Gen-Z Needs Suzanne Collins To Answer Some Tough Questions
The Hunger Games arrived five years ago on the cusp of social movements sparked by the next generation of young people, and it could be the perfect time for a comeback of the modern revolutionary classic. A lot of weird things are making a comeback this year. This was the year of the Disney remake, with films like Aladdin, Dumbo, and The Lion King making comebacks in a live-action form that try to find a place within today’s zeitgeist by touching on feminism, animal cruelty, and corrupt leadership respectively. It’s also the year where Gen-Z are more afraid than ever of climate change, neocolonialism, and job-security because it’s safe to say that it affects our future the most. It feels like children and young-adult films are steering further and further away from the real world, in favour of a watered-down perception of what the world looks like today in relation to the classic characters. In the world of sci-fi YA novels, this has not been the case. Most novels of this canon imagine the worst possible progression for human life and frame it as a fictional warning, or just plain sensational fun. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series was the pinnacle of dystopian fiction for the modern teenager, forcing Gen-Z to ask some tough questions about the future while arguing over whether Gale or Peeta was fit to be the lover of Collins’ stoic heroine Katniss Everdeen.
