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"Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor!"
— Multiple characters in the series, including President Snow, Effie Trinket, and even Gale and Katniss

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, is a tetralogy (formerly a trilogy) of young adult novels that take place After the End in Panem, a nation in what used to be North America that is divided into numbered districts and a large capital city (the Capitol).

The first three books focus on Katniss Everdeen, who takes her sister Primrose's place when Prim is chosen to be a contestant ("Tribute") in the Hunger Games: an annual televised Deadly Game wherein 24 teenage contestants are locked in an arena to fight to the death until only one remains. Her struggle for survival ends up igniting a firestorm that quickly goes beyond her control, until she finds herself embroiled in an all-out war that almost makes the arena look like Disneyland.

The fourth book is a prequel starring the future president of Panem, Coriolanus Snow. The story picks up in the lead up to the 10th Hunger Games, 64 years before the events of the first book. During the war, his family’s assets in District 13 were destroyed, leaving them poor. He jumps at the chance to pilot the tribute mentor program (although at this point, it’s done by the top preforming seniors at his high school) in hopes to be able to use the prize money to pay for university as well as to restore his family’s name and prestige. However, everything goes awry when he gets assigned a strange girl from District 12 as his mentee.

The series includes:

The original four books:

Media based on the books:

Film

Tabletop Games

  • The Hunger Games: Training Days (2010)
  • The Hunger Games: Jabberjay Card Game (2012)
  • The Hunger Games: District 12 Strategy Game (2012)
  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – Victors Game (2013)
  • Connect with Pieces: Catching Fire (2013)
  • Catching Fire: Shuffling the Deck (2013)
  • Catching Fire: Seeds Of Rebellion (2013)
  • The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - The Board Game (2019): A strategic game from River Horse.

The series now has a Character Sheet, and a Taiwanese game show named after it.


Note: The title event of this book series is a fight to the death. As such, Death Tropes and death-related spoilers are plentiful. Proceed with caution.

Provides examples of:

