The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion

by Lois H. Gresh

  It’s only fitting that we close this chapter, which explores reality television programs, with a discussion of Survivor. In the United States, the program launched in 2000, and it was so popular that it spawned reality television as a staple of programming. The show has taken place all over the world: Nicaragua, Fiji, China, Borneo, Australia, Africa, Thailand, The Amazon, Samoa, Gabon, Brazil, etc.

  The Hunger Games is an extreme version of Survivor. Suzanne Collins has pushed Survivor into the horror of dystopian post-apocalyptic fiction, where she pits competitors against each other for prizes worth a lot more than merchandise and cash.

  Just as everyone in the Capitol can’t wait for the Games, apparently people in the real world are obsessed in the same way with Survivor. Rating have been through the roof, ranging from 10 million to 52 million viewers.

  In the real Survivor program, tribes of strangers are stranded in a game locale that varies from season to season. The competitors must find water, food, and shelter, just as in the Hunger Games. They pair off and compete against each other so they won’t be eliminated from the game. One person wins each Survivor game and is designated the Sole Survivor. He also gets a million dollars, just as the Sole Survivor of the Hunger Games get a free mansion and food for life. While the Gamemakers often change the rules of the Hunger Games, so do the gamemakers of Survivor. The point is to keep the program entertaining, because after all, if the competitors always used the same strategies to win, nobody would watch the show.

  What about style versus substance? Is Survivor real or fake? According to MSNBC, it’s mostly real; however, the show does actively hire models and actors for programs. On Survivor Fiji, “everyone except one person . . . was recruited.”28

  AD 1603–1800

  By now, you realize that throughout history, hundreds if not thousands of doomsayers rose up and convinced the masses that “we are all going to die . . . any second now.” The list is extensive, and I’m only providing you with a barebones look at the various apocalyptic prophecies. There are plenty more.

  At this point, I’ll skip a lot of the predictions and try to shift us over the next five “Doomsday” boxes to the current time.

  AD 1603, Tomasso Campanella, a Dominican Monk, said the sun and Earth would collide in 1603.

  AD 1623, more geeky math as Eustachius Polyssel calculated that the world would end in 1623.

  AD 1624, another London flood was supposed to cause the end of the world this year. It didn’t.

  AD 1654, Helisaeus Roeslin claimed the world would end in a blaze of fire in 1654.

  AD 1657, according to the Fifth Monarchy Men of England, the apocalypse was set for sometime between AD 1655 and 1657.

  AD 1662, North America, cleric Michael Wigglesworth wrote a long poem, “The Day of Doom,” in which he claimed the world was going to end. Any second now . . .

  AD 1666, a must-mention date if only for the fact that 666 is three-quarters of it. This year came after a civil war in England and the plague and also happened to host the Great London Fire.

  AD 1688, John Napier, the mathematician who discovered logarithms much to the distress of many teenagers throughout time, also made some doomsday calculations. The first figured 1688 to be the end of the world.

  More more more more more. Seriously, I could fill up an entire book with Doomsday Predictions. Let’s close this box with John Napier’s second doomsday prediction of AD 1700; with Jacques Bernoulli’s prediction of AD 1719 due to a comet; with another London flood terror predicted by William Whitson for AD 1736; and with William Bell’s theory that the world would end by earthquake in AD 1761.

  In a famous interview with Scholastic, Suzanne Collins tells us that the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur served as a “significant influence” on The Hunger Games series. According to the author, she views Katniss as “a futuristic Theseus.”1

  So who was Theseus, and how does Katniss resemble him?

  According to mythology, Theseus was the son of King Aegeus of ancient Athens, and of Aethra, daughter of King Pittheus of Troezen. At first, Aegeus wasn’t aware that Theseus was his son because Pittheus and Aethra hid the fact from him. In fact, as the story goes, Aethra claimed that Poseidon was really Theseus’s father.

