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Showing posts from July, 2017

The Hunger Games and Codified Villainy

Within our current media landscape, heavily populated by Young Adult novels and their inevitable adaptations, there is one YA novel that stands above the others. Not because it's necessarily better, but because it's the mother of them all and has, at this point, spawned a thousand rip offs and copycats. We are talking, evidently, about The Hunger Games . The 2008 novel by Suzanne Collins (and its 2012 movie adaptation) could actually be blamed for the dystopian obsession in media that has dominated the movie/book industry for the last years. And, whilst dystopia can be a very clever tool for pointing out real problems in our society, it needs to be careful not to oversimplify those problems and therefore, trivialize them. But what does this have to do with Costume Design? Sometimes, the visual choices taken in this type of media can actually come to reveal even more problems with our social worldview than the creators originally intended. In this particular case, th