Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest book of The Hunger Games installment—and the second prequel based on fan-favorite character Haymitch Abernathy—released on March 18. In the original trilogy, Haymitch is the protagonist Katniss Everdeen’s jaded mentor and the only other surviving District 12 Victor of the 25th Hunger Games. Catching Fire, the second of the original trilogy, reveals that Haymitch’s victory came at the cost of his family and the love of his life, Lenore Dove.

Sunrise on the Reaping is an in-depth exploration of Haymitch’s character, a tribute who tried to rebel long before Katniss was ever the Mockingjay. 

The titular Hunger Games are brutal gladiator-like fights to the death, produced for entertainment for the rich and out-of-touch citizens of the Capitol, devised by the extraordinarily cruel President Coriolanus Snow. Katniss’ story is one of rebellion and hope against a seemingly all-powerful enemy. The story has resonated deeply for readers who have looked to Katniss as inspiration for change, as the series explores many relevant themes to our world—whether it is income inequality, authoritarian control, or the desensitization of the privileged to violence committed against those without.

Sunrise on the Reaping is the most explicitly violent of the Hunger Games books, as Collins seeks to underscore just how far the Capitol will go to suppress even the hint or record of rebellion. The book challenges the narrative of the original trilogy that Katniss was the first tribute to rebel against the Capitol—it urges the reader to imagine how many more rebellions had to fail before Katniss became the Mockingjay that brought the Capitol down once and for all.

All the Hunger Games books and films have been bestsellers and box office hits. Sunrise on the Reaping sold more than one million copies in the first week of its release, and the films have raked in millions for Lionsgate, the production company responsible for every Hunger Games film so far—as well as the upcoming Sunrise on the Reaping adaptation. Yet the series has also been hailed as a series that engages in smart commentary on how authoritarian regimes use propaganda to justify their violence. 

The books and the films have repeatedly inspired discourse about the importance of rebellion and resistance against authoritarianism, with varying levels of nuance, from video essays and academic analyses to fan edits and shipping wars. The combined announcement of the book and film adaptation in June 2024 sent fans into a frenzy, as they immediately began theorizing who could best play a young Haymitch—who Woody Harrelson portrayed in previous film adaptations. They were ecstatic to have the brilliant Collins’ pen back, almost depicting her as some kind of savior for our particularly tumultuous times. 

One user even tweeted, “the fact that Suzanne Collins has written not one but TWO new hunger games novels in the past five years should terrify you about the current state of the world considering she only writes when she has something to say.” 

The Hunger Games have perpetual relevance to our present day, but these analyses that assume that the U.S. will be where a revolution begins are reductive at best, delusional at worst. Also, on TikTok and social media, the engagement with the Hunger Games’ commentary is reduced to aestheticized quotes or flashy fan edits, inhibiting meaningful discourse. 

In this landscape, where the themes of revolution in the books have been reduced to an aesthetic or faulty comparisons, do we really need another Hunger Games to show us the cost of war on children and the pervasiveness of propaganda? What more is there for Suzanne Collins to say to a fandom that often misses the point?

The Hunger Games Fandom’s Surface-Level Engagement

Sunrise on the Reaping naturally invites a storm of comparisons from liberals in the U.S. to the Hunger Games, whether in the reviews from readers comparing Trump to Snow, or posts on X upon Trump’s election like “this legit must be how katniss felt when they made her do the hunger games a second time.” 

The reviews from mainstream media outlets—Kirkus Reviews, New York Times, NPR, and others—not only praise author Collins’ “visceral” writing but also the book’s relevance as the second Trump administration advances its fascist agenda in the U.S. at an incredible pace. One reviewer even mentioned that she had nightmares as a result of re-reading The Hunger Games series because of how “present” it felt.

The parallels to Trump rely upon the premise that he is singularly responsible for the authoritarianism and exploitation in the US. But for the comparisons to be truly accurate, the fandom (and especially liberals among it) needs to be honest: our entire country is built the way the Capitol is—off the exploitation of the killing and war against the people of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and others in the Global South—and we are all complicit in the exploitation that has built its wealth. 

Almost none of the reviews mentioned the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the concerted pro-Israeli propaganda that we see on our timelines every day. Palestine was only mentioned once in a review from Polygon, which pointed out how we are facing propaganda in real time, like when the performer who ran across the stage with the flags of Palestine and Sudan during the Super Bowl halftime show was erased from the televised broadcast.

