Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 may seem very different than Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy, but the dystopian governments in each story bear many similarities, especially their control over the media. In Fahrenheit 451 the citizens live in a society where books are illegal and there is an entire profession devoted to their destruction. While in The Hunger Games trilogy the government forces its citizens to watch their children be slaughtered to death while the lavish people of the Capitol laugh.
Fahrenheit 451 and The Hunger Games trilogy are widely popular dystopian stories; they share many similarities, but their most striking one is the governmental control of the media consumed by citizens. In both stories the insubordinate…show more content… In Fahrenheit 451 the story behind the censorship is delivered through an elaborate dialogue from the fire chief to Guy Montag, the protagonist. He explains that minority groups were offended by books, and that by the time that authors had grown to scared of being offensive to write bold stories all people had grown tired of their contradicting opinions. However, the strongest reason he gave for censorship of opinion and its replacement with fleeting fun is the societal need for everyone to be the same. "Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute." A book is dangerous is a society where everyone is expected to fit strict social norms because learning of different opinions can lead to acting on those ideas; that is the reason why they are destroyed. In The Hunger Games trilogy rebellions and insubordinate opinions are heavily edited if they are not completely censored. In the case of District 13 the Capital reminds the outlying districts of how they rebelled then the Hunger games were created, but only after that district had been reduced to rubble. However many rebels tried to defect to it; Katniss noticed them in the first book, but she
