This may sound a little confusing but hear me out. In my story, I have a character who’s going through a more or less boot camp for a dystopian empire. The ultimate goal of this “camp” is to make killing the enemy less of a regrettable necessity and more like a game, or a challenge- basically twist the morals of the soldiers so they no longer care about who they kill, they just care about the kill. Would this be feasible, or does it go too far into the “hurr durr Spartans are tough” trap.
So, you don’t actually have to teach soldiers how to do this. Dehumanize an enemy enough and they’ll do it all on their own. In fact, they’ll dehumanize enemies all on their own. All you need is the enemy killing people they care about in the abstract. It doesn’t have to be people they know, family, or friends. They don’t need a personal stake. After all, dehumanization of the enemy is part of how we stave off that pesky mental limit which leads to psychotic breaks.
What many writers don’t realize is that in this case we honestly don’t have work that hard to justify the behavior. The behavior already exists, and happened in ways far worse than you or I can imagine.
If you have the stomach for it, I recommend looking at the Pacific Theater for WWII (though the Nazis are good too.) Specifically stuff like the “Contest To Kill 100 People Using A Sword” series run by a pair of Japanese newspapers covering a contest between Japanese officers Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda during the Nanking Massacre. The quest to see who could kill 100 people with their sword fastest, this included Chinese civilians and POWs.
And, yes, it happened. That’s not dystopian. That’s history.
Japan’s war crimes during World War II are built on the specific variety of nationalism the country practiced during the period and their outlook on the concept of surrender. Look no further than the extensive list of Japanese war crimes in the Pacific Theater, from The Comfort Women, Unit 731, and I would not look at the POW camps unless you have a strong stomach. However, I will say they did ship POWs back to Japan and vivisected them while still alive. I include this as its probably one of the less disturbing actions toward the treating of POWs during the war. When the men were recovered, they looked like what we’d expect from a Nazi concentration camp.
Japan is not the only example, there are countless others throughout history, and they’re not unique but they are relatively recent. Also, often, overlooked. The revenge Allied troops took on Germany, specifically those from territories occupied by German soldiers like the French is also there. In the words of a German professor from college whose family survived Allied occupation of Berlin, “no woman between seven and seventy was safe” in those quarters held by the French. At the time, her mother was a little girl and she told the story about how German citizens went running for those areas under American control. (The reason, of course, being that the Americans suffered less during the war with their civilians being an ocean away.) In the Pacific Theater, Allied soldiers would cut out the teeth of dead Japanese soldiers for their gold fillings. They called it “Jap gold”.
Kill counts, war trophies, every game you can imagine, and plenty you can’t have all happened during periods of wartime. War is an ugly business, and some wars are uglier than others.
The problem is assuming you need some sort of special training to get people there. The sad truth is such training isn’t necessary, and that’s what makes this topic dystopic. Dystopia is based in human nature, it what could happen in the future when the world is on course. The events and outlooks which led the Japanese to behave the way they did when they went to war are just as present and relevant now in countries all over the world. That includes the US.
Rid yourself now of the idea there’s ever such a thing as a “clean” war. All war is dark, all war is dirty, and all wars involve people doing terrible things to one another.
If you really want to write this story then you need to be learning everything you can about the mindset of soldiers and what they go through while on the battlefield. This means watching documentaries, shows based on anecdotes and biographical experiences like The Pacific and Band of Brothers. You should be reading Starship Troopers as a primer if you haven’t already. Do so while understanding Heinlein is a fascist and that is what he endorses in the novel. You should be going over Vietnam. I’d even watch M.A.S.H., the show, the movie, and read the book. Growing Up Black In Nazi Germany is a stunningly eye-opening read if you’ve ever wondered how the German people were swept away by Hitler and what that looked like within their culture. Read the short story, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to get a look inside the camps run in Soviet Russia. Then tackle All Quiet on the Western Front. You want as much pro-war and anti-war media as you can get your hands on with history to fill in the gaps. Also, George Orwell’s 1984. Here’s the trick to understanding the best of the dypstopian genre: 1984 may be fictional, but similar events happened in the Soviet Union. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is entirely possible as a future for the United States, and it is plausible. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is dystopic and fictionalized, but the research behind it isn’t. The Jungle is part of why we have the FDA. There’s also Richard Wright’s Native Son.
