (Mexican/American), now that I know that the main character is a PoC.

3. WTF HOLLYWOOD? First Avatar: The Last Airbender and now this? Seriously? Seriously? I mean, I adore blondes and think the girl they've chosen is smoking hot, but totally ignoring the real ethnicity of the characters is just so wrong.

Thanks for bringing this all to my attention!

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

They haven't chosen her yet, but she's the frontrunner right now, and an announcement will be made in the next few weeks.