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  • 13 Is Unlucky: District 13 is the odd district out, especially after it got destroyed by the Capitol prior to the events of the series. Or so Katniss and most of the country has been told. A portion of the district has been quietly surviving underground, having enough nuclear weapons to keep itself and the Capital locked into an uneasy truce out of fear of a nuclear war. Still, they're cut off from most of the world.
  • Absurdly High-Stakes Game: Win, and not only are you rich for life, but your whole district gets monthly deliveries of food, which makes a big difference for a place where most people are perpetually on the brink of starvation. Lose, and you die, likely in a painful and violent way. Certainly in a public way. The games are mandatory viewing for everyone in the country, including your family and anyone who may care about you, and there's always a full recap of each death.
  • Abusive Parents: Peeta's mother physically and emotionally abuses him.
  • Action Girl: It's practically a World of Action Girls given how many female victors and other female fighters we see in the series, but there are a few prominent examples (in addition to Dark Action Girls below):
    • Katniss Everdeen herself. She already is an excellent shot with a bow by the start of the series, and as a result of training in all three books, becomes more and more of an Action Hero as the series goes on, as well as an Action Girlfriend to Peeta.
    • Johanna Mason, who won her Games by initially pretending to be so weak and helpless that everyone ignored her, only to prove near the end that she's deadly with an axe.
    • Jackson and the Leegs from Squad 451 in Mockingjay are quite experienced in combat, though sadly, they all die, with Leeg 2 blown up by a pod before she ever really gets to see combat.
  • Actually Pretty Funny: In The Hunger Games: Effie after Katniss described the Gamemakers' reaction to her firing at the apple in their roast pig's mouth. While everyone else (Katniss, Haymitch, Peeta, Cinna, and Portia) is laughing outright, Effie is suppressing a smile. After that she agrees that the Gamemakers did deserve that.
  • Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: In-universe; the longer the Games run, the more expensive it is for sponsors to send support to remaining Tributes.
  • Aerith and Bob: On one hand, you've got normal names like Annie and Johanna, but then on the other you've got more unusual names like Katniss, Peeta, Twill, Plutarch, and Beetee.
  • Affectionate Nickname:
    • Gale calls Katniss "Catnip", though this is really due to her being so shy when they first met that she mumbled her name and he misheard her.
    • Occasionally used is "little duck" from Katniss to Prim, due to the latter's habit of having her shirt tails untucked.
  • After-Action Healing Drama: When Katniss finds Peeta in the arena, he has been slashed badly by Cato, and she has to treat him. And get medicine.
  • After the End: Some combination of wars and natural disasters destroyed the entire population of the world except for Panem (North America). There are implications that Panem represents the entire human species. District 12, the smallest District (possibly excluding 13), has a population of between 8,000 and 10,000. It also explains why, for all his machinations, Snow doesn't want to risk nuclear war.
  • Airstrip One: The Districts are numbered, and segregated by industry.
  • Alas, Poor Villain:
    • Not even an Ax-Crazy Jerkass like Cato deserves to be Eaten Alive by Mutts for over twenty hours.note 
    • The way Glimmer bites it is pretty nasty, especially her cries for help.
  • Amazing Technicolor Population: The people in the Capitol have some strange fashion ideas, among them body dyes. At least one person mentioned has dyed her whole body pea green.
  • Ambiguous Situation: Since the story is told through Katniss' eyes, we don't witness the scene where Peeta goes back to "finish" the girl from District 8 who started the fire. Did he deliver a Mercy Kill and/or did he find her dying and hold her hand in her last moments?
  • Ambiguously Brown: Collins has stated that we're so far in the future that racial mixing has blurred any categories that might exist today. She refuses to elaborate on what modern races the characters would be categorized as. Katniss herself has olive skin and straight black hair, in contrast to her blonde-haired and blue-eyed mother and sister. Rue and Thresh have "dark skin". In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the District 11 tribute, Reaper, is described as having dark brown skin.
  • Amputative Sentencing: Avoxes are those punished for crimes against the Capitol by having their tongues cut out, spending their lives thereafter as enslaved domestic servants. "Crimes" here included trying to escape Panem and stepping in to try to stop a Capitol beating. Lavinia and Pollux are introduced as Avoxes, while Darius, a charismatic Peacekeeper in District 12, was turned into one in Catching Fire, to Katniss' horror.
  • Angsty Surviving Twin: Madge's mother Mrs Undersee lost her twin sister Maysilee in the 50th Hunger Games and became a drug addict afterwards.
  • Animal Motifs:
    • Katniss repeatedly compares President Snow to a snake, showing her distrust of him (the prequel with Snow as the main character is called The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes), and Rue to birds, highlighting her fondness for Rue and Rue's sweet and free-spirited nature.
    • In-universe, Katniss is associated with a specific kind of bird called a mockingjay, which is an emblem of freedom and of the Capital's fallibility.
    • Prim's cat Buttercup has a very similar personality to her sister Katniss, and takes the role in Prim's life that Prim takes in Katniss's life.
    • Tigris looks and acts like a tigress so much that Katniss wonders if she picked the name herself. She didn't.
  • Annoying Arrows: An unusual example where the trope applies the protagonist's own attacks. The arrows Katniss shoots only do much damage if she hits a vital area.
  • Anyone Can Die: The Hunger Games is actually an interesting example. Many of the characters are guaranteed to die, due to the format of the Games; however, as with most other works, main characters are very rarely if ever killed (depending on who you'd be willing to count as a main character), and only in major events. Katniss, as the first person narrator, inevitably survives the entire series. Everyone else, however, is fair game, especially in Mockingjay, where the country goes into a full-scale rebellion with heavy losses on both sides. And that does mean everyone.
    • For the "guaranteed to die" since both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire feature a year of the Hunger Games, they feature the deaths of most of the tributes. The majority of these are Red Shirts, but the most notable are probably Rue, Thresh, Mags, and Wiress.
    • A couple of series mainstays who die in Catching Fire (though their deaths aren't confirmed until Mockingjay) include Madge Undersee, Cinna, and the entire rest of the Mellark family besides Peeta himself.
    • Other notable characters introduced in earlier books who are killed off by the end of Mockingjay include Portia, Lavinia, Darius, Finnick Odair, President Coriolanus Snow, and Primrose Everdeen.
    • Mockingjay itself also introduces quite a few significant new characters who die off by the end, including Boggs; Messalla and Castor from Katniss's camera crew; Jackson, Mitchell, Homes, and the Leegs all from Squad 451; Lyme; and President Alma Coin.
  • Apocalypse How: At least continental, probably global. In the first book, Katniss describes a massive natural disaster: "the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land." Wars erupted as factions tried to claim the limited remaining resources, and this appears to have led to the collapse of the North American nations that we currently know. Some time after that, about 75 years before the present, a massive rebellion resulted in further destruction; District 13 was seen as a particular threat since they controlled the nuclear power and potentially weapons, so the Capitol bombed them into oblivion.
  • Arc Number:
    • 12, and relatedly 24 and 6.
      • 12 districts.
      • 12 pairs of tributes (who become eligible at age 12).
      • Training scores of up to 12.
      • 12 arrows in the quiver in the arena.
      • 12 houses in the Victor's Village.
      • Prim and Rue are 12 years old, and Rue was one of 6 siblings.
      • 24 wedding dresses designed for Katniss, then voted down to 6.
      • Catching Fire: Lightning strikes at midnight and noon in a certain section of the Quarter Quell arena, which later becomes important to the plot.
      • Mockingjay: A 12 ft ×12 ft apartment in District 13.
    • For District 13: 1. Unity is extremely important there.
  • Arc Symbol: The mockingjay, hybrid offspring of the genetically engineered jabberjay that was used to spy on the enemy during the last war, and mockingbirds.
    • They represent Katniss, the child of an oppressed working class coal miner who taught her to sing, and a white, blonde, (relatively speaking) upper-class mother who decided she would rather be married to him that have enough food and resources.
    • They stand for freedom, and as such represent the goal of the rebellion.
  • Arc Words:
    • "And may the odds be ever in your favor."
    • "Stay alive."
  • Artificial Limbs: Peeta is outfitted with an artificial leg after the first Hunger Games. Katniss, having had her eardrum repaired after it was ruptured in the first Games, feigns being able to hear forcefields in Catching Fire during the second games.
  • Artistic License – Pharmacology:
    • Snow used assassination by poison to rise to power. Apparently the Capitol can neither perform autopsies nor test surfaces for presence of toxins.note 
    • In Mockingjay, Katniss describes morphling as making her feel numb and empty. For opiate addicts (who've begun to grow 'immune' to the effects) this may be the case, but morphine makes non-addicts feel relaxed, warm and happy, even through emotional depression.
  • Asian and Nerdy: The narrator of the Scholastic audio books puts on a distinct stereotypical Asian accent that is especially noticeable in Catching Fire for "Nuts" Wiress and "Volts" Beetee, the two engineers in Catching Fire, although this trope has been averted by the film casting for Catching Fire: the Caucasian Amanda Plummer has been cast as Wiress, and African-American actor Jeffrey Wright has been cast as Beetee.
  • Ax-Crazy: Some of the Careers. Clove would've given Katniss a Glasgow Smile if Thresh hadn't stepped in. And Cato explodes so violently when Katniss takes out his supplies that he snaps a nearby boy's neck. Enobaria ripped someone else's throat out in her Games. With her teeth. Titus tried to eat the hearts of the contestants he killed.
  • Babies Make Everything Better: This trope is deliberately invoked by Peeta who claims Katniss is pregnant after the two are forced back into the arena for the Quarter Quell. Apparently not even the bloodthirsty denizens of the Capitol seem to want to watch a pregnant girl be killed. Subverted in the epilogue as while Peeta and Katniss do have two children, and this is a sign of hope, the world is still far from a good place, and Peeta and Katniss both retain enduring psychological issues as a result of the events of the books. This is less 'babies make everything better' and more the fact that the world is finally 'better' enough to have babies in the first place.
  • Back for the Finale: In a morbid example, the Muttations sent to attack the last of the tributes in the final battle of the Games are made to resemble the tributes who had already fallen.
  • Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work:
    • This occurs with regard to Rue. As Katniss would be rather unsympathetic if she was forced to kill a terrified 12-year-old who saved her life, looked up to her, and reminded her of her little sister, one of the fellow competitors does it for her.
    • Indeed, in the entire trilogy, she never has to do such "dirty work" against any sympathetic character, which is why her murder of the unarmed Capitol woman in the third book is so shocking.
  • Bath of Poverty At the Capitol, there is a panel with more than a hundred options in the shower in comparison to what Katniss is used to: a bucket of water warmed up on the stove.
  • Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Invoked at the end of the first book, when Katniss undergoes a beautification procedure that removes all of her scars after she emerges victorious. Averted in subsequent books, as she has a nasty scar on her arm at the end of the second book, and by the end of the third much of her body is covered by burn scars and skin grafts. Even after this, however, her face suffers no lasting damage.
  • Beauty to Beast: Glimmer is the stunningly beautiful tribute from District 1. Her beauty is destroyed and her face is horribly disfigured by Tracker Jacker stings.
  • Because You Were Nice to Me:
    • In a variant, Thresh, who is also from District 11, spares Katniss on one occasion because she helped Rue and gave her as much dignity as she could in her death. This extends in general to District 11, leading to riots breaking out.
    • The only reason Katniss has reason to suspect that Peeta is anything other than a canny competitor is because he gave her bread when she was starving to death and preparing to die. At least before he has the chance to kill her after the tracker jacker attack, and he clearly doesn't even consider doing so.
  • Becoming the Mask: Katniss pretends to be in love with Peeta just to keep them both alive in the arena. At the end of the first book, she has begun to question herself whether this fake romance has become real affection. By the middle of the second book, she is totally prepared to die so he can continue living.
  • Bee-Bee Gun: Katniss uses a hive of lethal, genetically-altered wasps to kill some of her opponents as well as unintentionally injure herself.
  • Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Johanna wants to see Capitol children get slaughtered in Hunger Games, and more specifically, President Snow's 12 year old granddaughter. Peeta in a twisted way, as it's not the torture per se that makes him evil, but the way that his pain and fear were redirected towards Katniss via memory manipulation.
  • Belligerent Sexual Tension: Even when Katniss tries to act nice, she can't help but bicker with Peeta. Also has this with Gale.
  • Betty and Veronica: Peeta is the Betty and Gale (despite being Katniss' best friend from early childhood) is the Veronica to Katniss' Archie: Peeta is nice and fairly sweet, while Gale has a revolutionary mindset and a ruthless streak.
  • Big Bad: President Coriolanus Snow for the entire series, by virtue of being the tyrant ruling over Panem in the first place, until Alma Coin seizes control from him near the end of Mockingjay by trying to go for a Full-Circle Revolution.
  • Big Brother Instinct: Katniss to Prim and most other children that remind her of Prim. Also Rue to her siblings, and Thresh to Rue. See the character page for how.
  • Big Brother Is Watching: Cameras are waiting to catch every minute of Katniss and Peeta's lives once they become contestants in the Games. Life in the districts is also very closely monitored, leaving people afraid to say anything that might come off as negative about the Capitol. President Snow even knows Gale and Katniss kissed in the woods outside District 12.
  • Big Damn Heroes: In the first book, Thresh saves Katniss from being killed by Clove, on behalf of her relationship with Rue.
  • The Big Damn Kiss: One per book. In-universe, the Katniss/Peeta shippers in the Capitol (and for that matter, the rest of Panem) get such a moment when Katniss and Peeta are hiding in the cave.
  • Bilingual Bonus: 'Panem', the name of the country this story is set in, means "bread" in Latin. This revealed to be a reference to "panem et circenses" — when a government appeases people with food and spectacle to maintain power, which is exactly what the Capitol does. The mute servants in the Capitol are called the 'Avox', which means "without voice" in Greek and Latin.note  'Katniss' is the name of a family of plants, also known as "Sagittaria" — Latin for "archer".
  • Bioweapon Beast: During the districts' failed rebellion, the Capitol bred a number of genetically engineered animals called muttations (commonly abbreviated to mutts) which were used as living weapons against the districts. From the Tenth Hunger Games onwards, they became a regular feature in the arena, with the Gamemakers using them either to kill the tributes directly or to drive the tributes together and force them to fight each other. Examples of mutts seen in the Games include poisonous snakes which are programmed to attack anyone whose scent is unfamiliar, carnivorous squirrels which attack in packs and werewolf-like creatures which have been created to resemble fallen tributes.
  • Birds of a Feather: Katniss and Gale, though ultimately inverted when Katniss decides that she needs Peeta to balance her own rather ruthless and cynical tendencies out.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • The first book ends with Katniss and Peeta both surviving the Hunger Games, as well as gaining the rewards that go with being crowned victor, but the government is very angry at them — mostly Katniss — because their refusal to try to kill each other is considered an embarrassment to the totalitarian regime that orchestrates the Games and a threat to its control.
    • At the end of the series, freedom is paid for in a lot of blood, and the characters are burdened with deep emotional scars. However, Panem is rebuilding and there's some Babies Ever After for the two lead characters.
  • Black-and-Gray Morality:
    • The crew that works the Hunger Games. They obviously live in the Capitol and prepare the candidates to be offered as tribute, and Effie even seems to love the Games, but the genuine horror that most of them feel for Katniss and Peeta's suffering makes things a little grayer. One could even argue that by styling, mentoring, and presenting them, the teams are doing all they can from the Capitol to ensure their survival, since good PR helps a lot.
    • This gets especially obvious in Mockingjay, since the Capitol commits all sorts of war crimes, and some of the rebels are willing to stoop to their level (either for the greater good of defeating the Capitol and/or for revenge). The final straw that convinces Katniss that the Capitol and District 13 are not really different is when she witnesses what is probably a False Flag Operation targeting children and medics (including her little sister) using a bombing tactic that Gale had thought up, followed closely by District 13's President offering a vote to have their own Hunger Games. To make it even grayer, Katniss herself votes yes on the Capitol Hunger Games (albeit as a ruse), and President Snow tells Katniss that while he's not above killing children, he would never have pulled the stunt that had just killed Prim, and they both know he's not lying.
  • Black Market Produce: Katniss makes her living poaching game and selling it on the black market. In addition, most food that isn't made from grain rations is expensive and rather rare in the Districts. The decadent Capitol, on the other hand, has tons of food of all kinds.
  • Blood from the Mouth:
    • Subverted by President Snow, since it's neither overt nor a sign of his impending death. When he's first revealed to be bleeding from his mouth, Katniss only realizes it when he's close enough for her to smell it, and he's nowhere near death at the time. Instead, the blood is used for symbolism of his crimes and his attempts to cover them up. Played straight later, when he starts coughing up visible blood toward the end of the series and dies shortly afterward.