You want to look at the cultures specifically that produced some of history’s most horrific war crimes and study up on the mindsets which led them there. That is how this happens, and that is what you need to write dystopias: an understanding of human nature.
Look beyond The Hunger Games to Rome. Consider the Spartan children whipped in stadiums to provide entertainment for the masses in simulation of ancient Spartan training, and that is only one small anecdote to the greater horrors of the Arena. See the horror in an entire culture reduced to a themepark attraction.
Remember, all dystopia is political and it is all based as a reaction to the real world. The best dystopias are talking about events that have happened in a fictional context with the warning they might happen again. We may all get upset at Animal Farm but that is a breakdown of how Soviet Russia came to be and it will teach you how the political system took hold.
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. – Animal Farm
Some people are more equal than others, some people are better than others, some people are more deserving than others. Be that their nation of origin, the color of their skin, their ethnic background, their accent, their education level, their economic background, or the part of a country they come from (much less the world). Dehumanization is all you need to justify great cruelty, and human beings do it to each other all the time.
After all, take any military shooter from the genre and do a hard contrast to Spec Ops: the Line. Take your experiences and what you feel while playing a military shooter, then imagine feeling those same emotions while killing real people.
You will. They’re not people to you anymore. After all, when was the last time you thought of the Stormtroopers from Star Wars IV: A New Hope as human beings?
When American soldiers called the members of the VietCong Charlies, what they were doing was taking letters of the alphabet VictorCharlie and translating their targets into anonymous individuals. They are no longer people. They’re all Charlies.
This is the key to understanding the horrors of warfare. Once you figure out how to write your characters from the perspective where they don’t see the people they kill as people, you’re off to the races. The only place you’re off is the idea they need to be trained to not care or turn it into a game.
Give them training.
They’ll make games out of killing their enemies all on their own.
What, if any, chance do they have of actually succeeding, given that
she’s been training since she was 5? Is there any way for them to manage
to turn her loyalties? And what would be going through her head during
all of this beyond disdain and escape plans, regardless of whether or
not she turns? [2/2]
I get what you’re asking here, you’re asking if a child soldier can be saved through the power of friendship. The answer to that, upfront, is no. Child soldiers and children raised for combat are not misunderstood misanthropes who’ve never had a support network but know what it is and can be approached in the same way you would the average loner.
Child soldiers/kids who’ve been put through any kind of brainwashing are a difficult subject to discuss because it is profoundly disturbing and messed up. The assumption is that if they’re kidnapped from their families, they’ll grow to secretly hate their captors and jump when the first opportunity comes for escape.
That isn’t how it works. In the training, they’re driven to hate their parents and view them as weak. As they’re systematically broken down, they grow to love their captors and consider them family. They develop a deep and abiding loyalty to them.
Falling prey to this conditioning has nothing to do with how strong someone is or isn’t. It’s not a matter of mental or emotional strength. Breaking them down and rebuilding them from the inside out is what their handlers do. They are very adept at it. These children are conditioned through empowerment, which is part of why it’s so seductive. They’re taught to believe that they are better and stronger than everyone else, that other humans are weak. That weakness must be destroyed.
You won’t reach them by treating them in any way they’ll perceive as weakness and if you react the way they expect then you play into the hands of the people who programmed them, then you’ve reinforced the child’s conditioning. The mental conditioning is a booby-trap for the people who might try to help them. Every intuitive choice, every choice that feels natural is going to be the wrong one.
You cannot reach them if you come to them with an assumed understanding of who they are and what a human being is. There’s the person they were, who they’ve learned to despise and the person they see themselves as now. Approaching either of those individuals, whether it’s the person they were or who they currently are, will lock you out.
