The well-known franchise “The Hunger Games” has been around for over ten years. For many Gen Zers, it was a franchise that came out during our most formative years. For me, the first movie came out when I was only nine years old.
Despite the fact that I was too young to fully understand the film’s more powerful messages, I still watched it and all of its following sequels. Watching it for the first time, I did not take much away from the films except that there was a lot of action, and Katniss Everdeen was stuck in a love triangle.
Now, ten years later, I know that I missed the most important points of the film. This seems to be a realization many people around my age are having as “The Hunger Games” trilogy has begun trending all over TikTok.
Creators on TikTok have been creating countless edits of the trilogy’s main characters, recording videos of themselves parodying the trilogy, and more importantly posting videos dissecting the real messages of “The Hunger Games.” This resurgence of interest for the franchise is being referred to as “‘The Hunger Games’ Renaissance.”
Rewatching the films has brought me a lot of nostalgia, reminding me of the times I would look up “Katniss Everdeen Braid Tutorial” on YouTube on my iPod Touch. But this rewatch has also given me a newer perspective on the film, especially when I realized almost all of the characters are younger than I am now.
I began to wonder what it would be like to be forced to fight to the death in order to keep a government that doesn’t care for me happy. Small moments from the film stuck with me much more than the action packed sequences, such as when Katniss makes a comment about never wanting to have children so they don’t have to experience the world she lives in.
I connected so much with that small sentence because it is something that crosses my mind regularly when I think about the future. Not just my own personal future, but the one in which the world is heading with all the technology that surrounds us, and the global issues we have to face.
Suddenly, “The Hunger Games” became much more than a set of movies with action and romance. It became commentary on the direction our world could be heading in and what it means for the generations that will follow us.
I started to think about all the small “rebellions” we have to go through everyday in order to get what we believe is right. Whether they be large-scale issues that affect the world or smaller ones that directly impact us on our campus, everyone has had to tap into their inner Katniss Everdeen at some point in their lives.
Seeing the beloved “Hunger Games” franchise be revived on TikTok shows us many things. It shows us the power of good storytelling, and how even years after a movie’s initial release, it can still be significant in people’s lives.
It has shown us how the same piece of media can impact us in so many different ways as the years go by and we live out more of our lives. The more we experience in life, the more we come back to these powerful pieces that molded us in some way or another.
Lastly, it shows us how much these fictional characters become a part of our lives, and how even without realizing it, the characters we watched growing up root themselves into our souls. And after all these years, we can still find them there.