    • The first tribute Katniss sees die suddenly sprays blood onto her face while fighting with her over supplies, due to a sudden and terminal case of throwing-knife-in-back. Katniss herself narrowly avoids succumbing to the malady a few seconds later.
  • Bloodier and Gorier: Mockingjay is probably the bloodiest of all the books (though none of them are gory, per se), but this applies much more clearly in-universe to the Quarter Quells, which are all extremely violent and in-universe intentionally made even more brutal than the "normal" Games.
  • Blood Knight: "Careers" are kids who train all their young lives to win glory in the Games, volunteering for them if they're not selected by lottery.
  • Blood-Splattered Innocents: About thirty seconds into the 74th Games, the boy from District 9 coughs blood into Katniss' face after getting knifed by Clove.
  • Bond Villain Stupidity:
    • In the 74th Hunger Games, the Careers have Katniss trapped up a tree at one point and do nothing to take advantage of her unfavorable position other than sleeping under the tree. Obviously, this gives Katniss enough time to figure out an escape plan.
    • Later, when Clove manages to pin down Katniss, Clove mocks and tortures Katniss instead of killing her. It doesn't end well for Clove.
  • Bookends: Buttercup is hated by Katniss in the beginning and adopted as protective pet and mutual reminder of Prim in the end. A nightmare wakes Prim in the beginning, and Katniss' child in the end. Singing to the frightened child: Prim in the beginning and Katniss' child in the end.
  • Boulder Bludgeon: Thresh, after believing that Clove had killed his young district partner Rue, had gotten so enraged that he killed her by smashing her head with a large rock.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: Peeta is subjected to mental conditioning that causes the mere mention of Katniss to send him into an Unstoppable Rage. He gets better. Mostly.
  • Bread and Circuses: Panem et Circenses, the original Latin phrase, forms the etymology behind Panem's name. The phrase itself is directly discussed in Mockingjay.
  • Bread of Survival: Bread is a recurring Arc Symbol that represents survival and life. When Katniss, her mother, and her sister ran out of money and were starving to death, she dug through the Mellarks' trash bin as a last resort. Mrs. Mellark shouted at her to go away, but Peeta "accidentally" burned two loaves of raisin-and-nut bread and then threw them to Katniss when his mother wasn't looking, which saved the lives of her and her family.
  • Breakfast Club:
    • People who have won the Games tend to become close friends and stick together, because only other tributes can understand what they have gone through.
    • In Mockingjay, there's a vote between the Tributes about whether or not to send high-ranking Capitol officials' children into a last Hunger Game; Katniss and Haymitch vote to do it. It seems almost certain that Katniss votes that way only in order to fool Coin into thinking she's on her side, and the fact that Haymitch understood that and voted with her makes Katniss realize how much they really understand each other.
  • Break the Cutie: To a certain extent, any character deemed cute goes through this treatment in the series.
    • Rue is the first, as she gets shoved into the Hunger Games at age 12 (the youngest eligible age to be reaped), and is heartbreakingly resigned to the fact that she can't win.
    • Peeta's Trauma Conga Line is significantly longer than that of most of the other characters, considering it begins with an abusive childhood, though for the most part he takes it all in stride.
    • In addition, Katniss' own mental breakdown, and the reasons it comes about, is elaborated on repeatedly throughout the third book, until eventually you have to wonder when the tale of a recent victor of a brutal tournament acting as the heroic symbol of a rebellion ends and the clinical psychological study on how to utterly break a seventeen-year-old girl's mind begins.
    • Averted, however, in the case of Prim who, despite the horrors she experiences, seems to adjust pretty well. Not that it does her much good at the end. The same could be said for Annie, who, despite having become unstable after her games and losing her husband Finnick during the war, actually seems more together somehow by the end of the series than she was before.
  • Brief Accent Imitation: Gale at the beginning of the first novel briefly imitates Effie's Capitol accent, inciting one of about five times where Katniss actually laughs.
  • Broken Aesop: Has its own page.
  • Broken Bird:
    • Before the storyline of the books, Katniss' father died, which caused her mother to cross the despair event horizon, entering a catatonic state where she could not care for her family anymore. This in turn drove Katniss over the despair event horizon as she nearly starved to death and had lost both parents as nurturing, reliable and relatable people and was suddenly tasked with keeping herself, her mother, and her little sister alive in a world where she's unable to even get a job. She's never able to fully trust her mother again, and watching her family starve because of her inability to bring in money and food has left her extremely closed off to others, protective of the people in her care, and utterly robbed of a childhood.
    • Johanna's and Haymitch's families were murdered. Peeta and Johanna got tortured. Annie had to listen to the screams of Peeta and Johanna and got mentally unstable from it.
  • Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Inverted, with Katniss as the brooding one and Peeta as the gentle one. Played straight, however, with Snow (a pessimist who believes Hobbes Was Right) and Lucy Gray (an optimist who thinks Rousseau Was Right) in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
  • The Brute: Cato in the first book and the aptly-named Brutus in the second: both big, strong, burly Blood Knight Career tributes from District 2 who genuinely enjoy participating in the Games. Also implied to have been the case with the never-seen Titus.
  • Butt-Monkey: Poor Boggs. His life is a string of tribulations, from Katniss puking all over him to Gale breaking his nose to getting his legs blown off and dying horribly. The only time he makes a stand is when he gets angry at Coin for sending Peeta into his squad.
  • Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The addictive painkiller in use around Panem is called "morphling" (morphine) and the people addicted to it are called "morphlings".
  • Call-Back:
    • Finnick offers Katniss a sugar cube again in Mockingjay, to add to her coffee, referencing when he offers her one previously at the 75th Hunger Games tribute parade.
    • Katniss notices Prim's untucked shirt just after her name is called at the Reaping, and again in Mockingjay just before her death.
    • Effie's mistaken belief that pearls come from coal gets a callback in Catching Fire by an amused Peeta when he actually finds a pearl. He repeats Effie's assertion to Finnick, who, not being in on the joke, tries to correct him.
  • Canon Foreigner: The characters Augustus Braun and Porter Millicent Tripp appeared on the now defunct Capitol Couture website, where they were said to be victors in past Hunger Games.note  However, there is no mention of these characters in either the books or the films. What's more, Augustus was said to be from District 1, though his name is more in keeping with District 2.
  • Cat Fight: Averted. A fight involving two females is not automatically a sexy catfight, which The Hunger Games proves especially intensely.
  • Cats Are Mean: Buttercup is to everyone who isn't Prim. Until Katniss and he finally bond after Prim's death.
  • Central Theme: Oddly enough, marketing and the power of symbols. Emphasized by the real-world marketing of the novel, preferring the love story to the social commentary in almost an exact mirror of the Capitol marketing the Games.
  • Chekhov's Boomerang:
    • The nightlock berries that Peeta accidentally kills Foxface with come up again after it's announced that the new rule that there can be two winners of the Hunger Games if they are in the same district has been revoked, Katniss and Peeta use them to threaten to kill themselves and ensure there is no winner. They come up again in Mockingjay where the rebels inspired by these events create a suicide pill they name Nightlock (whether it's made from Nightlock berries is unknown) also saying Nightlock 3 times will turn the Holo into a bomb.
    • Wiress and Beetee are known to be capable of making bombs, which helps out everyone in Catching Fire multiple times when they're able to manipulate the forcefield. Then, Beetee uses his skills in Mockingjay to kill many civilians.
    • The couple that Katniss sees on the edge of District 12 are a double between this and Chekhov's Gunman. One (Lavinia) shows up later in The Hunger Games, but the experience itself rebounds as an early clue that District 13 is still there, because they were escaping there.
  • Chekhov's Classroom: Peeta explains to Katniss how each district has a distinctive recipe for bread, which later allows her to recognize that the gift she receives after memorializing Rue must have come from Rue's own people. It comes back in Catching Fire. See below.
  • Chekhov's Gun: In Catching Fire, Katniss notes that, underneath the stench of roses, she can smell blood on President Snow's breath. It's then revealed in Mockingjay that the blood smell is a result of the damage caused by the numerous poisons he's ingested over several years in his bid for power; the roses are a deliberate effort to mask the scent.
  • Chekhov's Gunman:
    • Delly Cartwright is mentioned in The Hunger Games but doesn't appear until Mockingjay.
    • Johanna Mason is mentioned in the first book as well.
    • That random Gamemaker who tripped into the punch bowl, Plutarch Heavensbee, turns out to be pretty important as a leader of the Rebellion.
  • Chekhov's Hobby: Frosting cakes turns out to come in really handy.
  • Children as Pawns: The entire premise of the series could be considered this, as the Capitol is placing children in a Deadly Game to remind all of the Districts how powerless they are.
  • Children Forced to Kill: A person's name begins going in the jar for the Games at 12.
  • Climactic Battle Resurrection: Subverted in that defeated characters don't come back to help fight the Big Bad, they come back in another more sinister form to rip the remaining tributes limb from limb.
  • Closed Circle: Every game arena is tightly sealed off from the outside world. Tributes can receive supplies that float out of the sky on parachutes, but otherwise they're on their own.
  • Comfort the Dying:
    • Katniss spends a good chunk of the 74th games bonding with Rue, who reminds her a lot of her beloved little sister, Prim. When Rue gets fatally wounded by Marvel, Katniss stays with her until she dies and uses that time to sing her off.
    • Peeta does this in the Quarter Quell for the morphling addict from District 6 who makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save him; since they have the Commonality Connection of both loving to paint, he describes his paint set at home and all the beautiful colors of the sunrise, and she uses the last of her strength to paint a flower on his cheek with her blood.
    • They both take after their mentor in this regard, since Haymitch also did this in his Games for his district partner and ex-ally Maysilee Donner when he found her dying from a mutt attack, holding her hand and staying by her side.
    • Rounding out the tradition of District 12 tributes doing this, Lucy Gray Baird also did so for Jessup Diggs, her own district partner who had been infected with rabies. She keeps her physical distance from him for obvious reasons, but verbally comforts him, and gets close enough to him to stroke his forehead once he's too weak to move anymore and finally succumbs.
    • In a villainous example, Cato for Clove after Thresh fatally wounds her.
  • Conditioned to Accept Horror: The whole point of life in the Districts, and the Games. Katniss takes a lot of horror in stride in the first book, but over the rest of the trilogy it finally becomes too much for her to deal with.
  • Contrived Coincidence:
    • In the first book, Katniss finally collapses from dehydration mere feet away from water.
    • If Katniss ever thinks that she doesn't want to kill a person during the games, she won't have to. Either someone/thing else kills them (Peeta, Rue, Wiress, Thresh, Mags) or they survive (Peeta, Finnick, Beetee).
    • Family members of past tributes are disproportionately likely to be selected as tributes themselves. This is an in-universe example, as Katniss figures the drawings must be rigged that way to create extra drama, and this makes her painfully aware that any children she and Peeta have are probably going to get reaped when they're old enough.
    • The process of reaping Quarter Quell tributes is implied to have been even more rigged than the others. The tributes chosen from Districts 1 and 4, who are two of the three career districts with the biggest pool of victors, just happen to be a pair of siblings and a couple who Snow has every reason to want to drive apart. It’s also a convenient way to get rid of the more rebellious victors like Johanna and Katniss who are the only living victors of their sex from their districts. It’s all but stated the theme for the Quarter Quell was changed at the last minute when Katniss notes the envelope isn’t yellowed like the others.
  • Costume Porn: Each tribute gets a personal stylist. Looking flashy outside of the arena serves a practical purpose, though: tributes who catch the audience's eye are more likely to receive sponsors who can help them survive the arena. Mentioned to have sometimes in the past been literal costume porn; the Capitol is not afraid to incorporate nudity or partial nudity as part of a child's costume for the cameras.
  • Covered in Mud: Peeta uses a large amount of mud with plants on top to disguise himself as part of a riverbank when he is too injured to move. This probably helps his infection along.
  • Crapsack World: Panem is North America After the End: a totalitarian nation composed of 12 (actually 13) districts. Most of the districts are horrible places to live. The people are poor, starving, and oppressed while those in the Capitol live outrageously decadent lives. And that's even without mentioning the eponymous Deadly Game.
    • Then of course every year each district is forced to send two teens between 12 and 18 to fight until one survives as a constant reminder to the people how much power the government possesses over them. Oh yeah, everyone is also forced to watch the children brutally murder each other.
    • Even if you do happen to win the Hunger Games, you have some of the bleakest futures ahead of you: PTSD, madness, horrific nightmares, being prostituted out to the elite by the government, getting chosen a second time, or becoming dependent on drugs/alcohol to numb out the pain and memories especially when the Capitol kills everyone you love for making them look silly. Don't forget being forced to mentor the Tributes from your District. In Haymitch's case, that meant trying to help 46 children only to watch them die in the Games.
    • Even the rebellion is awful: food is rationed to the extent that stealing bread can result in torture and President Coin is just President Snow's other side to the same authoritarian coin.
  • Crippling Over Specialization: Career tributes are bred and trained for actual combat, which is why they have a disproportionate number of victories. However, they're from the wealthier districts that don't have to use basic survival skills very often, if at all, and thus they tend to be dependent on the supplies from the Cornucopia. They lack the basic medical care and foraging skills that allow Katniss and Rue to survive, and it's noted that in any year where surviving the arena became more important than killing other Tributes, Careers rapidly lose their edge (such as the Games where the arena flooded, and the Tribute who was best at swimming won). Naturally, Katniss decides to use this fact to her advantage and takes the supplies out of the picture when she gets the chance.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: Glimmer gets stung by a swarm of poisonous wasps which leave her a disfigured corpse. Cato gets mauled by wolf mutts. A morphling gets bitten by monkey mutts. One of squad 451 gets cut by barb wire. And several other of that squad get decapitated by lizard mutts.
  • Crystal Spires and Togas: The Capitol is described as being full of colored glass, and the people are obsessed with fashion. Technology also seems to have advanced to the point that it can be completely hidden from view. Although no one wears a toga, Capitol residents almost all have Roman names, establishing them as a decadent and technologically advanced society.
  • Cynicism Catalyst: Katniss' father dies five years before the first book, forcing her to toughen up and learn to hunt to support herself and her family. Later, Rue dies in the games, awakening her killer instinct. Then in Mockingjay, Primrose dies, driving Katniss towards deep depression and increasingly close to insanity.
  • Dangerously Garish Environment: The arena for the 50th Hunger Games is a bright, idyllic paradise with mountains and a forest. It then turns out that practically everything in the environment is poisonous or man-eating, and the beautiful mountains are actually volcanoes.
  • Dark Action Girl: The female Career tributes in general are this, since they've been trained for the games their whole lives like the boys have. (Annie is the exception, because her arena got flooded and she won by virtue of being the only one not to drown.) This is an Informed Attribute for Glimmer, Cashmere, and the unnamed girl from District 4 in the first book, since we never fully see them in action, but Cashmere at least must have been one in the past since she won her Games, and Clove and Enobaria play it straight.
  • Darker and Edgier: The whole series is pretty dark to begin with, but the series finale, Mockingjay, is much more hopeless than even the first two.
  • Deadly Game: 24 teenagers aged 12 to 18 are drafted to compete in a televised fight to the death. The titular Games started out as a government intimidation tactic by the hand of the wealthy Capitol, to repress the rebellion efforts of the outlying Districts. The Capitol spun this as a form of entertainment, and it eventually evolved into a game, complete with interviews, spotlights and publicity.
  • Deadpan Snarker:
    • Katniss herself, massively so; as the narrator of the books, this also makes her a First-Person Smartass.
    • Haymitch and Johanna seem almost incapable of interacting with others without snarking at them, and Peeta gets plenty of this as well. This leads to plenty of Snark-to-Snark Combat when they and Katniss interact with each other.
    • Just about all of Dean Highbottom's interactions with Lucky Flickerman; he is clearly not having it.
  • Death by Disfigurement: Glimmer dies from the trackerjacker stings that horribly disfigure her.
  • Death Course: The Games, especially when the Tributes settle down into a comfortable recovery period / stalemate. This was particularly true for the Second Quarter Quell (see Death World below), which had a disproportionately large number of tributes taken out by arena hazards rather than each other. Examples include a volcanic eruption that killed half the Careers and several others; some carnivorous squirrels that attacked Haymitch and killed off one of the other tributes who reached the top 3; and some candy-pink birds that ripped Maysilee Donner's throat out.
