by V. Arrow
Of course, Katniss, too, received a Capitol honor, hers prior to her reaping, and equally as meaningless as the “honor” of becoming a tribute: a medal of distinction for her father’s death.
The girl who five years ago stood huddled with her mother and sister, as he presented her, the oldest child, with a medal of valor. A medal for her father, vaporized in the mines.THG22
This cultural difference between Career districts and other districts—that of the value of nationalism—also seems to be exacerbated by an institutional element: that Careers are allowed to train openly, while those in the other districts are not.
My father could have made good money selling [his bows and arrows], but if the officials found out he would have been publicly executed for inciting a rebellion.THG5
Given the racial graduation of the districts and the status of the Peacekeepers as unanimously former District 2 citizens, however, it may not be official edict that allows the Careers to train and the other districts’ citizens to be punished: it may come down to socioeconomic and geo-ethnic bigotry on the parts of the Peacekeepers and/or local mayors.
Regardless of reason, the result is a balance between district oppression and Capitol nationalism in the wealthier districts that makes Careers equal parts victim and perpetrator. Their attitude about the Hunger Games—their ruthlessness and bloodthirstiness—is the biggest difference between the Career tributes and the tributes who become their victims. And we can criticize the system that shaped that ruthlessness without absolving the individual tributes of their responsibility for it.
The Death of Prim Everdeen
This leads to what is perhaps the most heated, divisive question in the Hunger Games series:
Who killed Prim Everdeen?
Although there are no definitive answers—the “culprit” behind Prim’s death is never clearly revealed—different stances on the part of various groups of fans, and where they place the blame, play into differing ideas about morality in war as a whole. Who is to blame when it comes to the atrocities of war? The weapons’ makers or the ones responsible for deploying them? The people who drove the necessity for war to begin with?
The most contentious claim, and probably the most widely supported, is the idea that Gale is responsible for Prim’s death, ostensibly because he had a hand in designing the bomb that caused it. It’s his role in Prim’s death that puts the final nail in the coffin of his hopes for a romantic future with Katniss. If the second round of parachute explosions was intentional, and not the result of accidental delay—and if it was the rebels, and not the Capitol, that dropped the parachutes in the first place—then the weapon Katniss saw Gale work on in District 13, one that plays on human sympathy, does suggest a certain amount of culpability in Prim’s death. However, if Gale is to be blamed because of his role in creating the weapon, then Beetee must be blamed, too, because he is the one responsible for the bomb’s technology. And if those who create war technology are primarily at fault for the deaths their technology causes, then it likewise stands to reason that the Gamemakers are primarily at fault for the deaths of all tributes in the arena—something most Hunger Games fans do not agree with, instead placing the blame largely on Snow or the Games–tesserae system itself.
Why, then, not blame Presidents Snow and Coin for Prim’s death? Certainly, many do. Snow is generally considered as the person most “at fault” for the horror of the Hunger Games because he was in a position to stop them and instead chose not only to continue them but also condone, if not request, increasing levels of inhumanity and manipulation within them (such as the mockingjays trained to sound like loved ones in pain for the Quarter Quell). Similarly, then, Snow is also arguably at the root of the Second Rebellion, given that the rebellion is against him and his government. Katniss, certainly, believes at first that Snow is most at fault for Prim’s death—both ideologically, as the representative of the government that made the rebellion necessary, and directly, as the person who ordered the parachute bombs dropped. But Snow claims that the latter, at least, is not true—that he had no reason to kill Capitol children or order the second round of detonations—and convinces Katniss that it was Coin who deployed the bombs that killed Prim, in order to make the Capitol government appear even more sadistic and destroy the Capitol citizens’ loyalty.
If Coin did, indeed, know that a second round of detonations would take place and still chose to send Prim onto the battlefield, then she is the most logical “culprit” behind the killing. Even if she did not intend to put Prim in particular into the line of fire, the fault for Prim’s death still appears to lie with her. However, the Gamemaker argument remains in play here, as well: Why would Coin be more at fault for creating or approving the battle plan than the person who actually detonated the weapon? Does that mean that Seneca Crane—or Plutarch—would be more at fault for Rue’s death than Marvel, who physically killed her?
Snow also implies that the mastermind behind the double round of explosions—which were conveniently televised live across the Capitol, horrifying the public and “instantly snapp[ing] whatever frail allegiance”M357 they still felt towards Snow’s government—may have been Plutarch. As Snow points out to Katniss: “It’s that sort of thinking you look for in a Head Gamemaker, isn’t it?”M357 There are those who believe that Coin must have been at fault because she is the one who would have most benefitted from Prim’s death had it not led to her own at Katniss’ hand. But Plutarch stood to benefit as much from the end of the war as Coin did: Plutarch, alone of the known Hunger Games characters and perhaps alone out of Panem, would have found financial gain in the creation of a free market Panem, by capitalizing on the loss of the Hunger Games and the personal connections he forged during the rebellion with Panem’s celebrities: Katniss herself and Peeta, among others. Prim’s death, in Plutarch’s eyes, may have just added drama to Katniss’ narrative. The deaths of those Capitol children, and of the brave rebel medics who went to tend to them, certainly added drama to the conclusion of the war. Should Plutarch’s financial gain be considered a lesser motive than Coin’s political motivation in causing, or excusing, Prim’s death?
