The Girl Who Was on Fire Read online

  Table of Contents

  OTHER YA SMART POP TITLES

  Title Page

  Introduction

  WHY SO HUNGRY FOR THE HUNGER GAMES?

  TEAM KATNISS

  Meet Katniss Everdeen

  Who am I?

  The Symbolic Katniss

  Survivor

  Daughter, Sister, Mother, Friend

  The End

  YOUR HEART IS A WEAPON THE SIZE OF YOUR FIST

  SMOKE AND MIRRORS

  Homeschooled in Deception

  The Arena: A Maze of Tricks and Traps

  Who’s on My Side, Anyway?

  Katniss: Know Yourself, Be Yourself

  SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

  The Watched

  The Watchers

  The Engineers

  The Balancing Act

  REALITY HUNGER

  PANEM ET CIRCENSES

  Ratings, Not Reality

  Narrative, Not Truth

  Propaganda, Not Reporting

  Real, Not Real

  NOT SO WEIRD SCIENCE

  Could Tracker Jackers Exist?

  It’s a Mad, Mad ... Scientist

  The Path to Muttdom is Paved with Good Intentions

  Unforeseen Consequences

  So, What Now?

  CRIME OF FASHION

  Initial Spark

  Fanning the Flames

  Flashover

  The Fire Spreads

  BENT, SHATTERED, AND MENDED

  Building a Brain

  Memory Happens

  Wounded Brains

  Bent, Broken, and Shattered: The Survivors of the Hunger Games

  Disintegration of the Self: Losing the Body

  The Arena: Insecurity in an Undependable World

  The Social World: “I don’t want it to come down to you and me.”

  Mending

  THE POLITICS OF MOCKINGJAY

  THE INEVITABLE DECLINE OF DECADENCE

  COMMUNITY IN THE FACE OF TYRANNY

  The Hunger Games

  Katniss Everdeen: The Girl Who Should Never Have Existed ...

  Too Little, Too Late

  President Coin, A Different Kind of Tyrant

  Rebuilding

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  OTHER YA SMART POP TITLES

  Demigods and Monsters

  on Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series

  A New Dawn

  on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series

  Secrets of the Dragon Riders

  on Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Saga

  Mind-Rain

  on Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies Series

  Flirtin’ with the Monster

  on Ellen Hopkins’ Crank and Glass

  A Visitor’s Guide to Mystic Falls

  on The Vampire Diaries

  Through the Wardrobe

  on C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia

  Nyx in the House of Night

  on P.C. and Kristin Cast’s House of Night series

  (coming summer 2011)

  INTRODUCTION

  You could call the Hunger Games a series that is—like its heroine—on fire. But its popularity, in itself, is nothing new. We live in an era of blockbuster young adult book series: Harry Potter, Twilight, now the Hunger Games. It’s more unusual these days for there not to be a YA series sweeping the nation.

  All of these series have certain things in common: compelling characters; complex worlds you want to spend time exploring; a focus on family and community. But the Hunger Games is, by far, the darkest of the three. In Twilight, love conquers all; Bella ends the series bound eternally to Edward and mother to Renesmee, without having to give up her human family or Jacob in the process. In Harry Potter, though there is loss, the world is returned to familiar stability after Voldemort’s defeat, and before we leave them, we see all of the main characters happily married, raising the next generation of witches and wizards. In the Hunger Games, while Katniss may conclude the series similarly married and a mother, the ending is much more bittersweet. Her sister and Gale are both lost to her in different but equally insurmountable ways. The world is better than it was, but there are hints that this improvement is only temporary—that the kind of inhumanity we saw in the districts under Capitol rule is the true status quo, and that the current peace is ephemeral, precious, something toward which Panem will always have to struggle.

  In other words, the Hunger Games ends in a way that feels surprisingly adult—bleak, realistic, as far from wish fulfillment as one can imagine. Such a conclusion only emphasizes something YA readers have known for years: that there is serious, engaging, transformative work going on in YA literature. The Hunger Games is more than Gale versus Peeta; there’s so much more at stake in this series than love (and so much more at stake in loving, here, as well). The series takes on themes of power and propaganda, trauma and recovery, war and compassion. It’s about not just learning one’s power, but learning the limits of one’s power as well.

  Because at its core, the Hunger Games is a coming-of-age story, and not just for Katniss—it’s a coming-of-age story for Panem, and in a way, for us, its readers, as well. The series pushes us to grow up and take responsibility both personally and politically for our choices: those Capitol residents we see milling through the streets in Mockingjay, the same Capitol residents who so raptly watched the Hunger Games on television year after year without recognizing the suffering that made it possible, are us. That’s a heavy message to take away from any book series, but an important one for all of us—whether we ourselves would be shelved under Young Adult or not.

  The pieces you’re about to read don’t cover everything in the Hunger Games series (they couldn’t cover everything), but they do tease out at least a few of the series’ most thought-provoking ideas. Together, they provide an extended meditation on the series and its world, on Katniss and our response to her, on love and family and sacrifice and survival. But you shouldn’t take this to mean the anthology is always as serious as Mockingjay at it heaviest. There’s humor, and warmth, and hope here, too. Each of our contributors has brought his or her own particular interests and expertise to exploring the series, and topics run the gamut from fashion to science to reality television and real-world media training.

