Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Narnia, & Christ-Like Girl Power

Hunger Games Movie Poster

Forget damsels in distress and feminist man-eaters. A new female ideal is emerging.

Katniss Everdeen welcomes us to her world, a 1984-styled hell of government oppression, cruelty to children, starvation, classism, and reality TV. These are The Hunger Games. But our heroine is brave.

Sacrificing herself, Christ-like, she saves the life of her sister Prim, and embarks on a perilous journey that will ultimately make the foundations of an evil empire tremble. It’s not lightly that she is dubbed, “the girl on fire.”

But Katniss isn’t the only brave young woman we’ve seen grace the silver screen of late. Cute little Lucy Pevensie recently journeyed into the land of Narnia and sparked a rebellion against The White Witch, who stood for everything evil and cruel in that world. If you were already a fan of the books, you probably knew that it was only a matter of time before brave little Lucy wandered – not just through a wardrobe – but out of the pages of a timeless classic and into the blockbuster charts.

Lucy has now changed western culture just as she changed Narnia, by reigniting our faith in The Old Magic.

While Harry Potter is obviously a boy, the real brains behind most of his operations is his bookworm gal-pal, Hermione Granger. Spunky, witty, and courageous, Hermione basically holds Potter together, serving as his confidant, ally, and emotional support, even when best friend Ron Weasley deserts him.

What do Katniss, Lucy, and Hermione all have in common? Besides originating on the pages of popular literature …

CONTINUE READING

How J. K. Rowling Wrote Harry Potter Last to First

Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling

Author J. K. Rowling says she wrote the last chapter of the last Harry Potter book first, around the time when she initially conceptualized the famous saga back in 1990, while riding a train from Manchester to London.

If you were going to write a story, where would you start?

When a certain monarch in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was asked a similar question by a White Rabbit, he responded gravely, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

But must all stories begin at the beginning?

The Bible does. In fact, it starts off quite simply, “In the beginning …”

And yet, God – being the ultimate author of a very long and suspenseful drama – surely already had an ending in mind before he ever breathed the world into existence. Otherwise, how can one explain Revelation?

Authors are indeed gods of their own little worlds. They govern everything from the arch demons to the seasonal climates.  They play chess with the lives of fictional friends, wage wars, end wars, and have the power to cause even the most treacherous seeming of souls – like Snape or Darth Vador – to turn good just in the nick of time.

“What a piece of work is a man, How noble in
Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals. and yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no,
nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seeme
to say so.”

– The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Act II, Scene ii, 285-300)