The odds have in fact been in my favor with “The Hunger Games” series entering a renaissance era recently. The fact that the series is trending again makes me so incredibly happy. 

Various trends on TikTok have occurred recently that revolve around “The Hunger Games,” such as creating scenarios for the series. Users have created videos that are made up of photos of celebrities or fictional characters that they have “cast” in the movie, like Sue Sylvester from “Glee” being the president of Panem. 

These videos, along with all the edits of different characters, started going around everywhere on TikTok. Even my friends who had never seen the movies or read the books were seeing them. 

While a large part of me would love to believe that part of the renaissance we are seeing is simply due to how amazing the franchise is, I feel there is more to it than that. Personally, I think that part of the cause of the resurgence has to do with talk on social media surrounding Liam Hemsworth after the release of Miley Cyrus’s song “Flowers.”

So many people were talking about Hemsworth in relation to the song and more than a few people used the opportunity to talk about their extreme dislike for his character Gale Hawthorne. These videos started circulating and, soon enough, “The Hunger Games” was trending not too long after. 

The other obvious reason for the trend is the announcement of “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” movie adaptation. We now know that the movie will be released on Nov. 17, 2023. 

I fell in love with “The Hunger Games” when the movie came out in 2012 and I was only 10. I rented the first film so many times from Family Video that my mom eventually just had to cave and buy it for me. After seeing the first movie, I got my hands on all of the books as soon as I could and read through them, falling in love with the series even more. 

“The Hunger Games” was the first dystopian series that I remember ever reading and it caused some switch inside my 10-year-old brain to flip. It quickly became a genre that I was obsessed with. “The Hunger Games” led to me reading “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner” series and I loved those as well. 

Part of what makes “The Hunger Games” the best dystopian series is that the cause of ruin for the world was nothing too far-fetched. The state of the world was caused simply in retaliation to a rebellion.

This “Hunger Games” renaissance that we are seeing is just what I needed. It gives a great form of escapism and is now reaching a larger audience than it originally had when the series first became popular. I will continue to happily indulge in all the fan theories and edits that can be thrown my way.

Editor’s Note: The North Wind is committed to offering a free and open public forum of ideas, publishing a wide range of viewpoints to accurately represent the NMU student body. This is a staff column, written by an employee of the North Wind. As such, it expresses the personal opinions of the individual writer, and does not necessarily reflect the position of the North Wind Editorial Board.