"It demolished just about every single genre convention and yet managed to stay true to itself till the very end."

I think I see what you mean, though I took your Hunger Games defense to mean the narrative as a whole (or plot point) is realistic, as it is certainly plausible within the fictional reality that it could happen as well. It just doesn't fit the narrative as well as it could, or more specifically, that because it's…

"But plausibility is not one of quality's metrics."

""Value today over yesterday" is a much better moral than "when all else fails reach into the past.""