'Hunger Games' is more than meets the eye
March 26, 2012
For those of you who cannot refrain from your “Team Peeta” and “Team Gale” Facebook posts and Tweets, this article is not for you, because you obviously cannot wrap your mind around the fact that “The Hunger Games” trilogy is not about sex and romance, but real concepts, such the politics of the book in relation to the American politics of today.
One might ask, “How does this apply today?” Here’s the deal: the Gamemakers have supremacy; they are able to influence the mayors of each district to do their requests. Only a handful of Gamemakers exist, but they are authoritative and control just about everything connected to the Hunger Games themselves.
In the current Republican political primaries, only a few sponsors are backing the candidates. The point is that the Gamemakers in the novel are much like the real gamemakers in the political realm in America, pitting, for sport, one candidate against another. And the real sport, the one with real lives in the balance, is each district pitted against another, not just in the Hunger Games, but in everyday life.
Here’s my plug. If you have yet to read the series, it is really, in my opinion, a great read. If you can get past the soap opera-esque drama and actually read into the novels, I really feel that you can learn a lot.
The author obviously has her opinions about politics; I might be a political science major, but I’m not asking you to care about the political undertones, I am just pointing out that they exist.
That being said, if I see one more person post about “Team Peeta” vs. “Team Gale,” I will personally find you and throw a copy of the book at you, because you clearly have no idea what the book is really about. It is about politics and struggle and overcoming obstacles and society.