  • Death World: It's sometimes amazing to see what the Capitol creates for the sake of killing teenagers, which is most prominently shown in the 50th Hunger Games, i.e. the Second Quarter Quell, which takes place in a fake Garden of Eden with Everything Trying to Kill You: all the food and water in the arena is poisonous and is filled with beautiful but deadly creatures.
  • Debate and Switch: In the first book, Katniss' major moral dilemma is whether she can kill equally innocent children in order to survive and come home to Prim and Gale. Yet, she never has to face this dilemma. She only ever kills Careers, who are treated as acceptable targets, and even then none of these kills are calculated or cold-blooded. Katniss drops the tracker-jackers on the Careers, because they are hunting her, which ends up killing Glimmer. She shoots Marvel, but as a quick reflex after Marvel kills Rue, and later kills Cato as a Mercy Kill. Katniss worries about having to kill Rue, but then Marvel kills Rue, Foxface, but then Foxface mistakenly eats the nightlock berries, and Thresh after he saves Katniss' life but then Cato kills Thresh. The end finally subverts this when the Gamemakers renege on their offer to let two members from the same district live, and Katniss must either kill Peeta or be killed. But then Katniss Takes A Third Option by suggesting they both eat nightlock berries together. This is then doubly subverted, because the Gamemakers blink and let both Katniss and Peeta live, meaning Katniss never has to address the dilemma of killing an innocent to save her own life.
  • Defector from Decadence: Plutarch Heavensbee, his assistant, and some of the other people in District 13 have fled the Capitol. This was also the goal of Lavinia, the redheaded Avox, and the boy she was with when Katniss first saw her, but they didn't make it.
  • Designated Girl Fight: Subverted, since Katniss's fight with Clove is her most dangerous in the Games, and the closest she comes to dying; Clove wins the fight and pins Katniss down, and would have killed her if it weren't for Thresh intervening and killing Clove first.
  • Despair Event Horizon: Katniss passes over it in a matter of paragraphs at the end of Catching Fire when she learns that Peeta has been captured by the Capitol and District 12 has been destroyed. And the rest of the series from there consists of it getting worse.
  • Deus ex machina: Invoked purposefully. If a tribute appeals enough to the cameras, they gain "sponsors", who can send them in supplies from a parachute. Katniss and Peeta utilize this by faking a romance for the cameras. The Capitol loves something to gossip and swoon over, so the two of them become celebrities as much as tributes. Also, Katniss could easily kill Cato with her bow, but he's wearing a sort of skintight body armor from a sponsor, so she can't. But the Capitol likes to put on a good show, and so the Gamemakers let loose a pack of genetically engineered wolves as a sort of "grand finale", and Katniss and Peeta manage to manipulate them to all but kill Cato. The wolves kill him slowly, because, again, the Capitol loves a good show. And in a previous Games, a 14-year old Finnick Odair didn't even do anything and yet was showered with sponsors, all because he was so ridiculously physically attractive. Finally they sent him a Game-Breaker weapon — a trident, one of the most expensive gifts a sponsor ever gave — and since he had grown up using tridents and harpoons to fish, he offed the rest of the competitors with ease.
  • Diabolus ex Nihilo: Just one fight left. Environment is herding the survivors towards the lake for a final brawl. SUDDENLY WOLVES! Justified, since the Gamemakers can do whatever they want in the arena (including manipulate animals) and so anything that happens is likely a choice they made to spice things up and make it more dramatic.
  • Dice Roll Death: Foxface dies not at the hand of another Tribute (at least not intentionally), but because she just happened to eat poisonous berries.
  • Disappeared Dad:
    • Katniss and Prim's father died in the mines a few years before the book begins. Gale's father also died in the same accident. It's concealed in somewhat of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but Haymitch's father might have been this as well. Haymitch has told Katniss that President Snow had his mother, baby brother, and girlfriend killed as punishment for making the Capitol look bad in the arena, but a father is never mentioned.
    • Also happens with Peeta's father at the end of Catching Fire, along with the rest of the family. It's implied that they died when Snow had District 12 bombed.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Par for the course in Panem: after all, it's a society that decided to punish a single rebellion by obliterating districts and ordering its citizens to give up their children to a ruthless bloodsport every year in perpetuity.
    • Katniss and Gale practically live off hunting in the Meadow, an area that is entirely abandoned by mankind and fenced off. Yet this action is considered poaching, even though the land belongs to no-one. Luckily District 12's Peacekeepers do not enforce this law, at least at first, because it carries awful penalties.
    • Victors in the Hunger Games are forced to do exactly what Snow wants with the threat of having their families slaughtered. Case in point: Snow had Haymitch's mother, brother, and girlfriend killed just because he didn't like the clever trick he used to win the games.
  • Distant Sequel: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set 64 years before the events of the series, showing the events surrounding the 10th Hunger Games.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: It's always supposed to remind you of something: this is an enforced trope in Suzanne Collins' books:
  • Do Not Adjust Your Set: The government of Panem controls all television broadcasts and requires by law for citizens to watch certain broadcasts, such as those of the Hunger Games. When the rebellion gains traction, they hijack the government's messages against them to broadcast "propos" of Katniss.
  • Don't Create a Martyr: The reason why President Snow does not just kill Katniss.
  • Doomed Hometown: District 12 is firebombed to the ground at the end of Catching Fire.
  • Driven to Suicide: Averted, but not for want of attempting. Katniss understandably attempts various suicidal things after the end of the war in the final book. None are successful naturally, although the fact she narrates the books isn't in itself a giveaway since the books are in present, rather than past tense.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: President Snow either died from choking on blood or being trampled to death. Neither one is a very glamorous way to go out.
    • Thresh is randomly killed off-page after finally getting some characterization.
    • Foxface, who was clever enough to survive almost to the end of the games without harming a single person, is killed by stealing berries from Peeta that he hadn't realized were poisonous.
    • Finnick, after being such a major character, is essentially killed offscreen.
  • Drowning My Sorrows: Haymitch becomes a drunk due to the horrors he has witnessed. Katniss actually drinks with him on one occasion, though since she's only ever had a few glasses of wine before and Haymitch prefers white liquor, she quickly gets sauced after just a couple of shots. The hangover is enough to convince her not to do it again.
  • Due to the Dead: Katniss sings to Rue and cradles her as she dies, covers her body with flowers, and then sings a funeral lament. Especially poignant because she's not just paying her dues, she's acknowledging the humanity rather than disposability of a 12 year old sentenced to certain death just out of spite, and had Katniss not done this, her family never would have recovered the body or ever had the chance to give their dead child any dignity. As it stands, they still don't, but they – and the rest of District 11 – at least got to be sure that someone cared for and comforted their daughter as she died, and that she wasn't alone when she did.
  • Dying Alone: This is the case for most of the tributes who die in the arena, but specifically averted for Rue, Maysilee Donner, and Jessup Diggs, all of whom had the winning tribute from District 12 stay with them as they died (Katniss, Haymitch, and Lucy Gray respectively).
  • Dwindling Party: Every alliance in an edition of the Hunger Games:
    • In the 74th Games from The Hunger Games, the alliance of Career tributes starts with five people: Glimmer and Marvel from District 1, Cato and Clove from 2, and the unnamed girl from 4. Peeta briefly pretends to join them as well as a way to protect Katniss. First, Katniss drops a nest of tracker jackers on the group, which kills Glimmer and the girl from 4 and leads to Peeta breaking off from the group to protect Katniss from Cato. Then later, Katniss shoots Marvel dead after he kills Rue. At the Feast, right before Clove can kill Katniss, Thresh kills Clove after hearing her indulge in some Evil Gloating about Rue. And finally, Katniss and Peeta have the final showdown with Cato, and Katniss eventually gives him a Mercy Kill when he's being mauled by mutts.
    • For both the protagonists and their enemies in the 75th games in Catching Fire:
      • Katniss and Peeta team up with Finnick and Mags near the beginning, but Mags later does a Heroic Sacrifice so she won't slow down the other three. Then they meet up with Beetee, Wiress, and Johanna, who by this time has already lost her own district partner, Blight, as well. Not too long afterwards, Wiress is murdered when the Career pack attacks. And finally, when they destroy the force field around the arena and break out of it, only Katniss, Finnick, and Beetee are rescued, while Peeta and Johanna are left behind.
      • The Careers this time around include Cashmere and Gloss from 1 and Brutus and Enobaria from 2. Katniss promptly kills Gloss after he kills Wiress, and Johanna kills Cashmere immediately thereafter. Then right near the end of the games, Peeta kills Brutus after the latter killed Chaff, and though Enobaria survives, she's left behind by the rebels and captured by the Capitol along with Peeta and Johanna.
    • Squad 451 in Mockingjay is a major example, starting with 13 people and ending with five. It's fitting that Finnick sarcastically refers to it as the 76th Hunger Games.
      • It starts with Leeg 2 being blown up by a pod, though she is replaced by a still-hijacked Peeta. Not too long after, Boggs and Mitchell are also blown up by pods—the latter by accident on Peeta's part—and the group escapes underground.
      • Once the mutts start to attack the group and they're forced to flee, Messalla gets melted by another pod, and Jackson and Leeg 1 stay behind to hold them off so the others can get away.
      • Finally, once the mutts do attack and the remaining eight people attempt to exit the underground to escape them, Finnick, Castor, and Homes don't make it and are torn apart by the mutts (with Katniss witnessing Finnick's death and the latter two dying offscreen), leaving the final count at five: Katniss, Peeta, Gale, Cressida, and Pollux.
  • Dying as Yourself: Before going into the arena in the first book, Peeta mentions that his goal isn't to survive, but to retain his humanity. Katniss doesn't understand him for a bit, but after seeing some of the more heinous things close-up, she begins to feel the same way.
  • Dystopia:
    • Panem's 12 districts are not great places to live.
    • The Dystopia, in a more meta sense. The Hunger Games kicked off a much larger trend of YA Dystopian novels, borrowing from it in various ways. After this point, nearly all Dystopian novels include forced segregation based on industry or personality (see the factions of Divergent, the circles in The Jewel, and the castes of The Selection, to the extent that The Selection is in a dystopian world), and many of them circle around a teenaged girl leading a rebellion. Far fewer of them seem to address philosophy, with more of them analyzing the life of how one or two people survive, see the injustice around them, and decide to act.
  • Early-Bird Cameo: Johanna Mason gets a brief mention in the first book, then appears in the flesh (um), a book later. Delly Cartwright is mentioned in the first part of the first book in passing, but doesn't appear until the middle of the third.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: In-universe example. As revealed in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the first few Hunger Games did not contain many of the elements which later became standard. Rather than spending the time leading up to the Games in the lap of luxury, the tributes were treated as though they were barely human, being transported to the Capitol in cattle wagons, kept shackled and imprisoned in the stables used by the Peacekeepers' horses, though those from the Tenth Games were caged in the zoo instead. The Games themselves took place in the ruins of an arena within the Capitol, not in a specially constructed wilderness. The mentoring system was not introduced until the Tenth Games, but the earliest mentors were students at the Capitol's Academy, not past victors, possibly because at least three districts would have had yet to produce victors at that point. Also, at least in the Tenth Games, several tributes died before the Games officially began.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: More like Earn Your Bittersweet Ending. The uprising destroyed entire Districts and killed countless people, while Katniss lost many friends, Prim, and temporarily her sanity. But Panem turns out to be better under a new president, the Hunger Games is abolished, the Tributes are honored, and everyone is recovering. Katniss and Peeta have two children and live together for over 20 years.
  • Eat the Dog: "No one in the Seam would turn up their nose at a good leg of wild dog."
  • Embarrassing First Name: While the people themselves don't seem to mind, Katniss notes that a lot of District 1's denizens should be embarrassed by their names, the likes of which include Glimmer, Marvel, Cashmere, and Gloss.
    • Doubles as Hypocritical Humor, given District 12 has some bizarre name, such as Peeta the baker. Pita bread? Then there's the likes of Beetee and Wiress in District 3. Plus a tribute named Woof in Catching Fire.
  • Enemy Mine: Temporary alliances are all part of the Hunger Games.
  • Enforced Method Acting: Often used in-universe with Katniss. She's never warned about Peeta's interview strategy so that her reaction will be more genuine, and has to be dropped into the war zone to film her candid reactions for propaganda, since she can't act at all.
  • Establishing Character Moment:
    • The first two things we learn about Katniss are that she loves her sister and that she has no problem drowning kittens.
    • Finnick: Once he actually gets inside the arena, he does land the first kill of the Games, and rather nonchalantly at that: he just tells Katniss to duck and impales a guy. However, he spends most of his time carrying an elderly woman around on his back instead of killing people. His previous scenes, where he all-but tries to seduce Katniss, cross this with Hidden Depths.
    • Gale: Telling Katniss that killing people in the Games can't be much different than hunting animals for food.
    • Haymitch: Appears to be just a drunken, washed-up has-been on Reaping Day, but after Katniss volunteers, he starts openly denouncing the Capitol for its cowardice and barbarism.
      "I like her. Lots of... spunk! More than you! MORE THAN YOU!!"
  • Even Evil Has Standards:
    • As cruel and barbaric as the Hunger Games are, apparently even the Capitol draws the line at cannibalism, as proven when they brought a swift end to a District 6 tribute who started eating the corpses of his fellow Tributes as he tried to avoid starving to death.
    • Coriolanus Snow is not above poisoning his enemies to land on top, killing children, or killing people's entire families to Make an Example of Them. However, he is a man of his word, and firmly does not believe in killing people just For the Evulz; he considers this wasteful and pointless, and only kills for specific reasons. Both of these traits are what allows Katniss to figure out that it was Alma Coin, rather than Snow, who ordered the bombings of Capitol children that ultimately killed her sister Prim; Snow explains why he wouldn't have done this, and then reminds Katniss that they promised not to lie to each other.
  • Everyone Can See It: Between Katniss and Peeta. Also between her and Gale. At least, everyone can see that he has feelings for her. She never develops romantic feelings for him in return. In fact, she's the last one to figure it out.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: The Arena for the second Quarter Quell, where everything from the water to the wildlife to the scent of the flowers was overtly lethal. The only things even safe to eat or drink were the rainwater and whatever was supplied at the Cornucopia.
  • Evil Empire: Quite literally and specifically. The Capitol (metropole/heartland) manipulates the Districts (periphery/provinces) to the benefit of the Capitol and the detriment of the Districts. Now consider the other things they engage in.
  • Evil Gloating: When Clove catches Katniss, she decides to give her something to think about. Followed, as usual, by a Thwarted Coup de Grâce.
  • Evil Mentor: Dr Gaul is a Straw Nihilist who believes that Hobbes Was Right, and over the course of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, she serves as The Corruptor to Coriolanus Snow, eventually getting him to share her worldview and setting him on the path to become the President Evil he is by the main series.
  • Evil Plan: President Snow is concerned with the status quo. Among other things this means: only one victor, keep Districts divided, putting down riots and rebellions, etc.
  • Evil Smells Bad: President Snow smells of blood and cloying roses. It seems symbolic at first, but a reason for it is given in Mockingjay: Snow killed many rivals with poison. He uses the roses to cover up the smell of poison, and his bloody breath is from the mouth sores left by poisoned drinks he shared with his victims after taking less-than-perfect antidotes. He also uses the smell of roses to intimidate his enemies, especially Katniss. The lizard mutts in Mockingjay were specifically given this trait to screw with her head. It's very effective.
  • Excessive Mourning:
    • Katniss' mother, for what is implied to be several years, after her father's death. By the time the series starts, she has moved on, but Katniss never forgives her the whole time she essentially abandoned her and Prim.
    • Katniss herself suffers this after Prim's death. She undergoes a deep depression and never really moves on from it. Peeta has to persuade her for 15 years before she agrees to have their children. Meanwhile, her mother feels that it's too painful to even return to District 12, so she decides to move to District 4.
  • Eye Scream: Discussed a couple times:
    • When Katniss is hunting squirrels and rabbits, she always nails her target in the eye. Ouch. Justified in this case, despite the gruesomeness of it: Traders in the Seam consider this good hunting practice. Animals with weapon marks in their hides aren't worth as much, and puncturing the bowels can contaminate precious meat.
    • Discussed in another instance where the repeated references to this suggested a possible Chekov's Gun scenario where Katniss might shoot a human in the eye during the game. This doesn't appear to actually happen — except possibly with Cato. Katniss describes shooting him in the skull, but given the likelihood of an arrow deflecting off bone, the most surefire way for Katniss to nail him in the skull is … you guessed it.