Ayan Artan, a 23-year-old culture writer and longtime Hunger Games fan, has also been frustrated with the lack of nuance in these comparisons. Most of her frustration stems from how liberals make the comparison that centers themselves, and do not extend the empathy they feel for fictional (white) characters like Haymitch, to those unlike them in the real world— despite what she believes to have been Collins’ universal message of the importance of resistance against authoritarianism. 

“We can’t be honest about the politics of a thing if the fandom refuses to be honest about the politics of a thing,” Artan said. To her, fiction like The Hunger Games is meant to inspire empathy in a way that the rapid-fire torrent of news cannot.

“I think art is very much the curing of callousness,” Artan said. “So when we’re talking about dystopian literature, the entire thing is usually predicated on something really [messed] up happening to an innocent group of civilians who don’t deserve that thing happening.”

While The Hunger Games is a reflection of the world we live in, as Collins herself has noted several times, it cannot be the limit of our interaction with ideas of revolution and activism. According to Arundhati (pseudonym), 22, also a longtime fan of The Hunger Games series, the comparisons to growing authoritarianism in the U.S. and Gaza are only valid on the surface level.

“I sympathize with people—especially young people, like the target audience for The Hunger Games—who use popular literature to better understand and process the events happening around them, especially if they don’t necessarily have a lot of exposure to other lenses through which to understand it,” she said. 

Her problem is less with the work of Collins than with the fandom and discourse around it, specifically the “epidemic of teenagers and young people who categorically refuse to engage in literature beyond the YA level and beyond The Hunger Games.” For Arundhati, many such young people claim moral superiority based on one book, while refusing to read authors of color and any non-fiction or theory. 

“People need to stop holding up the author as anything more than a white lady writing good fiction, and look to people engaging in praxis, research, and activism beyond that,” she said.

How the Movies Changed Fans’ Engagement with Katniss’ Story

The Hunger Games changed the game (no pun intended) for the YA and dystopia genres, birthing a huge wave of dystopian novels for this demographic. With the series becoming such a huge mainstream pop culture phenomenon, its themes of the morality of resistance and the power of propaganda were often diluted in favor of fans gushing over the love triangle in the original trilogy, especially in the films, with fans picking their sides of Team Peeta and Team Gale, spurring a fandom war following in the footsteps of the Team Jacob v. Team Edward disputes.

Media coverage also spurred this outsized focus on the romance, with polls and interviews with the cast almost entirely focused on the choice Katniss was going to make. This misplaced focus was especially true for the 2023 film adaptation of the prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which is the villain origin story of Coriolanus Snow, who becomes the evil President of Panem. 

The fandom’s interactions have long been an issue for The Hunger Games, especially regarding the character of Rue, who is Katniss’ motivation to rebel against the Capitol. In the books, Rue is described as having brown skin and is from the predominantly Black District 11. This is spelled out clearly in the first book when she is introduced. But when Amandla Stenberg, a Black American, was cast as Rue in the first film in 2012 at thirteen years old, the racist backlash was swift. Suddenly realizing that Rue was Black in the books, many fans shamelessly declared that they would not feel as bad seeing her die on screen. 

Artan recalled her shock from over a decade ago. “It was, quite literally, the most blatant expression of who gets empathy and who doesn’t,” she said, “and I will never forget it.”

In her 2019 book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, literary scholar Ebony Elizabeth Thomas explores how we think of race in fantasy genres, specifically who we think belongs and who doesn’t. “Rue…haunts the narrative the most,” she writes. “As much as Katniss’s story is a critique of the inauthenticity of the Capitol and its exploitation of its districts, Rue’s story, if counterstoried through a critical race lens, is a critique of Katniss’s heroism. For in a very real sense, Rue was, and is, the first Mockingjay of The Hunger Games.”

Rue’s position as the innocent, vulnerable girl that Katniss is moved to protect is what kickstarts the revolution that Katniss would eventually lead. But this interpretation of the books is a far cry from how fans have interacted with Collins’ work, reducing the role of these secondary characters and the power of Collins’ message of the value of armed resistance. 

