Hunger Games gets lumped in with all the other (mostly lacking in substance) dystopian novels that came out during that era, but what what people forget is that Hunger Games is really what kicked off that whole craze because it was actually pretty good. There’s this interesting phenomenon where when something is good enough it will kick off a bunch of bad to mediocre copycats until everyone is sick of that thing and decides that it’s a tired cliche. And with Hunger Games I think the copycats came out so quickly and got enough traction that people forget or don’t realize that Hunger Games was actually the original.

Currently I’m noticing this with the whole “humanizing the villain” trope. It was cool for a while, but now it’s tired and everyone wants to have a villain who’s just an actual bad guy again.