Or, of course, perhaps Katniss, the Mockingjay, the emblem of the war and the rallying point of its battles—including the battle in which Prim died—is to blame for Prim’s death. It’s an argument that ignores the idea of actual, physical culpability: Katniss did not drop the bomb that killed Prim nor did she build it or chart its course. But if Katniss had never volunteered in Prim’s place—if she had not performed her feint with the berries, had not become the Girl On Fire or the Mockingjay—then Prim would not have been in the Capitol on the day she died. The rebellion may still have happened, but Prim Everdeen likely would not have been a part of it.
With each possible explanation for Prim’s death come further possibilities and doubts: If Katniss is to blame, then would not Cinna be as well for turning her into a symbol? If Cinna is to blame for creating the symbols that made Katniss a revolutionary icon, then does it not circle back to Snow being at fault for propagating the Hunger Games that made her a star in the first place? Or does it all go back to the First Rebellion, before Katniss and Prim’s grandparents were even born: Was Prim, as an innocent victim of war, always marked for death in a society like Panem? (Narratively, the answer is yes: the Hunger Games series begins, really, with Prim’s reaping and ends with her death—Prim suffers a predictable, unnecessary death caused by the Hunger Games after all.)
By never revealing the actual source of the bomb, by never revealing who ordered it dropped or whether it was one that Gale or Beetee designed and built, Collins creates a resonant microcosm of war itself: Who killed Prim Everdeen? can only be answered insofar as Who causes war? can. There is no one distinct point of origin, no single individual responsible, for the Second Rebellion or Prim’s death—or for similar suffering in our own world.
Final Notes
Capitol Viewers and the New Panem
The nebulous conclusion of t
he Hunger Games series is a fitting illustration of what makes the series as a whole so remarkable within the Young Adult genre: rather than leading its readers to a set, cut-and-dried moral, the series treats revolution and war with the same ambiguity that they have in life, with none of its characters fully culpable or fully innocent and no conclusions fully satisfying.
Other popular YA and Middle Grade series of great depth and nuance—Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events—tend to divide their characters’ worlds and the characters who populate them into good versus evil. And at the opening of the series, the Hunger Games’ characters, too, seem to be clearly divided between “good” and “bad” in the comfortable and expected dichotomy. The people of the Seam are good; the people of the Capitol are bad. But over the course of the series, as Katniss’ experience with the world grows far beyond the fences of District 12, her beliefs shift, her mind opens, and her—and our—understanding of Panem becomes richer.
The Hunger Games begins to chip away at its own veneer of a morally simplistic, easily delineated Panem right away: from Madge’s quiet rejection of her wealthy upbringing to Peeta’s abuse at the hands of his mother, the graduated loss of the privileged veneer of the merchants’ side of District 12 is our first inkling that perhaps there is more going on in Panem than just the Hunger Games. And the pages that follow are full of one destroyed preconception after another, from the revelation that winning the Hunger Games may be an even worse fate than losing to the realization that, in backing the rebellion, President Coin may not have the best interests of Panem’s citizens in mind at all.
A common reaction from Hunger Games fans is that they feel “shell-shocked” after turning the final page of Mockingjay, as ill at ease with the end of the Second Rebellion and the Hunger Games as Katniss professes to be at the end, as she watches her children dance on a graveyard. Although a number of readers dislike the openness of the ending, it is a fitting close to the Hunger Games series: we are left with more loose ends than answers. How did Annie care for herself and Finnick’s baby? Where did Johanna go? How in the world did Katniss and Peeta get far enough past their experiences in the Games and the war to decide to have children? Did Plutarch really start airing Panem Idol?
The biggest question, though, and one that affects all of the rest, is, What happened to Panem?
How did District 12 become a center of medicine production—and if not from coal, once the District 12 mines were closed, where did the rest of Panem get its power? What did District 6 do if not manufacture medicine? Did its skilled workers migrate to District 12? Or did districts become responsible for producing more of their goods locally, returning to a system more akin to the one North America knew before the world wars? How did all of the various district cultures intermingle in the years after the war?
Was Plutarch’s cryptic prediction, that Panem was only enjoying a brief cease-fire between periods of violence, correct?
The beauty of the questions with which the series leaves us is that, through fandom—through interpretation and reinterpretation, through careful, loving extrapolation—these questions never need to go unanswered. There can be thousands of answers, shaped by different readers’ unique experiences and perspectives on the world, just as the canonical Panem is shaped by Suzanne Collins through Katniss’. And through that unique transformative process of interaction with the text and interaction with others who love the Hunger Games, we discover that the question of “what happened to Panem” after the rebellion is, in effect, the same question with which the series began, lingering still after turning the final page: How could the Hunger Games ever become accepted; how could our North America fall so far as to think of killing children as entertainment?
