A post-insurrection reread of "The Hunger Games" was not what I expected
On the aggregation of power and who we allow to call themself a "hero"
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Now, down to business. This week we are following the Throughline of a question I ask myself probably slightly more than what’s normal: Who gets to call themself a hero? This all hit me as I read “Sunrise Over the Reaping,” the newest book in The Hunger Games franchise that was published in 2025, nearly 20 years after the publication of the original series.
You think you can hurt me? The Hunger Games came out 17 years ago.
To me, there is no more poignant allegory in modern-day (early 2000s and on) literature to the political oppression and discrimination we are seeing today than the Hunger Games series. I was catapulted back into that universe this month when I read “Sunrise on the Reaping,” a new prequel to the series published 17 (yes, oh my god, SEVENTEEN) years after the original.
If you’re unfamiliar—though I don’t see how you could be, after “May the odds be ever in your favor” became a solid part of the zeitgeist whether you read the books or not—allow me to quickly catch you up: In the first “Hunger Games” book, Katniss Everdeen is a teenage girl in District Twelve, the poorest and most subjugated district of Panem, a post-modern land that was once North America. The Capitol of Panem maintains its hold on its 12 districts by forcing them each to select a boy and a girl, called Tributes, to compete in a nationally televised event called the Hunger Games. Every citizen must watch as the kids fight to the death until only one remains. Katniss is of course selected at the beginning of the book, and through the Hunger Games becomes the face of revolution a la the plebeians vs. the proletariat. The Capitol maintains control over the districts by restricting basic needs like food and electricity and by the brute force of a military dictatorship.
“Sunrise Over the Reaping” follows Haymitch Abernathy, Katniss’ mentor in the games, as he competes in and wins the Hunger Games twenty-four years before Katniss is selected to compete. Haymitch’s story is brutal and heartbreaking, and it shows that the rebellion against the Capitol was not something that Katniss started—it had been bubbling under the surface for many years before she was born.
To put it bluntly, the book absolutely destroyed me. It reminded me primarily of two things:
My love for dystopian fiction runs deep, but there is a huge difference between reading it as an unaffected 11-year-old and reading it as a beaten-down 28-year-old living through her own real-life dystopia.
The January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Where were you on January 6?
There was a meme going around in 2021 during the weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection where some (genius? sick?) person edited the lyrics to a Taylor Swift song to say “Do you really wanna know where I was January 6? You know there’s many different ways that you can k!ll a Congressman.” Using that sound, people were making jokes like this one about how the new barometer for social interactions was whether or not someone supported the J6ers…Anyway, it still makes me laugh because I actually was at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Back in 2020 and early 2021, I was regularly writing freelance stories for local news outlets. So although I wasn’t working out of the Capitol building at the time, I first noticed that something was wrong in D.C. when I heard siren after siren pass by my apartment in Capitol Hill. I lived about six blocks from the Capitol building, and when I opened my window I could hear the faint noises of what sounded like a protest going on in the distance.
It was immediately apparent on social media that the “peaceful protest” to support former President Donald Trump had turned violent. As the police and medical sirens kept blaring past my apartment, I got a call from an editor at The Forward, a Jewish magazine out of New York. They needed someone on the ground at the Capitol and knew my work from protests I’d covered before.
The instinct I had back then to run into dangerous situations, where “history is unfolding in front of our eyes,” was perhaps a journalistic one or perhaps something I needed to work out in therapy. Either way, I jumped at the chance to get out there and record history as it happened. I contacted a couple of friends — a photographer and someone who worked in the security industry — and ran towards the action.
By the time we got there, the mob had already breached the Capitol and members of the Capitol and Metropolitan Police forces were attempting to create a line with their bodies to keep the rioters away from the building’s entrances. At that point, we started trying to interview people. Most people I approached were extremely wary of our group. We stuck out: the three of us wearing masks in a crowd of nearly all maskless rioters, my two companions both men of color in a sea of almost exclusively white people.
It was strange, then, that as the smoke around the building cleared and the citywide 6:00 p.m. curfew began, the people I spoke to kept repeating that the movement was “multiracial, multicultural and nonviolent.” Many repeated the phrase “we’re peace-loving people.”