The average person with no understanding will simply reinforce the child’s views and their handler’s views, and shut out of any way to help them by the child’s dismissal. That’s if the kid doesn’t kill them first, which they will because that’s what they were conditioned to do.
A child overcoming this programming requires years and years of therapy, if they’re fortunate enough to receive it at all.
Abuse isn’t cured by the power of friendship.
We’ve talked about #child soldiers and #children and combaton separate occasions, we’ve even compared them to each other and explained the difference. They are not, however, totally separate.
The main difference:
1) Children Raised to Combat are a long term investment. This is someone whose training has been the focus of their life, with the intent to turn out a solid, above average combatant. These children who won’t see combat until they reach their late teens/adulthood.
2) Child Soldiers are expendable assets given a gun, often given drugs like “BamBam”, told they’re immortal, and shoved onto the battlefield on the idea they’ll give the adult soldiers pause, gun a few down, before getting gunned down themselves. They’re not “soldiers” so much as they are distractions. They are also never sent out alone. You’re not up against one, you’re up against many.
Both have the option of having been put through cultish/psychological programming, but the difference between the two is fairly obvious. It’s a disoriented and drugged child violently kidnapped from their village versus a member of the Hitler Youth or another, similar, organization.
They are both psychologically damaged but in vastly different ways, and those circumstances make it nearly impossible for anyone who isn’t a child soldier or comes from a similarly abusive background to relate.
The irony is going that the Child Soldier is going to be much, much easier to turn because they were never really inside the system to begin with. However, even with just a scant few months, the deprogramming is going to take years. They’re never treated as important. A child who has been raised to combat is valuable, they often see joining as their choice, and they know their own worth. They’ve never known any other kind of normal and are in a much better place to evaluate why their side is the right one. They are co-operative participants, rather than forced. They’re going to see the instructors in their lives as friends and family. They’ll believe in the cause.
A good way to look at the thought process of the adults behind these training programs would be to take a look at the French novel/film “La Femme Nikita” where the assassins are all druggies and runaways pulled off the streets, cleaned up, sobered out, and trained to kill people.
Why is this important?
Because it inspires loyalty. You take people no one will know and no one will miss, people who are not regularly getting four square meals a day, and get them off the streets. You give them a safe place to sleep, regular food, and a purpose. From their perspective, you save them. The threat of expulsion comes next, but what you ask them to do next is not that much worse for them than the hell they were living in before.
The problem when most people look at these situations and setups is that they miss the deeply embedded trust, loyalty, and respect these children feel for those who train them. They have a lifetime and a normative societal state to banish their doubts. They will know what the outside world is like. They’ll have been educated. If they’ve been handled by someone skilled, then everything they see will merely confirm their sociological programming. Questions will be encouraged. Pride in their skills, pride in their country/mission, ego, and self-esteem are encouraged.
You’re looking at your character having an attitude similar to the Spartans in 300.
Or, you know, Starship Troopers.
A person who understands their ideology and philosophy is far more useful and capable of independent operation than a blind follower. You want your elites to be capable of independently operating on their own.
You can’t force someone to be good at fighting. You can’t force someone to learn. Like the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
However, the real problem with this question is a critical failure to understand how soldiers operate in warzones, specifically in regards to enemy combatants.
Child Soldiers are still soldiers. They’re enemy combatants and they’re treated like enemy combatants.
This is the concept that’s hardest for most people to grasp.
It doesn’t matter, at the end of the day, whether or not they’re a forced conscript.
Child Soldiers are treated as enemy combatants, not children because, well, they are.
The sad truth about them is that they’re not really kids anymore. They’re brainwashed and weaponized. The moral barrier that will stop the average child from killing someone doesn’t exist for them. It’s gone. Their innocence is gone. They are exceedingly dangerous. They’re likely to betray and kill their “rescuers” if left to their own devices then return to those who kidnapped them in the first place.
