Suzanne Collins wants to use Hunger Games to fix our media literacy problem

“Media literacy is dead” is a common refrain in online discourse, reaction to online discourse, etc. etc., ad nauseam. Granted, in those circles, the complaints are usually about a fandom’s inability to follow a plot or identify an antagonist in fiction. Those things are concerning, but our ability to identify manipulation, consider multiple perspectives, and detect biases and falsehoods is in crisis too, and it’s a much bigger societal problem. Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins is actually doing something about it with her latest novel in the franchise, the prequel Sunrise on the Reaping. 

It isn’t surprising to see Collins exploring these themes and using this fictional world as a primer on how to recognize propaganda and persuasive marketing. Meditations on mass media, marketing, and power are present throughout the original trilogy and her 2020 prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Collins says her inspiration for the dystopian world of Panem and its battle royale punishment system, the Hunger Games, came back in 2003, when she was channel-surfing (remember channel-surfing?) between reality television and coverage of the Iraq War. If you look at the reality competition series that were popular at that time — including Survivor, The Bachelorette, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, America’s Next Top Model, and The Simple Life — it’s easy to see what might have inspired not just the Games’ survivalist competition, but also their spectacle elements, like the stylist teams and audience participation. 

In the original trilogy, Collins uses the dystopian Hunger Games themselves to comment on mass media, marketing, and power in an extreme way. When protagonists Peeta and Katniss are drafted into the Battle Royale-style Hunger Games by the oppressive, murderous Capitol that rules them, they learn how to brand themselves as star-crossed lovers in order to win sponsors and support. Then Katniss is rebranded as a rebel leader, as the revolution against the Capitol draws on the same media-savvy tools to gain support.

With Sunrise on the Reaping, Collins focuses much more specifically on media manipulation and media literacy. The most basic primer comes courtesy of Plutarch Heavensbee, the Head Gamesmaker whose rebel plot effectively ends the Hunger Games in Catching Fire, the second book in Collins’ original trilogy. Sunrise on the Reaping reveals that 25 years earlier, he was a rich kid and upstart videographer assigned to cover District 12. When Plutarch first meets Haymitch Abernathy — Katniss Everdeen’s mentor in the original trilogy, and Sunrise on the Reaping’s protagonist — Plutarch uses his ability to manipulate the media to get into Haymitch’s good graces.

When Haymitch is drafted into the Hunger Games in the annual reaping ceremony, and forcibly separated from his mother and young brother, Plutarch claims he needs several takes of the family “authentically” reacting to his selection — which gives Haymitch more time for a proper goodbye. The caveat is that his family has to perform their shock and pain over and over for the camera. It’s perverse, but it gives them time for a genuine moment before Haymitch is taken away. 

On the train to the Capitol, Plutarch explains how he was able to edit, or “card stack,” the reaping footage to make the District 12 tributes look good, and hopefully gain them some decent mentors and sponsors. “Stress the positive,” he says, “ignore the negative.” Another District 12 contestant, Maysilee, astutely compares this technique to when her parents, who own a candy store, try to sell stale marshmallows by calling them “chewy” and charging premium prices for them. In our world, we see these techniques on a micro level with Instagram filters, and on a macro level with political slogans. Footage can be edited to to lie by omission all the time, whether it’s on a reality show, like The Traitors trying to create a compelling story, or coverage of Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show that does not show the dancer who waved a Palestine flag in protest mid-performance. 

Over the course of the next few days, before they enter the arena, Sunrise on the Reaping’s District 12 kids receive a crash course in branding and crafting rhetoric. Plutarch explains that “when people have an emotional response to something […] they come up with a reason why it logically makes sense.” The District 12 group then brainstorms their own branding, looking for simple ways to make their stronger, faster, better-trained opponents look ridiculous in interviews, and to make a team of underdogs seem like viable winners for prospective sponsors. They play around with name-calling, a “cheap but effective” rhetorical device favored IRL by President Trump, to color their opponents in ways they hope the audience will internalize. 