  Still, you’ll find these essays tend to return to the same events and the same ideas over and over again. But each time we revisit them our perspective shifts—the same way reality in the series is constantly shifting—letting us interpret old events, old ideas, in new ways. As each writer passes the torch to the next, our contributors cover new ground while pushing our understanding of the Hunger Games as a whole further, toward a greater awareness of everything these books have to offer.

  While editing this anthology, I was alternately surprised, fascinated, and moved to tears—a tribute not only to the Hunger Games series itself but also to the talented YA writers whose work is collected here. And I hope that you, too, will find something fresh to feel or think about in these pages—that The Girl Who Was on Fire encourages you to debate, question, and experience the Hunger Games in a whole new way.

  Leah Wilson

  December 2010

  WHY SO HUNGRY FOR THE HUNGER GAMES?

  Or, the Game of Making Readers Hungry for More, Why Readers’ Imaginations Caught Fire, and My Sad Inability to Come Up with a Wordplay for Mockingjay

  SARAH REES BRENNAN

  The Hunger Games is, without question, a great series. Millions of readers have stuck with Katniss Everdeen through three books, two rounds of Games, and a war—and still can’t get enough. If you�
��re reading this book, then none of this is news to you. But what is it about this dystopian story that draws in readers of all ages and genres? Why have these books enraptured a generation? It’s no easy question to tackle, but Sarah Rees Brennan suggests some very compelling answers.

  As you can tell from all the atrocious puns in the title, this essay will be studying the elements in the Hunger Games trilogy that inspire its tremendous popularity. It’s fascinating to analyze the mixture of elements that has caught readers’ imaginations around the world. What is so alluring about the Hunger Games’ particular mixture of adventure, romance, and philosophy? Many of the elements present in the series are familiar, so how does Suzanne Collins make it all seem fresh and compelling?

  For a long time I avoided the Hunger Games because, well, I’d seen Battle Royale, thank you very much. (Battle Royale is a Japanese movie, based on the book of the same name by Koushun Takami, about high school students who are chosen by lottery to kill each other under new legislation introduced by a futuristic government.) I finally buckled under the weight of hearing everybody’s enthusiastic recommendations for six months, and then I read the Hunger Games voraciously and was extremely annoyed when interrupted by such inconsequential things as “Christmas dinner.” (God, Mom, did you not understand Katniss was being pursued by the mutts? You have several children, why does it always have to be about collecting the whole set all the time?)

  So my assumption made an ass out of me, and I missed out on the Hunger Games for six months! My reason for avoiding the Hunger Games really was ridiculous, as we all know there are no brand-new plots under the sun: what really matters is the way you tell the stories and the passion you have for them. Battle Royale, as I’ve said, deals with children killing each other for the benefit of an audience and with the sanction of the government. Ben Elton’s adult comic novel Dead Famous, in which a murder happening on a reality TV show drives up the ratings and makes the show a phenomenon (and it turns out the producers planned it all along), deals with many of the same issues of human fascination with reality television, violence, and the question of how illusion can mingle with reality.

  So there are no new ideas under the sun, and, if you ask Christopher Booker (author of The Seven Basic Plots), only seven plots in the world. What is it about Suzanne Collins’ treatment of the idea that has struck such a chord with readers? A writer friend of mine, Justine Larbalestier (author of Liar), described the Hunger Games books as “sticky,” meaning that they are compulsive reading. Once you have picked them up, it’s difficult to stop reading: your attention does not wander, and your urge to find out what happens next does not falter.

  Why is that? One reason is how deeply the Hunger Games goes into the questions of reality versus illusion and the examination of the media’s current fascination with manufactured reality, as well as humanity’s enduring fascination with violence. The idea of children killing each other is a horrible one to anyone, and yet so morbidly alluring. The evil presented by the Hunger Games is so terrible, and in this society so all-encompassing, that we watch Katniss’ adventures with instantly evoked sympathy, horror, interest, and simple terror—because we cannot imagine how she is going to get out of this situation. Another thing that kept me reading compulsively was sheer interest in how the novel is structured: how does Suzanne Collins allay the very bleak premise of the Hunger Games enough so that we are not all carted, weeping softly, off to a lunatic asylum in the middle of Catching Fire, and how does she keep her characters sympathetic even when they are almost all, by necessity, murderers?

  Anyone who speaks Latin (gets egged by the populace for being a nerd) must have wondered from the start if Panem was a reference to the Roman people’s reported liking for bread and circuses—for instant gratification that would distract them from the harsher realities of life. This is confirmed in Mockingjay , but Collins has said in a recent interview that she had it in mind from the start, and thus must have had in mind the questions: Why is it that that, for thousands of years, we humans have been allured by and interested in violent death? And what do you do when the underpinning of your whole society is based on this fascination? The answer is destroy the society and build a new one, which is an overwhelmingly daunting task, especially for a child who has to fight endlessly just for her own survival.