This is a behavior pattern which does not normally make sense to those who have never been abused, but it is very real.
What’s been done to them can’t be cured with kindness, at least not in the early stages and the average person can’t relate to them. It’s difficult enough for most people to relate to adults who’ve been through your garden variety child abuse, and this is on a whole other level. These kids are systematically broken. That is the point of the breaking. So, that when the average adult treats them like a kid they kill them.
Child soldiers are unpredictable, including for seasoned combatants. It’s hard as hell to tell when they’re going to snap, and there’s a certain level of psychopathy just lingering beneath the surface because (as children) they’re brains can’t register that death is real.
This is true with children and you see it a lot with children dealing with grief, they lack an understanding of permanence and struggle with the concept of death. Minors don’t grasp consequences the same way adults do, and there are different standards regarding their ability to do so consciously.The training child soldiers undergo preys on that. It preys on the limbo. So, they’re handlers feed them cocaine and tell them they’re invincible and they believe them. The important thing about child soldiers is that they don’t know what they’re doing. Their psychology is exploited by their handlers.
You can feel pity for the dog that’s been abused to the point its mind is broken. It won’t stop the dog from killing you.
So, you’re asking these soldiers to take a ticking time bomb with them. Someone who is a direct threat to their lives and their mission. No matter the amount of pity they feel, this is a time bomb they know better than to take. This is especially true if they’re working in enemy territory where she’ll have numerous chances to betray them to her comrades. They’re not equipped to handle her.
She belongs in a POW camp, away from combat, with people who can devote their time to helping her figure out how to be a human instead of a weapon.
Right now, a weapon is all this character knows how to be.
It is worth remembering that child soldiers exist in the real world, both in our present and throughout history. There is a body of research available on the subject, and worth looking into if you want to do it justice.
If you are a minor, I insist that you approach this subject with the aid or help of an adult. Child soldiers are disturbing material.
The CNN article on Ishmael Beah is an excellent place to start. Beah was a child soldier in the Sierra Leone eventually captured by enemy forces and rehabilitated by Unicef. His memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is worth looking into if you intend to take the true child soldier route.
If you’re interested in being depressed or learning more about the African diamond trade and how it ties into the Sierra Leone then Blood Diamond with Leonardo Dicaprio is a good movie to invest some time into. The movie goes through great pains to ensure the treatment of child soldiers and their training is accurate.
The book Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones which the movie referenced extensively, though only two chapters in the book discuss child soldiers directly. Instead, it focuses on the use of diamonds to fund the RUF in the Sierra Leone. You may find this book more helpful for worldbuilding and it’s discussion on the funding a revolution.
Monster an autobiography by Sanyika Shakur aka Kody Scott about his sixteen years spent as a gangbanger may be helpful. Gangs have a different method in their recruitment of child soldiers but, at the end of the day, the attitudes and mentalities end up in a similar place.
Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germanyby Hans J. Massaquoi isn’t a book about child soldiers per say, but it does document the effect Nazism had on the German people. If you ever wondered how the average person could fall victim to widespread propoganda, participate in such heinous acts, or wondered how the Nazis worked then this is a must read book.
Check out Boy Seamen on Wikipedia, a page discussing the ranking and usage of young adults as sailors in the British Navy and others at the turn of the century. Russel Crowe’s adaptation of Master and Commander: Far Side of the World has an accurate representation of the ages that were put to sea. Patrick O’brien’s series is a must read for anyone interested in doing any writing about the British Navy.
We bring up the Boy Scouts of America sometimes when discussing children raised for combat and while it isn’t a direct 1 to 1 comparison, most of the skills studied and mastered by the Boy Scouts as they gain badges are the sorts of supplementary survival skills you start children on when preparing them for a lifetime of combat.
You don’t have to look far to find the history of children studying and used in warfare. There’s a wealth of information out there, if you start looking for it.
