ABSTRACT
Katniss is a heroine in a longstanding ‘romantic’ fantasy tradition – and yet she is neither the hero’s reward (the traditional feminine role), nor is she simply a romantic lead. She is, rather, a hero whose quest is shaped by her becoming. Her journey is inevitably defined by her youthfulness: where young people embody future change, the authoritarian government of Panem maintains the status quo by systematically culling the youth of its twelve subordinate districts. After volunteering as tribute, survival in The Games is Katniss’s primary quest; but as she becomes further embedded in the sociopolitics of Panem, her survival depends more and more on managing her relations with the media. As a dark metaphor for the way that reality TV audiences dictate the fates of competitors, both Suzanne Collins’s novels and the films present a carefully curated spectacle that simultaneously represents and elides the machinations of the tyrannical President Snow. Katniss’s reluctance to simply be another character in this pre-crafted storyline marks her as special, and her potential to destroy the Games themselves drives the action onward.