The casting announcements have begun for the film adaptation of Sunrise on the Reaping. Actor Joseph Zada will play a young Haymitch, and Whitney Peak will play his love interest, Lenore Dove. Casting a person of color and a Black woman, especially as Lenore Dove, is an interesting choice, and it remains to be seen if the reactions to her will be just as racist.

Too many Black actors have been cast in major franchises only to be told they do not belong there, from John Boyega in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), to Ncuti Gatwa as the 15th Doctor in Doctor Who in 2023, to Leah Sava Jeffries in Percy Jackson (2023).

The Commercialization of The Hunger Games

As far as book announcements go, combining it with a film announcement before the book was even released was an atypical one, but it made sense: Lionsgate has made a sure bet that the next installment of the franchise will be just as successful as the rest. But the dual announcement and the naked excitement left me with a bitter taste. It appeared that the book and movie were primarily a profit-making enterprise, which contradicts the commentary in the books about the abhorrence of the commercialization of the violence committed in The Hunger Games. 

Perhaps the most egregious offense when it comes to the commercialization of Collins’ work is the recent announcement that SHEIN and Lionsgate are collaborating on a new clothing line inspired by The Hunger Games. 

Yes, you read that right: notoriously exploitative company SHEIN has announced a clothing line inspired by The Hunger Games, which has extremely pointed commentary on the exploitation of the vulnerable for their labor. And no, it is not fake.

The series has become part of the problem it intended to criticize, primarily in making violence itself entertainment and profitable for its makers. While the merchandising rights are not in Collins’ hands anymore, turning The Hunger Games into a vast profit-making enterprise makes me wonder what Collins herself thinks of the way her fans have interacted with her work. 

This question is difficult to answer, since Collins is notoriously very private and has only given about a dozen interviews to the press. What we do know is that Collins wrote The Hunger Games series after seeing the dissonance between reality television and footage of the Iraq War, a war spurred on by ferocious propaganda. To Arundhati and Artan, the work speaks for itself. But Artan notes that in a time where many so-called leftists and artists have shown their blind spot when it comes to Palestine, maybe it is worth it for Collins to speak out definitively.

“You can no longer assume that when [an artist is] in condemnation of evil, [they] are in condemnation equally, of all evil as it pertains to all people,” Artan said.

As a Hunger Games fan, Collins’ motivations behind the dual deal and her thoughts on the fandom have nagged at me. Collins must have written at least part of the book during Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, but was not moved to speak out at all. What does her silence signify when it could mean implicit endorsement? While her work very clearly criticizes the propaganda used to encourage and incite violence, can we truly assume that she would apply this lens to what is happening in Gaza right now?

Reading and Misreading Dystopian Literature

The other issue with Collins’ utter silence on her political positions is that the people least likely to be the good guys (even through her lens) are the ones most likely to co-opt the symbolism of her work. On August 10, 2024, Elon Musk tweeted an image with the text citing the “resistance” in Star Wars, The Hunger Games, and The Matrix, and stating, “When it’s fiction you understand. Yet you refuse to see it when it’s the reality you’re living in.” I do not need to elaborate on the sheer irony of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and now appointed member of the federal government, claiming to be a part of the “resistance”. 

There are other cases in which dystopian novels and literature have been compared to Trump and the general rise of authoritarianism today, from The Handmaid’s Tale as the number of abortion bans rise to 1984 as government censorship continues. Many of these comparisons are done exaggeratedly—“this is straight out of 1984!”—but they fail to truly motivate action beyond just shock and horror, like this article in TIME on how the Trump administration’s erasure of women and people of color is “Orwellian,” but it does not offer much in terms of actions to take against this erasure.

This media landscape is not Collins’ fault, but her choice to be so careful in what she says publicly outside of her work is confounding, considering how often her work is misinterpreted. Collins becomes increasingly direct in her critique of propaganda-fueled war, but many fans continue to miss the point. 

After The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes film was released in November 2023, fans seemed to forget that he would grow up to be a brutal dictator, and instead, relentlessly fawned over Tom Blyth’s Coriolanus Snow. The point of the book was ostensibly to show how and why Snow became what he did, but it became into fan edits and “but I can fix him” comments instead. As is often the case with adaptations, the film was unable to get Snow’s truly diabolical point of view and disdain for those closest to him across effectively, given that we were not in his head as often as readers were with the book. 

