this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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This is my working assumption for all those teenage dystopias.
Hunger Games? World outside the US is fine. Better, now that the hegemon is more interested in watching it's own population murder each other for television ratings.
Don't want me making that assumption about your story? Maybe mention anywhere outside the continental US at least one [1] time. At least Handmaid's Tale acknowledges Canada. And I guess heaven forbid Mexico ever get a mention.
The Hunger Games owes everything to Stephen King. They basically just took The Long Walk novel and glittered/mashed it up with The Running Man movie. Neither of those took place during or after any apocalypse. They were each just set in either the now, or the very near future, in an America that has gone fully corrupt as a result of being morally, politically, and economically bankrupt. King was (and always has) written very local and topical stories set in what is literally his here and now. When he lived in Maine, he wrote Maine stories. When he moved to Florida, he wrote Duma Key. So, it's no surprise that a YA story as derivative as The Hunger Games would have the same blind spot for Global events as the inspirational works.
But, also if we were really going to descend into an apocalypse (or a dictatorship), news of the broader globe would be one of the first casualties. People inside most apocalypse (and fascist dystopian) stories don't usually have a lot of knowledge about the "outside" world. If they do, it's usually an unreliable narrative.
‘Rollerball’ and ‘Death Race 2000’, both from 1975, are the progenitors of the genre. The first one is based on the screenwriter William Harrison's short story ‘Roller Ball Murder’ from 1973, the second one on Ib Melchior's 1956 short story ‘The Racer’, but the stories are pretty much unknown compared to the films.
Both of these set the totalitarian and corrupt backdrop. ‘The Running Man’ particularly feels like a rehashing of ‘Death Race 2000’ — at least the film does, idk about the novel since they're supposedly not 1:1.
‘The Hunger Games’ also uses the premise of ‘Battle Royale’, afaik.
Battle Royale (2000) - IMDb https://share.google/Hfhd2gcEJGVsn5h02
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwb2glCshzY