This is the last anon, and thanks so much for your answer! I left a couple things out that I shouldn’t have – for one, the world is a dystopia, and the soldiers actually enlist around 12, and start their training after pushing a lot of different things to accelerate growth. So even though he’s only 24, he’s actually been involved in the military for half of his life, which I’m assuming is enough time for a specialty? I don’t know what that specialty is yet, but thanks so much for your help!
-Anonymous
This is going to be a sensitive topic for a lot of people and as such, we requested for the sake of our followers and all of you out there who’d like to avoid this very traumatic topic that we could put it in a regular post so we could have the “read more” option, beyond just the ability to list it with trigger warnings for child abuse, abuse, and child soldiers. This will be a disturbing topic to go through and we are by no means experts on the subject, we’ll answer this question as best we can and give some help to those of you out there looking to write dystopias dealing with kids. In this post, we’ll be some basic developmental psychology, the technical limitations of messing with human biology in regards to creating human weapons, child soldiers, and with some helpful suggestions for what a writer can do instead, if this topic proves to be a bit too much to handle.
Child soldiers, while very dramatic, are one theme that can go off the rails very quickly. It’s important to remember when dealing with dystopia that the limitations of human nature, psychology, and the world today are very important to the novel’s dramatic elements. A dystopia isn’t a potentially bad future with a totalitarian government. It’s a society characterized by human misery, disease, and overcrowding and living within that society with no hope of escape. Dystopias are not, despite what the current climate may lead us to believe, happy stories.
Some good Dystopias to turn to for reference are: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, 1984 by George Orwell, Native Son by Richard Wright (A rare non sci-fi version), and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (slightly lighter than the rest on the list).
Warning: These are all ridiculously depressing books, so prepare accordingly.
When it comes to child soldiers, how realistic do you think the “Careers” kids are in The Hunger Games and the participants as a whole? Honestly, I think they suffer from the “writing children like mini adults” problem that most bad writing has. That, and it ignores emotion and trauma. They react and fight like emotionless drones or trained fully adult soldiers instead of scared, bumbling children.
I want you to understand something exceedingly crucial before we get into this. Starke and I both technically qualify as Careers. I started doing martial arts when I was five years old, I knew how to kill another human being when I was twelve, I could perform disarms when I was fourteen, and before I was eighteen I was working to teach other kids the same age as myself when I started. Starke is an Eagle Scout, and that should really say it all.
What I am essentially telling you is that I grew up around other kids, children to teens and young adults who spent their life doing martial arts, some of whom competed on a professional, national to worldwide competitive level and in the care of adults who grew up doing martial arts, some of whom competed on a worldwide competitive level. I’ve seen all sorts of kids do all sorts of things, and what a child can do is heavily dependent on the child we’re talking about. Yes, the average child might be bumbling, but the lifer? The one picked out early and heavily trained? Like these kids? Like Jade Xu? Ernie Reyes Jr? Jet Li? Then, there’s the seven year olds in Thailand who compete in Muay Thai bouts. There’s these kids. And these kids. And these kids.
Did you know this is a worldwide industry that utilizes children’s performance art for the entertainment of the masses? You just participated in it by watching these videos.
Congratulations.
If there’s an aspect of The Hunger Games that’s incredibly unrealistic, it’s the fact that the novel ignores all of the above. This is not some far flung future, this is now, and its a billion dollar industry worldwide. When you’re looking at a character who is a Career, this is what you should be thinking of. We call this phenomenon: sports.
The Hunger Games is YA, which provides a mistaken impression that kids wouldn’t be able to compete in arena style gladiator death matches. That’s untrue. They already do. The fights aren’t to the death, for the most part, because adults intervene but the ability is there. Children are actually a lot better at bloodsport when pitted against other children than The Hunger Games gives them credit for. You’ve seen child athletes. Add the fact that it’s mentally easier for children to kill because the concept of death and the permanence of it doesn’t really register for them, you have a situation where bloodsport games would be very easy. Condition them an environment where this type of killing is okay, even acceptable, where they’re rewarded for their success, and they’ll be perfectly happy to keep at it. They’ll even be perfectly sane and mentally well-adjusted without any abuse or forcing necessary.
