The protagonist's backstory (and first-chapter-or-two-story) is that she's been spending years sneaking under a security fence to hunt game, keeping her sister and mother from starvation and prostitution after her father died. Anti-feminist still? Two decisions to save other lives by risking one's own is still above average, no? I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of imaginary protagonists have done more, but real-life examples, particularly of teenagers, are less common.
Eliezer may claim that "it is an unvarying rule of fiction that problems are solved by protagonists", and maybe that's important for drama, but the idea that problems are all solved by the same character (or even few characters) is obviously grossly wrong in reality. If an author manages to pull off a story in which the plot-advancing choices are evenly split among many characters but the readers aren't put off by that, shouldn't we be congratulating Collins on her realism rather than criticizing her for not writing a superhero?
(I have my own criticisms of The Hunger Games, of course - please don't interpret this comment otherwise)
Thing is, keeping this sort of thing mostly in backstory is problematic in itself. There's a truly astounding number of failure modes for media dealing with feminist (or other social, but I'll just talk about the feminist case for simplicity) issues, but one of the more common ones involves making a female character hypercompetent in exposition but limiting the latitude of her choices in narrative. The idea is probably that we get to feel good about watching an empowered woman (not to mention that Strong Female Characters are a selling point in their ow...
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules: