by V. Arrow
AN UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO
SUZANNE COLLINS’ HUNGER GAMES,
FROM MELLARK BAKERY TO MOCKINGJAYS
V. ARROW
An Imprint of BenBella Books, Inc.
Dallas, Texas
THIS PUBLICATION IS UNOFFICIAL AND UNAUTHORIZED. IT HAS NOT BEEN PREPARED, APPROVED, AUTHORIZED, LICENSED, OR ENDORSED BY ANY ENTITY THAT CREATED OR PRODUCED THE WELL-KNOWN BOOK OR FILM SERIES THE HUNGER GAMES.
Copyright © 2012 by V. Arrow
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Contents
Introduction
1
Mapping Panem
2
How Panem Came to Be
3
Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Panem
4
The Socioeconomics of Tesserae
5
The Curious Case of Primrose “Everdeen”
6
Family Life in Panem
7
The Games as Exploitation, Exploitation as Entertainment
8
Gender Roles and Sexuality in Panem
9
District 4
10
Mythology and Music in Panem
11
District 11
12
The Architects of the Rebellion
13
Truly, My Name Is Cinna
14
District 13 and the Capitol: Two Sides of the Same “Coin”
15
Accountability for Acts of War in the Hunger Games
Final Notes: Capitol Viewers and the New Panem
The Hunger Games Lexicon
A Note on District Names
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Endnotes
Introduction
The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins, is arguably the most significant Young Adult literary work of the last few years; it has certainly been the most visible. It has also been lauded for its accessibility to a wide audience, from students reading it as an assignment in schools to adult men and women reading it for its literary value—or to see what all the fuss is about.
What is that fuss about? What makes the Hunger Games so compelling as to have become an international phenomenon? On first blush, the synopsis of the series does not exactly sound like the kind of pleasant, jaunty read that most casual readers would seek out—the story of a girl trying to survive a gladiatorial battle to the death in a televised competition, which ends with a war that kills most of the beloved characters—and its status as a young adult novel would seem, unfortunately, to disqualify it from many intellectuals’ “Must Read” lists. Yet somehow, the series managed to bridge that gap between scholarly critics and casual readers in a way that few books, much less series, have managed.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising that the Hunger Games bridges that gap, given that bringing different groups together is one of the key themes of the series: bridging class divides, ideologies, and political schism. As Katniss’ awareness of her world grows and opens, so does our own as readers; as her outlook matures, so does Collins’ literary voice—and so do we. It is Katniss, in her role as our conduit to the horrors of Panem, who makes the series palatable. The story is told so closely from her point of view as to be inextricable from it: the story of Panem becomes Katniss’ story, and as Katniss takes her place as the Mockingjay figurehead in the war, Katniss’ story drives and shapes the story of Panem.
Countless fan guides have been written for the Hunger Games series already, and most have focused specifically on Katniss and her tale: Katniss and Peeta, the boy with the bread; Katniss and Gale, the boy with the bombs; Katniss and Prim, the sister who could not survive. But Katniss and her personal narrative are only a part of the story of the Hunger Games, and the tantalizing gaps that Katniss leaves for us as she tells her story attest that there are as many stories in Panem as there are tessera slips. The Panem Companion looks at these stories, and it looks at Panem itself: the country’s relationship to Katniss and her story, but also how the other characters in the novels shape and are shaped by the world they share—as well as by our own world, and of the way we engage with media like the Hunger Games.
In Panem, viewing the Hunger Games is mandated as a way to bend the populace to the Capitol’s will and remind them of their low status and lack of freedom. In the Capitol itself, the Hunger Games are a phenomenon, spawning fanatic aficionados, glitz, glamour, speculation, and excitement. In our world, millions of us have freely chosen to read the Hunger Games series—and it has become a phenomenon involving fanatic aficionados, glitz, glamour, speculation, and excitement. Perhaps the truest reason, then, and the simplest, for the Hunger Games trilogy’s popularity in our own world is that it is the most effective mirror of our own culture that has been produced since the advent of reality television and celebrity social media coincided with the mainstream practice of fandom: the transformative interactions (from “meta” discussion of canon and the creation of “headcanon”—extrapolated, unconfirmed, precanonical or postcanonical “facts”—to fanfiction and fanart) among an engaged community of a particular piece of media (in this case, the Hunger Games series). The Hunger Games is a story about public interaction with mainstream media. It’s a story about what happens when media content and consumption become tangled—when interpretation becomes reflexive or bidirectional (in which the media and the analyst are able to affect each other) rather than reflective (in which the analysis is more unilateral and impersonal).