    F-M 
  • Fallen States of America: The Nations of North America and possibly the rest of the world have been gone for at least 175 years. The United States and its Republic are even noted.
  • False Flag Operation: A hovercraft with Capitol markings bombs Snow's mansion, killing Capitol hostages and several paramedics from District 13 including Prim Everdeen. This loses Snow the last bit of support he still had in the Capitol. But as Snow later tells Katniss, he does not kill if he has nothing to gain by it, the rebellion was controlling the area around the mansion at the time, and the hovercraft did not attempt to evacuate Snow. This makes Katniss realize that the attack was orchestrated by Alma Coin.
  • Famed In-Story: Happens to Katniss and Peeta, same as with all victors.
  • Family Extermination: President Snow threatens Katniss Everdeen of murdering lots of her relatives if she doesn't really sell her pretended couple with Peta Mellark.
  • Family Eye Resemblance: Prim has her mother's eyes, Katniss has her father's. The children of Katniss and Peeta also apply to this trope.
  • Family of Choice: Katniss, Peeta and Haymitch for each other (the films also include Effie to a degree). Katniss still has her mother and sister until the third book where her sister dies and her mother moves away and Peeta's family is still around until the end of book two but all of Haymitch's loved ones were killed by the Capitol after the second Quarter Quell. The three of them become very close and at one point in the second book Katniss flat-out calls Haymitch a family member. For Haymitch, Katniss and Peeta seem to be the children he never had. By the end of the series Katniss and Peeta are married with two small children and Haymitch presumably fills the role of grandfather, since both Katniss' and Peeta's fathers are dead.
  • Family-Unfriendly Death: The books are ripe with this. Not surprising considering how many children have died in Panem for entertainment over the past 75 years. How about being caught in a net and speared by a trident courtesy of a fourteen year-old? Or having an axe essentially boomeranged into your head? Or having a nest of vicious, highly venomous genetically engineered wasps dropped on you while you were sleeping? This happening with the whole world watching you doesn't make it better.
  • Fantastic Drug: "Morphling," an addictive drug that is obviously a reference to morphine, and likely some sort of hybrid, given the setting.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Panem is a futuristic, sci-fi version of the Roman Empire. The country's name is an adoption of Rome's "Bread and Circuses" motto. The Capitol is an incredibly authoritarian superpower that brutally reigns over conquered territories to feed the decadent desires of its own citizens. The gladiatorial parallels with the Hunger Games are obvious, of course. Parties at the Capitol feature guests who induce vomiting so that they can consume more food, which is popularly thought to have been common at Roman banquets. The Capitol residents almost all have Roman first names. As a bit of extra bonus, the lottery slips that entitle the residents of the districts to free food (at the cost of increasing their chances of being reaped) are called Tesserae. In Ancient Rome, the Tesserae Frumentariae are tokens handed out to citizens of Rome which can be exchanged for free grain. In the districts, bread and circuses come in a single package.
  • Fascist, but Inefficient: Panem has been called one of the worst-conceived totalitarian regimes in fiction. The people of the Capitol respond to rebellion by forcing their districts effectively to murder their own children and then broadcasting the result on TV, thus all but ensuring a future rebellion. Each district is consigned to exactly one industry, regardless of what industries its resources and population could actually support. For instance, District 4 supplies fish, despite corresponding to California and Oregon, two of the richest, most resource-blessed regions of the current United States. What happens if the fish disappear for a year? Does the entire country go without fish? When the Capitol destroys District 12, they cut off their own energy supply. The Capitol appears to exist solely to rub its superiority and decadence in the faces of its population. It doesn't perform any obvious political function other than acting as the leader's entourage. District 2 supplies soldiers, District 3 technology. In any sane regime, totalitarian or not, they would be in charge.
  • Feed the Mole: During the first revolt of the districts, once the rebels realized the jabberjays were being used as espionage tools, they started feeding them lies to deceive the Capitol.
  • A Fête Worse than Death: The Capitol requires the districts to treat the games as a festival. The place where the tributes obtain their weapons — and that is usually the site of the last, most vicious fights — is shaped like a cornucopia.
  • Fire-Forged Friends: Katniss and Johanna hate each other for pretty much all of Catching Fire, come dangerously close to killing each other multiple times, and their alliance is full-on Teeth-Clenched Teamwork for both of them. Come Mockingjay, they begin to understand each other more and more, joke about killing each other in a way that's almost affectionate, train together and motivate each other to get back into shape for combat, and even become roommates.
  • First Boy Wins: Subverted. Peeta is the first boy chronologically speaking, which should cast him as Unlucky Childhood Admirer, but he is introduced within the story after Gale.
  • First Kiss: Katniss has hers with Peeta in the arena. She notes that it probably should be a significant moment, but since it's a stunt she pulls on live television to try and save both their lives, all she feels is that his lips are very warm, because he has a fever.
  • First Person Snarker: The book is all told from Katniss' perspective, and sometimes she can't hide her disdain for certain things.
  • Flames of Love: District 12 has a wedding tradition where the newly-weds build a fire and toast bread together. Peeta admits that the tradition is old-fashioned, but nobody feels married until after the toasting.
  • Flashback Nightmare: Used on a few occasions, and Katniss makes reference to having them many times before the beginning of Games about her father's death.
  • Flaw Exploitation: Katniss exploits the Capitol's need for a victor to get herself and Peeta both out of the Games.
  • Floral Theme Naming: Several characters are named after flowers, plants, or agriculture, with the sisters, Katniss and Primrose the most central ones (Katniss is a partially-edible water plant, primroses are pretty flowers). In addition, there is Gale Hawthorne, Rue, and Thresh.
  • Florence Nightingale Effect: Given Peeta injures his leg badly in the arena and Katniss decides to care for him, a romance evolves, if only for the show.
  • Flower Motifs:
    • Peeta is, to Katniss, strongly associated with dandelions.
    • President Snow reeks of roses, and sends messages to Katniss is the form of snow-white roses.
    • Katniss herself is named for the flower Sagittaria, or arrowhead, but nicknamed for a plant beloved by cats. Prim's cat Buttercup clearly represents her, but they don't even like each other.
    • Evening primrose for Prim, albeit mostly after her death.
    • Buttercup is named for a flower that resembles both katniss and evening primrose.
    • Rue is also named for a yellow flower, just like Prim and Buttercup.
  • Food Porn: Early on, Katniss describes everything she eats in detail, which makes sense considering she spent a good portion of her life on the edge of starving to death, to the point that she'd boil a mint leaf in water just to stop feeling so hungry. It gets elevated when she goes to the Capitol, that has all sorts of delicious food given its flamboyancy and wealth.
  • Forced to Watch: The Hunger Games are a nation-wide version of this for the districts. Each one is made to watch, on television, as two of their adolescent citizens engage in a weeks-long fight to the death with 22 other kids until only one is left alive. Katniss sums up the Capitol's message herself:
    "Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there's nothing you can do."
  • Foreshadowing: In the first book, Katniss mentions she first met the avox in the train while in the forest with Gale. She ponders where the Avox could have been headed since there’s nothing beyond the forest of District 12… only to find out to in the second book that there is. District 13, previously believed to be destroyed, had survived the first war.
    • "The Head Peacekeeper loved wild turkey." So Gale later goes to his door with one, only to discover that the Head had been replaced.
    • Rue first comes to Katniss and Peeta's attention in training when they're practicing throwing spears. A spear is later what kills her.
    • The first time Gale appears he's carrying a loaf of bread speared on an arrow, foreshadowing who Katniss will end up with.
    • During the Quarter Quell, Katniss has a dream that foreshadows the epilogue.
    • District 12's wedding ritual. Katniss describes it in her narration when thinking about how her engagement to Peeta and how different a Capitol wedding will be. Later, at the interviews for the Quell, Peeta claims that he and Katniss already got married in secret in 12 to garner sympathy from the audience, and describes this ritual to them.
  • Freudian Slip: After Rue is fatally injured by the District 1 Career, in a panic, Katniss refers to her as 'Prim' in her narration, though it's not really a secret that Rue has been a surrogate Prim in Katniss' eyes before that. And reversed in a later book Katniss sees Prim after Rue's death and calls Prim 'Rue' in the narration.
  • From Roommates to Romance: In the end Peeta appears to move in with Katniss shortly after returning to Twelve, sleeping beside her to help comfort her when she has a nightmare. This time around, though, it eventually leads to sex, marriage and babies.
  • Gallows Humor: Katniss and some of the other Hunger Game tributes/victors learn to have a very droll outlook on their Crapsack World. Finnick takes it somewhat literally in Catching Fire by tying a noose and pretending to hang himself as a joke.
  • Gender Flip: Katniss is the Action Girl and is proficient at hunting with a bow and arrow. Peeta bakes and paints, and is more emotional of the two. They're an inversion of Manly Men Can Hunt and Feminine Women Can Cook, respectively.
  • Generation Xerox: Katniss looks like Mr. Everdeen, has inherited his hunting abilities, singing voice and, like him, will marry someone from the town. She also comes to find that, like her mother, she quickly falls into severe, inconsolable emotional distress when her loved ones die or are in grave danger. Prim looks like Mrs. Everdeen and has inherited her passion for healing. Also, Mrs. Everdeen was close friends with Katniss' friend Madge's mother as a teenager, and Peeta's father had a crush on Mrs. Everdeen when they were younger.
  • Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: More literally than usual. Genetically engineered beasties are the Capitol's favored weapon of war, or at least are coequal with troops and air power. Proper nukes are still around, though.
  • Genghis Gambit: In order to rally the people in the Capitol on her side and end things early, Coin blows up a bunch of children Snow gathered as human shields and makes it look like Snow is responsible. It works.
  • Genocide Survivor: The Capitol destroys District 12 in retaliation for Katniss' actions, killing most of the population. Among the survivors are Katniss herself, her mother and sister, Peeta, Gale, Haymitch, and a minor character named Delly. They and the other survivors all eventually go to District 13.
  • Gilded Cage:
    • The Tributes' training area. Luxurious quarters, beautiful clothes, five star cuisine and of course, a top-notch training facility to prepare you for your fight to the death. Simply divine.
    • It's implied that the 'five-star' housing of the victors is also like this. Once they've won the game, they're celebrities around Panem and are live in a posh (by their standards) home in a special section of town. However, the Capitol keeps a close eye on them, and they're expected to serve as a mentor to future Tributes.
    • The wealthier districts have better living conditions but more brutal and fanatical Peacekeepers. On the other hand, District 12 is one of the poorest districts, but the authorities are far more willing to turn a blind eye to things like poaching and black market trading, or at least until they get replaced by new troops during Catching Fire.
    • We come to see as the series progresses that The Capitol is not the Utopia Katniss thought it was. Seneca Crane was executed for simply failing at his job. In Catching Fire, Effie's frightened comment – "That sort of thinking... it's forbidden, Peeta. Absolutely." – implies a Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque society where their lives are physically comfortable, but people live in fear because thought, word, and deed are policed by the State, and free-thinkers are punished in terrible ways.
  • Gladiator Revolt: The series, especially the third book, could be seen as a post-apocalyptic version of this, with Katniss and other Hunger Games winners becoming major figures in the rebellion.
  • Good Is Not Dumb: Peeta is kind and patient and totally kills people in the arena, including going back to finish off a wounded opponent while he was in the Career pack. Besides being three steps ahead when it comes to manipulating the on-camera narrative.
  • Gotta Kill Them All: Throughout The Hunger Games, Katniss quite literally counts the number of remaining contestants on her fingers and toes, and in both the first and second books rationalizes that if no one else kills them, she will have to. Although she only personally kills two or three in the end.
  • The Government: The setting's government, based in the Capitol, is authoritarian and very sinister.
  • G-Rated Sex: At the end of Mockingjay, there's a passage about Katniss and Peeta kissing and how it makes her feel, then there's an ambiguous phrasing about "after" that could mean after the kissing or after sex.
  • Great Offscreen War: One or two of them – the civilizational collapse that led to the founding of Panem (we're never sure just what it was or if a war was involved), and the more-recent uprising (~75 years before the books take place) when the Districts rose up against the Capitol and lost. Most of the fighting in the revolution is also off-screen, up until Katniss gets directly involved in District 2. Even then, the majority of the rebellion is off-screen, with the individual Districts' revolts (sans Two and Eight) and even the final capture of Snow being done away from Katniss and therefore the reader. It helps to emphasize the fact that Katniss is only a tool in the war, not a soldier and certainly not a major player.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: Gale tries damned hard not to like Peeta, jealous of the romance he presents with Katniss. And also briefly takes a dislike to Finnick when he thinks he has designs on Katniss too.
  • Grouped for Your Convenience: Each person in Panem is born into 1 of 12 districts. When citizens are between the ages of 12 and 18, they are pitted against each other in the annual Hunger Games.
  • Guys Smash, Girls Shoot:
    • In the first book: Clove uses throwing knives, Glimmer and Katniss use a bow, and Rue uses a slingshot, while Cato uses a sword, Marvel uses a spear, Thresh uses brute force, and Peeta uses a combat knife and is noted to be strong enough that he could just use brute force as well.
    • Averted with Johanna, who uses an axe, and District 13, where soldiers of all genders rely on guns.
  • Happily Ever After: Katniss and Peeta, who despite all the trauma they go through end up falling in love and having a happy family together decades later. Especially poignant because every other pair of lovers mentioned (both during the story and prior and even during the prequel), even the most genuine, has tragedy befall them because of the evils of the system (whether it be mine accidents, violent deaths or emotional betrayals) - the fact that the two find love symbolically shows that Panem is finally able to turn a new chapter.
  • Happily Married: Mr and Mrs. Everdeen. When he died, she was so grief-stricken that she couldn't look after their children for a long time.
  • Hard Work Hardly Works: The Careers are trained from children to be bloodthirsty killers. But, especially in the 74th Games, it serves them very badly. Despite her training, Glimmer apparently can't make even a half-decent shot with a bow and arrow.
  • Harmful to Minors: Only minors are selected for the standard Hunger Games. The 75th Hunger Game changes the rules by having past victors, most of whom are over the normal age of eligibility, become tributes again.
  • Hate Sink: Katniss and Peeta can't exactly attack the directors of the Games, the Capitol doesn't send its children to die in the Games, and most of the other Tributes are from Districts as oppressed as 12. However, "Career Tributes" from Districts 1, 2 and 4 are frequently volunteers, Child Soldiers have who trained to kill other children since they were able to walk. In addition to their loathsome mindset and superior skills, they always team up to eliminate the weaker Tributes, then gleefully kill each other once everyone else is dead.
  • Hates Rich People:
    • ZigZagged with Katniss. While she starts out disliking the rich of the Capitol from afar, while she and most of District 12 struggle in poverty, her close contact with Effie Trinket and her styling team during the 74th Hunger Games makes her realize many of the Capitol citizens are well-meaning but clueless to the horrors outside their city.
    • Played straight with Gale, whose hatred for the Capitol was always more extreme than Katniss's, and who never got to know any Capitol citizens personally. In Mockingjay, he was willing to bomb innocent Capitol citizens in order to advance the rebel cause, and may have designed the bomb that killed Katniss's sister Prim due to this.
  • Heel–Face Turn: Effie, who starts out as one of the Capitol's seemingly vapid escorts, but gains a soft spot for Katniss and Peeta and eventually defects to the Rebellion for "more personal reasons" than genuine support for the morally grey at best Rebels.
  • Her Heart Will Go On: Peeta tries to invoke this in a More Hero than Thou dispute, wanting to help Katniss survive so she can go back home and be with her family and Gale, whom Peeta believes is the person she's truly in love with. Katniss' internal monologue reveals she'll have none of it.
  • Heroic BSoD: Katniss has several: a minor one in Games after Rue's death, followed by a very brief one when she realizes she's killed for the first time (made more obvious in the film); another at the end of Catching Fire, and two major ones in Mockingjay, one each after she sees Prim die and then kills President Coin.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Two in the first book:
    • Katniss takes Prim's place in the Reaping during Games, expecting to die doing so.
    • Peeta plans on protecting Katniss until the end of the Hunger Games and then allowing her to kill him so she could win.
    • Mags does it twice in Catching Fire, by volunteering for the Quell in Annie's place and leaving to die in a Fog of Doom obstacle because she was slowing down her alliance's escape from it.
  • Hero Secret Service: The rebel-aligned tributes work to break Katniss out of the arena in the Quarter Quell, keeping it a secret from everyone, even Katniss.
  • He Who Fights Monsters: Gale, especially after setting off what is essentially a giant mine explosion in District 2 to win a battle.
  • Hidden Depths: All the sympathetic characters reveal themselves to be more than they at first appeared.
  • High-School Sweethearts: They're not actually in school when they get together but age-wise the trope fits for Katniss and Peeta.
  • History Repeats: Several between different Hunger Games.
    • Most particularly, the two games that Katniss and Peeta participate in, the 74th games (from the first book) and 75th (from the second book):
      • Katniss kills the male tribute from District 1 (Marvel and Gloss, respectively) with an arrow in direct response to him killing one of her allies (Rue and Wiress, respectively). Also, both of the District 1 tributes die at the hands of Katniss or her allies before either tribute from District 2 dies.
      • The District 2 male (Cato and Brutus) kills the District 11 male (Thresh and Chaff), before he himself is killed by a tribute from District 12 as the final casualty of the Games.
      • Katniss is not interested in alliances with the Careers or anyone who would be seen as a more conventionally desirable choice, and instead is drawn to underdogs and/or selfless people who are also Non Action Guys: Rue (a small twelve-year-old girl) in the first book, and Mags (a frail 80-year-old woman), Beetee, and Wiress (both very intelligent but rather eccentric and nerdy) in the second book.
      • On a more morbid note: in both Games, both tributes from District 9 die at the beginning in the Cornucopia bloodbath, as does the District 10 female, while the male from 10 survives at first but dies offscreen later from unknown causes.
    • Also between the ones Katniss participates in and the 50th Games, the one that Haymitch won:
      • In each case, the District 12 tribute who would become the winner disfigures the girl from District 1 while trying to kill her, and ends up taking advantage of a hazard of the arena to finish her off (a tracker jacker nest for Katniss, the force field around the arena for Haymitch).
      • Said District 12 tribute also forms an alliance with a girl tribute once the numbers start to dwindle (Rue for Katniss, Maysilee for Haymitch), and are able to do better for a while as a result. However, said girl is fatally Impaled with Extreme Prejudice while they're separated, and Katniss/Haymitch is helpless to save her, only able to stay by her side to comfort her as she dies.
      • The climax of both Quarter Quells involves taking advantage of the arena's forcefield in some way. Haymitch uses its Boomerang Comeback properties to trick the District 1 girl into getting killed by her own thrown axe, and Katniss uses the lightning strike to pierce the forcefield with an electrified arrow that destroys it and allows her and her allies to break out of the arena.
      • Both Katniss and Haymitch showed up Gamemakers in the way that they won their games: Haymitch with the aforementioned forcefield, and Katniss with the berries and forcing them to crown two victors. Subsequently, Haymitch's mother, younger brother, and Love Interest were murdered on Snow's orders, and Snow likewise threatens to have Katniss's own mother, younger sister, and best friend/potential Love Interest killed if she steps out of line in any way.
    • This is the case with Quarter Quells in general in that they have a particularly nasty set of "special rules" in terms of how tributes are chosen, instead of the standard "draw one name each from a bowl of girls' names and boys' names for each district". In the first Quell (the 25th games), the population of each district had to vote on the kids they were sending off to most likely die; in the second Quell (the 50th games, which Haymitch won), the number of tributes were doubled, meaning that each district was sending four kids (two boys and two girls) instead of two to die; and in the third Quell (the 75th, which takes place during Catching Fire), tributes are reaped from the surviving pool of victors.
  • Holding Hands: Most notably during the interviews for the Quarter Quell.
  • Hollywood Genetics: Katniss has the same typical Seam traits as her father - dark hair, grey eyes, olive skin. Her sister Prim, however, inherited their mother's merchant look with blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin. One might wonder how that was possible when it's strongly implied that townfolks and people in the Seam haven't interbred for generations. It's possible that their father carried those genes too but it's highly improbable.
  • Hollywood Healing: Due to the advanced medicine available in the Capitol, and the need to keep the tributes looking nice, most injuries sustained by the characters are healed completely. Aversions include Chaff's hand and Peeta's leg, though he gets a prosthetic leg that is rarely referred to again. In the end, Katniss and Peeta are both covered in skin grafts and burns that the District 13 doctors gave only basic treatment for.
  • Hollywood Psych:
    • Though Haymitch is an alcoholic, in the first book he very conveniently decides to stay sober only when he needs to be on the condition that Peeta and Katniss not interfere with his drinking when he feels like it. Real alcoholism isn't quite that convenient. Bit better in later books when we see him at least having difficulty sobering up. Many real-life alcoholics do go through periods of sobriety in-between benders so Haymitch's sobriety in itself is not such a stretch. The fact that it happens from one day to the next, on the other hand...
    • Catching Fire describes Annie as hysterical when she's reaped for the 75th games, without going into any sort of detail. This is enough to have Katniss think she's completely insane, though Katniss has never really understood overly emotional people. Later in Mockingjay, we meet Annie and Katniss seems to think she's just a little quirky, though she occasionally covers her ears with her hands for no apparent reason. In real life, a person covering their ears that way would imply that they are hearing things that aren't there. Being that this isn't a one off (she does it "occasionally") it's a pretty big alarm bell for a psychotic disorder not otherwise specified. So apparently Katniss was right the first time, though at the point in Mockingjay when Katniss actually meets Annie, she herself has become even more psychologically damaged, either allowing her to relate better to Annie's "quirks", or deciding that she has no right to judge. This change in opinion also happens after her friendship with Finnick develops, whereas before she'd never met him. Her defense of and possible friendship towards Annie might be a result of that, seeing her more the way Finnick sees her rather than how the majority might.
    • Hijacking. The way Tracker Jacker venom works in the first book is somewhat questionable, but in Mockingjay it really doesn't make sense as a conditioning tool. For one, the brain really doesn't work that way. Conditioning is an unconscious mechanism that can't be manipulated into a deliberate response the way the book describes. This is why the CIA stopped trying to do this in the first place. For another, the part of the brain that controls fear is so separate from your memory that it's unlikely that a drug designed to affect the fear part of your brain would have any affect on memory whatsoever.
  • Hot Wings: One of the outfits Cinna designs for Katniss burns away its outer layer when she twirls, leaving a smoking mockingjay costume, a symbol of rebellion. President Snow is not amused.
  • Hufflepuff House: Most of the Districts of Panem are pretty extraneous and we learn little about them. The district that stands out the most for standing out the least would have to be District 9. (No, not that District 9) Both its tributes die in the initial bloodbath at the Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth Hunger Games, it has only two named characters, and the only character who does anything of even minor significance is the boy who fights Katniss for the backpack in the Seventy-fourth Games and gets killed by Clove in the process. All we hear about the district itself is that they grow grain — nothing about its sympathies or role in uprisings against the Capitol. Their generic status continues in the prequel, where both of their tributes die early in the Tenth Hunger Games. It's not known how their tributes fared in the other seventy-two Games, other than that at least two of them won.
  • Human Resources: Discussed. Near the end of the first book, Katniss realizes that Muttations, the genetically engineered monsters that attack the surviving tributes, were somehow created from the dead tributes. In the book, the Muttations have the same hair color and eyes as the tributes they were created from. In the movie, the correspondence is much subtler. They all look like brown dog-wolves, but their CGI facial expressions are based on the actors who played the tributes. She later reflects that the Muttations probably didn't actually contain any parts of the dead tributes - they were just made to look like them for the additional psychological terror.
  • Human Sacrifice: Tributes are sacrificed by the Capitol to remember the betrayal of District 13.