Through Haymitch and his friends, Collins illustrates how people can learn how to identify persuasive forms of communication like marketing and propaganda, and recognize their intentions and purpose. Then they can begin to use those tools — or resist their effects. District 12’s Capitol escort, Drusilla, comes up with Breakfast Club-like archetypes she wants the contestants to embody when they’re presented to the public. Haymitch’s role is “the rascal,” and he plays the part without hesitation. It’s really no wonder that he takes to Peeta Mellark years later: Peeta has an innate sense of how to market himself to the Capitol and craft a compelling, moving personal narrative. 

Throughout the book, Haymitch refers to this kind of self-branding as “painting a poster.” He recalls his father telling a District 12 tribute a few years before that he mustn’t let the Capitol “paint their posters in [her] blood” and allow them to use her for their agenda. Haymitch takes that advice to heart once he’s in the same position. As Collins illustrates, he can’t guarantee his survival in the arena, but he can try to control how he’s perceived.

So Haymitch periodically stops to consider what kind of “poster” he’s making with his behavior, actions, and words as he navigates the pomp and circumstance of the Hunger Games. If he behaves a certain way, how will the audience interpret his actions? How can the Capitol profit off his image? Can he try and paint an anti-Capitol poster without getting himself killed? Does it matter if he does get himself killed? Most of us aren’t fighting children to the death in an arena full of aggressive, mutated wildlife, but we do live our lives on camera: With the combination of social media and cellphones, we more or less provide self-surveillance to the general public and those in power. As we navigate those spaces, it doesn’t hurt to consider what posters we’re painting, too. 

By painting these various posters — by shaping the narrative around him — Haymitch is able to do some manipulation of his own. He can play the role of an uncooperative ally or a scoundrel with a heart of gold in order to hide what he’s really up to in the Hunger Games arena. When he and Maysilee can’t discuss their plans openly because of the surveillance cameras around them, talking about their posters becomes a shorthand code for defying the Capitol. For example, Maysilee lays out their waning food supplies as a pretty little picnic. According to Haymitch, “This morning’s poster says, We’re civilized. We appreciate beautiful things. We’re just like you.” It’s a metaphor — but also, for Collins, a way of considering how advertising works, and asking her audience to be aware of that dynamic, too.

Haymitch’s tragedy is that he ultimately fails to shift the Capitol’s narrative, even though, as we know from The Hunger Games, he is the second Quarter Quell’s victor. Watching the televised recap, he sees how the Capitol has given him what Bachelor Nation would call a “villain edit” by omitting his efforts to aid other tributes and making him out to be a lone wolf with no regard for others. They may not have painted his poster with his blood, but they did get final control over the public narrative.

While the Hunger Games audience likely saw a different version of the events as they aired live, they unquestioningly accept the edited version. “Their lack of discernment transforms the recap,” Haymitch says, “validating it as truth.” That is the postmodern reality we face when media literacy truly dies. If you are emotionally affected by a social media post, for example, and react without verifying the information, you are helping to normalize and validate the claims in that post. 

One of the final lessons Collins imparts in Sunrise on the Reaping, however, is that there is hope. Nothing is inevitable — not even the sunrise. The Capitol is watching the Districts, but the Districts are watching too, and the people have the ability to see through the lies and manipulation when they’re being mistreated. Throughout the novel, Haymitch observes the use of political slogans — another form of mass media. In District 12, signs read “NO PEACE, NO BREAD”; “NO PEACE, NO SECURITY”; “NO CAPITOL, NO PEACE.” In the Capitol, the message is different, because the audience’s perspective is different: “NO PEACE, NO PROSPERITY”; “NO HUNGER GAMES, NO PEACE.” 

Then, in a dreamlike state, Haymitch realizes his girlfriend, Lenore Dove, put up her own street-art slogans that use the Capitol’s rhetoric against them. Lenore’s read “NO CAPITOL, NO HANGING TREE” and “NO CAPITOL, NO REAPING.” The Capitol’s downfall and the end of their cruel punishments doesn’t come for another generation, but it still happens — in part because not everyone in Panem validates the Capitol’s biased messaging as truth. Throughout these books, but in Sunrise on the Reaping in particular, Collins reminds readers that it’s possible for us all to consider the source of the narratives we’re being fed, recognize the goals behind it, and consume media critically. Eventually, she suggests, media literacy can help flip the narrative.