ABSTRACT
The Hunger Games franchise spanned four feature films, several successful websites that continued the narrative and allowed readers/viewers to engage with Panem as reality, a clothing line, several Katniss Barbie dolls, and multiple other merchandising and marketing strategies. Many fans were outraged that large corporations profited so heavily from a narrative partly about the social harms of over-consumption. Meanwhile, fans in areas of unrest began using the Mockingjay symbol as one of real-life resistance and, elsewhere, Jennifer Lawrence, partly through her own actions and critical commentary and partly by association with her character Katniss, became a symbol of contemporary feminism – or, at least, of the rejection of postfeminist media culture. In this merging of fandom with activism, and reality with fantasy, Katniss-as-symbol became a heroine in real-world contexts. The Hunger Games offers a critique that is most convincing because it promises no easy and immediate solution, drawing fans to a speculative world of fan practices, celebrity politics, and intractably politicised desires that is, in fact, all too real.
