Some readers think the new installment of ‘The Hunger Games’ will be a commentary on Gaza. Courtesy of iStock

By Mira Fox June 7, 2024

Suzanne Collins was inspired to write The Hunger Games after flipping between news coverage of the Iraq war and a reality TV show. If that sounds bleakly familiar, and a whole lot like the current experience of scrolling between influencers selling skincare and images of the Israel-Hamas war, well, Collins has announced that she’s returning to the world of Panem. The just-announced prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, will be out in 2025.

The Hunger Games, which was published in 2008, takes place in a dystopian future America, Panem, divided into 12 districts, each of which has a particular manufacturing specialty. The districts are all ruled by the wildly wealthy Capitol, where people spend lavishly on insane outfits and look down upon the largely poverty-stricken, oppressed district folk. 

The original books focus on the Hunger Games, an annual gladiatorial prime-time television event in which 24 children — two from each district — compete to the death in a booby-trapped arena. It’s all part of a manipulation tactic to keep the districts obedient to the rule of the Capitol, though the heroine, Katniss, ends up the symbol of a revolution. 

But — spoiler alert if you’ve managed to avoid the series this long, even after its blockbuster movie adaptations — the rebel movement is nearly as bad as the Capitol government. Its leader is simply seeking to create her own authoritarian government, oppressing Capitol denizens instead.

Collins’ books are more cynical than most young adult dystopian series, and far more morally gray. The villainous president of the Capitol is charismatic and canny, and his motives seem tough to decipher; in his own way he seems to want the best for the world, he just has a twisted idea of how to achieve it. (He’s compelling enough that Collins’ other prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, places him as its hero.) And her books are as focused on the leveraging of soft power and the careful crafting of public narratives as they are on world-building or splashy battle scenes, the usual core of the genre.

The upcoming installment, Collins said, would lean even further into this focus on messaging and public image. “With Sunrise on the Reaping, I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,’” she said. “The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

The author, who grew up in a military family, has always focused on writing about war; in an interview with The New York Times in 2018, she said she is most compelled by writing about “just-war theory,” which she described as “an attempt to define what circumstances give you the moral right to wage war and what is acceptable behavior within that war and its aftermath.” And she has frequently said that she only writes a book when she has a new angle of war theory she wants to explore.

This sort of statement has led plenty of devoted fans to believe that her newest Hunger Games book will address the Israel-Hamas war. While propaganda and public messaging has been a key part of numerous wars, the culture war has surged since Oct. 7, with Israeli and Palestinian advocates duking it out online in their attempts to influence public opinion. (A Times investigation this week found that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ran a campaign to influence U.S. government officials about the war using fake news sites and social media accounts.)

What Collins might have to say about the Israel-Hamas war remains to be seen — she hasn’t made a public statement, to the ire of some of her readers — or at least inferred from her newest book. But even now, plenty of people are drawing parallels between the war in Panem and the war in the Middle East. 

In the wake of the siege on al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, an X user tweeted a scene of a woman standing in front of the wreckage. The woman glares into the camera furiously as she speaks. “The Capitol just bombed a hospital filled with unarmed men, women and children,” she spits, flames still flickering behind her. The woman is Jennifer Lawrence; it’s a scene from the Hunger Games.

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