There’s a scene in the last Hunger Games
Movie that I remember being mad about back
in 2015.
Here’s the setup.
It’s the final stages of a civil war between
the authoritarian Capitol and the 13 rebellious
districts.
The main character, Katniss Everdeen, abandons
her original mission of filming propaganda
clips to instead lead a small group of soldiers
behind enemy lines to assassinate the leader
of the capitol, President Snow.
An enormous amount of time is dedicated to
this plot-line.
It takes up nearly a third of the book and
most of the final movie.
To get to the presidential palace they fight
through booby traps, genetically modified
monsters, and dozens of soldiers.
Major characters die on this mission!
And The only reason we think the sacrifice
is worthwhile is because every sacrifice is
getting the group one step closer to ending
the war.
In the climactic scene, Katniss is nearly
at the palace when…
… the rest of the rebels show up…
Katniss gets knocked unconscious… and the
rebels win the war… offscreen.
Wait… what?
So this whole plot-line was a waste of time?
We didn’t have to do any of that?
This would have happened anyway?
But coming back to it now, I see things very
differently.
Not as some kind of oversight or mistake,
but as a deliberate and meaningful choice,
a statement that entirely fits into the worldview
of this story and is sorely needed on a broader
scale.
It’s a statement that rejects the aura of
the Chosen One trope we see in so much genre
fiction in favor of collective action.
WILDSTYLE: You’re the one the prophecy spoke
of.
You’re The Special.
EMMET: Me.
WYLDSTYLE: You found the piece of Resistance,
and the prophecy states that you are the most
important, most talented, most interesting,
and most extraordinary people in the universe.
One of the most common tropes in fiction is
the Chosen One trope.
You’ve seen it a million times.
The main character is special in some way.
They’ve been chosen by prophecy to do something
important, or are supernaturally powerful.
Something external has made them this way
and now they are the only person capable of
DOING THE PLOT.
But even in stories where the character isn’t
explicitly singled out as The One, the conventions
of storytelling make the protagonist feel
as if they might as well be a Chosen One.
Most stories have a singular protagonist.
The story is about them because they are going
to do something notable.
If that weren’t the case the story would
be about a different character.
The audience expects them to have some skill
or talent that will make them uniquely capable
of DOING THE PLOT even if they aren’t from
an ancient royal bloodline or the subject
of prophecy.
DARK ARMY: You are just one hacker.
What makes you believe that you are better
than an army of people just like you.
ELLIOT: Because I am.
There is an element of pandering to the audience’s
desire to feel important that is inseparable
from the trope.
The audience identifies with the protagonist
and every time someone tells them they’re
the smartest handsomest good little boy, the
audience gets a warm little feeling in their
tummies because they feel it’s being said
about them.
This is why the trope is so useful for writers
and so common in media.
But there is a negative side to the trope.
This isn’t to say that the trope is entirely
bad or that stories that use it are bad.
It’s the fact that the trope is so common
that its underlying ideology — that we need
one extraordinary person to come save us — is
so deeply rooted in the ways we think about
social change.
This is why it’s really weird that this
trope is so central in stories about rebellion.
The plots of Mr. Robot, the Matrix, and the
most recent season of Westworld are basically
Mad-Libs versions of one another.
In Mr. Robot, the protagonist believes the
ultra-wealthy are oppressing the rest of humanity.
In the Matrix, machines are oppressing humanity.
In Westworld, the ultra-wealthy and a machine
are oppressing the rest of the machines AND
the rest of humanity.
But for all the talk the stories do about
the need to rise up against their oppressors,
achieve a more equal society, and exert their
own autonomy, the rebels accomplish very little
through collective action.
In the Matrix, the rebels job is to just not
die long enough for Neo to save them.
In Westworld season three, an AI has a predictive
algorithm that determines what people can
and cannot do.
It’s Dolores’ mission to expose this reality.
When she does this, it immediately causes
spontaneous rioting.
But the rioting merely provides background
noise to the main plot, which is that Dolores
has CHOSEN one man, Caleb, to make the decision
about the future of humanity.
In Mr. Robot, Eliot is the most brilliant
computer hacker in the world.
In the first season, with the help of like
four people, he destroys the financial records
of the world’s most powerful corporation.
This causes all sorts of riots, but that rebellious
energy is, again, always off to the side.
The closet the show gets to depicting actual
organizing in in season two when Darlene is
leading a group of rebels, but they are quickly
splintered and annihilated.
For the rest of the show it’s almost entirely
the story of one or two man versus the world
pulling off all sorts of daring heists.
Collective action is not only not necessary
for their final victory against the ultra-wealthy,
but is constantly depicted as only a destructive
obstacle.
So we’ve got three extremely popular fictional
revolutions — all stories I either love
or at least enjoy — where almost everything
of importance is handled by a singular hero.
They all conform to the idea that we need
a Great Man or Woman to come along and liberate
us.
And then there’s the Hunger Games.
Like the previous examples, the Hunger Games
depicts a class war.
The people in the Capitol are rich and authoritarian.
The people in the Districts are poor and subjugated.
The centerpiece of the injustice is the Hunger
Games, which is a kind of ritualized slaughter
of the poor that is entrenched into the political
structure of the country.
While the films really only depict the class
divisions between the Capitol and the Districts,
the books spend a lot more time explaining
how poor people are disadvantaged by capitalism…
I mean the Hunger Games.
In both, we’re told that Capitol citizens
are exempt from being entered into the Hunger
Games.
