Lamron Lit Corner: The Hunger Games and how to create effective young adult stories
“I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is a dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.”
~ Suzzanne Collins, Mockingjay
As The Hunger Games movie trilogy left Netflix last week, it seems that fans have once again been met with an end to their favorite story. The movies and books saw a massive resurgence in popularity over the last month or so, whether it be on TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram, praising the master storytelling that defined our generation—possibly even more than Harry Potter. It seems that right now is the perfect time to look at why exactly we feel such a strong connection to the books, and why that connection is more than deserved.
Let’s start disassembling the most basic and fundamental comparison that holds Hunger Games down: Harry Potter. Being not only the most successful young adult franchises, but one of the most successful franchises in general, the comparison was inevitable when the movie adaptations began overlapping. It goes without saying that the Harry Potter franchise has become plagued with confusion and hurt over the past few years for reasons I’ll leave out of this piece, but there is much more that makes Hunger Games more culturally significant than its magical counterpart.
If your family is anything like mine, you were sure to have heard the age-old, “I don’t want to see something about kids dying” as an excuse from your relatives not wanting to see or read The Hunger Games. And they aren’t wrong per se, but there is immediate ignorance in a claim like this. The same can be said for countless banned books: people don’t want to see Holden Caulfield’s mental descent in The Catcher and the Rye, they don’t want to see the horrible intricacies of slavery in Beloved, the don’t want to see the complexities and trauma of growing up gay in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but that doesn’t mean that we should look away. While Harry Potter has had its own issues with censorship, it doesn’t take a literature student to understand that the power of The Hunger Games and its plot alone has more significant societal connotations than most other YA novels, but even more so over Harry Potter.
It is in these societal connotations that the books and films are truly able to strive. The world of Panem is incredibly complex and concrete, so much so that the reader is able to spend hours just understanding the backstory of each district and character, even if they may not be hyper-relevant to the main plot; however, the real power of Collins’ world is its ability to be everything and nothing at the same time. Yes, it is a “fictional” dystopian world, but it’s also a metaphor for classism, school shootings, fame, rebellion, totalitarianism, etc.
There is very little you can’t connect to the basis of The Hunger Games alone, but Collins doesn’t require that you make those steps. For a thirteen-year-old just beginning to read YA novels, there is still a fully developed world to become lost in; then, ten years later when the movies are released on Netflix, our generation begins to see just how significant these novels have become and just how much they predicted correctly.
Whether you were a fan since their release, just got into them over the last few months, or have never seen or read them at all, The Hunger Games will continue to serve as a significant stepping stone for our generation’s understanding of the tragedies that are and will continue to befall us.