Within the dystopian world of The Hunger Games, the remnants of the once United States has been carved into “districts” under the control of a capital city called Panem. Ever since a revolt erupted decades earlier, Panem has retained power by restricting these districts to limited supplies of food and forcing their citizens to work in the most dire of conditions. While the elite of Panem thus live in luxury, the rest of the districts inevitably go hungry.
For many fans of the book trilogy written by Suzanne Collins, the similarities between the future Panem and present United States are self-evident. While the richest one percent controls a vast majority of the overall wealth within the country, a significant number of Americans still struggle to put food on the table. And while the wealthiest within the United States live in luxury, others are forced to work two jobs just to make ends meet.
To raise awareness of the various struggles that many Americans still endure, a group of Hunger Games fans – led by the non-profit Harry Potter Alliance under their Imagine Better banner and global charity Oxfam International – launched a campaign that coincided with the release of the first Hunger Games film in March 2012. Entitled “Hunger Is Not a Game,” the initiative encouraged fans to make donations to Oxfam, sign an Oxfam GROW Pledge calling for food aid policy reforms, and take part in food drives.
The film’s production company, Lionsgate, likewise used the release of The Hunger Games to raise awareness regarding hunger by partnering with Feeding America and the World Food Programme to help drive donations to these organizations. The Hunger Is Not a Game campaign did not escape Lionsgate’s notice, however, especially when volunteers showed up at midnight pre-screenings of The Hunger Games in support of their campaign and major news outlets like the New York Times began to spotlight their efforts.
Lionsgate subsequently issued a cease-and-desist notice to Hunger Is Not a Game, claiming that the initiative was “using Lionsgate’s fans and fan Internet sites” to promote its own agenda and was “causing damage to Lionsgate and our marketing efforts.” Instead of complying with the request – and preventing potential legal action against them by Lionsgate – Imagine Better refused to end their campaign.
“Fans have been changed by this story and have expressed a wish to change the world based on the message of this story,” Harry Potter Alliance executive director Andrew Slack said of The Hunger Games in an email to Think Progress features editor Alyssa Rosenberg. “I would hope that Lionsgate would celebrate fans, not pick on them, for taking the message of their own movie seriously. It’s amazing that they’re working with two great partners already to fight hunger. But why get in the way of fans who are working with a third one?”
Faced with a backlash, Lionsgate soon relented and backed down from their original “cease-and-desist” proclamation. When the second film in the series – Catching Fire – was released the following year, meanwhile, Lionsgate continued their hunger awareness efforts with an “Ignite the Fire” campaign. The official Hunger Games website was retooled to allow visitors to explore and share facts about hunger while also encouraging them to make donations to charitable partners Feeding America and the World Food Programme. The original Hunger Is Not Game likewise transformed with the release of Catching Fire, encompassing a wider “economic inequality” focus under the new banner “The Odds in Our Favor.”
“Economic inequality knows no boundaries,” the new initiative stated. “It is pervasive and persistent, and it affects every city, region and country across the world. The gap between the wealthy and the poor grows wider every day, while the middle class shrinks and more people find themselves short of what they need to get by. These are our Hunger Games.”
Odds in Our Favor not only used social media to spread awareness regarding economic inequality but also encouraged fans to post pictures of themselves giving the three-finger salute – a form of defiance within The Hunger Games – and tweet about their own experiences of economic intolerance under the hashtag MyHungerGames. “Small biz owner dad couldn’t afford health care,” one of them wrote. “Dad died at 49 w/problems that could have been helped by regular dr visits.” Others tweeted about an inability to afford college, their experiences being homeless as a child, and the difficulties of making a living on minimum wage.
The most successful aspect of the Odds in Our Favor campaign was a two-and-a-half-minute long video posted on YouTube called “The Hunger Games Are Real” that was viewed over 450,000 times when initially released. Intersplicing actual footage from the films along with Lionsgate marketing efforts that spotlighted the cast, the video contained a “call to resistance” message that declared, “Enough with the distraction, the Hunger Games are real. Check it out – in The Hunger Games a small portion of the population controls a majority of the wealth. People have full time jobs and still go hungry. Think it’s fiction? Think again.”
In 2014, the third Hunger Games film was released, Mockingjay Part One, and Imagine Better once again raised the stakes by standing in solidarity with fast food workers demanding higher wages and the right to unionize. “These workers struggle with the same issues that workers in the districts face – low pay, bad hours and working conditions, hunger, lack of affordable health care, and more.”
This new aspect to Odds in Our Favor still allowed fans to post selfies of themselves giving the three finger-salute but also encouraged them to take direct action by visiting a local McDonald’s and handing information fliers about fair wages and unionization rights to managers. Taking the campaign even further, Imagine Better also urged fans to join in Black Friday protests against Walmart and McDonald’s that showed support for worker’s rights at those companies.
Like with Hunger Is Not a Game, the campaign’s Black Friday efforts garnered nationwide media attention and even attained the support of Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, each of whom were photographed making the three-finger salute.
The Hunger Games trilogy written by Suzanne Collins and their subsequent film adaptations are fictional, but for many fans of the series, the depictions of economic inequality and poverty have direct correlations to those found in the real world of the twenty-first century. While it took a revolution to overthrow the one-sided system in Panem, efforts by Imagine Better instead used inventive campaigns that tied the fictional and factual together to raise awareness of the similar issues experienced by each.
Hunger Is Not a Game and Odds in Our Favor may not have changed the world in the same way that Katniss Everdeen did in The Hunger Games, but it showed that fandoms have the ability to make a difference – no matter how small – just the same.
Anthony Letizia