In this op-ed, writer Helen Li argues that with the recent release of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, fans are rekindling their connection with the series and seeing many parallels with real life oppression and injustice. Ultimately, that means people are still paying attention.
I first read Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games in eighth grade when I was 13 years old. When the trailer for the adaptation came out in 2011, I searched on Youtube how to replicate Katniss’ signature braid and wore it to school. For film premieres, my friends and I would cosplay as President Snow, Primrose Everdeen, or Effie Trinket. We loved to dress up in the most flamboyant, colorful, outrageous outfits and pretend to be from the Capitol; we didn’t think about what that might mean. These stories were dystopian and distant from our realities in the suburbs outside of Richmond, Virginia.
I’m 27 now, and with the release of Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, it’s more clear to me — and fans globally — how much Collins’s films and books have always been a mirror to society. I see scenes and hear their words echoed on the news every single day: the discussions on civilians and casualties in war, the way we treat children as commodities for entertainment, the profitization of militaries during conflict. And we watch on, becoming part of an apathetic Capitol before we even realize it. The United States has participated in many wars and helped fund them, but almost all in more recent memory — the Vietnam War, Korean War, Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan — have been largely fought on foreign soil. When the 10th Hunger Games Capitol mentors lose a tribute or a Capitol citizen loses a bet, they can easily retreat back to their lives without any immediate physical consequences.
Collins, whose father was deployed in the Vietnam War, created the Hunger Games trilogy after channel-surfing between footage of the Iraq War and a reality television show. The prequel, published in spring 2020, focuses on the origin of Coriolanus Snow, the authoritarian president of Panem, and how the 10th Hunger Games becomes the first to engage Capitol citizens and become an entertainment-focused spectacle. “I don’t write about adolescents. I write about war for adolescents,” the author once said in a rare interview.
Dystopian books and films have long been a way for people to talk about topics such as war, propaganda, and injustices in their own lives and in the world they inhabit. But the prequel, and the world we live in, have ushered in a resurgence of fans using The Hunger Games as a lens for how to process exploitation and violence, and our own roles in a society that often condones those things. That lens isn’t perfect, and it shouldn’t be used as a one-to-one comparison between whatever situation we choose to apply it to, but the link between what we read and how we see the world can illuminate the systems of oppression and state violence that threaten to harm us all.
Sejanus Plinth, a mentor who grew up in District 2 but migrated to the Capitol, has a father who profited from the war through the sale of weapons — echoing how the military-industrial complex keeps wealthy individuals influential. Capitol citizens are more angry about Reaper, a District 11 tribute, pulling down a Panem flag rather than the deaths of the children in the arena who they view as the enemy, drawing similarities to debates about flag kneeling, burning, and banning. Since October 7th, when Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israeli citizens, more than 17,000 have died in Gaza, with 70% of them being women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has since warned that Gaza is becoming “a graveyard for children.” In the original series, the citizens of District 12 suffer in poverty and exploitative working conditions; Katniss’s dad dies in a mining explosion. Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, cobalt and copper mines expand and human rights abuses abound as the people mine materials for our smartphone and electric vehicle batteries. Similar to the districts who supply goods to the Capitol, the vulnerable populations that pick the supplies never reap the full benefits of their labor; rather, they sacrifice their health, loved ones, and life, for capitalist greed.
It’s clear people understand the films’ and books’ themes can be seen as paralleling current conflicts. At a pro-Palestinian protest in New York City, a protester held up the signature three-finger salute that characters in Hunger Games use to show solidarity and support in the face of oppression. On TikTok, a fan spliced together videos of Katniss visiting a bulldozed District 12 and BBC footage of building remains in eastern Ukraine after bombings while Jennifer Lawrence sings “The Hanging Tree.” Another shared scenes of a hospital bombing in Mockingjay, with the caption “sound familiar?”, referencing the Al-Shifa hospital bombing in Gaza. “The Hanging Tree” song has mutated in the mainstream, with creators changing the song’s lyrics or using the chosen soundtrack for more awareness of humanitarian crises: from the Philly water crisis, to protecting the Indian Child Welfare Act, to the prevalence of mass shootings in the United States.
