Why is hunger games so popular

Katniss Everdeen, the hero of the story, is one of those who must battle for her life. Good and Evil. The story clearly delineates between good and evil. There is no confusion about what is right and what is wrong, no difficult or confusing shades of gray. Collins makes it easy on the reader by making the participants in the games either all-good or all-evil. There is one character who may be a little less evil than the rest, but he dies at the hand of one of the bad guys; none of the good guys has to face an agonizing decision about whether or not to take his life.

Katniss is good, Peeta is good, Rue is good, every other participant who is developed as a character is evil. We all love a story of good versus evil and this one follows a tried-and-true pattern. I think there is more here, though, than mere good versus evil.

I think there is a kind of evil here that does battle with the moral relativism in our culture. There is no doubt that these games are purely evil, that it is wrong to pit a child against another child in a battle to the death. Children who read the books are seeing pure evil doing battle with pure good and enjoying that contrast. It is so clear, so unconfusing, so real. And not just that, they are the highlight of the year, a holiday.

The injustice in it all is so clear, so apparent, so in contrast with the spirit of our age. It is rare that we are allowed to feel evil as evil; in this story we are free to rage against it. The Underdog. While the story is one of good battling evil, it so happens that the evil are also the rich and powerful while the good are the poor and weak. Katniss is from the districts and not only that, but from one of the farthest and poorest district.

Probably not. I think what made this book immensely popular was that it was written in first person. You got to be in the mind of Katniss Everdeen, the girl who is flawed in so many ways that everybody can't help but relate to her in a way. Dystopian novels have been popular for the last 50 years or so, but none have been done quite like this one. For the adults, there is something that eerily resembles reality when Collins describes the different districts and their relation to the Capitol.

For younger readers, it might be their first venture into dystopian prose. No matter who you are the events of the novel stir you up, leaving you wanting for more. The controversial topics, events, and decisions characters make bring to life an imperfect world which readers have to talk about to others after they are done reading it. News U. The Hunger Games creates exactly the state of mind I need to think those issues through.

I have to respect the guts of a book willing to make that fact so clear. Does The Hunger Games work as a way of thinking through big questions for you, or does it still feel a little trashy or overwrought? And if it got you, how did it get you? I think for me — as someone who is really not typically into dystopia and high fantasy, because the language and codes of those stories often feel very removed from present-day reality — the localizing ideas in The Hunger Games really started to come through for me in those moments.

They conveyed that this is a story about people consciously manipulating their public images and using fashion as a mode of survival in a society that has become entirely image-obsessed. I think one reason for that is that The Hunger Games is a YA series, so Collins also has to include a proverbial love triangle. I think another reason is that her action scenes and the plot by which we watch contestants fall to the Games can feel plodding and procedural, and far-fetched in the moments of climax.

I think Collins took great care to make the Capitol especially feel like it could be any current city, rather than something very stylized and futuristic. And that impression of the city as this vapid but very real place, where the people who succeed have learned to manipulate its superficiality, has stuck with me ever since.

Katniss keeps the whole thing grounded. Battle Royale did well to establish a dystopian future where adults control the youth through the annual Battle Royale.

Like, Clove was a nasty piece of work, and I felt a dark relief and satisfaction when Thresh not only concussed her to death but did so to save Katniss and avenge Rue. Collins can also turn that feeling inside out and make you root for the charismatic Finnick or the damaged but loyal Johanna.

Collins taps into a kind of wish fulfillment — that you could imagine yourself winning the Games and be the exception. In reality, I would probably be most like Glimmer and die when Katniss drops a bunch of bees on my bitchy head. Eleanor: I am on record as being a bit of a Hunger Games hater. Katniss is a really compelling character! Collins does do a really nice job of not letting the reader off the hook!

The series is a canny subversion of the love triangle trope! For a while there, everyone had a theory on how The Hunger Games applied to post-recession America. Also London. But all the lazy takes have made me wonder if, in fact, The Hunger Games was also lazy — a simplistic critique of economic equality masquerading as something deep. What do you think? And what do we do when the conversation around a franchise becomes bigger than the franchise itself?

After all, any good dystopia needs a significant gap between those who have power and money and those who do not. Or, put another way, it became easier to understand real life as an extension of The Hunger Games than it was to understand The Hunger Games as an extension of real life.

Famously, Collins conceived of the book when channel-flipping between Iraq War footage and reality shows. I suspect that the way the stories became conversational shorthand is due to how canny Collins is about the exact thing those conversations rarely touched on: television production. The Hunger Games is shot through with the knowledge of somebody who used to work in the TV industry, and Collins is always careful to ground the story Katniss is trying to sell within the larger stories and strategies that everybody around her is plugging away at.

And it understands how pop culture is used to prop up all aspects of the social order, even the horrible, unjust ones. This is why, for me, the second book is the most frustrating: In its desire to plunge the characters back into the Hunger Games arena, it loses sight of these larger satirical devices. I know. Collins is really, really good at having horror slide right by you in the middle of a sentence or two, a style that took a while to gel for me but that I eventually really got into.

It might be my least favorite of the three books, but Catching Fire was a terrifically entertaining film, precisely for the reasons that it sort of dragged on the page. In movie form, it almost seemed a snide critique of franchise filmmaking! How do the movies compare to the books for all of you? I know! But I agree with Emily! They blithely, consciously missed the entire point of the series in a way the series itself anticipated — not to mention a way that also seems like the perfect presaging of the post-ironic, post-dystopian reality we have entered since.

And that constant sense of ironic self-awareness is also why the movie franchise works so well — better than the books, for me. Again, that starts with Katniss. So I was constantly marveling at the way the media completely ignored how perfectly this previous breakout role had positioned her to play Katniss, and instead dissected her ability to play the part solely based on her weight, her blondness, her attitude, her public persona.