  • Hungry Jungle: A staple for the arenas at the Hunger Games; most notably, a good chunk of the 75th Hunger Games' arena takes the form of one.
  • Hypocrite: Despite supposedly being the product of environmental distasters that reduced the human population to less than a million, they still burn coal for heating. Why they can't just power their heaters electrically from District 5 is anyone's guess, since 5 at least uses dams, and who knows what else. Admittedly District 13 was developing nuclear energy, but it seems the Capitol just gave up on that after 13 cut itself off from them.
  • Icon of Rebellion: The mockingjay pin and, by extension, any sort of image of a mockingjay, become symbols of resistance among the Districts. Multiple characters show images of a mockingjay to show that they support the rebellion. Katniss herself plays into this in her guise as "The Mockingjay," rallying the districts while wearing an outfit meant to evoke it and going by the moniker.
  • Idealist vs. Pragmatist: Katniss frequently opposes some of the most ruthless traps devised by Gale such as one targeting medics caring for wounded soldiers or one threatening the targets' children, along with initiatives such as burying alive the Nut in District 2, even though there were innocent civilians inside. This attitude is best shown by the following exchange:
    Katniss: I guess there isn't a rule book for what might be unacceptable to do to another human being.
    Gale: Sure there is. Beetee and I have been following the same rule book President Snow used when he hijacked Peeta.
  • Idiot Ball: Katniss and Peeta toss this back and forth in the first book: Katniss seems to be very bad at reading people. Cinna, Haymitch and Effie all tell Katniss that her high score after firing an arrow at the Gamemasters is a good thing, no one seems to notice the big ol' bullseye on her back that this stunt grants her. In Catching Fire, when Plutarch goes out of his way to show her his fancy pocket watch, and makes some rather pointed statements regarding it and time in general. It doesn't occur to her until much later that he was trying to drop her a hint about something.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: A District 6 tribute from a past Games named Titus went insane and ate the bodies of the tributes he killed.
  • Important Haircut: Katniss having her body hair waxed throughout the series. District 12 has no fashion to speak of, and the citizens have a lot more important things to concern themselves with, so Katniss — and by implication, the other women of 12 — don't shave their body hair(legs, underarms) and think nothing of it. Her stylists stripping her bare is just another example of the Capitol changing who she is — to the point where by Catching Fire, she considers her unshaven legs a sign of her freedom, and is more than a bit sore to lose them.
  • Impoverished Patrician: The Snow family was a noted Capitol family and extremely rich before the Dark Days killed their patriarch and cut them off from the source of their wealth, the nuclear munitions empire they ran in District 13. In the ten years after the war, even though they managed to retain their highborn status, they're barely scraping for food and struggled to pay rent. It only ended when Coriolanus Snow accepted to be designated heir by the ultra-rich Plinth family after he ratted out their only child as a rebel sympathizer.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: Katniss is repeatedly shown hitting small game directly in the eye, seemingly with ease.
  • Incendiary Exponent: An In-Universe Enforced Trope. The Capitol stylists placed in charge of the District Twelve tributes looks think they'll be more appealing to the audience with a fire theme and design their costumes around one, to the point that the costumes Katniss and Peeta have to wear for the tribute parade include synthetic fire so it appears they're burning.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink:
    • Haymitch is pretty much constantly in this state as The Alcoholic; having his family and lover murdered by the Capitol and being forced to mentor two teenagers who die horribly every year (at least until Katniss and Peeta come along) probably has a lot to do with it. That said, he gets especially drunk whenever something particularly terrible happens, like learning the rules for the Third Quarter Quell.
    • Katniss also has this reaction after learning that she'll have to go back to the arena for the Quarter Quell, coming to Haymitch's house to drink with him.
  • Informed Ability: Peeta is mentioned as being good with a knife and Katniss makes a point of giving him one during the Quarter Quell, yet he's more proficient at being The Load.
  • Informed Kindness: Katniss comments how Ceasar is actually good at his job and wants the best for the contestants. However, this is his job and he isn't shown having any particular response to any of the characters, which leaves it ambiguous if any of his "kindness" is remotely sincere, or just a good front for the cameras. However, justified by the fact that Katniss has watched the Games since she was a child and so may just be carrying over her enjoyment of watching him on television.
  • Inelegant Blubbering: During Katniss' breakdown after the announcement of the Quarter Quell, most notably. Even more so when she meets Buttercup in district 12 which makes Katniss realize Prim's death.
  • Inevitable Mutual Betrayal: Every alliance in the hunger games, except Katniss and Peeta. Team ups make both tributes more likely to survive, but in the end one of them must kill the other if they are the last.
  • Inevitably Broken Rule: Immediately after the 'two victors can win' rule is revoked and the 'one victor only' rule is restored, Katniss and Peeta still manage to get around the restored rule by threatening a Tag Team Suicide. Katniss, as the instigator, spends a majority of the next two books dealing of the consequences of her actions, as President Snow is angry that she broke the rules and showed the Capitol up, and also the fact that her actions helped to spark a nationwide rebellion.
  • Instant Taste Addiction: Katniss Everdeen immediately took a liking for lamb stew with dried plums, to the point it was sent to her in the arena.
  • In-Universe Factoid Failure: Effie Trinket insists "Well, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls." That should be diamonds.
  • It Began with a Twist of Fate: Katniss literally volunteers to be thrown into the life-or-death fight to the finish battle that is the Hunger Games. The twist is that she did so to keep her little sister out of the ring. Comes full circle when the events that her participation in the Games set in motion eventually lead to her sister's death.
  • It Gets Easier: Referenced several times in the first book, with Katniss several times rationalizing that killing people isn't much different than killing animals, to the point where before she actually does so for real she begins actively planning how to kill other tributes and, by the third book she's capable of not only planning Snow's death, but cold-bloodedly and without hesitation cuts down an unarmed Capitol citizen whose only apparent crime was opening her door at the wrong time. Peeta's reluctance to change who he is because of the Games is interpreted by Katniss as being a fear of this, too.
  • It Meant Something to Me: Peeta to Katniss at the end of the first book. They had been presenting themselves as in love with each other in order to get Capitol residents invested in their stories and therefore willing to help them survive the Hunger games. Peeta turns out to genuinely be in love.
  • It's Personal:
    • Between Katniss and Snow. Katniss is never a fan of Snow, but at first she has no particular wish to hurt him, just to keep herself and her loved ones alive. However, after Snow destroys her home district, killing almost everyone there, Katniss becomes determined to make him pay for it.
    • For his part, Snow claims he is simply trying to protect the country by threatening and harming Katniss and the people around her, but Katniss suspects he has some personal investment in it. The prequel shows she is correct, that Snow has a personal disdain for many things Katniss is associated with and stands for, including (but not limited to) the districts, District 12 in particular, rebels, and music. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes reveals he was a mentor to a vocally-talented tribute from District 12 during the 10th Hunger Games and helped her win. He even fell in love with her, and vice versa. However, a series of events caused their relationship to sour suddenly, as she discovered what kind of person he really is, and him attempting to murder her in turn. The possibility that she was Katniss' ancestor just adds to the grudge, because after they drifted apart Snow had worked all his life to forget that the girl used to be a part of his life.
    • Between Katniss and Coin after Katniss realizes that the latter is the one truly responsible for Prim's death rather than Snow. It doesn't help that she also picks up that Coin will be at least as bad of a dictator as Snow is. It ultimately results in her decision to kill Coin instead of Snow at what's supposed to be the latter's execution.
  • It Was a Gift: Katniss' Mockingjay pin is given to her by Madge as a gift to remind her of home while she's in the arena. This helps Katniss realize that Madge has been her friend and marks the pin, which will become an In-Universe sign of rebellion and unity among districts, as significant early on.
  • I "Uh" You, Too: Averted in Catching Fire when Gale tells Katniss that he loves her. Katniss, who is still confused about her feelings for Peeta, does the Han Solo thing and tells him "I know." Also averted in Real Life by the characters actors:
    Jennifer Lawrence: Liam is clearly in love with me.
    Liam Hemsworth: Very much so, we already know that.
  • I Was Quite a Looker: Several characters are noted by others to have once been more attractive:
    • When watching the video of his Game, Katniss is surprised at how handsome Haymitch used to be.
    • And while her mother is implied to still be quite attractive, Katniss is also surprised by how beautiful she was as a teenager.
    • Also implied a bit when Katniss' prep team sees her for the first time after her burn injury.
  • I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: Snow's favorite tactic. The entire premise of the Games itself was a way to punish the rebels by making their children kill each other, and to remind them that the Capitol can and will do things like this if they rebel again. Snow directly threatens Gale and indirectly threatens the rest of Katniss' loved ones if she doesn't convince all of Panem (including Snow himself) that she's madly in love with Peeta. And Snow also uses the threat against loved ones to force Victors into prostitution.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Several characters fall under this. Gale can be rather harsh at times, but he has a soft spot for Katniss and her family. He even gets along with Peeta a couple times. Effie seems a shallow Capitol citizen, but she's more of a Stepford Smiler that really seems to care about Katniss and Peeta as well.
  • Just Friends: Katniss and Gale. They're best friends, and Katniss initially believes that's all they are, but later realizes he's in love with her. Though she's confused about her feelings for him—she knows that she loves him, but just doesn't know if it's romantic love or not—and kisses him a few times, she ultimately never feels true desire for him at any point, and by the end of the series, even their friendship is shattered completely.
  • Justified Criminal: Katniss, Gale, and the few others who illegally hunt since it's one of their few methods of survival.
  • Karmic Death: Marvel got an arrow in his neck from Katniss as revenge for killing Rue.
  • Kid Hero All Grown-Up: All of the former tributes qualify who are now mentors qualify, such as Finnick and Johanna, but it's true for Haymitch—the most prominent mentor, who is 40 at the start of the series—in particular.
  • Killed Off for Real: Due to the very nature of its premise this happens to a lot of characters in the series. After all, 24 tributes enter the arena and only one can come out alive. Not that characters who aren't tributes are safe. Outside-the-arena deaths include Cinna, Primrose and Peeta's entire family.
  • Killed Offscreen: Given the nature of the Hunger Games being a 24 person deathmatch, this is basically inevitable. The most notable example in the 74th Hunger Games is Thresh, while it happens to several named characters in the Quarter Quell.
    • We do see Cinna beaten and dragged off in Catching Fire, but it isn't until Mockingjay that we find out that he was killed during interrogation.
    • Katniss, and by extension the reader, doesn't find out about Portia's death until Plutarch informs her of it the next day.
    • Darius and Lavinia's deaths during interrogation are revealed by Peeta weeks after they happen.
  • Kill the Cutie: The series loves this. Cuties killed include Rue, Cinna and eventually Prim.
  • Killer Rabbit: Katniss watches a tape of an earlier Hunger Games featuring beautiful flowers (all poisonous) and cute critters (all deadly).
  • Lap Pillow: Reversed between Katniss and Peeta, and once each between Katniss/Finnick and Katniss/Gale.
  • Last Request: The dying Rue asks Katniss to sing for her. Despite not singing for years, Katniss comes through.
  • Leave Him to Me!: Katniss insists on being the one to kill Snow. She ultimately decides to off Coin instead.
  • Legend Fades to Myth: Zig-zagged. Technology in the Capitol, After the End, far exceeds what we're capable of now, but the lower Districts are like third world countries. Some Capitolites are well-educated enough to know about the history of the world Before the Dark Times, but Katniss only has a very vague idea of the Dark Days and the world before Panem.
  • Leitmotif: Rue's four-note song.
  • Lewd Lust, Chaste Sex: In Catching Fire Katniss has a long make-out session with Peeta, described in great detail. When the two of them eventually have sex it's described with such little detail that it can be argued they didn't even have sex at all (and in the movie it turned into hand holding and cuddling).
  • Lighter and Softer: The arena for the 50th Hunger Games (the Second Quarter Quell): The Cornucipia sitting in the midst of a sweet-smelling green meadow, and the sky was azure blue, with fluffy, billowing white clouds. There was a snowy mountain and a forest, squirrels and butterflies and flowers and pinky birds. And even food growing. However, it was actually a Death World: carnivorous squirrels, butterflies with stings, killer birds, poisonous flowers, the mountain was a volcano.
  • The Lightfooted: Rue is described as a bird on her toes about to take flight. She's also lightweight and able to quickly jump and climb around through the treetops.
    [Rue] stands tilted up on her toes with her arms slightly extended to her sides, as if ready to take wing at the slightest sound. It's impossible not to think of a bird.
  • The Load: Peeta is a surprisingly competent survivor in the Games, but after the rules are changed to make Katniss seek him out and ally with him, by the time she finds him he's already so badly injured and sick that he's completely helpless and for most of the rest of the Games Katniss is mainly focused on trying to keep him alive.
  • Loophole Abuse: President Snow's favorite tactic. After he declared it illegal to have anything to do with the mockingjay symbol, he considers it treason for the injured at a District 8 hospital to have received an impromptu visit from Katniss.
  • Lottery of Doom: The reaping, which selects tributes for the Hunger Games. The only exception is during the 25th Hunger Games (the first Quarter Quell), where tributes are selected by voting. In Catching Fire it takes on a ridiculous tone as the contestants are already known in many cases, i.e. Katniss as she's the only female former victor from District 12.
  • Love at First Note: Peeta falls in love with Katniss when he first hears her sing.
  • Love Hurts: Often literally.
    • Gale is in love with his best friend Katniss, and has to watch on live television for both of her Games and the Victory Tour as she appears to be love with and repeatedly kisses another guy. And at the end of the series, upon discovering he might have inadvertently had a hand in her sister's death, loses Katniss's love and friendship forever.
    • Conversely for Peeta, he's had a crush on Katniss since they were little kids. Throughout their first Games, it seems like he's finally won her over and she reciprocates his feelings, only to find out at the end that she was apparently faking it the whole time. Then he comes to believe that she's actually in love with Gale and he can't compete with that, so tries to die in the Quarter Quell so she can live and be with him. And then he's captured by the Capitol and brainwashed to hate her, which takes him a while to recover from.
    • Katniss is confused by her feelings for Gale and Peeta, loving them both but not sure if it's romantic or not, and repeatedly has to deal with threats to their lives and almost losing them. And once she finally realizes she reciprocates Peeta's love and gets him back, discovers his aforementioned brainwashing when he tries to kill her, and truly believes she's lost him forever, to the point where she almost starts hating him for not loving her anymore.
    • Finnick, ever since winning his games, was forced to become a Sex Slave under threat to his family and later his love, Annie, if he refused. Annie is later captured by the Capitol in Mockingjay, and Finnick can barely function out of worry for her. They're finally reunited and get married, but then barely have a chance to be happy together before Finnick dies.
  • Love Makes You Crazy: Katniss tries to convince the citizens of Panem she was so crazy with love for Peeta that she can't be held responsible for her actions. To say nothing of Peeta's actions to begin with.
  • Love Triangle: Peeta and Gale are both in love with Katniss, who is fond of both but has difficulty sorting out her genuine feelings while dealing with constant threats to the survival of all three and their loved ones, made more complicated by the expectations various people place on her regarding who they think she will or should be with. By the end of the series, she parts ways with Gale for good, and ends up marrying and having Babies Ever After with Peeta.
  • The Ludovico Technique: Hijacking is a form of this. It involves simultaneous exposure to delirium-inducing venom and specific stimuli. In the victim's delirious mind, the stimuli come to be associated with pain and fear and from the results we see in Peeta Mellark, if the stimuli are related to a certain person then hijacking can produce a homicidal hatred of that person in the victim.
  • Madness Mantra:
    • Wiress repeatedly says, "Tick, tock" during the Quarter Quell. No one initially understands what she's referring to.
    • In "Mockingjay", Katniss deals with her PTSD using the following mantra:
      My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. There is no District 12. I am the Mockingjay. I brought down the Capitol. President Snow hates me. He killed my sister. Now I will kill him. And then the Hunger Games will be over…
  • Make It Look Like an Accident: President Snow uses the threat of killing the victors' families and loved ones like this to keep them in line and to make them do as he says. This is what happened to Haymitch's family and girlfriend after his Games, and it's implied to have happened to everyone Johanna loved. However, averted with Katniss herself; Snow is forced to admit that while he could very easily have her killed, she's become so popular in the Capitol that people would be suspicious or outright hostile in response.
  • Makeover Fairy: The stylists and prep teams who work with the tributes are this. Cinna subverts the trope by being more understated and politically aware than the typical Makeover Fairy.
  • Man on Fire: Katniss gets lit on fire five times: thrice in the name of fashion and twice in combat situations. There is a reason they call her The Girl Who Was On Fire. Peeta also gets singed at the very end, when he was presumably following Katniss.
  • Marriage of Convenience: Katniss and Peeta are sold as a couple in order to gain popularity so that one of them can survive the games. When they both survive, they're expected to marry - they get engaged for this reason but by the time they do marry it's of their own choosing.
    Katniss: Not like this. He wanted it to be real.
  • Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark are often called "The Star Crossed Lovers from District 12" because of their romance while in the Hunger Games, where only one can survive. Katniss is a determined fighter and an excellent archer. Her strategy is to put on a brave face so as to not appear weak. Peeta is more expressive of his emotions as seen in his tear stained face, artistic talent, and public confession of love for Katniss.
  • Meaningful Name: All over the place.
    • "Katniss" is a real plant. Its common name? "Arrowhead". And its scientific name is Sagittaria, which is a transparent reference to the Zodiac sign Sagittarius, a fire sign whose symbol is an archer.
    • "Peeta" the baker sounds like "pita," a type of bread. His last name, Mellark, is a Greek word meaning "cake," which Peeta is adept at frosting.
    • Haymitch sounds like the Yiddish word "haymish", meaning "folksy" or "home-like". Katniss considers him "from home", as he's from not just her District, but her social strata.
    • Effie "Trinket" seems to be trivial and shallow (but Effie is short for Euphemia - well-spoken- belying her skill as a speaker).
    • Cinna was the name of various Roman figures relevant to his character, namely a doomed opponent of Sulla the dictator, one of Julius Caesar's assassins, a poet mistaken for the same and beaten to death by an angry mob, and a conspirator against Augustus.
    • Seneca Crane was executed basically for failing his superior, just like his namesake.
    • One of the meanings of "Rue" is "regret." Her death haunts Katniss, who failed to protect her and those in power probably rue the day she was chosen for the arena.
    • Avox means, in an awkward and incorrect mixture of Greek and Latin, 'without a voice.'
    • "Coriolanus," as in "Coriolanus Snow" refers to a hated Roman who betrayed both sides and died loathed and friendless.
    • Tigris had plastic surgery to look like a human-tiger hybrid. Katniss wonders which came first, the name or the look. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes reveals that the name came first.
    • Pollux and Castor, the twin cameramen from Mockingjay are named for the Gemini of Roman mythology. Like the myth, Castor dies and Pollux is allowed to live — only with some horrible mutilation.
    • Titus and Lavinia are names from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Like their counterparts in the Shakespeare play, Titus was known for cannibalism, and Lavinia had her tongue cut out. Peeta's comments about 'fingers and toes' are unfortunate implications, given what other things happened to Lavinia in the play.
    • Panem is a reference to the Latin phrase "panem et circenses", meaning "bread and circuses", or idiomatically, sustenance and entertainment — the two things you need to give a population to keep them happy.
    • District 1, luxury goods, gives us Marvel, Glimmer, Gloss, and Cashmere.
    • District 3, electronics, has Wiress. And Beetee, which sounds like TV, CD, PC, etc. (Or BD, as in blu-ray disc). For British readers, it invokes BT — British Telecom.
    • District 4, fishing, Finnick Odair and Annie Cresta.
    • Meaningful nickname in this case, but while the District 6 former victors are nicknamed "Morphlings" due to their addiction to morphling drugs, they were also skilled at camouflaging themselves with paint.
    • District 7, lumber, gives us the optimistically-named Blight.
    • District 8, textiles, has Twill, Woof (another word for "weft"), and Bobbin (a cylinder or spindle on which yarn or thread is wound, usually in a sewing machine).
    • District 11, agriculture, has Rue, Thresh, Chaff, and Seeder. Chaff is a double example. Not only does it mean "the husks of grains and grasses that are separated during threshing", but it also means, "worthless matter". Chaff never becomes important to the plot. Seeder is obvious.
    • District 12, coal mining, has Peeta (Peter, meaning "stone") and of course Katniss' nickname; "The Girl Who Was On Fire".
    • The Capitol uses Roman names, in reference to their technological superiority as well as their decadent culture.
    • District 2 is noted for having the closest relationship to the Capitol, and their male tributes also have Roman names: Cato and Brutus. This makes sense considering that District 2 provides most of the Peacekeepers. Had the tributes not gone to the Hunger Games, they would likely have become Peacekeepers and served under and alongside Capitol citizens
    • Clove, the District 2 competitor known for her prowess with knives. "Clove" is past tense for "to cleave", meaning "to split or sever".
    • In Katniss' case it's a nickname, but the drama largely boils down to "The Girl On Fire" against President Snow.
    • Volumnia Gaul. Not only does Gaul sound like "gall" (and refer to a province of the Roman Empire, where France is now) but Volumnia was the name of the historical mother of the historical Coriolanus, foreshadowing that Volumnia Gaul will become a mentor to Snow.
  • Mercy Kill:
    • After Katniss puts Cato out of his misery at the end of the 74th Hunger Games. In Catching Fire, Katniss considers doing this for Peeta and possibly Beetee as well. Gale and Katniss have an understanding in Mockingjay that they would kill each other before letting the other get captured, to avoid torture. Both fail to do it in the end.
    • Out of mercy, Peeta kills the girl that the career pack tormented in the first arena.
  • Metaphorical Marriage: Peeta describes to the citizens of the Capitol how he and Katniss have already tied the knot, opting for a simple home ceremony of 'toasting'. During the toasting, the couple make their first fire together and share a toast over it as they don't want to wait for the big Capitol wedding. He openly states it wasn't an official ceremony as there was no paperwork, but Katniss notes the ceremony's symbolic value, as "no one really feels married in District 12 until after the toasting". Peeta's lying though, because they never had any ceremony.
  • Mind-Control Eyes: Peeta, after being hijacked, is described as having his irises dilate to huge sizes or shrink tiny when he's having episodes of his brainwashing taking over.
  • Mix-and-Match Critters: As a consequence of evolution, and the Capitol's experiments on animals, many of the plants and animals in Panem are hybrids. These include grooslings (goose and grouse), mockingjays (mockingbirds and the jabberjays, themselves muttations), nightlock (nightshade and hemlock), and possibly morphling.
  • Mole in Charge: Plutarch Heavensbee is the Head Gamemaker for the 75th Hunger Games.He's also a key member of La Résistance.
  • Monument of Humiliation and Defeat: The Hunger Games themselves. 74 years after the complete obliteration of a District that tried to play La Résistance to the Panem government, once a year, 23 kids are horrifically slaughtered in an Involuntary Battle to the Death to show everybody who's the boss. The one kid that survives is turned into a celebrity: obviously turning him into a living example of this.
  • Morality Pet:
    • Prim and Rue for Katniss.
    • Buttercup the cat for Prim.
    • Gale has his own younger siblings.
  • The Mourning After: Katniss' mother went into a near-catatonic depression after the death of Katniss' father, leaving Katniss to support the family. Even when the mother becomes functional again, she never really gets over his death. In Mockingjay Katniss goes into this after Prim's death
  • Mr. Fanservice: Gale maintains a surprising harem in the fandom for someone who was a tertiary character for the first book. Also, Finnick, both in-universe, and out.
  • Muscles Are Meaningful: The Careers are a serious threat because their years of proper nutrition and serious training give them more muscle than the Tributes who've starved all their lives, and Katniss notes that Careers almost always win in Games where Tribute-on-Tribute fighting is the deciding factor. She thus makes sure to only ever attack them indirectly, because she knows she's not strong enough to stand up to them in close quarters, as demonstrated when Clove catches her and pins her down easily.
  • Mushroom Samba: An extremely serious version thanks to Tracker Jacker venom.
  • Mystery Meat: Greasy Sae's stew.
    "Once it's in the soup, I call it beef."