  The premise of the Hunger Games provides us not only with a set-up for nonstop action, in which not only are the heroine’s life and the lives of the vast majority of the supporting characters in danger, but they and we possess a continuous awareness of both having and having to entertain an audience. Katniss is forced to go through with not one but two Hunger Games. In The Hunger Games, she is deeply aware of the audience because she knows playing on its sympathies by pretending love for Peeta will get the two the food and medicine they need to survive. In Catching Fire, the equation is even simpler—unless Katniss and Peeta give a convincing enough display of being madly in love, Snow will conclude that they are revolutionaries instead of lovers and have them executed. In each case, the weight of the populace’s expectations weighs heavily on Katniss, influencing both her actions and her feelings. It is a deadly loop, as both Katniss and the audience discover. We the readers are aware that Katniss’ audience is both enthralled by her pain and gullibly sucked in by her love story. Yet all the while we know that we are Katniss’ real audience—and aren’t we enthralled by her pain and sucked in by her love story? How gullible does that make us?

  The message of the Hunger Games is that appearances are both deceiving and vitally important. It is Cinna, Katniss’ stylist, who ties together Katniss and Peeta in the audience’s eyes by making them hold hands: “Presenting ourselves not as adversaries but as friends has distinguished us as much as the fiery costumes” (The Hunger Games). Katniss first attracts attention with costumes cleverly designed by Cinna and his team, and the importance of appearance is underlined again when Cinna (who dies near the end of Catching Fire) administers a makeover from beyond the grave in Mockingjay. Here too is one thing that gives relief to the grim storyline of the Hunger Games. Katniss does not want to be dressed up, or enjoy dressing up; she has no interest in such things. But the readers who do can enjoy the lovingly described costumes and the idea of being made up to be someone more attractive, someone so compelling they could end up being the sole focus of an audience’s attention, while the rest of the readers simply sympathize with Katniss during another trial.

  In a way, the romantic subplot of the books reminds me of the makeover scenes. The romance intensifies the life-or-death tension of the books, because we know that Katniss and Peeta being able to appear to be in love is even more important than Katniss being able to appear beautiful—these illusions will save their lives. But it also provides relief: just like there are readers who would like to be transformed, there are readers who would like to be loved in the way Katniss is. Peeta loves her even though they have barely spoken, even though they hardly know each other. She has won his love from afar by doing nothing but being herself, fiercely struggling for her own survival and that of her family, and he loves her so much he is willing to lie, to kill, and to die for her. The reader never really doubts Peeta’s love for Katniss, even when Katniss believes it is total illusion, and that not only provides a ray of light in the dark situation of the Hunger Games but endears both characters to us. Then we are shocked in Mockingjay when the one thing we did believe was real, Peeta’s love, may be destroyed.

  If many of us like the idea of being loved from afar without having to work for or even be aware of it, there is also Gale, Katniss’ childhood friend and hunting companion. None of us want to be reduced to hunting desperately to feed our families, but if we were, it wouldn’t hurt for one’s trusty companion to be a good-looking, much-sought-after, and rather devoted member of the opposite sex. That leaves Katniss in a bit of a bind, of course—even if she does manage to survive, it seems that there is going to be a painful choice to make.

  The romance also further
displays the complexities of reality versus illusion: Suzanne Collins does not go the easy route of condemning illusion in favor of reality. Peeta, the golden boy of the series, the main character whose morality is the strongest and who is always the spokesperson for decency, is actually an accomplished liar, in the first book able to convince both the Career tributes and Katniss that he is a merciless killer. He is also able to use his skills as a baker to camouflage himself when wounded in the Games. As he puts it: “I guess all those hours decorating cakes paid off” (The Hunger Games).

  Katniss, at first profoundly uncomfortable with deceit, by the end of Mockingjay ends up fooling the reader into thinking that she has agreed to the unthinkable—setting up a new Hunger Games—and thus become what she has been fighting against all this time. When she shoots Coin rather than Snow, we realize that this agreement was her means of getting the chance to execute Coin and end the idea for the new Hunger Games. We also realize that a very new Katniss Everdeen has evolved over the Hunger Games trilogy, one who has progressed from being able to fool nobody to one who can fool everybody, including us.

  Gale may in fact be the most open and honest character in the books. “I never question Gale’s motives while I do nothing but doubt [Peeta’s],” says Katniss in The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins pulls a neat trick with Gale: he advocates throughout the three books for retaliation against the injustice of their society. But we the reader, like Katniss, are not sure he entirely means what he says. Gale is on the sidelines and understandably frustrated while Katniss and Peeta spend all three books in the eye of the storm. “Back in the old days ... Gale said things like this and worse. But then they were just words. Here, put into practice, they become deeds that can never be reversed” (Mockingjay ). Suzanne Collins tells us how Gale is, and yet we do not quite realize it until the third book, when he turns his words into actions and thereby loses Katniss forever—by being the person he told her he was all along.