I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and arenāt actually part of the original.
Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical āunqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reasonā.Ā The entire point is that sheās not leading the rebellion. Sheās a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, āNo, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.ā Sheās not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to doāsheās a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. Itās much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as āstereotypical YA dystopianā gives it credit for.
And the misconceptions donāt end there. The Hunger Games has no āstereotypical YA love triangleāāyes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. Thereās a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boysāitās about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expectĀ āhot love trianglesā in their YA.Ā
The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because sheās cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia thatās āsimilar to the Hunger Gamesā. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really sayingāand itās nothing so comforting as āwe need to fight the evil people who are ruining societyā. The Capitolās not just the powerful, greedy bad guysāthe Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.
Thereās a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. Thereās a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators canāt capture that same genius, largely because theyāre trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and youāll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldnāt make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.
