ABSTRACT
The Hunger Games is a film franchise based on a trilogy of ‘young adult’ novels that merge YA tropes with speculative fiction to offer a dystopian narrative about the grim effects of the convergence of political, economic, military, and media power. Through the central heroine, Katniss Everdeen, the girl hero is positioned as the catalyst of social change and as a critical perspective on both commodity culture and this state-media complex. While the Hunger Games embraces a feminist perspective in the critical and heroic role played by this girl, it is also a transmedia franchise that fetishizes youthful femininity through its marketing and merchandising strategies and constitutes the girl as a spectacle of desirability which is also the only path to a new future. From books to films, across websites and apps, and on to saleable objects, the Hunger Games uses transmedia storytelling to build a world in which the everyday risks of adolescent girlhood can mean the difference between life and death even in a narrative about overthrowing a totalitarian regime.
