Suzanne Collins has returned us to Panem with Sunrise on the Reaping, a prequel to The Hunger Games trilogy that takes us back to the 50th Hunger Games—the Second Quarter Quell that would crown Haymitch Abernathy as its lone victor. Set 24 years before Katniss would volunteer in her sister’s place, this novel strips any romantic notions we might harbor, especially the softened image of President Snow lingering from actor Tom Blyth’s charismatic performance in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Instead, Collins presents us a brutal world where the spectacle of violence is normalized and stakes are doubled, with four tributes from each district instead of two. Through Haymitch’s dialogue, we witness not just the horrors of the arena, but also how the Capitol’s sophisticated media design transforms muder into entertainment and quashes any trace of rebellion.
Collins holds up a mirror to our own world, where we scroll past real atrocities with the same detached sentiments as Capitol citizens watching the Games. What’s the difference between betting on a tribute’s life and doom-scrolling through endless feeds of deportation raids and genocidal violence?
Slowly, the Capitol’s genius is revealed; how it packages brutality as irresistible content, warping and weaving narratives. Collins brings us a society where citizens don’t just tolerate violence; instead, they crave it, debate it, and build their lives around it. Reading the book with trembling hands, I couldn’t help but parallel the hollow glorification of watching a child’s life unfold in a killing colosseum to our attention economy where algorithms prioritize engagement over truth. The more extreme the content, the more irresistible the clickbait, and the more likely we are to click, share, and stay glued to our screens. Not unlike Capitol citizens, we’ve become conditioned to consume tragedy without digging deeper to find truths. Wars become hashtags, humanitarian crises become reduced to viral videos, and geopolitical situations are morphed into memes and reduced to shareable content.
The sheer volume of human suffering presented to us on the daily has desensitized us, resulting in an emotional overwhelm that renders viewers passive, unable to take meaningful action. We are perpetually engaged with surface-level drama while deeper structural dilemmas remain unchanged. Uncomfortably similar, citizens of the Capitol can momentarily feel sad for fallen tributes while never questioning the existence of the games.
The broadcasts of the Hunger Games don’t just serve as news reports of the Games – Caesar Flickerman actively constructs narratives to market tributes: star-crossed lovers, a career killer, the sly fox. Collins reminds us that media literacy isn’t just just about the identification of fake news—it’s about understanding how media shapes perspective.
We are reminded of our own media consumption: Who decides which stories get told? What perspectives are spotlighted, and whose voices are marginalized? What frameworks do these narratives operate under, and which ones are we accepting? Finally, how often do we attempt to extract truth from omission when investing in online narratives?