This is the one criticism I’m going to really level at The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games does not understand the mentality of violence, specifically the mentality behind bloodsport, and what draws people to it both as participants and as a form of entertainment. The novel really can’t grasp what draws people to it, what makes bloodsport a billion dollar industry, and why someone would want to participate. The Careers are gladiators, they’re not child soldiers. They’re professional athletes in the Olympic level category, which is the sort of competition they’re training for. They won’t have the same hangups an ordinary child would in regards to violence because this event is not just what they trained their whole lives for, but the competition they competed fiercely to gain access to.
They’re not going to have the kind of trauma you might expect because they’ve spent their lives preparing for this. We’re talking someone age sixteen and seventeen who has been training for around twelve to thirteen years.
What should really disturb you about gladiators is they’re entertainers. They exemplify the commodification of violence and of human beings as vehicles of violence for entertainment. They’re putting on a show, putting on a spectacle, and, yes, there may be death at the end of the experience but that’s part of the experience. The crowd came to watch the bloodsport for the enjoyment of it, and your success in the arena is decided by how well you can put on that show. How well you entertain the audience while you beat the living shit out of someone else. It’s disingenuous to say one would ever need to force people to watch bloodsport because they don’t, they don’t need to force them to participate either. Humanity’s appetite for violence as entertainment is about as old as humanity, and its a cornerstone in many cultures around the world.
The Careers are not child soldiers, which is a very specific term identifying very specific circumstances. They don’t fall under that category. They’re children raised to violence. From a mental outlook perspective, they should have more in common with Olympic athletes, competitive martial artists, and those children in the real world who are raised for bloodsport. You want to find a decent comparison to a “Career” type character, you’re going to be looking at the kids participating in competitive sports martial arts.
Twelve year olds who participate in scheduled Muay Thai bouts against other twelve year olds for the enjoyment of the masses do exist. In Thailand, they participate as young as seven. Olympic boxers, Olympic athletes competing in Judo, Taekwondo, Fencing, Greco-Roman Wrestling, Free-Style Wrestling, you’ll find most of these combatants were training from a young age and competing from a young age in appropriate age group categories in order to get their foot in the door. Martial artists like Jackie Chan and Jet Li technically qualify under the Career title. Jet Li won his first wushu changquan champion when he was fourteen years old. This is before we get into backyard wrestling, where we have kids imitating what they see on the TV on friends or family members in their own homes. However, none of these children are child soldiers. Child soldiers aren’t really trained, they’re children stolen from their families, brainwashed, and hopped up on drugs then sent out to kill. They’re competitive athletes which, when you really stop and think about it, is another can of worms all on its own.
What you’re missing about these kids in this specific mold is the part where they’re professional athletes, they’re not soldiers. Soldier is the wrong skillset for a gladiator. It’s a good starting skill set, but you need more than that in order to succeed in the entertainment industry. What’s easy to forget when you’re looking at novels like The Hunger Games is we already have a billion dollar industry in bloodsport, and watching humans beat up other humans for audiences everywhere is, at this point, a staple in entertainment. Careers are gladiators, they’re professional athletes, and that’s pretty much where they land on the spectrum. They’re somewhere in the collegiate to Olympic levels of serious with a lowball at Friday Night Lights.
Have you ever spent much time around professional athletes? If they’re good at what they do, they have the potential to be worth a lot of money. If they’re at the top of their game, they know it. They’ve beaten out a lot of people to get where they are, and, in the case of bloodsport athletes, those beatings are literal. No, they don’t kill anyone but the reasoning behind that is there’s no money in it. There’s a lot of resources invested in training a gladiator and, whether they’re successful or not, you can make your money back off them over the course of their career. Even in the Roman arenas, the professional gladiators rarely died. They had fans, they were worth a lot of money, and it’s better to have them around to fight next weekend than bury them.
