From gladiators through reality TV to "The Hunger Games" - old ideas in new clothes?

What would you say at first? "We are better than the people from the Capitol, because we don't force people to kill each other“? 

Well, then I would advise you to read this post.

Starting with the Gladiators I’d like to mention that in the time of the Old Rom people hadn’t had much tasks to do. Beside political issues and historical writing there was nothing else to do for the citizens. Also just a small part of the population was able to read and write and political issues weren’t all the time.

So they had to get a different task to do. Therefore they trained prisoners of war to gladiators. These gladiators fought in arenas against each other until one died.

They were actually very public, even the best just survived maximal three years. Anyway these guys grained much reward and earned a lot of money.

Here you can see a connection to the Hunger Games. In the book are also fighters, with are in an arena and have to kill each other until just one survived.

So the past and the future is very violent and bloody. 

And today? Do you think today we aren’t violent? Well, let’s see!

Fist I want to repeat the facts that makes the Hunger Games:

• people are poor and don’t have much entertainment
• 24 kids have to be tributes (there can be volunteers, but this actually doesn’t do anyone)
• they fight in an arena against each other until just one is left
• the winner gets rewards, like money and food and is very public

In these four points you can see that there weren’t much difference between gladiators and the Hunger Games.

Today we have many ways to get entertained. The internet, cinemas or theme parks are examples for our big number of entertainment possibilities.

But even so we have reality TV and I would say this is just trimmed version of the past and the future.

Although in our real TV shows none of the people kill each other it is very bad. They maybe don’t lose their life, but they lose something else which is very important: their image and even worse their dignity! Just like the “Jungle Camp”. There some celebtrties (that aren’t popular and famous anymore) go into a jungle camp and have to do special tasks, for example eat very disgusting things (I don’t want to go amplify on this).

The only difference between our TV shows and the gladiators and the Hunger Games is, that in our world the people do these things more or less voluntarily. But even here the money plays a big role. None of the b-celebrities would go to the jungle camp if they hadn’t had money problems and needed the reward.

So what do you think? 

Are we so much different from the Hunger Games and the Gladiators? 

Do we treat our people much better than the Capitol does?

Think about this!

ZZg AG