bit of a diary entry about my relationship to the hunger games below
i remember when i was the exact target demographic seeing the hunger games on the library shelf and reading it because whoaa death games?! then finishing it and thinking "wow, katniss is so amazing, she's so selfish, she knows exactly what she wants, she doesn't give a fuck about that loser boy's feelings. she also feels violated and confused and upset when people try to do beauty things to her or make her do beauty things. and this is so right, reality tv is evil and exploitative and a slippery slope to kid murder games. big brother is just like this for real." <- opinions of 11yo contrarian egg who was unreasonably smug about not watching reality tv
then i discovered the sequel catching fire by seeing it physically existing in WHSmiths and immediately bought it. katniss stayed winning. i loved it, although i found the importance of a figurehead for the rebellion implausible. then it ended on the cliffhanger and i was distraught. so i obsessively read fanfiction and stalked suzanne collins's website for the year it took for them to release mockingjay. then when my preorder finally did arrive in the post (a few days late), i had organised to see a friend, so i brought it and then mostly ignored the friend to read it in front of them (i am so sorry about this i used to be even more unsocialised and feral no wonder everyone bullied me). 12yo me finished mockingjay a little later and burst out crying. some of it was because of prim. but most of it was because peeta had pressured katniss to have babies. he literally pulled those babies out of her body with sad eyes and passive aggression that only worked on her because of her PTSD, and we all know it. my girl would never have babies, that's so fucked up and evil. i still hate that ending. even though haymitch, who was my joint fave character with johanna, got geese, which is so cool. geese! geese!
i don't really enjoy movie adaptations in general, but when the first hunger games movie hit cinemas 2 years later, i thought that they did a shockingly good job. i had outgrown the books a bit because i stopped reading YA fiction about a year before when i was 13 (i did still read some YA after that age, stuff people gave me, but i didn't like it mostly because of the preoccupation with romance. i was in my space opera phase at that age and also reading whatever my parents had on their bookshelves. i was fixated on this idea that if reading a book wasn't challenging (full of new words, conceptually dense, using less familiar phrasing), it wasn't worth it).
despite my dwindling interest, i saw them as they continued to come out. i think i skipped catching fire for a few years. i really liked mockingjay part 1. part 2 caught some criticism from me because it relied too heavily on nazi imagery and i got annoyed about that, because why does fascism have to always equal those rallies hitler did, let's get some new aesthetics please, let's get anticolonial with it (i was 17 and in my very passionate and inflexible Everything Should Be Postcolonial Or Else Fuck Off And Literally Die In A Fire!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! phase -- a phase, which i might add, made me oddly susceptible to "diverse" books about immigrant experiences set in the imperial core, or Very White books like conrad's heart of darkness, just because they were the most accessible, whereas i should have been enjoying the kind of shit i do now like achebe). but as i've gotten older i've gotten more chill about appreciating a work of art while being conscious of its shortcomings. i think they're pretty decent movies. i have had my attention drawn to certain performances and altered dynamics which have made me enjoy them even more!
my heart will always belong to the books though. this is entirely because they let katniss be like that, so untouched in her development by all the social pressures that normally affect young women. she's a breadwinner. i love how she's introduced to beauty and celebrity culture as a form of violence. i love how strongly she rejects it all as something obviously evil instead of enjoying the luxury. it reminds me of how when i'm introduced to nice things my immediate reaction is not gratitude or appreciation that such a nice thing exists and i now have it, but absolute disgust at the indulgent wastefulness of it. that strong gut reaction is one of the reasons i'm much happier living in rural france.
i will say this, as a final thing, i think it's weird that people talk about the hunger games books as introducing kids to basic civic concepts through fiction. because you don't really get them? like at all? i've always put them in a box with john christopher's 'the tripods' and a few others, a box i call "books where people with no business knowing what democracy is discover it and magically apply it without any infrastructure to unrealistically positive results (propaganda for liberal democracies)". i think the books do a good job covering social issues, like beauty culture, you can extend the reality tv stuff to cover social media if you squint, there's some nice addressing of what it means to be a child carer and to live in poverty, but this isn't really overtly about civics or how governance works. like we live in a real world where inequality is just as evident and explicit as katniss's dad dying in the mines, and it's difficult to not know that by the time you can read. i don't think saying something like "war is bad and kids shouldn't have to risk participating in the death games to eat" is teaching anyone anything. but idk maybe I'm overestimating the average usamerican child