The Hunger Games has the same problem a lot of YA has which is formula. The Careers aren’t emotionless drones, they’re the popular kids in your high school cafeteria. They’re the jocks and the cheerleaders with a touch more homicide rather than the ones who can never show up to any functions or hang out with friends because they’re training from six to eight and then three thirty to eight with eight hours left in the middle of the day for school.
The problem with this set up is that professional athletes and kids training to become professional athletes aren’t “normal” kids. The Best is a competition, the closer you get to that pinnacle the rougher the competition gets. If you want to be the best, you’ve got to put in the effort. To be the best requires a lot of work, a lot of dedication, a lot of sacrifice. You can throw in blood, sweat, and tears but that still won’t be enough. Talent can pave your way, but it isn’t enough to be a winner. You have to be all in, you’ve got to want it, and be willing to sacrifice everything to win.
The formula for The Hunger Games is wrong because you need to be using the formula from your average sports film about the kid trying to make it big. The kids in the new Karate Kid movie with Jackie Chan, for example. That’s the expected level of competency you’d be getting out of a thirteen year old training for high level sports competition. You ever gone ahead and watched high level gymnastics? That shit is fierce, and the behind the scenes competition for top spots on national teams is about as fierce. This is before we get to other countries like China where the prospective child candidates are scouted early and taken into custody of the state to be trained.
The Careers are gladiators, which means (under normal circumstances) they’d be trained to be one part killing machine, one part actor, and one part stuntman. The training part here is key, and that’s what would keep them emotionally and physically stable. Gladiators are showmen. They’re bloodsport, and bloodsport is honest-to-god entertainment. This is an industry which makes billions every single year worldwide, and there are kids the same age as the Careers preparing for their debut UFC bouts out there right now in the United States.
Reality TV isn’t real, it’s entertainment. The WWE is entertainment some people do believe is real. Bloodsport is real… ish, but to be successful at it you need to be more than just good at fighting. Fighting another human being for the enjoyment of the masses is a different skill set. Gladiators are the one place where I’ll say, yes, the flashy additions to their fighting style suits a real purpose. They can kill their opponent or beat them to a bloody pulp and they’ll look good doing it. With someone who is very good, you’ll find yourself enjoying the bout even when you didn’t want to.
When we’re talking about “Careers”, we aren’t discussing kids most middle class Americans would consider “normal” teenagers, not by any stretch of the imagination. They’re trained for a very specific utility, and working the arena is their job. They’re like every other sort of young professional from child models to child actors.
The key component to understand with professional bloodsport is poverty. Like professional sports, this is a route people choose when they have limited options. They often don’t come from privileged backgrounds, and for most of these kids in the real world this is a way out. There aren’t better options for them to choose, and by the point they’re seventeen or eighteen they wouldn’t choose another path. They fought for this, they’re invested in this, and this part of their life is an important aspect of who they are. However, to really delve into the dystopic aspect of this part of society we’d end up in Lord of the Flies territory.
A career is a job. You can take a child of five and train them for eleven to twelve years, by the time they’re sixteen to seventeen they’d be perfectly capable of doing much more than we see from the Careers in The Hunger Games. In fact, the entire problem with the Careers approach to the Hunger Games is that they don’t treat it like a job. We have hyper specialized characters who’ve trained their whole lives to compete in bloodsport, perform, and win the heart of the crowd. They’d be capable of taking someone like Katniss, who was competent in their own right but not prepared for the Games, and incorporate them into their performance. Like in any good reality TV show, you use your actor plants to stoke drama and create entertainment. There’s a real aspect to preliminaries in sports where you use them as an opportunity to size up the competition, which is why you should always be carrying around more than one routine.
In the Roman arena, the thumbs up symbolized the gladiator performing well enough to kill their opponent. The thumbs down indicated they hadn’t performed well enough. The right to kill another warrior was one that had to be earned, and this was difficult to do. These rules were put into place because gladiators are valuable commodities, they are worth more alive than they are dead. At least, until they reach the point where they’re no longer useful.
