On TikTok, 'The Hunger Games' is a metaphor for our modern dystopia

The odds of The Hunger Games on your TikTok FYP are ever in your favor. 

In a feat of marketing genius, the four The Hunger Games movies returned to Netflix, but only for the month of March, ushering in a collective rewatch and re-examination of the dystopian YA franchise that defined the early 2010s. The Hunger Games spent three weeks of March on Netflix's Global Top 10 watch list. The month culminated in the release of the first teaser trailer for Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, out this November. 

If you haven't revisited the series since it's heyday you might have been inclined to rewatch it to understand all that talk of reapings, Jabberjays, and District 12 happening across your FYP. The tags "Hunger Games" and "The Hunger Games" have since garnered 2.6 billion views and 2.9 billion views, respectively. 

Seemingly out of nowhere, a swell of interest on TikTok came from pop culture analysis accounts, fan editors, BookTokkers, and out-of-context movie scene accounts. The TikTok machine pivoted their content to capitalize on what creators dubbed "The Hunger Games resurgence." It coincided with Sam Claflin's own pop culture resurgence thanks to his starring turn in Daisy Jones and the Six. (You may remember him as District 4 victor Finnick Odair.)

Not to mention, there's also Miley Cyrus's Billboard no. 1 single "Flowers" — a song seemingly referencing her past relationship with Hunger Games heartthrob Liam Hemsworth. Even Taylor Swift rereleased her two original songs from the soundtrack. 

A lot has changed since The Hunger Games peaked in popularity, making it ripe for re-examination. Many of those partaking in the resurgence are revisiting the series for the first time as adults grappling with the climate crisis, social upheaval, and a global pandemic. How do our 2023 adult sensibilities transform our understanding of a beloved childhood franchise?

We asked Loretta Loera, a 21-year-old known by handle @luckyleftie. She's at the forefront of all of the Hunger Games content on the app.

"I started posting [The Hunger Games content] the first week of March because my siblings were watching The Hunger Games for the first time, and I got to re-experience it through them," Loera told Mashable. After rewatching the movies, Loera reread the books and picked up on a lot more subtext and nuance then when she first read them as a tween. 

Over the course of the month she gained 300,000 followers. Loera estimates that she's posted 85 to 90 video essays about The Hunger Games in March alone. In one video Loera analyzes Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci), the Games' host. She describes him as "a propagandist mouthpiece" and argues that, outside of the gamemakers, he causes the most damage to Panem by desensitizing audiences to the violence of the Games. So she asked her audience, "How severe of a crime is complacency?" In another, she describes the importance of Katniss's stylist, Cinna, because it is Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) who crafts the symbol of the rebellion: the mockingjay. 

The comments section of her videos is full of analysis, critical theory, extremely specific video requests, and viewers praising her content. One comment reads, "Did you get your PhD in The Hunger Games babes?? You ARE the fyp rn" Another says, "babe wake up luckyleftie posted another heartbreaking The Hunger Games take." 

One topic that comes up again and again is the re-examination of the love triangle between Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), and Gale (Liam Hemsworth). Inspired by Loera, Nia Òla Hill posted her own series of The Hunger Games analysis videos and gained 5,500 followers over the course of March. "I wanted to talk about this series that I feel like didn't get as much critical analysis as it should have the first time around," said the 24-year-old sex educator. "I was a teenager when it came out, so it made more sense for me to frame the story as a love triangle, but rereading it now I realized I can use it to discuss these real world themes about capitalism, the way that we relate to each other, and our relationship with violence as a culture."

Our ideals of masculinity have also changed since The Hunger Games first came out, making the Peeta versus Gale debate overwhelmingly lean toward Peeta, a short king and sensitive baker. Hill received flack on the app for posting nuanced takes about Gale. "He represents masculinity or 'traditional masculinity.' I think for a lot of people the idea of finding complexity in Gale would also mean considering that modernity doesn't have all of the answers," explained Hill. 

Tori, a 21-year-old in Oklahoma who runs a The Hunger Games fan edit account, concurred that TikTok is Team Peeta. "I get the most requests for Peeta. Obviously, Sam Claflin has always been popular as well, so Finnick edits never fail, but it's definitely been mainly Josh Hutcherson," she told Mashable. Tori had been steadily posting Hunger Games edits since last summer, but they only recently gained widespread popularity, growing her follower count by 50,000 since January. "Right when the movies went on Netflix when everyone started talking about it again, my videos started getting a lot more traction."

For many re-visiting the series has made The Hunger Games a richer text. 

"At this stage in my adulthood and where we are in the world, something about reading the books felt urgent," Hill told Mashable. "People are already feeling this kind of desperation. And they're already in this kind of pre-revolutionary energy, where they're like, we need change, how do we bring about this change? So it was really interesting to watch the way that I understood the books change."

Loera echoed Hill's sentiment: "Right now we're seeing a huge wealth disparity between the rich and the poor and a prioritization of entertainment. A lot of people resonate with those themes from the books, especially in characters like Coin because people feel they've been betrayed by their political leaders."

The reconsideration of The Hunger Games has proven that it's a franchise that grows with you and gets richer with time. It's the latest in a series of past cultural moments that TikTok has fixated on to make sense of the present. "People want to be able to explore so many parts of their childhood that they can't really talk about or feel like they can't talk about unless they have some kind of media functioning as this third party insulation," explained Hill. 

But some have also dismissed this moment as a clever marketing ploy. "A very common misconception is that I and other creators that discuss The Hunger Games in this amount of detail are being paid by Lionsgate, and we're not," said Loera.

Certainly, The Hunger Games' return to Netflix sparked a renewed interest in the series, but swaths of TikTok users are getting on board to help make sense of today's cultural unrest. Maybe they're even planning the next uprising.