  Aegeus’s wife, the sorceress Medea, bore the king a son named Medus. In the meantime, Aethra led her son, Theseus, to a rock, where Aegeus had hidden his sword and sandals.

  When Theseus grew older, he traveled to Athens to meet his human father, Aegeus. Medea didn’t want any competition against her own son, Medus, for the throne, so she sent Theseus on what she hoped was a doomed quest to capture the savage Marathonian Bull. Expecting Theseus to die, Medea was shocked when Theseus captured the bull. She persuaded Aegeus to poison the boy with tainted wine. But in the nick of time, Aegeus recognized Theseus’s sword as the very one he hid near Aethra’s home. He realized that Theseus was of his own flesh and blood. So he knocked the goblet of poison wine from the boy’s lips, and he banished Medea and Medus from Athens.

  Aegeus, in the meantime, was at war with his brother, King Minos of Crete. The people of Crete suffered from war and hunger, and as a result, Minos demanded every year for nine years, seven boys and seven girls be sacrificed to the Minotaur.

  Fighting over the throne with his brothers, Minos had resorted to desperate measures. He had prayed to Poseidon for a white bull as a sign of Poseidon’s approval to rule Crete. He promised to then slay the bull in honor of the Greek gods. But when Minos saw the beautiful bull, he couldn’t bring himself to kill it. Bad idea. You don’t mess with the gods. Poseidon was furious with Minos, and worked his magic on Minos’s wife, Pasipha, who fell in love with the bull. Alas, as is the case in stories of the ancient gods, Pasipha had a child with the white bull. It wasn’t a boy. It wasn’t a girl. It was the Minotaur: a monster with a man’s body but the head and tail of a bull.

  Minos ordered the architect Daedalus to create a huge labyrinth in which to imprison the Minotaur. And then, every year for nine years, he cast seven boys and seven girls from Athens into the labyrinth, where the monster would feast upon them.

  Hoping to end the sacrifices, Theseus volunteered to be one of the young men who had to battle the monster for his life. Suzanne Collins points out that, in this regard—because Theseus volunteered to fight the Minotaur—Katniss is a “futuristic Theseus.” He sailed to Crete, where Minos’s daughter Ariadne helped him defeat the Minotaur.

  In the meantime, Aegeus assumed that the Minotaur had killed Theseus, and he threw himself off the Acropolis into what later became known as the Aegean Sea.

  Suzanne Collins describes in her Scholastic interview how struck she was, even as a young girl, by “the ruthlessness of this message. ‘Mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you. We’ll kill your children.’ ”2

  Let’s summarize:

  Theseus is the son of a king—or possibly a god—and a king’s daughter.

  Katniss is the daughter of a coal miner and a healer.

  Medea sends Theseus on what she hopes is a doomed quest to capture the Marathonian Bull.

  Katniss does not have an evil stepmother like the sorceress Medea. She is not sent on a quest to capture a bull.

  Medea wants Aegeus to poison Theseus with tainted wine.

  Katniss’s father does not try to give her poison wine.

  Poseidon is furious with Minos and makes his wife Pasipha fall in love with the bull. She and the bull have a child, the Minotaur.

  There are no gods or bulls giving birth with humans in The Hunger Games, though many of the muttations merge human and beast.

  Minos orders the architect Daedalus to create a huge labyrinth in which to imprison the Minotaur. And then, every year for nine years, he casts seven boys and seven girls into the labyrinth, where the monster feasts upon them.

  The labyrinth is akin to the arenas of the Hunger Games.

  Katniss and the other tributes must find their way through mazelike arenas to su
rvive.

  Every year, the government casts an equal number of boys and girls into the arena, where they die.

  Hoping to end the sacrifices, Theseus volunteers to be one of the young men who must battle the monster for his life.

  Hoping to thwart the sacrifice of her sister Prim, Katniss volunteers to take her place as a tribute in the Games.

  Aegeus assumes that the Minotaur has killed Theseus, and he throws himself off the Acropolis into the sea.

