Trials and Tribulations

Battle Royale. The Running Man. The Hunger Games. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The Maze Runner.

What is it about the “games and trials” trope that’s so appealing to us? Characters compete in structured challenges or games, usually with failure meaning DEATH (!), and we just eat. it. up.

I guess it’s not so different from the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, or the mythological heroes from pretty much any culture who are tasked with impossible and deadly challenges. We like action. We like violence. We like heroes who beat the odds. We even, apparently, like to imagine this stuff happening to children sometimes?

At any rate, the popularity of the “games and trials” trope is undeniable, and there are many examples of recent books that employ it, e.g. Phantasma, The Serpent and the Wings of Night, Lightlark. The show Squid Game, one of the goriest entries on this list, is immensely popular. Even Fourth Wing and Red Rising, though their trials are framed as educational training rather than tournaments for entertainment or personal gain, have a very Hunger Games-y feel, with young people trying to prove themselves in circumstances that require them to compete against – and do violence to – each other.

I love a well-executed “games and trials” as much as anyone. I was HOOKED by Hunger Games back in the day, and, more recently, by Red Rising (seriously, you couldn’t have pried that book out of my hands if you tried! Actually, you probably could have. I’m pretty weak and would fail any of these fictional trials immediately).

But sometimes I do find myself asking the question…why is death always on the line?

Sorry, Vizzini just popped into my head. So now he’s in yours. You’re welcome.

Back to the business at hand: why is the Triwizard Tournament in Goblet of Fire potentially deadly? The high death toll from past iterations is emphasized repeatedly at the beginning of the book (even though none of the competitors in GOF end up dying from the tasks themselves). Bitch, they’re wizards!!! You’re telling me they couldn’t have set up some spell where, if a wizard’s about to be burnt to a crisp by a dragon, he gets portkeyed or disapparated somewhere instead (and loses that round of the competition, obviously)?

What about the trials where only one person can survive? Like…why? Why can’t it be like a triathlon or something, where one person is victorious but everyone (hopefully) is alive at the end?

“Because it’s more exciting that way, Reina.”

OK, fair.

But one of my favorite moments in Iron Flame (the sequel to Fourth Wing) is when a newly-introduced character throws shade at the whole system that’s set up in the first book. From the first page of Fourth Wing, cadets are thrown into a succeed-or-die training regimen for prospective dragon riders. A whole bunch of them are just killed off if they can’t immediately perform the skills being thrown at them. And that’s…not how training works. Ask anyone in the military. You go in (mostly) without the skills, and you train hard to get brave and proficient enough to do the things that will eventually be asked of you. So in the sequel Iron Flame, when one of the newly-introduced gryphon riders points out that the dragon-riding school is set up in an unnecessarily harsh – and wasteful – way (like, it doesn’t make sense to kill off a huge portion of your best and brightest right at the start), it was very satisfying for me as a reader, because I had been thinking that very thing since the beginning.

What do you think, friends? Do you have a favorite entry in the “games and trials” club? Is there something you particularly like or dislike in this type of story? Please comment!

In Proximum, Regina Vestra