Between the thirsting over President Snow, the still-ongoing debate of Team Peeta vs. Team Gale (Katniss’ two love interests), and the comparisons of the Capitol’s leadership to the Trump administration, fans either do not understand—or refuse to understand—how to engage with the Hunger Games as a work of fiction that addresses real-world issues. 

If they did, they would understand that the comparison of the second Trump administration to the brutality of the Capitol in The Hunger Games is only true in that we in the United States as a whole—specifically in its profiting off of the genocide in Palestine, its global “war on terror,” and the continuous oppression of the poor, people of color, and the incarcerated—is the Capitol. It is extremely self-centered to think that we are the heroes of this story.

After all, the Capitol bombed hospitals, too, and our taxes are funding the same bombs that are striking hospitals in Gaza right now.

In this context, the excitement about how Suzanne Collins would write a brilliant book reflecting and criticizing our current condition, and her simultaneous silence on Palestine and the parallels there, gave me whiplash. There is a distinct lack of empathy when it comes to the real-life parallels in Gaza as opposed to the fictional rebellion eventually led by Katniss Everdeen, the beloved revolutionary protagonist.

Is Explicitly Violent Imagery Effective? 

Sunrise on the Reaping is the most chilling of the five books, as Collins vividly describes the gruesome deaths. I find it difficult to say I “enjoyed” the book, but it was gripping, even knowing that Haymitch will lose his friends and fellow tributes, his mother and brother, and his love, Lenore Dove. Each tribute’s death is described in brutal detail, and the tragedy of Haymitch’s loss of his family hits so much harder knowing how jaded he is in the original trilogy. 

The extremely explicit violent imagery has always been typical of The Hunger Games books, as Collins went to great lengths to depict just how gruesome the cost of this violence-turned-entertainment was on the children fighting for their lives. Perhaps portraying violence so clearly could move readers to empathy in the way that Artan hopes. 

But this past year has proven that empathy is selective, and I doubt that The Hunger Games can correct that, especially since the author herself is so selective in how she speaks about her work. Frankly, I dread seeing the film and the discourse that will come from it— yet another cycle of fans missing the point for the sake of crushing on a young Haymitch (along with the dreaded edits).

Will they care about Haymitch losing Lenore Dove, knowing that she is Black? Or will her character be called “manipulative” like Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray was in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes?

Michael Walsh, a writer at Nerdist, was a bit more hopeful about the new installment, despite becoming disillusioned with the idea that fictional stories can change things. “Fiction, especially stories about fighting fascism, are always going to be important,” he said. “They let us know others out there feel the same way and that we can do something.” For this reason, Walsh is excited about the new Hunger Games book. In his words,  “I want to briefly enter a world where I know things will get better because people will fight.”

While I have always believed in the power of words to change minds, I have struggled to understand how many more ways something has to be said for people to pay attention, or be moved to act. How explicit does this imagery of violence in the upcoming Hunger Games film need to be to convince people to extend their care beyond a young, white, blond Haymitch? 

In the book, Haymitch starts as a kind, considerate, and hopeful sixteen-year-old boy. He makes friends quickly and takes care of his fellow tribute, Ampert, the way he would his little brother, drawing a striking parallel to how Katniss took care of Rue twenty years later. He ends the story utterly emotionally wrecked, drowning his sorrows in alcohol, and pushing away everyone who cares about him. It is no wonder he is so jaded: the Capitol took everything from him, and still makes him pay for it every year as he watches yet another pair of children from his district go to their deaths. 

Artan believes that this brutality might be enough to move people. “I think we need to be explicit, because even when we are explicit, there are people [at] a distance,” she said. “Perhaps, seeing an attractive, young white person go through these systems, if you have to watch them in terms of that level of love, maybe that will shift public consciousness in a way that the images of Arab children won’t.”

While Collins’ work remains relevant, it is still chilling to understand just how selective liberals’ empathy is towards Palestinians, while they fawn over Haymitch and sob over his story. After the “ceasefire” in Gaza broke down this March, the stories and images we are seeing from Gaza every day reach new levels of terror. Journalist Hossam Shabat was targeted and killed in an airstrike for seeking to show us everything that was happening, and liberals in the West barely said a word. 

The fact that we even have to hope that works of fiction like The Hunger Games can motivate people to care more is just proof of how limited empathy is in only being able to recognize the humanity of those suffering in fiction, but not in reality.