  Everyone worries that the tribute they personally know will be killed at any moment in the Games.

  The King of Athens does not get along with his brother Minos, who rules Crete. Minos demands that Athens send sacrificial “tributes” to Crete every year.

  The Capitol demands that the districts send sacrificial tributes to the Capitol every year.

  AD 1856–1900

  AD 1856, many people considered the Crimean War of 1853–56 to be Armageddon. If Russia took Palestine, then all would be lost.

  Bypass hundreds of additional doomsday predictions and fast forward to AD 1870, when Irvin Moore’s The Final Destiny of Man, predicted that in 1870, Jerusalem would become the capitol of the world and the apocalypse would occur.

  AD 1891, Mormon founder Joseph Smith predicted in AD 1835 that the apocalypse would occur in 1891.

  AD 1900, another landmark doomsday year, in which Father Pierre Lachèze marked us for total obliteration and one hundred members of the Brothers and Sisters of the Russian Red Death killed themselves before the apocalypse could take them.

  From the beginning of The Hunger Games series, we know that Katniss Everdeen operates in survival mode on a daily basis. Her survival instincts and strategies are well honed from many years of practice. Her need to survive against all odds is the basis of the entire trilogy, and author Suzanne Collins roots this idea firmly in our minds right away. We know the series will be fraught with horror, action, adventure, tragedy, misery, and strife.

  The first few pages of The Hunger Games build Katniss as a girl we like: She’s kind; she loves her mother and sister. However, these opening pages also show another side of Katniss’s life: We’re told that her mother doesn’t look quite as “beaten-down” when she’s asleep, and we’re told that Katniss tried to drown her sister’s cat, Buttercup, when it was just a kitten. We know immediately that there’s a dark side to the life of our kind girl.

  Suzanne Collins jacks up the hints of upcoming horror by page four, as the tone mingles the lightness of youth and kindness with the darkness of impending trouble that we sense is beyond anything with which we might be familiar. Here, the author tells us that Katniss feeds entrails to Buttercup, that she hunts for the family’s food; that today, she must once again face the reaping.

  Survival instincts and strategies will be paramount to Katniss, this is very clear when we learn that she lives in District 12, the Seam, where downtrodden coal miners can barely feed their families, where even the Meadow is “scruffy,” where barbed wire fences surround everyone, and usually the fences are electrified.

  This is a place that needs basics such as electricity, food, work, and modern conveniences. We get the feeling that Katniss is living in medieval times, yet we’re also distinctly aware that these are not medieval times at all; rather, people are executed by Peacekeepers for basically any reason at all. Everyone’s starving all the time, even the people who govern.

  Over the course of all three novels—The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay—Katniss uses almost every survival technique known to mankind. Hers is a dystopian post-apocalyptic society, where children are selected by lottery tickets to compete to the death in an arena reminiscent of the ancient Roman Colosseum. They battle in front of the entire population of the world as they know it; they battle on reality television. The series is like a gore-filled video game in which Katniss has no choice but to kill in hopes of saving her own skin. While battling in the arenas of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, she receives “gifts” and ponies up health points, just as she would as the heroine of a video game. But unlike a video game, Katniss suffers real losses: her friends, her sister, her own sanity are all on the line. The physical suffering is far more acute than in any video game. The emotional pain is simply unprecedented for video games, and for this reason, quality fiction still affects us in ways that video games do not.

  Suzanne Collins has been widely quoted as stating that one of her main inspirations for the series came from her father’s experiences fighting in Vietnam. It’s clear that the author knows a lot about combat and survival techniques in early and primitive societies, as well.

  Katniss has frequent nightmares, which are common in post-traumatic stress syndrome. She trains constantly for battle. She wears camouflage. She knows how to find and conserve water, food, weapons, and medical supplies. She knows how to barter for what she wants and needs. She knows how to find shelter so she can sleep without being killed. These are all aspects of real survival strategies.