But the book also tells us repeatedly how
contestants from poor districts are unlikely
to ever win, because the contestants from
the rich districts are able to prepare for
the Games their entire lives.
The only reason Katniss has any chance is
because she was illegally hunting before being
chosen.
And even within the poor districts, the wealthier
citizens are less likely to get picked for
the games.
If you’re poor, you can get food if you
enter your name extra times into the reaping
where tributes are chosen.
So the people in the Hunger Games themselves
are usually not just the poor, but the poorest
of the poor due to class differences between
the districts and within each district.
So on the setup alone, we have a setting that
is stuffed with class conflicts, just like
all of the other stories mentioned previously.
What makes the Hunger Games unique though
is that this isn’t just a backdrop for a
hero saves the day narrative.
Because Katniss is a very unique version of
the Chosen One trope.
Unlike many Chosen One characters, there is
nothing inherently special about Katniss.
She is not destined for greatness nor does
she have superpowers.
Her importance in the grand scheme of the
rebellion comes entirely out of the decisions
SHE makes.
In the first book, Katniss makes two important
acts of resistance.
She shows empathy for a young girl named Rue
in the arena, something which is uncharacteristic
for the Hunger Games competition.
It’s the first instance of solidarity between
districts in the series, the first moment
that indicates that the different sections
of the working class can co-operate.
At the end of the games she defies the orders
of the game-makers by refusing to kill Peeta,
forcing the Capitol to change the rules of
the game again at the last minute.
The act shows that the power of the Capitol
can be successfully resisted.
Her actions inspire organized rebellion across
the country and for the rest of the series
her fame is leveraged by various political
players for their own agendas: President Snow
uses her to try and tamp down the uprising,
and then President Snow uses her to unify
the Districts.
So she isn’t quote-unquote “Chosen”
in a traditional way these kinds of characters
are, but she IS chosen democratically, collectively.
She has power because everyone agrees that
she has power.
It’s for this reason that all of the characters
in the story treat her as if she were a Chosen
One.
People are in constant awe of her.
Still she is just one person, and as such,
she can’t just singlehandedly save the day.
There’s even a part in the book where she
wants to join the resistance military and
says the thing that all protagonists say in
this situation: “I’m you’re best shot.”
And the military guys are like, no thanks.
So Katniss can only succeed by using her fame
to bring other people into the rebellion.
As a result, we get to see something we don’t
often get to see in stories like this, which
is the nitty gritty of actually building a
resistance movement.
Now this is somewhat undermined in the films,
compared to the books.
The books are told in first person entirely
from Katniss’ perspective, so the films
try to emulate this by similarly focusing
entirely on Katniss, even when that isn’t
in their best interest.
For instance, I think the third movie would
be much better if we got to see Peeta’s
perspective while he is captured in the Capitol,
rather than stretching out the scenes with
Katniss.
Katniss is in almost every scene and the framing
of the scenes she’s in are designed to put
us into her headspace.
Sometimes the camera even gives us a first
person view of what she’s looking at.
In contrast, the scenes she’s not in are
shot more objectively, the coverage is neutral,
not tilted toward one character’s feelings
over another.
This means that there are a bunch of events
in the books that Katniss only hears about
that the movies exclude or have to truncate.
So in the second book, there’s this scene
where Katniss runs into a pair of rebels from
District 8.
She learns that the District is currently
in an uprising and we get a detailed story
about how it was organized, how they were
able to coordinate because the noise of the
factories in that district made it impossible
for the Capitol to surveil them, and how the
leaders focused on seizing strategic locations
and then getting word out to the surrounding
districts.
In contrast, the first movie uses the same
shorthand that every movie does.
In the timeline of the story, the first uprising
happens much earlier in the films.
After the death of Rue, Katniss’ act of
compassion for her sparks immediate and spontaneous
riots in District 11, where Rue is from.
In movies, riots are often all we see of a
resistance movement.
Visually, riots communicate to an audience
the general idea that people are not going
to accept the status quo anymore.
So Joker can end on this moment of apparent
triumph simply because people are in the street,
without getting into what happens the day
after the riots.
The third season of Westworld ends with mass
rioting and the declaration that now anything
is possible, but again we don’t see — or
at least haven’t yet seen — how that rebellious
energy can be transformed into achievable
political goals.
There is a persistent and organized protest
movement in Mr. Robot that feels like it exists
parallel to everything that Elliot is doing,
and so we don’t see how the movements are
built or organized either.
But both the second and third books in the
Hunger Games are almost entirely concerned
with how to motivate people to organize.
It starts with symbolic acts of unity.
The three finger salute after Rue’s funeral,
or the Victors holding hands before being
sent into the games.
Then they use media and the narrative around
Katniss to inspire more people to join the
cause.
It’s in this context that the final climax
I was once upset about is perfectly fitting
with the ethos of the series.
It’d be a failure of the story to spend
all this time building up a resistance movement,
only to have Katniss be the one to do everything
of note.
Instead, the Hunger Games at least gives us
a glimpse into a story where collective action
is necessary within the logic of the story,
and not just a sideshow to the heroics of
one person.
It is harder to tell stories this way because
it is not crowd-pleasing.
It’s easy to have the hero and villain have
a fist-fight at the end.
It’s hard to dramatize an entire social
movement and I think there’s a significant
gap in our fiction for stories like that.
The Hunger Games isn’t perfect at this.
If it had more point of view characters, maybe
we could have seen more of the struggles of
the people on the ground.
But out of any major piece of genre fiction,
it gets the closest at showing us what it
takes to organize a movement.
And man… do we ever need more stories like
that
right now.
