What Are "Adult" Themes, Anyway?

24 Jul, 2024

Scene from The Hunger Games (2012). Taken from Filmgrab.

Posting about my experience in the Hunger Games fandom made me revisit how much fun I had...and how dark the concept really was.

I mean, there's the obvious stuff—teens ripped away from their families to fight to the death for the entertainment of TV audiences. Dying violently in something like that is bad enough. It's not rosy for the victor, either, because killing is traumatizing for most people. That's why real-life soldiers must train for it. In the Games, the closest we have to soldiers are the so-called "Career" tributes from Districts 1, 2, and 4. Because of their years of training, they're stronger than their competitors, but ultimately, they're still teenagers. Can you imagine the sort of culture that raises their children to believe that winning a death match is a badge of honor? And not only that—they encourage those children to offer up their lives.

The nightmare doesn't end with your personal trauma, either. If you piss off the Capitol, they might kill your loved ones (see: Haymitch). If you're good-looking, they might force you into prostitution (see: Finnick). Even if the above two don't happen, you still have to mentor tributes who will probably come home in boxes. That's especially true if you're from a poor outer district. No wonder Haymitch turned to the bottle. It's that, or drugs, or suicide, or otherwise turning bitter and angry at the world. I don't think Panem has therapists.

Then there's all the stuff in the background—being poor, living under a dictatorship, and the horrors of civil war. Stack all of this on top of the regular problems that families and friends face even during the best of times. It gets dark pretty quickly.

And we read this as teens.

Seriously, so much young adult fiction is about hard topics like this. That leads me to the question—when is a work for adults, and when is a work for children? Themes alone can't be it. In this country, the MTRCB¹ has a rating called "Strong Parental Guidance" that covers "themes, language, violence, sexual matters, horror, and drugs that are inappropriate for children."² But you can find all of that in YA. Even media that's popular with younger children has its fair share of violence. Just watch any episode of Tom and Jerry.

For now, I guess the difference lies in how it is presented. For example, in Tom and Jerry, the title characters can get flattened or whack each other with objects. But they don't bleed or get injured like real cats and mice would. No matter what happens, they'll be fine and chasing each other by next episode. Horrible things happen in The Hunger Games, but I don't remember nausea-inducing descriptions of injuries or dead bodies. It's been years since I last read the books, so feel free to correct me if needed.

Another difference lies in the depiction of sex. Characters in media can hurt each other as much as they want, but anything too sexual is in adult territory. The meaning of that can vary between people, countries, and cultures. On the one hand, I see complaints that modern media is too sexualized, but I also see people lamenting that modern media is too sexless. I'm not a big movie or TV person, so I don't have an opinion either way. The bottom line is that when it comes to mass media, many people seem more tolerant of violence than sex. Why? I don't know. But I have my suspicions. Going back to The Hunger Games: we know that Finnick was forced into prostitution, but the book doesn't describe it graphically or in a way that's meant to appeal.

On a lighter note, I don't remember if Katniss ever swore. Maybe the reason is practical: words evolve over time, so the swear words in Panem might not be the same as the ones we have. But except for some terms, the whole series is written in standard American English. Oh well. Suzanne Collins got her point across regardless.

Think of the Children

Why did I mention The Hunger Games in the same post as Tom and Jerry? We associate the first with teenagers and the second with their younger siblings. That's the point—they're in different age groups, but legally, they're all "children." And adults have always worried that certain media will corrupt the youth.

This topic is both interesting and complicated. I don't think I can expound on it now. But as long as we live, we'll always have problems, some of which might include "themes, language, violence, sexual matters, horror, and drugs." Those problems can and will affect more than a few children—and people's art will show this, for better or for worse.