i think something that elevates the hunger games franchise is not just the quality of writing but the integrity of it. tbosas isn’t just a cash-grab by suzanne collins in the age of sequels and reboots (though i won’t pretend that didn’t play a part), it’s a character study of the main antagonist with a different structure than the main trilogy. and importantly, it doesn’t just re-hash the same old themes and beats the main trilogy had, it expands on not just the world of the hunger games but the themes as well, it actually has something new to say about the trilogy’s themes about class, capitalism, power, and control, in a way that couldn’t be explored with the main story because the protagonist of that story simply did not have access to the world that’s being explored in tbosas.
i understand the people who call for books/movies to be made about haymitch, finnick, johanna, different years of the games — we love those characters and want to see more of them! i’d kill for a novella on finnick’s days mentoring tributes, or katniss’s parents falling in love. but at the end of the day we probably wouldn’t be very satisfied with those stories being fleshed out if they had absolutely nothing new to say about the world, they’d be enjoyable, but not as interesting and engaging as tbosas has been.
Reading all this NOW makes me so depressed and angry, like, why does STOR even exist ?
Damn it, Suzanne…