    N-Z 
  • Naked First Impression:
    • Cinna met Katniss in this state due to her choosing not to put on her robe.
    • Johanna's first two appearances are naked. Partly because Jo knows it makes the virginal Katniss uncomfortable.
  • Named After First Installment: Series and first book titled for important event repeatedly happening in series.
  • Named After Somebody Famous: People from the Capitol are often named after Ancient Roman historical figures: Cinna, Caesar (Flickerman), Seneca (Crane), Coriolanus (Snow), Claudius (Templesmith), etc.
  • Necessarily Evil: The war-ending plot, seen from two different perspectives. At first, it seems like the Capitol views the deaths of children by their own weaponry as a necessary evil to lure in and kill rebel medics with a second attack, but it turns out that the deaths of the rebel medics were the necessary evil for 13 to frame Snow for the attack with the enemy's equipment and ruin all faith in the Capitol.
  • Neck Snap: Cato to the boy from District 3.
  • Never a Self-Made Woman: Despite her skills and high score before the games, Katniss doesn't have a personality that will stand out to sponsors. Peeta does however, and Haymitch resolves the situation by marketing her as the object of his affections. This is what saves them both in the games.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Katniss' main goal through the second book is to find a way to trick Snow into believing she's in love with Peeta. Unfortunately, she does convince him (and everyone else), and therefore manages to give him the leverage to break her during Mockingjay. And you can say that the entire series is this, as Prim dies anyway, which was what the instigation of the plot of the first book was trying to prevent.
  • Nightmare Sequence: Katniss' dreams are usually a horrifying mishmash of bad memories and fear-gripped imagination, like everyone getting their tongues cut out or all her loved ones screaming in agony.
  • Noble Male, Roguish Male: Peeta Mellark as the noble male, Gale Hawthorne as the roguish male. Peeta is gentle, kind, chivalrous, has a way with words and advocates diplomacy over violence (even, at times, during the actual Hunger Games). Gale is hot blooded and passionate, believes that the ends justify the means, is eager to go out and fight and became his family's main provider at age thirteen when he began poaching (eventually together with Katniss).
  • Nobody Poops: Bears may shit in the woods but Tributes, apparently, do not. It wouldn't be so noticeable, except that Collins takes pains to make everything about the Hunger Games and the horrors of the arena seem dirty and uncomfortable and horrible, so in the first book at least it's a glaring omission. They do, however, urinate.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Given the nature of the beast, it's an inevitability. Even outside the arena, Cinna receives a nasty one as Katniss watches helplessly, never to see him again.
  • Non-Action Big Bad: President Snow never participates in active combat against the Rebellion.
  • Non-Action Guy:
    • A decent number of past and present tributes are not physically intimidating and had no chance of winning through force, so used a different strategy like outsmarting or outlasting their enemies:
      • This is the strategy employed by both Rue and Foxface in the first book, who knew they would never have been able to survive going face-to-face with the Career tributes.
      • Some past winners who won using such a strategy, despite being this trope, include Beetee (who won by electrocuting six other tributes at once), Annie (who out-swam her competition when the arena flooded), Lucy Gray (who out-lasts everyone else while poisoning a few in the background), and presumably Wiress as well, though the details of her win are unknown.
    • Subverted with Peeta, who sometimes seems like this next to his Action Girlfriend Katniss, and it's noted that his best weapon is his words and ability to manipulate people. But he's actually very skilled in wrestling and hand-to-hand combat, and good with a knife.
    • Quite a few of the unnamed tributes in both games from the first two books (as well as prior games) die in the initial bloodbaths at the Cornucopia as a result of being this.
    • Some participants in the Third Quarter Quell in Catching Fire presumably used to be Action Girls or Guys when they were younger, but have gotten so much older and more out of shape now that they've become this.
  • No Name Given:
    • Katniss never learns the names of most of the tributes. She doesn't find out until well after the games are over that the boy from District 1 was named Marvel, even though she was the one who killed him.
    • This applies to Katniss' parents, and to Peeta's entire family. Not to mention Peeta's and Katniss' children, who go unnamed as well. Reportedly Suzanne Collins has stated that their names are Willow and Rye.
  • No Periods, Period: A possible in-universe explanation is that Katniss spends most of the trilogy either barely eating enough to survive or just past the edge of good nutrition; this could easily cause her cycling to be irregular, especially with the stress of the Games and providing for her family. A possible real-world explanation is that Collins (or her publisher) didn't want to deal with Moral Guardians howling over references to a teenage girl having her period in a Young Adult book, and simply chose to ignore it. Another entirely likely explanation could be that the Capitol may inject or otherwise provide the girls with hormones to keep them from menstruating during the games, in the same way that they kept the boys from growing any facial hair.
  • Nothing Is the Same Anymore: As a companion to It Gets Easier, Katniss makes reference several times to how her life has changed since she became a killer and a symbol.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: In the first book, Katniss loathes the Careers, since they were trained their whole life for the Games and tend to be very sadistic and bloodthirsty. However, as time goes on, she realizes that, as teenagers forced into a death match at the behest of a totalitarian government, they're ultimately in the same boat as her. She still hates them and has to kill them to survive, but she can acknowledge that they're victims, too. In particular, no one could fault her for killing the District 1 boy (Marvel), since he killed Rue and would've killed Katniss as well if he got the chance—but she can't stop thinking about how vulnerable he looked in death, or the fact that he has parents and friends back at home who loved him, who probably now justifiably hate her for killing him. None of the tributes are the real enemy, and all of them are at the Capitol's mercy in the end.
  • Not So Stoic: At the climax of the first book, Claudius, the announcer. Booming, "Stop! Stop!" directly to the Tributes was not supposed to be in his vocabulary.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Katniss remarks this was Johanna Mason's strategy in her Games: everyone thought she was a sniveling, useless weakling and overlooked her… until she turned out to be a ruthless killer who ended up the victor. And Haymitch counts — not only is he quite the strategist in the first Games, but he turns out to be a major figure in the underground resistance by the end of Catching Fire. Not bad for someone most people just think of as the town drunk.
  • Official Couple: Katniss and Peeta (at least, as advertised by the Capitol), and Finnick and Annie. In Mockingjay, the former couple end up together for real.
  • Official Kiss: The kiss in the cave in the first book might be considered this, as it is the first time Katniss feels real desire and the first sign that she could genuinely fall in love with the boy in question. However the clearer example is in Catching Fire, specifically Katniss' long make-out session with Peeta on the Quarter Quell beach. It goes on for a long time, they're both half naked and she experiences sexual desire for seemingly the first time. It's basically the point where the love triangle dies.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
    • The implied epic two-day battle between Cato and Thresh. In the rain.
    • Peeta killing Brutus, one of the most intimidating tributes in the Quarter Quell. Not bad for the guy who's usually seen as The Load.
  • One-Product Planet: The districts function as this for the Capitol, each focusing on a specific industry.
    • District 1: Luxury goods.
    • District 2: Masonry, weapons.
    • District 3: Electronics.
    • District 4: Fishing.
    • District 5: Electricity and power.
    • District 6: Transportation.
    • District 7: Lumber.
    • District 8: Textiles.
    • District 9: Grain.
    • District 10: Livestock.
    • District 11: Agriculture.
    • District 12: Coal.
    • District 13: Officially: mining graphite. Actually: nuclear technology.
  • One True Love: Katniss, for Peeta. At least until he is hijacked by the Capitol. However, it is implied that in the process of his recovery he falls in love with Katniss again, this time in a more grounded and realistic way. As for Katniss, she implies at the end of the third book that she believes she would have fallen in love with Peeta even without the Hunger Games bringing them together, stating that "this would have happened anyway" after their implied first sexual experience together. She goes on to love him for the rest of her life.
  • The Ophelia:
    • Katniss near the end of the third book, after killing Coin.
    • Annie is also presented as unstable at the best of times. She even has the Shakespearean character's water motif: District 4 specializes in fishing and she survived her Hunger Games because she could swim the longest after the Gamemakers flooded the arena.
  • Opposites Attract: Katniss and Peeta, at least by the end of Mockingjay. Katniss ultimately decides that she needs Peeta's warmth, optimism, and nurturing nature to balance out her "fire", and that this is why things would not have worked out between her and Gale, because he has too much fire himself.
  • Ornamental Weapon: Subverted with Katniss' bow. After all, just because it's pretty doesn't mean it can't be deadly.
  • Orphanage of Fear: It isn't actually seen, but the District 12 community home is said to be like this.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: The bloodthirsty, upright-walking muttations bought out at the end of the first book are a hybridization of wolves and the Hunger Games tributes who have already died.
    • Subverted. Later on in the third book, they decide the mutts were pure Mind Rape, and not really made from dead tributes.
  • Outrun the Fireball: One of the Gamemakers' traps in the 74th Games involves having the Tributes run from and dodge fireballs, or else they'd be injured at best or die at worst.
  • The Outside World: The series has its fair share of Outside Worlds, since Panem is made up of districts.
    • Katniss ventures out into one part of The Outside World to do some illegal hunting as District 12 is fenced off. However, the true Outside is far beyond any distance she's traveled. Once, while she and Gale were hunting, they witnessed a red-head and a boy running away, but both were taken by the Capitol before they escaped the district 12 area.
    • In Catching Fire, Katniss finally gets to really see the other districts on her tour. They are increasingly more privileged the lower the number gets.
    • In Mockingjay Katniss learns that there's even more to the world than she knew before: there is a District 13! She actually gets to go there for the first time, but finds that it is another Underground City.
  • Parental Abandonment:
    • Katniss' father died a few years ago and her mother was sent into catatonia for quite some time, forcing her to become the family's breadwinner.
    • Peeta suffers this at the end of Catching Fire, after his parents and brothers are killed during the District 12 bombings.
  • Parental Substitute:
    • Haymitch eventually takes this role to Katniss and Peeta, his winning tributes, by the end of the first book, as Katniss lost her father several years ago and Peeta isn't super close to his family and later loses them all by the end of Catching Fire, On Haymitch's end, it's implied he sees them as the kids he never had.
    • Likewise, Mags, who was Finnick's mentor when he won the 65th Hunger Games at age 14, is stated to have practically raised him since then. Finnick is devastated when she unhesitatingly makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save him, Katniss, and Peeta.
  • People of Hair Color: Most people in District 12 look like Katniss and Gale, black hair, olive skin, and gray eyes. Mrs. Everdeen is from the merchant class so she has blonde hair and blue eyes. Her daughter, Prim, takes after her. Peeta, the baker's son, and Madge, the mayor's daughter, also have blonde hair.
  • Perfect Poison: Nightlock berries. Most of the plants in the Second Quarter Quell.
  • Phobia: Johanna develops a fear of water after being tortured with drowning and electrocution, to the point that she rarely showers and hesitates to even walk outside when it's raining.
  • Planet of Hats: Each of the districts has a different primary industry, which serves as its theme. This is an Invoked Trope in the Hunger Games, since the tributes are each trope are traditionally dressed in ways that reference their theme.
  • Plastic Bitch: Plastic surgery is common in the Capitol, the part of Panem famous for its vanity, luxury, and extravagance. It's mentioned that Caesar Flickerman hasn't aged a day in almost a quarter century due to a reliance on the practice.
  • Please, Don't Leave Me: "Stay with me." "Always." Physically in Catching Fire, mentally in Mockingjay, along with "Don't let him take you from me."
  • Please Put Some Clothes On: Katniss is flustered by people's nudity on several occasions. Johanna knows this and strips off in an elevator whilst chatting with Katniss and Peeta, and again during training, even oiling her body for a wrestling lesson. Peeta finds it amusing. Katniss… not so much.
  • Plot Armor: In the film, anyone that gets more than a few seconds of screentime is guaranteed to have some, only for other characters to then penetrate it and kill them, usually rather sadistically. Only Katniss and Peeta's hold up long enough.
  • Police State: Panem is one. District 13 is less cruel but even more restrictive. Justified in their case, as everyone has to do exactly what they're told for the relatively small population to keep District 13 going.
  • Portmanteau: Several. "Muttation" is a generic in-universe term for a genetically engineered creature, probably derived from "mutt" and "mutation". Lots of things count, like those wolves at the end of the first book, or Jabberjays and Tracker Jackers. Many more exotic variants are introduced in the third book when they're storming the Capitol. For some reason, Peeta and Katniss also take to using the term "mutt" to refer to the mentally damaged Peeta after his brainwashing, and the physically damaged Katniss after her burning. Poisonous berries called "nightlock" (nightshade, hemlock). Mockingjay features political ads called "Propo", as in "propaganda spots", and a "Communicuff", which is exactly what it sounds like. "Mockingjay", for that matter. Just like real-life examples, this one shows a combination of two different species — mockingjays are the offspring of mockingbirds and muttations called jabberjays.
  • Powered by a Forsaken Child: The grisly games are viewed by the Capitol as bringing the country together and helping everyone come together (and acknowledge who's in charge).
  • The Power of Love: Haymitch tells Katniss to use this as her reason for why she tried to Take a Third Option by taking the berries with Peeta in order to have them both die and have no winner at all. The audiences seem to lap it up when both of them then say they couldn't bear the thought of living without the other.
  • Pragmatic Villainy: The Gamemakers frown on certain behaviors in the Games, but moreso because it will draw a poor reaction from the audience rather than out of moral disdain. They will not tolerate cannibalism, nor will they allow a psychopath to become a victor (unless they can be charming about it, as the Career Tributes tend to be somewhat… Ax-Crazy). The Capitol citizens will gleefully watch children fight to the death, but send a young woman who's pregnant into the arena and they'll call it barbaric. And in the third book, Snow never exercises his Nuclear Option, which would damn humanity to extinction, even when he realizes that he's doomed. He states that he would never kill someone if it gave him no advantage.
    • They also forbid tributes to use firearms, because they're seen as an unfair advantage. Guns are never even mentioned until the third book.
    • It starts to dip into Pyrrhic Victory in the third book. Snow states that the Capitol needs the Districts to survive, and with the people of the Capitol losing faith in their government, the brutal mistreatment of the Capitol's cultural figureheads and multiple districts in open revolt or burned to the ground it becomes clear that even if the Capitol wins it's going to have a rough time. This is even pointed out in the motto of the rebels.
      "If we burn, you burn with us!"
  • Present Tense Narrative: The entire story is told in present tense, outside of the odd flashback to past events.
  • President Evil:
    • President Snow has been this for Panem for a very long time. We learn more and more about his atrocities as time goes on, like how he poisoned his political opponents to rise to the top, has made Sex Slaves out of particularly attractive Hunger Games victors, and will kill and execute people with no hesitation, including entire families, to Make an Example of Them.
    • President Coin of District 13 eventually proves that she's at least as bad as Snow if not worse. She bombs a bunch of Capitol children and even some of her own side (including Prim) in a False Flag Operation to turn the populace against Snow, and wants to continue the Cycle of Revenge by holding a "Revenge Hunger Games" using Capitol children. This is ultimately why Katniss chooses to assassinate her.
  • Primal Fear: Suzanne Collins seems to be a fan of these. Both The Hunger Games and The Underland Chronicles are full of people dying in horrible ways thanks to fire, drowning, bugs (sometimes GIANT bugs) and/or savage animals.
  • Prized Possession Giveaway: Madge Undersee gave Katniss her Mockingjay pin just after she volunteers for her sister Primrose.
  • Promotion to Parent: This is what drove Katniss and Gale together before the beginning of the series. Both of their dads died several years before in a mining accident and as the oldest children, had to step up and help their mothers. Mrs Everdeen fell into a deep depression when her husband died and was unable to provide emotionally or financially for her children, so Katniss had to become the breadwinner and be both a mother and father figure to Prim. Gale's mother Hazelle helps financially as much as she can, but has three other children to raise and only just makes do washing clothes. Gale's siblings, from what little we see of them, also see him as their father figure. The two of them began to help each other out by splitting the workload.
  • Prongs of Poseidon: Since he's from the fishing district, Finnick is dangerously adept with a trident.
  • Propaganda Hero: Katniss' formidable fighting skill is entirely overshadowed by the sympathy she draws from the populace. Both sides try to exaggerate and embellish her reputation—inventing star-crossed romances and so forth—and both meet with mixed results due to her bitter, taciturn, rebellious, survivalist-but-self-sacrificing nature...which is why the people truly love her.
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy: Tributes from Districts 1 and 2 tend to come off this way due to those Districts' practice of training children specifically in order to volunteer for the Hunger Games. As a result, these "Career" Tributes are also far more likely to win than Tributes from other Districts, although Haymitch describes their arrogance as a flaw that can lead to their defeat. District 4 applies to a lesser extent, as they are considered Careers in the books but not in the films.
  • Public Execution: Happens to several characters, most notably President Snow... or rather, President Coin. The Hunger Games themselves can also be seen as a variant of this.
  • Publicity Stunt Relationship: The glamour-obsessed Capitol treats the contestants of the titular battle royale as celebrities, giving them a full media blitz before they all brutally kill each other. The two contestants of District 12, Katniss and Peeta, are encouraged by their handler Haymitch to play up a romance between them, as it will draw viewers and sponsor gifts that will give them greater chances at surviving the Game. Katniss is reluctant to do so but reneges when more displays of affection give them better gifts and even a rare rules change to allow surviving co-champions. The "co-champions" offer turns out to be a lie, but Peeta and Katniss force the Games’ hand by attempting to commit suicide together. Afterward, they realize their act of defiance made them a target of the government, so they have to keep up the act of a couple after the Games in an attempt to seem like they were just lovestruck teenagers too emotional to want to live without each other.
  • Pyrrhic Victory: Generally the case for victors, especially non-Careers. Congratulations, you just won the Hunger Games! You're rich and will never go to a reaping again (*cough*). Oh, and 23 other kids are dead, some of which you probably watched die and/or killed yourself. Have fun being even more on the Capitol's radar and dealing with the PTSD with no treatment or therapy. Katniss says it best during the finale of her first Games:
    "Hurray for us," I get out, but there's no joy of victory in my voice.
  • Rain of Blood: Literally happens in the 75th Hunger Games, where one of the hourly arena events is precisely a rain of blood.
  • Reality Show: The eponymous games, used as a terror tactic against the Districts but spun as a form of entertainment for the Capitol.
  • Recycled In Space: Panem is, for all intents and purposes, a futuristic version of the Roman Empire.
  • Red Herring: Chaff and Seeder initially seem like they'll be important characters: they're from the same district as Rue and Thresh, Katniss' ally and rescuer from her Games, first of all. Seeder deliberately seeks out Katniss to thank her for her treatment of them, while Chaff is repeatedly mentioned to be good friends with Haymitch. At different points, Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch all consider or advocate joining up with them, but instead, they're both killed in the Quarter Quell despite being at least somewhat aware of the rebels' plan and Katniss and Peeta end up allying with other tributes.
  • Regional Speciality: Each district's bread is very distinct. Peeta is a second-generation professional baker and he expounds on the regional breads in sufficient detail that fans have been able to make them.
  • Replacement Goldfish: Katniss forms an alliance with Rue, stays with her while she dies, and vows to win for her, because Rue reminds her of her own little sister Prim back home.
  • La Résistance: It's revealed at the end of the second book that District 13 is not destroyed but a functioning Underground City, home of the brewing Second Rebellion against the Capitol and its totalitarian rule.
  • Rich Language, Poor Language: The citizens of the wealthy Capitol have an odd accent characterized by a high pitch, clipped words, and a tightly puckered mouth. The accents of the citizens of the twelve districts are fairly neutral by comparison.
  • Riddle for the Ages: In the first book, what exactly occurred offscreen when Peeta left the Careers to "finish" the girl from District 8 whom they had mortally wounded? Did he perform a Mercy Kill on her (and if so, how?) Or did he find her already dying and hold her hand in the last moments (and then wipe her blood on his knife to fool the Careers?)
  • Rocky Mountain Refuge: What's left of the United States following an Unspecified Apocalypse is Panem, with its capital located securely in the mountains in the center of the country, in what is implied to be Salt Lake City, Utah (as the Rocky Mountains are visible surrounding the city and there is a large lake to its west).
  • Rubber-Band A.I.: Frequently used by the Gamemakers if the show isn't entertaining enough. Their methods range from setting off natural disasters to changing the weather or environment to force tributes together to releasing mutts and animals to hunt the tributes. Katniss is savvy enough to plan her strategies with this in mind.
  • Rule of Drama: Ties with Rule of Empathy, below. The Capitol loves best those victors who put on a great show and will give them a sort of celebrity status. Such is the case for Enobaria, who, after winning by ripping out her opponent's throat with her teeth, got her dentures specially sharpened and became very popular with the Capitol.
  • Rule of Empathy: Tributes must be able to invoke sympathy from the Capitol and District audiences. Sympathy will equal sponsors and money for necessities in the arena, and could therefore make the difference in the Games. Peeta, it turns out, is a natural at invoking the Rule of Empathy at the drop of a hat. Katniss is not, so Peeta and Haymitch keep her in the dark to evoke more genuine reactions.
  • Rule of Symbolism: Katniss, once she decides to rebel, invokes this trope, turning her every action into a symbol meant to add fuel to the rebellion.
  • Rule of Three: Suzanne Collins loves her powers of three. There are three books devoted to Katniss Everdeen. Each book is divided into three parts. Each part contains nine (3×3) chapters.
  • Save This Person, Save the World: Initially Katniss though it seems that Coin thinks they should have saved Peeta instead. Eventually the trope begins to apply to Peeta by proxy as people begin to realize that as long as Peeta is Snow's prisoner Katniss will be too worried about him to be of any use.
  • Say My Name: Especially Katniss' incident in the tree during the first games.
  • Scapegoats: The Tributes pay for the uprising against the Capitol almost a hundred years prior.
  • Scars are Forever: Peeta ends up with an artificial leg after the first Hunger Game. Katniss retains several physical scars. They both also sustain some pretty hefty emotional scars. Even after 20 years, they still have nightmares.
  • Scary Stinging Swarm: The tracker jackers — mutated wasps — were created by the Capitol as weapons of war. They're intensely territorial, and will fly in huge swarms after whatever draws their attention. They have the tracking capability of African bees and will hunt you down for at least a mile. Their stings instantly create painful, plum-sized lumps that ooze green fluid, and their venom causes hallucinations that will drive a person insane or even kill them if not treated immediately. Their only weakness is that smoke sedates them. At one point, Katniss drops a hive full of them onto a group of her enemies. Two of the targets die within a few minutes, the rest of them flee to a lake, and Katniss only makes it a short distance before her three stings make her black out for about two days.
