Ok soooo I finished rereading the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010)) and it’s making me think a LOT about rebellion and its surprisingly clear anti-war messages and I have to share all my thoughts.
I read this series for the first time when it was originally released (I was in middle school y’all) and then again in high school (around 2012) and now I just reread it for the third time 10 years after that. My favorite thing about this series is that it started the young adult dystopian girl-hero genre of literature that led to books like Divergent, the Maze Runner, Legend, Matched, etc etc etc. We got to experience the start of a genre… like imagine if you read Frankenstein when Mary Shelley wrote it for the first time in 1818? The book that started science fiction! This feels like that to me.
If you haven’t read the Hunger Games series, you can read their blubs on the Storygraph page for the series or find a synopsis somewhere online or just read to books dang they’re hella good. My thoughts below obviously have a ton of spoilers so proceed with caution.
Ok so my Hunger Games and Catching Fire thoughts are pretty simple:
The Hunger Games // so incredibly depressing and it really gets you as an audience to buy into the horror of Katniss’ world. She has to watch children around her die and she has to sacrifice her humanity here and there to do some of the killing herself. We hate the Capitol, we hate the people who work hard to this day to keep up these evil games, we love Katniss. In the games she pretends to be in love with Peeta (the other tribute from her district) to keep them alive, tricking him into thinking her feelings are real. The story ends with you cheering on her strategic play: getting the gamemakers to accept two victors to the game instead of no victors (remember them threatening to eat the nightlock berries? Genius).
Catching Fire // Anyway… the Capitol wants revenge for this minor act of rebellion (which makes Katniss LOL because she wasn’t even trying to be rebellious she was just trying to keep herself and Peeta alive). The revenge comes in part in the form of the 75th Hunger Games: where instead of regular kids from regular districts, the tributes are chosen from the existing pool of victors. The evil of this is one of the reasons this book is my favorite… like who thinks of this stuff????? And it’s so realistically evil too. Yes President Snow would orchestrate a way to get Katniss back into the games to show her who has the power.
When I read Catching Fire this time around I was a little annoyed at how fast everything was happening. The games were announced, the training started, the games lasted literally 3 days, and then they broke out and escaped. But at the end of the story you learn that all the other players in the game knew about the plan to break out of the arena except for Katniss and Peeta. It was fast because it was meant to happen asap. The game was a cover for this plot and Katniss just had no idea. Everything was happening quickly and efficiently for 2 reasons: they needed to escape as an act of rebellion against the Capitol and they needed to keep Katniss and Peeta alive as the heart of the rebellion.
This book is also where Katniss finds real feelings for Peeta. Gale (her childhood friend) wants some romance with Katniss and she’s like alright yeah let’s do this. Smooch smooch here and there. But it’s really clear that Katniss’ participation in the first games and her fake love for Peeta created a rift between her and Gale that feels really hard to repair. At the end of the book, Peeta is captured by the Capitol and Katniss is heartbroken.
And now to everyone’s least favorite book of the series: Mockingjay. I really really liked it this time around. My memory of this book was murky: Peeta hates Katniss, Prim dies, and Gale leaves forever. But so much happens that I didn’t understand as a tween and it really improved my perspective on the book. I think this book was realistic even if we didn’t like it. We wanted a happy ending but there’s never a happy ending with war.
I remember being annoyed that Suzanne Collins killed off Prim in this book and my takeaway as a kid was that it sucked that Katniss took down the Capitol for her sister but in the end it didn’t even matter because her sister was dead. This time around I can see that Suzanne Collins killed Prim to show the inhumanity of their war: killing children is wrong and, when you have war, sometimes children are killed. In the series, the innocence of the children is emphasized again and again: they don’t have the power to change their society, their government doesn’t help them survive, they have to watch their loved ones die, and they’re suffering the consequences of a decision adults made generations ago. They don’t deserve to die. Metaphor for real life alert: people who are oppressed are in this position to varying degrees.
Katniss has the opportunity to kill the president (Snow) but chooses to kill the replacement president instead (Coin, the prez of the rebels). Prim was killed through a tactic developed by Gale and other rebels under the guidance of President Coin: gather your enemy and kill some, when medics come to aid the remaining, kill the rest and the medics. In the case of Prim, the enemies gathered were children from the Capitol, and the arriving medics were rebels (including Prim). In a scene immediately before the presidential murder, Coin proposes a last Hunger Games with the tributes being the children of Capitol government members. An act of revenge for what they’d done to their people. Katniss approves of this plan “for Prim.” She kills Coin in the next scene and you never find out if the last games happen or not (I like to think they don’t). President Coin dies as a villain in Katniss’ eyes: her ideals were as bad as her enemy’s. She was willing to engage in the same evil moves that her enemies had been practicing for 75 years (killing children, putting on another Hunger Games) but this time the victims would be the people they had been fighting.
Fictional good/bad groups often follow this line of thought and people use them to criticize real life events: if you fight back using your enemy’s tactics, are you as bad as your enemy? I think SC was arguing (with like this one scene lol) that you need to have ideals that are more morally just than your oppressor’s instead of redoing every injustice they’ve perpetuated back at them. Otherwise, what difference did it all make? And Katniss saw this all. Coin might have turned into another Snow so she stopped it before it was too late.
(I don’t know what my stance is on real life conflict: I firmly stand on the side of the oppressed everywhere and for everything and I have no right criticizing the way other people fight for justice. I want to say that you shouldn’t be perpetuating the same harm that has been harming you but that’s not always what I believe everywhere… still unsure. I think there’s a line for everything?)
This whole Prim murder adds so much to the rift between Gale and Katniss: Gale’s idea to attack the Capitol results in the death of Prim. He knows that Katniss will never stop wondering if he directly caused her death so he removes himself from the equation and moves somewhere to continue fighting for the rebellion. Peeta and Katniss end up together naturally through shared experiences and shared trauma: the book ends with them living near each other with no other family around and the love they share for each other slowly returns.
SC’s series (and especially this last book) is very explicitly anti-war. In the acknowledgements, she thanks her father for teaching her about war and peace when she was a child. I appreciate this book so much for having such a strong stance against war because of war’s inherent capability to take human life and especially life that is considered to be innocent (children in this series and oppressed folks in real life).
It’s not lost to me that I reread this series while people around the world rise up every day against their oppressors (it’s truly personal for me). Rereading these books as an adult while holding this knowledge led to a unique reading experience.
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I’m planning to reread her prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) and will share more thoughts after.
RH
Follow my reading adventures on The Storygraph @rzaha
