Back to the Arena: Battling the Hunger Games Prequel with Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast (#57)

Remem­ber when The Hunger Games was every­where? Its author Suzanne Collins has decid­ed that young peo­ple could ben­e­fit from more explo­ration of Just War The­o­ry through the world of Panem, and so has pub­lished The Bal­lad of Song­birds and Snakes, a pre­quel cov­er­ing the ear­ly years of future pres­i­dent Cori­olanus Snow dur­ing the 10th Hunger Games.

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt give their spoil­er-free reviews of the new book and look back on the orig­i­nal book tril­o­gy and its adap­ta­tion into four films (and do spoil those, in case you want to go watch them). We talk about what makes these nov­els “YA,” the func­tion of adapt­ing them to film, and the lim­its of the fran­chise’s premise and world-build­ing. Does the work cri­tique yet glo­ri­fy vio­lence at the same time? Will the film ver­sion of the new nov­el be our next Phan­tom Men­ace?

Some arti­cles we looked at includ­ed:

• “A ‘Hunger Games’ Pre­quel Focus­es on an Unlike­ly Char­ac­ter” by Sarah Lyall
• “ ‘The Bal­lad Of Song­birds And Snakes’ Is A Lack­lus­ter Pre­quel To ‘The Hunger Games’ ” by Annal­isa Quinn
• “Why the ‘Hunger Games’ Pre­quel Book is So Con­tro­ver­sial” by Lau­ren Sarn­er
• Stephen King’s orig­i­nal 2008 Enter­tain­ment Week­ly review of The Hunger Games
• “Hunger Games: 25 Things Wrong With Kat­niss Every­one Choos­es To Ignore” by Stephanie Marceau
• “How Bad Is Kat­niss’ PTSD in The Hunger Games? We Asked the Experts” by Vasilis Pozios and Praveen Kam­bam
• “How does The Hunger Games Crit­i­cise Amer­i­can Soci­ety?” By Megan Burbage
• “Suzanne Collins Talks About ‘The Hunger Games,’ the Books and the Movies” (Q&A with David Lev­i­tan)
• “Why the Mes­sage of the Hunger Games Films is Dan­ger­ous” by Peter Bloom
• “10 Years Lat­er, is The Hunger Games Still Shock­ing?” by Con­stance Grady et al at Vox
• “Hunger Games Pre­quel Movie The Bal­lad of Song­birds and Snakes Offi­cial­ly Set by Lion­s­gate” by Joseph Bax­ter

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.