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Recently, I had the pleasure of showing one of my older millennial friends The Hunger Games films for the first time. As a younger millennial who hadn't thought about the series in a few years, it was the chance to introduce one of my friends to a story and world that shaped my adolescence. I remembered the first film and its sequel, Catching Fire, as having pretty good production design, soundtrack, sound editing, and costume design. Plus, a bunch of our favorite actors - Stanley Tucci, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, a young Jack Quaid - appeared in the films. As Catching Fire wrapped up, I concluded that not only had these films aged well, but they still remain relevant. 

I hadn't, however, seen or read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. And as we watched Rachel Zegler's Lucy Gray Baird get treated like a zoo animal by the Capitol before being led into a stadium where an automated voice told her to "enjoy the show," we felt nauseated. As the credits rolled for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I turned to my buddy and said, "Damn, these Hunger Games got hands." I meant that not just as a way to compliment The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes' craft from a filmmaking standpoint, but also its political themes. Sure, it's created for a 'YA audience,' but it still featured hard-hitting criticism in the spirit of Marxist philosopher Guy Debord's seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle. I was impressed. 

This led me to read the latest prequel book in the Hunger Games series, Sunrise on the Reaping, and my goodness, Suzanne Collins doesn't miss. While I never doubted her writing prowess, seeing Harry Potter continue to persist in pop culture despite the... everything about it has admittedly left me jaded about whether or not a massively popular YA series can still stand for something meaningful today. 

In this, our inaugural edition of the weekly literary column If It Bleeds, We Read, I'll look into how far Suzanne Collins go to wear the themes of the Hunger Games on her sleeve - especially in these turbulent political times where subtely has seemingly gone out the window.

Sunrise on the Reaping invites readers' eyes to revolutionary thought from page one

The answer is - four epigraphs far, to be exact. The book opens with George Orwell and William Blake quotes about propaganda and truth, before including two excerpts from Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. The first is about governance and how the power of "governors" only exists within the form of public opinion. The second is where things start to really get interesting, though. Hume wrote, "That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise." 

Out of context, that might sound a bit vague. But there's a reason Collins put it as the last of the epigraphs, because it sets the stage for the novel's discussion of how power is constructed within the minds of citizens (echoing Hume's previous passage), and how the power of Panem's government only exists as long as its citizens believe that it will affect their reality. The story opens with a young Haymitch Abernathy trudging his way over to the Quarter Quell reaping, where four children from District 12 will be picked to fight in the Hunger Games. He imagines how him and his family would respond if his younger brother, Sid, were chosen for the games: "And if Sid should ask, 'But why do I have to do this?' We can only say, 'Because this is the way things are.'"

While the government of Panem appears to be an ironclad fascist state, Collins encourages us to see it for what it actually is: a manmade political entity. While Haymitch doesn't yet see that the Hunger Games and Panem's government at large aren't permanent, natural forces like gravity, we certainly do, because Collins primed us with that Hume quote about a sunrise before Haymitch's story even began. In other words, she's inviting readers to consider how their view of the world around them is informed by the systemic forces acting on their lives. In effect, this is not all too different from the way that Karl Marx wrote about capitalism's effect on the imagination. If you've lived your entire life under capitalism, you may not be able to imagine a world under a different system. 

Suzanne Collins meets readers of The Hunger Games books where they are, instead of overwhelming them with dense political theory

It's prudent for Collins to start off her book this way, considering that Haymitch is the vessel in which we experience the story. Haymitch must go on a journey of growth, and Collins makes his revolutionary awakening accessible to younger readers who haven't yet read Marx, Debord, Roland Barthes, or Jean Baudrillard, for that matter. Even though she seeds the ideas of Hume in our minds before the story begins, she understands the level that her target audience is at. The rest of Sunrise on the Reaping functions as a way for Haymitch, and by extension, us, to realize that social power is a manmade construct. And it doesn't require an act of divine intervention for it to be dismantled.

This is just about one of the most powerful messages you can give young people today, because they're facing a unique set of issues. Back in my day, social media wasn't yet used as a pipeline for disinformation or a weapon against democracy. Generative AI didn't exist yet. The notion of "truth" wasn't yet politicized. I cannot imagine what it's like for teenagers today to come of age into this world, where things beyond our individual control feel more oppressive than ever. 

As dystopian as things are right now, it's heartening to see that The Hunger Games series was never just a thought experiment for Suzanne Collins. That after all these years, she's finding real-world relevancy within the fictional world she's created. Instead of punching down, she's showing the kids how to punch up. 

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A reading guide to Cassandar Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.