Also to add to this, the love triangle being awkward and forced was the point! It was the whole point! It was older, manipulative adults putting three teens into that position for their own gains and forcing strife and trauma into their lives without the idea of what’s best for the teens even being remotely up for consideration! The love triangle feeling forced and disruptive of the plot is the point!
Collins didn’t put in a love triangle because romance and by extension the implication of sex sells, but as a criticism of that exact concept! It was a blatant criticism of teens being forced into adult situations for the amusement and benefit of adults before they were remotely ready! That’s the point! So much of the Hunger Games is about criticizing exactly how adults force kids into situations that are normal and relatable to adults for their own amusement and ignoring how it fucks up the kids along the way because kids are just seen and treated as tools instead of whole entire people that need to have control of their own lives the love triangle being unnatural is the point it’s the point it’s the entire point I’m not even anything more than a casual reader of these books once in my childhood but even I realized at twelve that the whole point was that for kids it’s a warning about adults who want to use you and treat you like an adult being bad fucken news
Like, for adults it reads as a criticism of their own behavior and failings but I remember very clearly as a kid even when the books weren’t my favorites that Collins was pretty much the only writer who used her books to sit me down and say “hey, you’re a kid, and that’s not a bad thing. I get you want to be treated like a person, and that’s normal, that’s your right, you’re not crazy for that. But adults trying to treat you like an adult aren’t safe and are very bad news don’t fucking trust them they’re not safe they don’t actually care about you they’re trying to use you and it will fuck you up. Don’t fall for it, I know you’re smart enough not to if someone warns you about it.”
Collins didn’t write her books for adults to argue about them. She used them to be one of the only voices telling kids very frankly about the dangers of grooming, what it looks like, why adults do it, and what it can do to you. She trusted children to be smart, clever, and aware enough to understand her messages and make use of them, and she’s frankly one of the only writers who understood that children are not only ready for this info, but that adults aren’t. She sat millions of kids across the globe in multiple languages down and told them very frankly what it means for an adult to want to treat you like older than you really are, what it looks like, and what it does to fellow kids exactly like you. She told kids it not only isn’t right for adults to want to force romance and those kinds of adult relationships on you, even with your fellow teens, before you are ready, she also showed what it means to be used in many, many other ways and how it will fuck you up, even if the adults don’t actually mean to harm you.
Collins showed, without mincing words, that adults who try to make you love, fight, politic, perform, even kill like you’re an adult aren’t doing so because you’re mature for your age, but because they want to use you without caring what it will do to you. I can’t even tell you what it did to me as a kid to learn that and then see militaries try to recruit as young as they can, contests designed for kids to compete like adults, and adults try to apply “you’re mature for your age” in so many different ways. It made me aware, as a child, that I not only was right in feeling like adults were failing me, but that I had the right to outright say “I am a kid, this isn’t how you treat a kid” which saved me from a lot of adults being able to worsen my trauma without pushback because I didn’t know any better.
Hunger Games weren’t my favorite books as a kid, and still aren’t now. But they were some of the only books who were legitimately, truly, and completely on my side as a powerless child, tween, and teen and armed me with a knowledge no other adult tried to give me without mincing words. They allowed me to be secure in my own mistrust of school staff who ended up trying to ruin my life because I looked bad on their records for being neurodivergent and not give them an inch. They allowed me to tell my assigned guidance counselors in the program I ended up in that each of them lied to me when they said they would be there for me and I ended up being transferred between counselors four times in about two years and that I couldn’t trust them because I couldn’t trust they wouldn’t be gone in a few months to which the last one ended up agreeing.
The lessons Hunger Games taught me allowed me time and time again as a kid and teen to outright defy adults who I realized weren’t acting in my best interest and that being a child didn’t mean I couldn’t trust my own gut and instincts. I still ended up horribly traumatized but I know for a fact that those lessons kept it from being endlessly worse by teaching me right as all the bullshit began that it wasn’t me. I was a kid. And adults don’t treat kids this way.
Say what you want of Collins, but she knew exactly what kids needed to know and understand that no other adult would be willing to tell or teach them. Even if it meant other adults would tell her she was every horrible thing under the sun for it.
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