Looking at a Career would be similar to the feelings inspired when you look at a gif with some martial artist performing martial arts that seem to be outside the laws of nature. Whether that’s climbing up a willing partner to use their legs in a scissor to bring them swinging to the ground or a gun disarm that involves kicking someone’s legs out from under them from a kneeling position. It’s the Clarke quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This was the aspect of the Roman arena that was so demoralizing. You can’t figure out how they did what they just did, they seem so incredibly superior, and now your entire culture is ripped apart into bits for the titillation and tantalization of the masses, but goddamn if some part of you doesn’t enjoy it. (See: the Roman treatment of Sparta.)
The trick to understanding any violence is understanding the kind of training they receive, the purpose of the role they’re preparing to serve. All violence is not the same.
If you’ve never spent any time around children who participate in high end sports or martial arts, you’re not really fit to judge what they are and aren’t capable of. The truth is that children are much more capable than you might think, especially when you train and prepare them for what they’re going to experience. There’s an assumption they’ve suffered abuse, be it mental, emotional, or physical, but that’s actually unlikely. You get more out of a willing participant than you do from one that’s been forced, and bloodsport has never in human history had a shortage of individuals willing to sign up. Modern bloodsport is all volunteers, and many of them began training as children in one form or another.
We can debate the nature of traumatized children, how young is too young, but it is important to remember that in sports like gymnastics you’re often looking at children who are sixteen to eighteen years old. These kids train from four in the morning to eight in the evening, and, for the high fliers, their entire education is probably home schooled. Ballet requires a lifetime of preparation in order to achieve professional status. We have child actors. And, of course, there are the Muay Thai kids I mentioned earlier. They get into the ring and give each other injuries that make their brains look like they’ve been in car accidents. But, if you ask them, most would be happy to keep doing it. The rewards outweigh everything else.
Don’t think of these kids as props. They’re very real, and they have very real desires, real wants, and real goals. You can’t become good at something if you don’t love it. If you want to write these kinds of characters, you need to try thinking from the perspective of the kids who actually want to be there. Who want to do this. Who looked at the glamour, and the blood, and the cheers of the crowd, and said, “YES! I WANT TO BE THAT!” Not as a passing fancy, not in a way that discounts their experiences or chides them for being childish or naive, but the ones who understood what they were getting into. The ones who were raised in the environment and never wanted anything else, and nothing anyone can offer will ever make them feel quite as good. The harder one works to be good at something, the more invested they become. You can be proud of your skill, how hard you worked, and how you struggled without being proud of your ability to kill. This is who they are.
You can cringe from it, you can be terrified by it, you can feel sorry for them, but while you’re doing all that pearl clutching you can’t write genuine stories about their experiences. You can’t write them if you don’t understand. At best, your writing is patronizing. At worst, it ignores the real dark side of their experiences, their struggles, their sacrifices, and the cost of their dream. You also ignore the good that comes from their actions, like the Muay Thai children who are so successful in the ring they can buy their parents houses, the family bonding with parents and siblings who also fight. The friendships, the families, the community, the support, and what its like to be around people who want the same as you. The ones who truly understand your experiences.
Honestly, if you want to be doing anything gladiator, you need to be looking at sports and the influence sports has on our culture. If you want to discuss the evils of bloodsport or violence as entertainment, then you need to understand the cultures we’re talking about. You need to grasp why people like it in the first place, what draws them to watching children beat the shit out of each other, and why they enjoy it without just outright initially dismissing them as psychos. You also need to grasp performance and sports martial arts as their own skill set, with one not completely rejecting your ability to kill people.
In those videos, you’re watching some kids who are twelve and thirteen years old with enough physical control to perform the same sort of stunt fighting you see in a Hollywood film. That’s forgetting Ernie Reyes Jr, who could do the same when he was about five.
What I’m saying is: The Hunger Games doesn’t give children enough credit.
Inspiration Haven 