"Much Worse Games to Play"

I reread the Hunger Games series a few weeks ago during Thanksgiving break. And just like anyone who reads a book or watches a movie more than once, I noticed some new things. Mostly, I noticed quotes, like this one: “But there are much worse games to play.” This is the very last line of Mockingjay, the last thought given to the reader. When I read it, I realized something. This isn’t just Katniss speaking, it’s Suzanne Collins.

She’s bringing up a larger argument: the things people face in the world are worse than the things that the people of Panem face. Sure, they starve in Panem; they watch their children kill each other. Those things are terrible. But they are fiction. In our world, people starve; people are forced into inhumane conditions. The final line of the series is meant to provoke thoughts. It’s meant to provoke action. Collins wrote the series as a forewarning, much like George Orwell did in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell wrote his novel in the period following the Second World War; his work encapsulated the fears of totalitarianism and the ideas of socialism that were ever-present in his world. Collins wrote her series in the twenty-first century.

Who today hasn’t heard anything about world hunger? Who doesn’t know someone who has fought or is fighting in a war? Collins brings those themes to the attention of the reader. She essentially warns of the dangers of a corrupt and unrepresentative government. The people will suffer. People do suffer. In the United States, the suffering may not be to the extent that the people in Panem face, but people in other countries—real countries—suffer even more.

One of the biggest forms of suffering in the world is hunger. It’s in the third world countries in Africa; it’s in first world countries like the United States. It’s also one of the most solvable problems in the world. It isn’t that there’s a lack of food or anything, it’s just that resources like food aren’t distributed evenly. The unequal distribution means a small portion of the population has excessive amounts of food—and therefore a lot of waste—while the majority of people rarely get enough to survive. The Capitol in Panem represents the excessive nature of a small proportion of people. This is juxtaposed with the people in the districts like 11 and 12 who often go to bed hungry. The only reason Katniss is relatively well fed is because she breaks the law and poaches her food.

Hunger is obviously one of the biggest themes in the series, and I think one of the reasons Suzanne Collins wrote the series was to bring these issues to light so people would take action to help solve these problems. Lionsgate Entertainment, the company that distributed the Hunger Games movies, teamed up with the World Food Programme and created a PSA with some of the cast to bring the issue of hunger to light. Fans of the series have signed petitions to change agriculture laws. “There are much worse games to play,” but with help, these games can be won.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iR0KsyO9DE (World Food Programme PSA)