Mary O’Leary discusses how the return of The Hunger Games has revived dystopian fiction for a new generation, but online fan trends suggest that its warnings about violence as entertainment may be getting lost.
Since the release of Susanne Collins new Hunger Games novel, Sunrise on the Reaping, and the subsequent trailer release of its movie counterpart, buzz for the series and other dystopian novels of its era have seemingly relapsed in popularity. Along with this renewed popularity, the fanbases surrounding these works have transformed with the growth of the Internet, particularly through platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
These apps have also offered YA Dystopian fanbases new, more accessible ways to interact with and converse about their source materials, creating microtrends throughout said internet platforms. One such trend involves Hunger Games fans presenting their ideas for arenas within the Hunger Games universe, as well as ideas for how individual tributes might be killed.
Just a quick search on TikTok will bring you hundreds of videos of Hunger Games fans describing their ideal arena types, with suggestions ranging from frozen tundra's to abandoned hospitals to haunted mine shafts. As these videos have gained traction, other videos describing Quarter Quell ideas have also started to pop up. In one particularly morbid example, one creator explained their idea of parents with multiple children being reaped and forced to choose which child will compete in the Games.
This trend is of course ironic when considering the main theme of the Hunger Games novels to be how violence is often used for political entertainment. When watching such videos, it’s not hard to imagine them being created by Capitol citizens within Panem, excited to share their ideas for future arenas. The rare video or comment explaining this irony is often met with responses to the effect of ‘It’s not that deep’ and ‘Susanne Collins did it first’.
However, these responses and the trends themselves point to a larger conversation of fanbase discourse and media consumption, particularly within YA dystopian literature. In an age where the internet is so stuffed with discourse, it’s easy for readers to selectively engage with the parts of a fandom that interest them and ignore the rest. This makes it much easier for fans to interact with one another on their own terms, often without feeling the need to engage in deeper discussions about a novel’s central themes.
When watching such videos, it’s not hard to imagine them being created by Capitol citizens within Panem, excited to share their ideas for future arenas.
Fans of popular YA and children’s novels have always tried to imaginatively enter the stories they’ve read, whether that means sorting themselves into a Hogwarts house or discovering their Percy Jackson “godly parent.”. Hunger Games fans are of course no different, with online quizzes telling you what District you belong to, having existed for nearly a decade. In that sense, it could be argued that trends such as ‘building your own arena’ are simply the evolution of these preexisting fan discussions.
However, it could also be said that getting young readers involved in literary discussions is inherently positive, especially if they get people interested in reading. Imagination is a cornerstone for engaging with literature and trying to control the imagination of others directly polices how they might interact with the medium of literature as a whole.
That being said, understanding why a story is written and interacting with its main themes or criticisms is just as important as the imagination of an audience. Assuming that young readers should not be expected to understand or engage meaningfully with a source material perpetuates the idea of literature as something only to be consumed, not discussed.
It is not difficult to comprehend why such a lack of understanding for dystopian novels has risen, with the YA dystopian genre vastly decreasing in popularity compared to its fantasy counterpart in recent years. Many fans of The Hunger Games are also widely supportive of the series due to childhood nostalgia, thus distancing their interactions with the novel’s main themes as they age.
Consumption, as it relates to modern literature, is the backbone for how fanbases on the Internet operate. The money which fanbases circulate encourages publishing companies to release five different covers of the same novel and to give spin offs such as Sunrise on the Reaping movie deals. Entertainment is so easily provided that comprehensive analysis and understanding of source materials are no longer required or even widely encouraged.
It is through a fanbases' own desire for consumption that such trends, which inherently go against what characters like Katniss were fighting for, are created. Videos such as these are often presented as a slide show, each going down the number line of the creators' ideas without showing their face. These videos, however, do not meaningfully discuss how an arena idea might tie back to the original novel’s exploration of violence as entertainment. Instead, they are worded and simplified in ways which turn the ideas into examples of violent entertainment themselves.
With the resurgence of The Hunger Games and the oversaturation of the modern fantasy genre, it is not hard to assume that the dystopian genre will reemerge with many new popular additions in the coming years. That being said, with how internet fan spaces encourage consumption over analytical discussion, it calls into question how these new dystopian novels will be written and how their fanbases will engage with them in the future.