Of course, reflexivity is the core of both academic inquiry and fandom. Academic inquiry of the Hunger Games seeks to find the instances of social criticism in Collins’ text and demonstrate their effectiveness to the books’ audience in a way that inevitably becomes a deeply personal critique of the readers’ own relationship to both the Hunger Games series and society in general. If we see the Hunger Games as a scathing examination of how Big Media and the government in our world entwine to create and maintain the socioeconomic status quo, then we are forced to consider this question: Can anyone enjoy a mainstream media phenomenon—like the one the Hunger Games has become—from an unbiased position outside of the system the series itself exposes? The world we live in necessarily depends on understood societal values and class assignments reinforced by stereotype and superficiality, just as in Panem. An analysis of the way Panem’s government and media combine to reinforce social perceptions of race, class, gender, sex, and morality necessarily fosters recognition of our own—either by divorcing Panem from us and cri
tiquing it as an independent culture or by viewing it as an extension of the contemporary world and a critique of contemporary American culture.
Fandom is also a deep reading of the text, but the focus is intrapersonal (each individual on how or why the media is so resonant to the self), not interpersonal (despite the communal nature of fandom), and based more on extrapolation and the fulfillment of reader desire than scholastic research. More than passive enjoyment, the practice of fandom—the verb form of which, at least in Hunger Games fandom, is “fangirling,” regardless of the sex or gender of the fan—is an active consumption of media and the creation of derivative and transformative works through deeper analysis. Academic analysis looks at the overall scope of the Hunger Games; fandom analysis focuses on what outsiders may consider trivialities (Mags needing “translation,” Cinna’s lack of Capitol accent, Peeta’s observations of Katniss’ parents) to try to build a deeper understanding of the characters’ lives and the country they live in as its own place—outside of, or even unrelated to, the canonical text and authorial intent. Fandom strives constantly to wring additional information out of the canon Hunger Games text, often in an effort to “give justice” to characters who are seen as receiving unjust fates or to open new avenues of transformation. They craft scenarios for pre-series Hunger Games, question whether there were truly no other chances for rebellion. In short, fans explore, expand, justify, and transform actions or words in the text that are often overlooked by even the most stringent academic annotation—and explore, expand, justify, and transform scenes implied by, but outside of, the text as well. Hunger Games fandom is more than fanatic enjoyment of the series; it is an almost compulsive need to extract (or to create) from the main text more of Katniss, more of Peeta, more of Cato and Clove, more of Panem.
In The Panem Companion, I have tried to incorporate both broadscope academic analysis and the minutiae of fandom concerns in order to provide a fuller, richer, and more complete picture of the nation of Panem and the people who live (or, in the case of most characters, lived) there. When I say “broad-scope” academic analysis, I mean that the overall goal of this guide is to place Panem within the context of the Hunger Games series’ resonance as a pop culture phenomenon today, as well as place Panem in its own context as a nation that is not our own, not part of our culture, and therefore does not share our understanding of ethics or morality or etiquette. But because this book has its origins in my own desire to understand more, more, more about Panem, I would be remiss if I did not also employ fandom-style analysis to inform that academic analysis of Panem’s systems and institutions. To this end, I’ve also incorporated the thoughts and work of many of my fellow fans in the Hunger Games fandom community.
One final note before we jump into that analysis itself: I’ve looked here only at the Panem of the novels, given that the Panem of the movie is quite different and, in some places, directly oppositional. In large part, this was a choice based on continuity, because at the time of this writing only one film has been released, whereas the complete series is available in novel form. The Hunger Games film series and the Hunger Games novel series exist in different spheres of audience interaction, as well; while the novels require of us active participation with the text to consume the story and idea of Panem, the movies let us passively consume it as a viewer if we so choose . . . adding an additional parallel between us, as fans of the Hunger Games series, and the citizens of Panem’s Capitol, as fans of the Hunger Games.
How we view and consume media is a major aspect of Suzanne Collins’ series and it is one that follows us on our journey through Panem, from the mines of District 12 to the ocean of District 4, and the vast fields of District 11 to the secret tunnels of District 13. I hope that exploring the more hidden geographies of Panem through The Panem Companion will make Katniss’ journey in the Hunger Games an even more thrilling one to travel.
1
Mapping Panem
A significant part of what makes the Hunger Games trilogy unique within the genre of dystopian sci-fi is not its plot (which is both based in real history and a common trope within the genre, an oppressive political regime forcing the disenfranchised to become citizen–gladiators) or its characters (many of whom serve largely as archetypes and allegories) but the nation of Panem itself.
