When The Hunger Games came out in 2008, no one was able to anticipate the incredible impact it would have on pop culture in the years to follow. After gaining an incredible literary following, the trilogy’s first movie was released in 2012, two years after the final book, Mockingjay, was published. In this relatively short span of time, Suzanne Collin’s novels created a plot device—the Hunger Games—which will live on in public consciousness for decades to come.
Unfortunately, like all things that become incredibly popular, a lot of the meaning of The Hunger Games was lost along the way of this pop culture frenzy. The harrowing story of children forced to fight to the death became a slew of online quizzes which would help you decide which District you were from, how long you would survive in the games, and whether you would end up with Peeta or Gale.
An incredibly potent example of this exists in fanfiction—works created about Collin’s novel by a wide variety of fans all across the internet. As of today, the fanfiction websites Archive of our Own, FanFiction.net, and Wattpad have over thirteen thousand, sixteen thousand, and thirty-four thousand works related to The Hunger Games on them respectively. Many of these works focus on rewriting the novels—what if Prim hadn’t been picked and Katniss stayed in the Seam and married Gale? Others retell the story through a different perspective—imagine the thoughts of Foxface throughout the entirety of the Hunger Games, what would they be like?
However, large swathes of these works are devoted to a single concept: taking characters from other pop culture franchises and throwing them into the world of The Hunger Games.
These stories take characters known and loved by fans—anime characters, Harry Potter characters, video game characters, etc—and write out the descriptions of them fighting each other to the death in an arena of the writer’s design. They use all of the structures set up by Collins in her novel; they assign districts to the characters, they often write them through the processes of the interview, and usually there is a single victor (or, mimicking Collins exactly, a love story tale of two victors who outsmarted the game masters).
I believe that these stories in particular represent a lot of what is wrong with how pop culture interpreted The Hunger Games. Collins used the structures she created as a form of political criticism, taking shots at society’s willingness to enjoy the pain of others, as well as attacking the tools of oppressive governmental regimes. But these works do exactly what the Capitol inside of the novel does: they glorify the violence of the games, using it as a plot device for a truly gruesome genre of stories. In this, the meaning of Collins’ work is gone, and it is reduced merely to an alternate universe in which we can place our favorite characters and see who has the wits or strength to survive.
As someone who read The Hunger Games at a very young age, my pre-teen self was not fully aware of the many underlying metaphors that were present within the novel. As a young girl, I was privileged to not be able to relate to Katniss, but I did look up to her as she fought for those she loved. Even though I didn't understand everything I was reading, I still loved the books. However, when the movie came out even I knew something was wrong with what I was seeing. Katniss was played by a white woman, they were focusing on the nonexistent love triangle, and suddenly there was an excess of merch for the movies. Although making movies based on books is not inherently a bad thing, The Hunger Games movie franchise did not maintain the goal of the novels.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who used to write self-insert fanfiction of the Hunger Games, this concept rings particularly true for me. I don’t think, as a 12 year old, that I had the ability to grasp what Collins was actually doing with her book; I had a tenuous understanding that it was criticism of authoritarian regimes, but in my pre-teen head it remained a regime of fiction, something that had no bearing on reality beyond being a caricaturized, aestheticized, dramatized version of places like, say, China. (I was also fed that propaganda as a kid. It’s okay, though; I’m a socialist now.) I treated it as a franchise in much the same way as Harry Potter gets treated, what with the merchandise and amusement park and whatnot. I think, to an extent, that’s where pop culture was in 2012; the internet was beginning to flourish even in the mainstream as a haven for fandom communities everywhere, which necessarily involves diluting certain media franchises into forms able to be materially consumed. A lot of themes of books like the Hunger Games were left behind in this frenzy, and in their place came a world of fanfiction Alternate Universes, online character quizzes (which I made), and shipping wars that dominated popular fandom thought about media. I feel like getting involved in shipping characters became a prerequisite for engaging in many forms of entertainment—this is why shipping actual, real life people was popular at the time as well. This, coupled with the newfound onslaught of fandom communities, made the Hunger Games and its emphasis on categories and the trappings of modern media extremely susceptible to the very things it was criticizing. Maybe this phenomenon is why the very concept of fandom is being criticized so heavily by the population of people that were so heavily involved in it before.
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