“That’s a fun and tropey little love story. Then Peeta took the stage and gave his interview, and announced that he was in love with Katniss. Here’s what got me: Katniss had reached the Capitol and was going through her press interviews, and I was getting bored and thinking about maybe putting the book down. That passage tells us an enormous amount about the brutal pragmatism and unlikability that makes Katniss such a specific and unusual protagonist, and I skipped right over it the first time I read the book because I didn’t care to look for it. I thought the premise of children being forced to murder each other on a reality TV show sounded gross and trashy and exploitative, and I thought Suzanne Collins’s sentences were clunky and inelegant.Īnd because I didn’t respect the book, I was skimming as I read, so I missed all the telling details that deepened Katniss’s characterization in the first few pages, like the scene where she befriends a wildcat and you think she’s going to pick up an adorable animal companion, and instead she chases it away with stones because it’s scaring away the game. When I started reading the first book, I didn’t like it all that much. Does this franchise live up to the hype? Is it actually good, or was it all talk? And at the end of the day, are we Team Peeta or Team Gale? Here’s what The Hunger Games does really wellĬonstance: I still remember the exact moment The Hunger Games got me. To that end, Vox culture writers Constance Grady, Aja Romano, and Alex Abad-Santos joined managing editor Eleanor Barkhorn and critic at large Emily VanDerWerff to talk the whole thing through. Ten years out from the Hunger Games phenomenon, it’s time to look back and reevaluate. They helped launch Jennifer Lawrence to megastardom. They created slogans that were used in actual protest movements.

They became a pop culture shorthand for stories of inequality and scarcity. Together, the two series kicked off the YA dystopian boom of the late 2000s. The Hunger Games books were giant best-sellers, and the movie adaptations were blockbusters. And that book - and its two follow-up sequels, 2009’s Catching Fire and 2010’s Mockingjay - became a phenomenon.

Ten years ago this fall, children’s author Suzanne Collins published The Hunger Games, a creepy, insidious story about a dystopian government that forces children to fight in a gladiatorial death match and broadcasts the whole thing on TV.

The the hunger games trilogy box set