  And if all else fails, she’s even equipped with poison berries so she can commit suicide. Not exactly a way to survive, but suicide is often used in espionage and warfare to protect the overall group.

  WATER

  Let’s start with water, a critical resource for anyone lost in the wilds or thrust into a combat arena. Katniss clearly knows how to squeeze water from her environment, and when she needs tips, Haymitch is there to help her. His last advice to her before she first heads into the arena is to “find a source of water” (The Hunger Games, 139).

  Now let’s look at real techniques for obtaining water where there is none and compare what Katniss does to how it’s actually done.

  Obviously, you can wear camouflage, create makeshift weapons, hide behind trees, rocks, in caves, and so forth. You can improvise a lot when you’re in the wild, but you can’t improvise water. If you have a chemistry lab, you might be able to do it, but in the wild, you have to know how to find and leech water from all sort of environments.

  Most of us depend on power grids and water that’s piped into our homes, restaurants, offices, malls, and airports. If the grid goes down, the water towers are depleted very quickly, and before you know it, people must seek water from natural sources.

  Similarly, if using a well, which many people still do, if it runs dry or becomes polluted or otherwise unsuitable, natural sources must be found. Quickly.

  We do have lakes, ponds, and rivers. We can collect rainwater. But how do we purify the water so we don’t get sick? Can it be done in the wild?

  Sure it can.

  With a source of springwater, you’re in good shape should doomsday come. As in the arena of the Hunger Games, in a post-apocalyptic world, people will kill to access and control the water supply.

  In the real world, if using an unknown source of water, the supply could be heavily contaminated with pesticides, bacteria, and other dangerous pollutants. We see no evidence of heavily polluted water in The Hunger Games series, so purification of drinking water is not a huge issue; though in Mockingjay, District 13 does purify its underground water sources.

  Well water typically requires pumps, which in turn, require grid power. If the power fails, the water pressure drops, and you’re dry. There are ways around this problem, such as using a photovoltaic sun-driven method of pumping well water, but installation is probably prohibitive for most people.

  If necessary, most of us could collect rainwater in buckets and use it for bathing and washing clothes and dishes. If collected directly from the sky—that is, without letting it drip off the roof or down a pipe—we can drink the water, too. We’ve all done it as children by tipping our heads in a storm and letting the drops flow into our mouths. But rain collected from spouts could be dangerous, as it might contain coliform bacteria and other hazards.

  It’s wise to purify all water before drinking it regardless of whether it comes from a spring, a well, or a rainstorm. If in a populated area or someplace with farms, it’s wise to distill or otherwi
se treat water for pesticides and herbicides. Unfortunately, most methods of purification, including boiling, treating with chlorine solutions, and filtering don’t kill chemical toxins.

  Purification should at least remove particulate matter, which you can do by pouring water through several layers of cloth. If at all possible, you should chlorinate the water or use iodine, then filter it more finely. The sizes of microorganisms vary, so for example, if using a filter (like most cloth) that traps particles that are 1.0–4.0 microns big, protozoa such a Giardia and Cryposporidium will be removed, but bacteria and viruses may flow through the filter. You might want to use filters that trap particles down to 0.0004 microns in size, which will handle viruses.

  Other methods exist such as UV sterilizers that control bacteria, parasites, and viruses in shallow pools of water. These do not require chemicals and some are compact enough to carry into the woods. Other compact water filters, commonly used by campers and hikers, may require batteries.

  The old-fashioned method of boiling water helps, and in many countries, people don’t even bring the water to boiling point before drinking it. They use water pasteurization indicators to let them know when the water temperature reaches 149 degrees Fahrenheit (rather than boiling point, or 212 degrees), at which time, they assume all the microbes are dead.

  The best bet is to heat the water above 160 degrees Fahrenheit for thirty minutes; and if the water’s above 185, it will kill all pathogens after only a few minutes.