The Hunger Games, in my opinion, is an incredibly trilogy of books that was later turned into
some really good movies. When I read them back when they came out, which was -- oh god,
about ten years ago now -- I was captivated by the story, by the fast-paced, straight-forward
writing, by the characters, by the universe, by all of it. But the thing about it that
shocked me the most at the time and the thing that has stuck with the most all these years
later, was the ending. Not the ending as in the big epic final battle in the capitol,
but the ending as in the epilogue where Katniss is talking about her kids and her future with Peeta.
Because when I was reading this in high school -- which was ten years ago oh my god -- I
was pretty used to stories with a generally happy ending. Sure, maybe you lose some side
characters along the way, but the main characters that you’ve been rooting for the whole time
ultimately end up happy and pretty well-off, all things considered. I was used to books
with conflict and intense themes, obviously, but I could usually close the book at the
end with a warm feeling in my stomach, knowing that these fictional characters were gonna be alright.
I didn’t feel that way when I finished Mockingjay, the last book in the Hunger Games series.
In fact, I vividly remember closing the book and being kind of horrified. I didn’t really
believe that it had ended the way it had. The ending wasn’t
happy. It wasn’t necessarily the epitome of horrific, but it was, uneasy. And that’s
how I felt: uneasy. This wasn’t the satisfying, end-of-an-epic-series ending that I was used
to. And it put me on edge. I read the epilogue back over a few times, thinking I
had missed something. But no, it just wasn’t the happy ending I had been hoping for. And
I think the fact that I still remember that feeling today -- all these years later -- is
a testament to how impactful this series can be.
And, importantly, I don’t think that the ending was shocking and sad just to be shocking
and sad. There was a very specific, important meaning behind it, that the entire story was
leading up to. So today, I want to talk about that unhappy ending, because I think it presents
to us one of the major themes of the Hunger Games: War is always bad.
So, in case you just kinda blacked out from like 2012-2015 and just missed all the Hunger
Games hype, I’m gonna very quickly summarize the plot up until the epilogue. Basically,
Katniss lives in a dystopian world where The Capitol forces children from all 12 Districts
to fight to the death once a year in a huge televised event. In the first book, she takes
the place of her sister and enters the Games alongside Peeta. Her and Peeta win by being
the last two remaining and then acting like they’re going to kill themselves at the
same time, forcing the Capitol to accept two winners instead of one. In the second book,
the Capitol retaliates against Katniss and Peeta for their initial defiance by instituting
a special edition of the Games where Katniss and Peeta are entered again. Nobody wins this
Hunger Games because Peeta makes a plan with anti-Capitol rebels for them to break into
the Games and rescue Katniss, and in the process, Peeta is captured by the Capitol. The third
book follows the rebels as they make Katniss their symbol of the rebellion and go to war
against the Capitol. Eventually, they storm the Capitol and force President Snow to surrender,
but they suffer a lot of casualties along the way, including Katniss’s younger sister.
Afterwards, the leader of the Rebellion, President Coin, suggests holding a Hunger Games for
the Capitol’s children as retaliation for what the Capitol did to them. In order to
prevent this, Katniss kills President Coin.
And so that’s what leads up to the final chapter of the book. Katniss has been through
absolute hell, but now there is finally peace. So what does she do? Live happily ever after?
Fall in love? Have a bunch of kids? Become President of Panem and lead everyone into
an unprecedented era of peace?
It’s complicated. She does fall in love, and even her choice of which person to be
with contributes to the series’s anti-war message. There’s a moment in the third book
where Gale and Peeta, her two love interests, are talking about her while she lies nearby,
pretending to be asleep. Gale says that “Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can’t survive
without”. Katniss thinks that’s a horrible thing to say because it paints her as a cold,
calculating person who doesn’t take into consideration “love, desire, or compatibility”,
and she’s mad that Peeta doesn’t argue Gale on that. But you can kind of understand
why Gale thinks that. He and Katniss grew up in extremely tough conditions in District
12, where they were constantly just trying to survive, and then Katniss was thrown into
the Games where literally her only goal had to be to survive. The main characters haven’t
yet had much of a chance to do anything except try to survive. And Gale probably wants to
believe that she’ll continue to make her choices based solely on survival because he’s
better at war than Peeta is. Peeta is the kind-hearted baker while Gale is the one designing
weapons and fighting the Capitol. Purely in terms of survival, Gale might be the better
option if you’re choosing someone just to help you stay alive. But in the end, Katniss
chooses Peeta specifically because he’s not fueled by war, like Gale is. Gale likely
designed the weapon that killed Katniss’s sister. Peeta voted against a final Hunger
Games for the Capitol’s children because he wanted all the suffering to stop. So Katniss
realizes, in the final parts of the Mockingjay, that what she needs isn’t fire and destruction
-- Gale -- but a “dandelion in the spring”, which is Peeta. Even in
her choice of who to spend her life with, which many wrote off as just another silly
love triangle, Katniss pushes forward the book’s message that what we need isn’t
more war, but more peace.