“I was right up there at the top steps of the Capitol,” a man from Alaska told me. “I didn’t go inside – I’m not trying to break and enter. Besides going to the Capitol today, I always say, we’re peace-loving people.”
When I asked one man about the presence of many alt-right and neo-Nazi symbols in the crowd that day, he dismissed the idea that Nazi ideals were behind the crowd’s actions. He said the police were actually the ones working to overturn the law: “That’s what Nazi Germany is all about – the police overthrow the law, and then they claim they are the law…the police are helping ‘them’ steal the election.” Standing calmly in front of the line of riot-geared police, he told me that Trump was just trying to follow the constitution. “That’s why we’re here.”
The conversations I had with rioters over four years ago highlighted a certain detachment from reality in many of them. It’s something I’ll never forget: In a sea of mostly white men, they called it a “multiracial, multicultural movement.” As people stormed the Capitol in Auschwitz shirts and swastika symbols, they said that the Capitol Police were the Nazis. After several people died and many were injured, they called it a “nonviolent” movement.
You call yourself a hero?
I imagine that whenever a person feels righteous, looked-down-upon by society, like the world is against them, they must also feel like the “hero” when they fight back against their oppressor, whether real or imagined. If I dare to put myself in the J6ers’ shoes for a moment, I know that they felt like they were doing something heroic. In fact, they said as much to me when I asked them.
I also imagine that some of them may have seen themselves in Katniss. Sure, on the surface, they were out-of-towners raging into the Capitol to “rise up” against the government. To be honest, though I kind of always thought I’d see an uprising in my lifetime, I never imagined it would be on behalf of some of the least disenfranchised people in the world. The J6ers were putting their bodies on the line for a man who had already aggregated power on behalf of some of the richest men on the planet. Some of these “oppressed” rioters literally took private jets to attend their coup.
I hate to say it, but if you’re a lover of fantasy and science fiction like me, you know that when authors write dystopian and protest narratives, they purposefully remove things like race and geography while keeping hallmarks of historical protest movements (e.g., the three fingered salute was taken from Thai activists while also deployed in a way that invokes the raised fist of the Black Lives Matter movement and Black liberation from the 1960s).
Though this makes for a compelling story, the unintended side effects of decontextualized storylines and riot tactics allow for anyone to find themselves in the story. In fact, this study showed that “Conservatives and radical white nationalists often read the series as advocating rural struggle against totalitarian and cosmopolitan ‘liberal fascism.’”
So: Who gets to call themself a hero? Am I fighting against a perceived oppressor, experiencing true outrage, sweaty and short of breath at my own misfortune? I must be the hero. Is the entity exerting control over me a sprawling government with unimaginable reach and power? Well, gee, I must be a revolutionary.
The annoying thing about life is that we’re all allowed to make up our own narratives and justify our stories in any way we’d like. HOWEVER—and it’s a big however—the world offers us an unending supply of nuance. For example…
Even though both things may hurt the recipient, meanness is not the same thing as racism. Even though two people may lose their jobs, targeted malicious terminations are not the same as layoffs. Even though Americans retain the right to free speech, protesting on behalf of a failed businessman president is not the same thing as protesting on behalf of a murdered Black man. Even though some parents may not want their kids to read about gay people, gay kids deserve to see themselves in the media they consume.
I guess you could say heroism is in the eye of the beholder. If you ask me, though, heroism is in the eye of the group of people who actually feel the effects of oppression. The heroes in our favorite fictional stories are clear, but real life makes everything a bit more complicated. I fear that lots of Americans are losing the ability to see the nuance in the stories we tell ourselves, but hey—that could just be the coastal elite capitol girlie in me.
Are you the hero in your own story? Or are we finally leaving the hero trope behind forever? Let me know your thoughts. I’m sure I will be mulling this one over for a while.
Let’s get through this together.
-Ashley
Media I’m consuming instead of doomscrolling this week:
The Last of Us Season Two. Dang girl, another piece of dystopian fiction? Yeah. Unfortunately I cannot keep my eyes away from anything Pedro Pascal touches (touched. sob). We’ll call this doom watching, not doom scrolling.
“You’re Pretty for an Asian Girl,” by
. Jeanne is someone I’ve recommended reading before—her cultural commentary is top-tier, and this piece is an incredibly touching look at the way pretty privilege is complicated by racism.