To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Four Hunger Games fans and one skeptic debate the franchise on its year anniversary. The Hunger Games books were giant best-sellers, and the movie adaptations were blockbusters. Together, the two series kicked off the YA dystopian boom of the late s. They became a pop culture shorthand for stories of inequality and scarcity.
They created slogans that were used in actual protest movements. They helped launch Jennifer Lawrence to megastardom. Does this franchise live up to the hype? Is it actually good, or was it all talk? And at the end of the day, are we Team Peeta or Team Gale? Constance: I still remember the exact moment The Hunger Games got me.
Then Peeta took the stage and gave his interview, and announced that he was in love with Katniss. Whom do I consider worthy of my attention?
What violence truly hurts me, and what violence do I ignore? The Hunger Games creates exactly the state of mind I need to think those issues through. I have to respect the guts of a book willing to make that fact so clear. Does The Hunger Games work as a way of thinking through big questions for you, or does it still feel a little trashy or overwrought?
And if it got you, how did it get you? I think for me — as someone who is really not typically into dystopia and high fantasy, because the language and codes of those stories often feel very removed from present-day reality — the localizing ideas in The Hunger Games really started to come through for me in those moments.
They conveyed that this is a story about people consciously manipulating their public images and using fashion as a mode of survival in a society that has become entirely image-obsessed. I think one reason for that is that The Hunger Games is a YA series, so Collins also has to include a proverbial love triangle. I think another reason is that her action scenes and the plot by which we watch contestants fall to the Games can feel plodding and procedural, and far-fetched in the moments of climax.
I think Collins took great care to make the Capitol especially feel like it could be any current city, rather than something very stylized and futuristic. And that impression of the city as this vapid but very real place, where the people who succeed have learned to manipulate its superficiality, has stuck with me ever since.
Katniss keeps the whole thing grounded. Battle Royale did well to establish a dystopian future where adults control the youth through the annual Battle Royale. Like, Clove was a nasty piece of work, and I felt a dark relief and satisfaction when Thresh not only concussed her to death but did so to save Katniss and avenge Rue.
Collins can also turn that feeling inside out and make you root for the charismatic Finnick or the damaged but loyal Johanna.
Collins taps into a kind of wish fulfillment — that you could imagine yourself winning the Games and be the exception. In reality, I would probably be most like Glimmer and die when Katniss drops a bunch of bees on my bitchy head. Eleanor: I am on record as being a bit of a Hunger Games hater. Katniss is a really compelling character! Collins does do a really nice job of not letting the reader off the hook!
The series is a canny subversion of the love triangle trope! For a while there, everyone had a theory on how The Hunger Games applied to post-recession America. Also London. But all the lazy takes have made me wonder if, in fact, The Hunger Games was also lazy — a simplistic critique of economic equality masquerading as something deep. What do you think? And what do we do when the conversation around a franchise becomes bigger than the franchise itself? After all, any good dystopia needs a significant gap between those who have power and money and those who do not.
Or, put another way, it became easier to understand real life as an extension of The Hunger Games than it was to understand The Hunger Games as an extension of real life. Famously, Collins conceived of the book when channel-flipping between Iraq War footage and reality shows. I suspect that the way the stories became conversational shorthand is due to how canny Collins is about the exact thing those conversations rarely touched on: television production.
The Hunger Games is shot through with the knowledge of somebody who used to work in the TV industry, and Collins is always careful to ground the story Katniss is trying to sell within the larger stories and strategies that everybody around her is plugging away at.
Along the way Katniss senses that a rebellion is simmering, but the Capitol is still very much in control as President Snow prepares the 75th Annual Hunger Games The Quarter Quell - a competition that could change Panem forever.
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The book focuses on year-old Coriolanus Snow who is trying to seek fortune for his family by becoming a mentor in the 10th annual Hunger Games. He thinks his hopes are shot when he's forced to mentor Lucy Gray, the tribute from the country's poorest 12th District, until he sees how promising she turns out to be and plots to help her win.
Fans of the original series pushed back before the prequel's release, arguing that the book may have attempted to make readers sympathize with the fascist leader. However, there ultimately wasn't much in the way of sympathizing with Snow in the prequel; Collins instead shows readers how Snow was just as cruel as a teen.
Here's how Abby Monteil previously described the book in a review for Insider:. In his mind he might be a hero fighting to save Lucy Gray, but Collins makes it abundantly clear that Snow is a cold, ruthless teenager well on his way to becoming the cruel tyrant we first meet in "The Hunger Games. The original series is set in a futuristic dystopia where a country is split into class-based districts and Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the poorest district, overcomes all odds to inspire a revolution that ultimately destroys the old order.
In "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," we see the earlier days of the 12 districts and the Capitol, 64 years before the events of the original trilogy. This was a couple of years after the war that put the Capitol in charge, hence the Hunger Games of this book is a lot more simple and brutal than the elaborate and sophisticated event we see in the original series. In addition to mentoring Lucy Gray, teen Snow is also enlisted to help come up with ideas for "improving" the twisted battle royale — ultimately showing how he helped shape it into the spectacle it is by the time Katniss and Peeta are thrust into the fray 64 years later.
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