Even so, she doesn’t necessarily get her happily ever after. She says it took her fifteen
years to have kids because she was so terrified at the prospect of bringing more people into
this horrific world. She says that when she first got pregnant, she was “consumed with
a terror that felt as old as life itself”. She does say that she feels joy holding her
daughter, but she also says: “on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure
in anything because I’m afraid it could be taken away.” Over twenty years later,
she’s still not fully recovered from the terrible things she went through. She says
she has nightmares that “won’t ever really go away.” She has coping mechanisms, and
she has plans to explain everything to her children when they’re old enough. She’s
getting by, making the best with what she has and working through her trauma every single
day, but she’s forever scarred by it. It’s a bittersweet ending because you’re both
happy that Katniss was able to move on to some degree and sad that she’ll have to
deal with the repercussions of war forever.
The point of this ending, at least how I interpreted it, was that people are resilient, and we
can go through horrible things and do our best to rebuild, but we’ll never be the
same. War destroys people, even the survivors. Even wars that may have been necessary, like
one to overthrow the Capitol and stop the Hunger Games, will have devastating affects
on everyone involved that will ripple through generations. That’s what stuck with me the
most when I closed the Mockingjay after reading that Epilogue. It was kind of an unsettling
realization that the heroes don’t always end up happy and unharmed, because war doesn’t
leave people unharmed. It’s about as anti-war of a message as you can get.
Because the epilogue very easily could’ve been about how great Peeta is, or how great
her kids are, or what a beautiful life they’ve built together. But instead, it’s almost
entirely about how difficult things are. How she doesn’t know how to explain to her kids
what happened. How they take the lyrics of a happy song for granted. How they play on
a graveyard without knowing it. It’s not like everything is terrible and desolate,
but things are hard, and that’s the whole point of the epilogue -- rather than how wonderful
and perfect and happy everything is. I think that’s impactful.
And then recently, I saw this quote from K.A. Applegate making the rounds on Twitter. Applegate
is the author of the Animorphs series, and she got pushback from some readers about the
ending of the massive 60-book series. They thought it was unsatisfying because there
wasn’t some big final fight. The villains weren’t truly defeated and the protagonists
didn’t end up in a good place. And in response to that, Applegate basically said: “That’s
the point.” You can pause and read her whole statement, but to paraphrase, she basically
said that wars don’t have happy endings. People who experience war don’t come out
bright and cheery on the other side, and she wanted the Animorphs series to reflect that.
She tells people that if they’re mad about the ending, they need to remember that feeling
when they’re voting and when politicians are proposing going to war. It’s a strong
anti-war statement, both her letter to fans and the ending of the series. The Animorphs
doesn’t have a happy ending because wars don’t have happy endings, which makes “War
is always bad” arguably one of the most major themes of the Animorphs. I think the
Hunger Games falls into a similar boat.
I don’t know if Suzanne Collins wrote it with the same intent as K.A. Applegate, but
regardless, I took away a similar theme when I read it. I wanted to see if other folks
came away with a similar view of the Hunger Games series, so I tried looking up Mockingjay
on a few study guide websites. Sparknotes didn’t have one for it, Shmoop listed one
of the themes as a generic “warfare”, but GradeSaver said that one of the themes
was the “Price of War”, which is basically the same thing. It talks about how major characters
lose their lives and even the heroes who do survive suffer long after the war has ended.
In particular it highlights this one quote from Plutarch: “Now we're in that sweet
period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated... but collective
thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a gift
for self-destruction.” This is a great quote that contributes to that feeling of there
not really being a true happy ending. It’s clear foreshadowing that another war is just
around the corner.
When I watched the movie, though, I didn’t come away with that sense of unease. I normally
like the movie adaptations of books. In some cases, they can even improve on the source
material. And overall I really liked the Hunger Games movies. But at the end, it felt like
it wrapped up just a bit too nicely. It didn’t instill me with that same sense that the war
had deeply scarred the heroes. Katniss does say basically word for word some of the lines
from the book, but something about it in this format just doesn’t work as well for me.
Maybe it’s the uplifting music at the end or the fact that they’re just chilling in
a sunny meadow that doesn’t seem at all like a graveyard. I don’t know.
Still, I don’t think the Hunger Games books get the credit they deserve for being anti-war
literature. I think most people see the Hunger Games as just light YA fun. A Battle Royale
knock-off with cool action scenes. But it’s a lot more than that. It’s a series with
a serious message: War is always bad. It has a lot of themes throughout it: sacrifice,
rebellion, violence as entertainment, the power of propaganda -- but it’s anti-war
message spans all three books and is the message that the series ends on.
Stories are here to teach us lessons. You can tell someone that war is bad, but they
won’t really be able to take that to heart without any context. Stories give people
a frame of reference to be able to internalize lessons like that. And stories aimed at a
somewhat younger audience, like the Hunger Games, can do that especially well. The Hunger
Games taught a generation of young adults that war is bad, that war hurts people and
communities long after the war has ended, and I think it deserves some credit for that.
The Hunger Games is, at the end of the day, an important anti-war story.
That’s all I had for you today. If you enjoyed this video, I’d appreciate your support
over on Patreon. I’m only able to make these videos thanks to the generosity of everyone
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so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
[dishes rattling] [someone gasps] That is mahogany!
And the library, all mahogany.