The final question behind the Hunger Games series, one that we attempt to answer over and over again, is not What happened to Panem? but What’s happening to us?
The Hunger Games Lexicon
In late summer, I was washing up in a pond when I noticed the plants growing around me. Tall with leaves like arrowheads. Blossoms with three white petals. I knelt down in the water, my fingers digging into the soft mud, and I pulled up handfuls of the roots. Small, bluish tubers that don’t look like much but boiled or baked are as good as any potato. “Katniss,” I said aloud. It’s the plant I was named for. And I heard my father’s voice joking, “As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve.”THG52
Every name in the Hunger Games series plays a significant role in characterization, either revealing possibilities for untold backstory or foreshadowing the character’s final fate in the series. The Capitol characters’ names tend to relate to their real-world historical parallels in the ruling or fall of Imperial Rome, like Cinna, while district-born characters’ names are often reminiscent of their home’s specialty, like Thresh, both the strong and deadly District 11 tribute of the Seventy-fourth Games and a lethal, efficient aspect of agricultural cultivation (to thresh is to beat grain from its stalks; a thresher is a highly dangerous farming machine).
The Hunger Games series is Katniss’ story. However, due to Suzanne Collins’ extraordinary attention to detail and skill with historical, scientific, and literary allusion, the books also tell dozens of further, deeper stories about the Second Rebellion and fall of the Capitol. Embedded in its characters’ names are personal histories, motivations for rebellion, and connections between the page and our world that make the Hunger Games grow from an enjoyable reading experience to a rich, thought-provoking analysis of the contemporary Western world.
From a fangirl’s perspective, this richness makes for a more entertaining experience, as well! After all, who wouldn’t be inspired by learning that Woof’s name likely refers not to the sound a dog makes but the cross-threads of a loom, which ties him to his home in District 8?
This lexicon includes a look into every character name in the Hunger Games trilogy, with discussions of their possible origins, etymologies, and figurative resonance.
A Note on District Names
Names in Panem, like any names, have meaning beyond their linguistic origins. They also reflect the culture they come from, and the culture of the parents that choose them.
One interesting result of the isolation of each district and its culture in Panem—as well as the further separations we see within individual districts, between district specialty classes and merchant classes—is the variation in naming practices. Although each individual name in the series has its own potentially meaningful peculiarities, we also see similarities in the names of people who share the same district origin—and stark differences between naming practices in different districts. Those who live in the Capitol—and a few key characters from Career districts who sympathize with Capitol ideals—have names derived from Roman history; characters from the districts have names related to their districts’ specialties or elements of nature. Young girls, in particular, are all named for flowers, while adult characters from the Hob have largely proprietary names that come from contemporary phrases, songs, or nursery rhymes—holdovers in Panem from our own culture, perhaps.
Names in our world work in a similar way; they follow specific cultural norms. Economist Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors of Freakonomics, explored the issue of names’ relationship to culture on their podcast in 2005 and in two Slate articles that they published concurrently. They heavily cite a study done in 2004 by Levitt and a young, black Harvard colleague, Roland G. Fryer Jr., whose area of study is the role of race in economics, in which they looked at the birth certificates for every child born in California from 1961 to 2004, which afforded them information from names and races to gender, birth weight, parents’ marital status, zip code, means of paying the hospital, and level of education. (The Panem equivalent of this might be district origin, tesserae taken out, and whether the child was of the specialty or merchant class.) One of the things they discovered was a stark difference in naming practices between black and white parents, a cultur
al difference that was only intensified by economic differences.
They suggest that the choice of a “distinctively black” name may be “a black parent’s signal of solidarity with her community.”lxxv But these connections between a culture and certain names are not just meaningful to the people who choose them and those within their community. They also affect how the names’ recipients are seen by those outside the community.
We experience this sort of stereotyping in the Hunger Games series largely through Katniss, as she reacts to others’ names. Nature and specialty class names seem to be familiar to her; she does not seem to find Rue’s or Thresh’s names strange, and her description of Prim’s appearance is tied not only to Prim’s namesake but to other natural imagery:
Prim’s face is fresh as a raindrop, as lovely as the primrose for which she was named.THG3
In contrast, she reacts to the name of the female District 1 tribute with distaste:
Glimmer I hear someone call her—ugh, the names the people in District 1 give their children are so ridiculous.THG182
We can probably assume that other districts’ names carry their own baggage in Panem, depending on who’s judging—including the names of Seam residents like Katniss, Gale, Haymitch, and Hazelle.
Evidence from real-world studies suggests that “all [parents are] trying to signal something with a name, and an overwhelming number of parents are seemingly trying to signal their own expectations of how successful they hope their children will be.”lxxvii This may partially explain why some Career tributes, like Cato, have Roman names like Capitol citizens. The Capitol is a symbol of wealth and luxury; for a Career district resident, what could signal success more clearly than a name that is popular there?