"Real or Not Real?"

“Real or not real?” This is another Mockingjay quote that really got me thinking as I reread the books. I’m a fan of Peeta, so most of my favorite quotes from the series are things that he says. After being hijacked by the Capitol, he is forced to question everything in his life: his past, his relationships. He can’t tell reality from fiction. But this quote, again, seems to suggest something deeper.

“Real or not real?” The Hunger Games series is fiction, but the themes it expresses are not. War happens. Hunger happens. Suzanne Collins created Panem and the people who live there, but she didn’t create war or hunger. She didn’t create human nature. She just emphasized those ideas. Just like hunger, these are problems that can be solved. Forced labor and slavery aren’t necessary things. In Mockingjay, we discover that Finnick was sold for his body.

“Real or not real?” In the United States, forced labor and slavery aren’t as widespread as hunger, but things like human trafficking happen. It’s very real. In other countries, slavery still exists. In some African countries, children are forced to join armies and kill. War. “Real or not real?” War isn’t fiction. War is real. It happens everywhere. Human nature leads to disagreements. People fight. But little play fights we have as children don’t prepare us for the real thing.

One of the verses in Taylor Swift’s song, “Eyes Open,” from the Hunger Games movie soundtrack says this: “The tricky thing/ Is yesterday we were just children/ Playing soldiers, Just pretending/ Dreaming dreams with happy endings/ In backyards, winning battles with our wooden swords/ But now we've stepped into a cruel world/ Where everybody stands and keeps score/ Keep your eyes open.” The world is cruel, and it’s full of people seeking vengeance.

These are ideas that are larger than the books themselves. The movie soundtracks are full of songs that aren’t actually in the movies. They express the themes in the books and movies. The songs apply to real life just as much as they apply to the movies. “Keep your eyes open.” We have to be aware of the enemy.

In Catching Fire, Haymitch reminds Katniss to “remember who the real enemy is” in the arena. The real enemies aren’t the other tributes. The enemy is the Capitol. Those people who force the tributes to fight, who keep the citizens poor and weak, they are the enemies. The Capitol seeks revenge for the rebellion by the districts.

We learn to take “an eye for an eye.” In Hunger Games, the Capitol forces the districts to surrender two tributes to the Games as punishment for their rebellion. Obviously this concept doesn’t really work, because the districts end up with the upper hand and defeat the Capitol. But they come out victorious only after many lives are lost. That’s how real wars are. Lives are lost; many of those who die are innocent.

Suzanne Collins doesn’t sugarcoat the war in her novels. People are affected psychologically as well as physically, just as they are in the real world. She brings awareness to these issues in the hopes that the people who read her novels will do something about them.

Gaining an awareness of issues is the first step to doing something to change them. I think fiction is a great way to bring light to heavy subjects like war or forced labor. I know I would much rather learn about world problems in a novel than in a history book. “Real or not real?” The subjects in fictional works like Hunger Games are very real. If Katniss can help solve the problems in her world, we can solve the problems in our world.