The biggest reveal in the 10th annual Hunger Games is the backstory of how the games’ attention economy works. Conceptualized by Coriolanus Snow, Capitol citizens can place odds on their favorites. A tribute performs their trauma for the camera, similar to a TikTok livestream. When Lucy Gray Baird sings a ballad, donations flood in. In the arena if they kill someone, the little ticker at the bottom of the television screen goes up. The tributes initially don’t know that though, as District 7’s tribute Lamina killed Marcus partially out of mercy to end his suffering. In return, she receives a sponsor gift, validating that killing gets the audience’s attention. “Murder or Mercy? Either way, that’s what happens when you do stuff. You get money,” Lucky Flickerman says. These tweaks cement the games and the behavior of Capitol citizens, mentors, and tributes for decades to come. Attention becomes currency.
It makes sense that people are drawing parallels between books and films and reality — that’s one of the goals of dystopian fiction after all. “It's very natural when something is happening in the world that we draw from a set of references that we know other people are going to understand,” says Dr. Isra Ali, an assistant professor at NYU’s department of media, culture, and communication who focuses on how narratives of the war in Afghanistan move into popular culture. These films and books help audiences develop a “shared vocabulary” which can become the basis for questioning, empathy, and possibly resistance. The three-finger salute, for instance, also became a symbol of solidarity and resistance for pro-democracy protestors in Myanmar and Thailand in 2021.
But it also matters what we do with these references, and with the onslaught of information about the world. Creator Alyssa Ablon shared her theory on TikTok that we are living in an unprecedented age of the internet where viewers can form parasocial relationships with those who live in war, such as Plestia Alaqad, a 22-year-old journalist, and Motaz Azaiza, a 24-year old photojournalist. Each day, people see their update videos, get to know them, and wonder if they are still alive. “Either that becomes enough for us to come together and stop this, or we create a new global environment where we knowingly allow for young people to become the spectacles of war,” Albon said.
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Ali says that while these comparisons may not be exact, as real life is much more complex than fantasy, these shared parallels are helping create a community.
“It might even just be as simple as opening people up to conversations that they thought didn't involve them in some way,” she told me. No longer is a conflict distant and happening someplace else. “Actually they are things that have meaning to us, and therefore, it's worth your time, it's worth your attention. And that's always the basis for actually engaging in some form of action.”
As a child, seeing these elements as fantasy helps us escape. As an adult, literature and film are keeping us attentive and giving us a safe space to discuss uncomfortable topics and take action. Rather than just enjoying the show, we may begin to ask questions and change the course of events. Unlike in the books, there is no single person like Katniss that may begin to save us. That is a limitation of the books and films: real life is much more complex.
It’s easier to prioritize the extremely graphic bodily injuries and violence — like the Hunger Games themselves — when we want audiences to become invested, as Dr. Ursula Heise, a professor who studies environmental literature at UCLA, tells Teen Vogue. Extreme hardship has itself become a commodity and form of entertainment. In reality, the more common kinds of injury in our world are from structural inequality, such as lack of access to food, healthcare, and shelter. We can easily become too comfortable, like the Capitol citizens, if we simply accept an inequity as inevitable. Slowly, we become desensitized to the point that what isn’t normal becomes normalized. If we only care when people are dying, then we will ignore the small decisions that lead up to these larger structural challenges.
What stands out to me from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is that the “traditions” that we as readers took for granted in the trilogy — the betting, TV tribute interviews, and games entirely — all began somewhere with one person. Each horrible practice had roots from the rational, self-interested actions of a few. For instance, Dean Highbottom co-created the Hunger Games as a theoretical experiment, only for it to become co-opted as a brute force of terror by Crassus Snow and Dr. Gaul. A major motivation for Coriolanus, another victim of war, to excel at the Academy mentorship assignment is a scholarship at the university and to help his family avoid an eviction. The Hunger Games were falling out of favor, until his proposals enabled them to continue. Everything has a reason and an origin — knowing how each challenge has its roots and beginnings, we can resist when we first see the signs of something bad happening. That can come from actively paying attention to the bills being proposed and passed in our legislatures, how we spend our money, how we design and regulate supply chains, or how we vote our leaders in elections.
In the book (sadly, the film did not do this character justice!) after Jessup dies of rabies, Lucky Flickerman interviews his mentor Lysistrata Vickers. She points out that Jessup saved her during the arena bombing and corrects Lucky when he compares Jessup to a dog. “No, not like a dog. Like a human being,” she says to the camera. It’s her character that gives me a sense of hope, like journalists who are still reporting from conflict zones and speaking out to ensure fairer coverage. With a platform, Lysistrata doesn’t shy away from correcting the stereotypes she hears. She dares to empathize, and most importantly — like Sejanus — she dares to question the way things are, and the way they could be.