Like many other fictional dystopian nations, it is North America—But Not: recognizable to us as our own culture but different enough that it should not be held to the same cultural or sociological standards. Panem, like any other culture, has its own structure of values and standards based on its history, ethnic make-up, economy, and geography. Although Katniss lives in the coal-mining shadow of the Appalachian Mountains, she does not live in West Virginia or Pennsylvania or Virginia: she lives, very particularly, in District 12’s Seam, and every decision she makes is a product of that place and its culture. So, as a fan of the series, what I wanted to know was—just where, and what, is District 12? And how does it fit in to Panem as a whole?
For me, involvement in the Hunger Games fandom really began with the creation of a map of Panem, and that’s the most logical place for this guide to begin, too.
We see very little of Panem over the course of the Hunger Games trilogy. But what we do see during the Victory Tour in Catching Fire really drove home for me the idea that Panem is not, in fact, one nation, but instead is made up of autonomous, isolated nation-states. I also realized slowly, as Katniss did during the Quarter Quell, that the lives of each of those nation-states’ residents are affected as deeply—at least—as Katniss’ life has been affected by the mines in District 12. And that the Capitol, too, shapes its citizens, for better or worse. In other words, despite how little time the books spend in most of the country, Panem itself plays a central role in the story.
Panem seems to take on a character of its own even from the first scene of the series:
I can feel the muscles in my face relaxing, my pace quickening as I climb the hills to our place, a rock ledge overlooking a valley. A thicket of berry bushes protects it from unwanted eyes . . . Gale says I never smile except in the woods . . .
From this place, we are invisible but have a clear view of the valley, which is teeming with summer life, greens to gather, roots to dig, fish iridescent in the sunlight . . . With both of us hunting daily, there are still nights . . . when we go to bed with our stomachs growling.THG6-9
In looking more deeply at Katniss’ world, the nation of Panem should be front and center; it shapes everything in the series, from the horror of the Games themselves to Katniss’ family’s dynamics, from why Rue knew what night-vision goggles were to why Mags’ language is “unintelligible.”
So, armed with frosting, ice cream, and overflowing love for Finnick Odair—as well as a mountain of research—a fellow Hunger Games enthusiast and research geek friend of mine, Meg, and I started mapping Panem. We began with an image of modern North America:
FIG. 1
The first question we had to ask, in order to map the country, was about Panem’s origins: When did Panem begin? Suzanne Collins has kept fairly mum on the subject but did tell Scholastic in 2008 that Panem was not a prediction for the lifetime of any of the Hunger Games’ contemporary readers!
Q: How long would it take for North America to deteriorate into the world depicted in the books?
A: You’d have to allow for the collapse of civilization as we know it, the emergence of Panem, a rebellion, and seventy-four years of the Hunger Games. We’re talking triple digits.i
Given the grand scale of cultural collapse, anywhere from 200–999 years seems absolutely believable for a nation like Panem to arise. However, the changes that have taken place by the start of The Hunger Games aren’t just cultural. They’re physical, too. Katniss herself recounts geological catastrophe as a major part of the fall of North America, as she narrates Mayor Undersee’s recitation of “the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disa
sters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land.”THG18
Panem, then, is likely best seen as its own continental island nation, like Australia is today, with North America as its precursor. It would take at least 300 years, according to the best estimates of ecologists, meteorologists, and other global warming scientists, to see a major disaster or chain of disasters extensive enough to change the topography of North America drastically. Therefore, in terms of the creation of the Panem map, Meg and I were more focused on the geological cataclysm than on social change—and it turns out that even “triple-digit” years is a pretty short amount of time for the earth literally to fall apart!
When Suzanne Collins signed the three-book deal for the Hunger Games with Scholastic in 2006, the world was still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, record-low fatal freezing temperatures in Canada and the northern United States, and a massive Pakistani earthquake. It’s easy to imagine our real-world events being woven into Katniss’ story. But there’s a piece still missing: “the encroaching seas,” which is a common trope in sci-fi literature that takes place on Future Earths. One possible origin is the urban myth that California is sinking or will “break off” into the ocean—and that, admittedly, is what Meg and I used in making our first draft of the map. However, it’s more likely that a combination of tectonic shifts in California causing tsunamis, global warming affecting the Atlantic, and continued erosion in Louisiana and the Gulf would have been responsible for the seas “encroaching” on North America.