  • Schizo Tech: Justified in that the Capitol deliberately suppresses technology in the Districts, especially weapons tech.
  • Screw the Rules, I Make Them!:
    • The Gamemakers repeatedly change rules to get the outcome they want. Every 25 years, a special edition of the Hunger Games is held, with different rules from the usual Games, supposedly laid out well in advance. However, when the rules of the 75th Games just so happen to target certain people seen as undesirable by the current administration, it raises the suspicion that the Quarter Quells aren't planned out as far in advance as the Capitol would have the citizens believe.
    • In an example of this trope being beneficial to the heroes, Katniss is able to hunt outside the gates of District 12 at the beginning of the first book, in spite of a clear law against it, because her kills are so prized that even the Peacekeepers in charge of enforcing the laws need and want the meat that she sells.
  • Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Katniss begins to see potential loves interests in two guys, Peeta, the baker's son who decorates the cakes and Gale, her hunting partner. Gale is angry with the Capitol for making them participate in the games while Peeta is reflective on how he can maintain his identity in the games despite the Capitol using them.
  • Sex Slave: In Book 3. According to Finnick, this happens to a lot of victors, himself included.
  • Shadow Archetype: Haymitch and Katniss: Two abrasive survivalists who withdraw into themselves to cope with the harshness of their lives. Part of the reason they never really get along is that they're too alike. Haymitch is Katniss thirty years later, after mentoring forty-six children to their deaths.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: The story begins in the first book with Katniss sacrificing herself to save Prim's life. Prim dies at the end of Mockingjay.
  • Shell-Shocked Veteran: All of the Victors have some form of PTSD. Katniss, having been put through two sets of Games, as well as threats from the government and being manipulated by her own allies, has among the worst. Annie became a wreck after seeing her ally being decapitated.
  • Shipper on Deck: Several characters do this towards Peeta and Katniss, like President Snow as mentioned above, though for some of the other reasons, it's to help make sure that Katniss and Peeta stay on top and ensure a good chance of survival in the Games, since people enjoy good drama.
  • Shooting Lessons From Your Parents: Katniss and Gale both learned their archery and survival skills thanks to their fathers having taken them hunting when they were children, allowing Katniss to have an edge in the games that District 12 tributes rarely have.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Prim's death nearly makes the entire series this, since everything started with Katniss volunteering for the Hunger Games to protect Prim.
  • Shout-Out:
    • invokedWord of God has stated that Katniss' family name is a reference to the Thomas Hardy character Bathsheba Everdene.
    • Katniss (the "Girl on Fire") is in Squad Four Five One, a reference to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which is another dystopian novel with a fire motif.
    • Dividing the population into professions the way it is done with Districts seems to be a shout out to Brave New World, where life in the main capital is quite idylliic, with each profession being filled by clones of the same person, and life outside it being segregated and fenced-in and pretty dismal.
  • Shout-Out to Shakespeare: Katniss remembers a boy who was eliminated from one edition of the games for cannibalism. His name? Titus. There are some other minor characters with names from Shakespeare – Cressida comes to mind, for one, and Lavinia, who has no tongue.
  • "Shut Up" Kiss: Katniss does this to Peeta in the cave when he attempts to give her an If I Do Not Return speech. He shuts up.
  • Sibling Yin-Yang: Katniss and Prim. Tomboy and Girly Girl, a hunter and a healer, a tough, introverted girl with very few friends and the sweet Friend to All Living Things who everybody loves, they couldn't be more different.
  • Significant Birth Date: Katniss is born on May 8, the date Germany surrendered and World War II ended.
  • Single-Target Sexuality:
    • Peeta towards Katniss. He fell in love with her when he was 5 and never fell out of love. Except of course for the brief time while he was hijacked, and even then it seems that a part of him still loved her.
    • Katniss herself appears to be Peeta-sexual, showing no sexual interest in any other man during the course of the novels (including Gale, whom she finds attractive but not arousing) and begins a lifelong relationship with Peeta around the age of eighteen.
  • Sky Face: Invoked. A killed tribute is "honored" by having their face projected against the sky.
  • Slave to PR: A dominating theme. A likable persona for a tribute wins sponsors: for example, Finnick. It culminates in Mockingjay when the rebels bomb a town square full of children, in a Capitol hovercraft, solely to convince everyone in the nation that the Capitol is evil. P.R. is possibly the most powerful weapon in The Hunger Games.
  • Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: Level 5. For all its faults, Panem is pretty gender-equal. You never see anyone bragging about being one gender over another, or putting anyone down for belonging to a gender. It is implied that there are still conventional gender roles in romance, such as the guy being expected to get down on one knee and propose, but other than that, nothing.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The cynicism side. Far, far, far on the cynicism side, but the last book does express some optimism that the human race can "evolve" to become better and that a brighter future will arise.
  • Slow Clap: Not exactly an applause, but the whole community of District 12 uses a cultural gesture to show their support of Katniss when she takes her sister's place. District 11 tries this as well and pays the price.
  • Smart People Play Chess: Haymitch and Peeta, two of the most cunning characters in the series, enjoy playing chess together. At one point, they are doing so at Katniss' house — when she's not even at home.
  • Snow Means Death: Katniss remembers one arctic-themed Hunger Games where they watched many of the tributes quietly freeze to death in the snow, which was considered anti-climactic by the Capitol. Since then, there's usually been wood or some other fire-making material available. Notably, the murderous Big Bad is President Snow.
  • Social Services Does Not Exist: Avoided. They exist, they're just the worse alternative.
  • Sole Survivor:
    • Only 10% of District 12's population survived the Capitol's bombings at the end of Catching Fire. The Everdeen and Hawthorne families, plus Delly Cartwright, made it, but the Undersee and Mellark (except for Peeta) families did not.
    • There are very few Victors at the end of the series. When Coin calls a Victors' conference at the end of Mockingjay, which pointedly includes everyone surviving, only seven turn up, out of the fifty nine alive before the Third Quarter Quell. Eighteen were killed during the Quell, two (Finnick and Lyme) were killed during the Second Rebellion, and the remaining unaccounted for were killed during the so-called "Victors' Purge" that the Capitol ordered after the Quell was sabotaged.
  • Someone to Remember Him By: Annie gives birth to a son several months after Finnick is killed.
  • Soup of Poverty:
    • Residents of the Seam, poorest part of District 12, regularly buy bowls of hot soup from an old woman named Greasy Sae who throws whatever ingredients she can find into her kettle. When Katniss and Gale bring her the carcasses of wild dogs, she winks at them and says, "Once it's in the soup, I call it beef." In the winter, she makes a stew out of mice meat, tree bark and pig entrails.
    • When Katniss is tending to Peeta's injured leg, she makes a soup out of mashed groosling meat and roots. She admits to herself that she's not much of a cook, but even she can make soup because it mainly involves tossing everything in a pot and waiting.
    • In Mockingjay, after District 12 is destroyed by firebombs, the survivors are evacuated to District 13, where everything is tightly controlled to conserve resources, down to each citizen's individual portion of food during scheduled mealtimes. One of the meals is fish stew, which doesn't taste bad, but the slimy texture makes it hard to swallow. Gale advises Flavius, "I wouldn't let that get cold. It doesn't improve the consistency."
  • Speak Ill of the Dead: Clove talks about Rue, while holding down Katniss near the Cornucopia. Of course, karma sweeps in to save the day, via Thresh.
  • The Speechless: Avoxes are traitors who've had their tongues mutilated as punishment.
  • Spiteful Gluttony: Effie compliments Peeta and Katniss for having proper meal etiquette, unlike the two kids that were sent to the Games the previous year. Katniss and Peeta eat very sloppily from then on to embarrass Effie because they know the aforementioned kids were starved (and then, of course, died brutally in the Games).
  • Spoiled Sweet: Katniss' prep team, who are simply too naive to be genuinely mean. And though you can't be one hundred percent sure of his financial situation, probably Cinna, who treats Katniss with respect and the games with disgust despite being from the Capitol. And Madge, who is the Mayor's daughter, very kind and is one of Katniss' few friends.
  • Star-Crossed Lovers:
    • Peeta and Katniss pretend to be this to garner sympathy. Subverted in that they eventually do become real lovers, but manage to get through everything alive.
    • The real star-crossed lovers of the series turns out to be Finnick and Annie. With him being the Capitol's Golden Boy and she being very mentally unstable, there was no way for them to officially be together, until the rebellion. Snow obviously knows about their love affair since he has Annie captured to get back at Finnick for being part of La Résistance. In the third book they are reunited and get married but only have a brief time together before Finnick dies.
  • Stealth Pun:
    • Finnick offers Katniss sugar when he flirts with her. "Give me some sugar" is slang for "Let's kiss, etc."
    • When Katniss requests to kill Snow, the President of District 13 offers to flip her for the privilege. The president's last name? Coin.
  • Strange Salute: When Katniss volunteers to take her sister's place, the entire crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hands to their lips, and then holds it out to her. Katniss explains that it's an old District 12 gesture that means thanks, admiration, and goodbye to someone you love. It becomes a little more meaningful later on.
  • Stupid Evil: It's never adequately explained why the Capitol decided that forcing two kids from every district to kill each other every year in highly-elaborate battlefields was a better means of preventing rebellion than, say, creating a decent welfare state that would keep the masses complacent and dependent upon the government. The welfare system would probably have been cheaper.
  • Sudden Contest Format Change: Played for Drama. The games are expected to only have a single victor. Due to Katniss and Peeta becoming beloved as the "Star Crossed Lovers of District 12", though, a rule change is spontaneously announced a few days in that if both tributes from a district are alive, they can win together. This gives the two extra motivation to keep each other alive. However, when they do outlast every other district, the rules change again — revoking the earlier change for in-universe drama. Katniss and Peeta force their hand by threatening a double suicide, so the rules flip back for a final time so they can both go home as victors.
  • Sudden Principled Stand: Katniss and Peeta's stunt with the berries becomes this for the entire nation (perhaps unintentionally), as their willingness to die rather than continue living without the other in defiance of the Capitol's insistence that they kill one another (or at least let the other die) quickly becomes a rallying symbol for a nation chafing under brutality and ritualized killing of their children.
    • Downplayed in the sense that leading up to this were several other principled decisions by the District 12 team also seen as rebellious in their humanity like Katniss volunteering for her sibling (when apparently few to none have), their decision to act like friends in public rather than coldly towards one another, Peeta's willingness to protect Katniss from the Careers at the risk of his own life, Katniss's alliance with Rue, Thresh and District 11 returning her kindness, among others.
  • Super Doc: Outside the poorer districts, medicine is far more advanced than in our own time.
  • Super Happy Fun Trope of Doom: The role of the Peacekeepers isn't as sweet as it sounds. (Bit like in Real Life, then?) Everything surrounding the Games is treated as fun and entertaining; being a "tribute" is an honor.
  • Super-Persistent Predator: The tracker jacker wasps do not give up an attack once pissed off. Running away doesn't help. The only thing that saves Katniss is that they're so drugged from the smoke they don't realize she dropped their nest..
  • Sure, Let's Go with That: When Caesar Flickerman asks Katniss exactly when she first fell for Peeta, she's evasive at first (since at this point she hasn't actually fallen for him yet) and then immediately goes along with his first guess.
  • Take a Third Option: The climax of Games. And Catching Fire. And Mockingjay.
    • In the first film/book more specifically, Katniss and Peeta are the two sole surviving tributes. The Game Master earlier said that two people could win as a team if they were both from the same district to make things a little more interesting. However, he changes his mind at that point, and tells them that one would have to die. Peeta offers himself as a sacrifice, claiming Katniss had more reason to go home alive. However, Katniss refuses to play into their hand, and brings up the poisonous berries he had accidentally gathered earlier. Katniss knows that PR is king in the Capitol, and having no victor would look bad for the Hunger Games, so she figures if they both threaten to eat the nightlock berries the Gamemaster will change his mind. She ends up being right, although her defiance sets in motion the events of the second two books.
    • Snow believes Crane should've done this in response to Katniss' Third Option of double suicide. Rather than letting both die or both win, Snow would've simply killed Katniss. It's revealed in Catching Fire that Crane pays the ultimate price for his choice.
  • Take Me Instead: In the first book, Katniss volunteers to take Prim's place as tribute for District 12.
  • Take That!: In-universe, the mockingjay becomes an increasingly unsubtle one of these towards the Capitol.
  • Taking the Bullet: During the Quarter Quell, one of the morphlings is killed by an attack from a vicious monkey that was meant for Peeta.
  • Taking You with Me: In Book 1, Cato threatens to take Peeta with him into the jaws of the Muttations if Katniss shoots him with her arrows.
  • Talking through Technique: Katniss and Haymitch are alike enough that Katniss is able to figure out the hidden message in each of the gifts sent to her by sponsors, not only by looking at what was sent to her, but in some cases when she received it.
  • Tall Is Intimidating: Katniss finds practically every other tribute intimidating because they're all bigger and stronger than her thanks to her childhood of malnutrition. However, this is especially pronounced with the careers and Thresh, all of whom are described as massive and scary. Thresh in particular is so large that even the careers — trained killers from childhood — are intimidated enough to avoid him for most of the game.
  • Tears of Remorse: After Katniss' meeting with the Gamemakers, when she thinks she's ruined everything by defiantly shooting an arrow towards them- expecting that not only will she be summarily executed and have wasted all the efforts her team have put in to try and give her a chance, but her family might be punished as well for her actions.
  • Teenage Wasteland: Subverted. The kids are all right, adult authority in the form of The Capitol is forcing them to kill or be killed.
  • Teens Are Monsters: Played with. Most of the kids seem reluctant, if resigned to killing each other. Played straight with the Careers, who are trained specifically for the Games, and volunteer at eighteen; they positively gloat about their ability to murder other children.
  • Tempting Fate: In the first book, Katniss reassures her sister Prim after a nightmare that her name won't be drawn for the Hunger Games... Seconds later, that's exactly what happens. And Katniss realizes that if you're referred to as "the girl who was on fire" enough times, eventually you do get actually lit on fire.
  • Theme Naming: Multiple:
    • The Capitol and District 2 use Greek and Roman names to highlight their decadent nature and fondness for gladiatorial combat — Seneca, Coriolanus, Cato, Effie (for Euphemia), Brutus, Cressida, Messala, Castor and Pollux. and so on. The nation itself is called Panem, the Latin word for bread.
    • The districts often use names referencing their primary industry. For example:
      • District One names evoke luxury — Gloss, Glimmer, Cashmere.
      • District Four past tributes Finnick Odair and Annie Cresta have names alluding to water, corresponding to their district's industry being fishing.
      • District Eleven's Rue and Thresh (agriculture).
  • There Are No Therapists: The districts don't largely seem to have therapists, leaving the traumatized victors to relive their nightmares yearly as they're forced to participate in the games (though it's implied that Katniss' mother was able to somehow gain access to one in order to get hold of drugs to treat her depression). Exploited by the Capitol to make them broken beyond repair and thus unable to fight back. Subverted in District 13: all refugees are given psychological help and local specialists do everything they can to get Peeta back to his old self after a Mind Rape. Before the final attack on the Capitol, soldiers are checked for possible psychological problems; Johanna gets sent to a mental facility as a result of this. Katniss also goes through therapy after her sister's death.
  • There Can Be Only One: An in-universe example. The winner of the annual Hunger Games is determined by a process of elimination, with elimination in this case meaning death. Triple-subverted in the first book. The popularity of the relationship between Katniss and Peeta leads to a change in rules to allow both of them to win/surive, only for the change to be revoked at the last minute, before Katniss and Peeta get the Capitol to bring the change back by each refusing to let the other die for them.
  • Tired of Running: Katniss: "Life in District 12 isn't really so different from life in the arena. At some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face whoever wants you dead. The hard thing is finding the courage to do it."
  • Title Drop: There's a belated, sort-of one in Mockingjay when Katniss proclaims that "fire is catching". Catching Fire was the previous book.
  • Together in Death: The promise of this was how Katniss and Peeta forced the Gamemakers to back down on their attempt to force them to fight to the death, being prepared to die from suicide simultaneously, which they would later portray as both being unwilling to live without the other.
  • Token Good Cop: Most Peacekeepers are just uniformed enforcers for President Snow, and while the regular District 12 Peacekeepers are more easygoing about enforcing unjust regulations, this is at least partially for their own comfort, and Head Peacekeeper Cray is still an exploitative Dirty Old Man. However, Darius and Purnia are openly risk their necks to intervene when Cray's brutal replacement flogs Gale within an inch of his life.
  • Too Dumb to Live: None of the Gamemakers ever bothered to install any defensive shields between them and the tributes in the Training Center where they hold private sessions to observe and score each tribute's best skill. This results in Katniss firing an arrow at them, which luckily wasn't meant to hit any of them. When the Games come around again in Catching Fire, they've installed a forcefield, and Katniss lampshades that it was probably because of what she did.
  • Too Hungry to Be Polite:
    • Effie mentions that the tributes before Katniss and Peeta ate "like a couple of savages". Knowing that the last year's tributes were starving kids from the Seam, Katniss makes a point of eating the rest of her meal with her fingers and wiping her hands on the tablecloth afterwards.
    • Katniss experiences this herself in the Hunger Games. One sponsor meal she and Peeta receive comes with utensils, but she's so hungry that she quickly stops using the fork and digs in with her hands.
  • Tokyo Rose: Under torture by the Capitol, Peeta is forced to make propos urging the rebels—but mainly Katniss—to lay down arms and surrender.
  • Tomboy and Girly Girl: Katniss, who hunts, fights, has No Social Skills, and isn't particularly interested in fashion, is the tomboy to Prim's girly girl, with Prim being a sweet, lovable Friend to All Living Things, as well as The Medic.
  • Tracking Chip: All the tributes going into the Games are implanted with a tracker so that the Capitol knows where they are in the arena at all times.
  • Tragic Keepsake: The Mockingjay pin that Madge gives Katniss in the first book used to belong to Maysilee Donner, Madge's aunt and a tribute in the 50th Hunger Games. It later becomes Madge's own memento when she and her entire family perish during the District 12 bombings at the end of Catching Fire.
  • Trauma Conga Line: By the end, try to count more surviving characters that haven't suffered one. You won't run out of fingers. This is especially endemic amongst the victors of the games, as the Capitol torments them to keep them from using their elevated status to foment rebellion. In fact, for Katniss, this series is one entire Trauma Conga Line.
  • Trick Arrow: Both the flaming and exploding kinds.
  • Trilogy Creep: While she assisted crafting the cinematic adaptations, Suzanne Collins appeared to be done with the series after releasing Mockingjay. In 2019, however, she revealed that a new entry to the series, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was in the works, although it is a prequel.
  • Troperiffic: Invoked in the games, where the tributes try to appeal to the Capitol and potential sponsors by playing according to recognizable and interesting archetypes.
  • Try Not to Die: Everyone's last words to Katniss and Peeta. "Stay alive."
  • Unperson: The entire 10th Hunger Games is revealed to be this in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Because so many mentors died and the victor ended up MIA, the Capitol opted to forget that the entire games ever happened at all. The only recognition seems to be limited to the the fact that a District 12 tribute won the Games.
  • Unrequited Love Switcheroo: By the time Katniss has realized she's in love with Peeta he's been brainwashed into thinking she's a mutt trying to kill him.
  • Unspecified Apocalypse: The event that caused the fall of pre-Panem civilization is never stated. It is mentioned though, that rising oceans consumed vast areas of land. Drought, storms and fires destroyed the remaining agricultural land and people waged war over the dwindling resources. Panem rose from the ashes of that war. Some time later, the districts rebelled but lost against the Capitol. During that rebellion, humankind was on the verge of extinction. One consequence is that planes have to fly low to the ground, since the upper atmosphere is apparently non-existent, another that several types of technology got lost, like satellites etc.
  • Unwitting Pawn: Katniss feels this way, since she's constantly out of the loop.
  • Urban Warfare: The final attack on the Capitol in Mockingjay.
  • Useless Bystander Parent: Mr. Mellark, who never seems to have intervened when his wife physically and verbally abused their sons.
  • Villain Ball: The Capitol seems to hold this on occasion, especially in Catching Fire. There is a lot of Villain Ball discussion relating to the Games themselves, available on the discussion page.
  • Villainous Rescue: When Clove is on top of a nearly helpless Katniss, she decides to taunt the latter a bit, saying how they enjoyed killing Rue. Thresh then shows up out of nowhere, and kills Clove after hearing her confession. He then walks away, saying he was doing this favor just once for Rue, who was the female participant from his district, and one of the few friends Katniss made.
  • Villains Never Lie: President Snow agrees to never lie to Katniss, and as far as the reader is aware he keeps to that.
  • Villain with Good Publicity:
    • President Snow, at least with the citizens of the Capitol. That goes away by Book 3.
    • Coin is presented as the rebel leader fighting for justice. But the truth about her is much harsher than that.
  • Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: There's a joke that Catching Fire and Mockingjay are written almost entirely in sentence fragments. Of course, this is a poorly-educated, emotionally jaded teenage girl narrating…
  • War Is Hell: Absolutely nothing glorious about it. One of the main themes of Mockingjay.
  • Was It All a Lie?: Peeta's ongoing question to Katniss from the end of the first book all the way to the "Real or not real?" question at the end of the last. It was a lie, but is now real.
  • Wealth's in a Name: District One characters have names evoking their district's industry of luxury goods: Glimmer, Marvel, Gloss, Cashmere.
  • Wealthy Ever After: Win the Hunger Games, get upgraded to a nice house in the Victor's Village and more money than you can ever spend in the districts. Whether or not the victors who survive the revolution get to keep the money is not mentioned but they do get to keep their houses.
  • Weapons Kitchen Sink: Inevitable, given the fact that the Capitol just spreads them around in the Arena and hopes for a sloppy death scenario to increase the "entertainment" value. There's a dark aside in Book 1 where Katniss mentions how one year the only weapons provided were horribly awkward maces.
  • We ARE Struggling Together: The Hunger Games not only serve as collective punishment for the Districts' rebellion against the Capitol, but also serve as a way to keep Districts divided and competing one against the other.
  • Weather-Control Machine: The Gamemakers can control the environment inside the arena, from weather to whether it's night or day.
  • We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: The ruling class of Panem relies on keeping the vast majority of its population as essentially slave labor despite possessing technology on a level which makes localized weather control possible.
  • Wham Line:
    • "It's Primrose Everdeen."
    • "[T]he male and female tributes will be reaped from their existing pool of victors."
    • "Katniss, there is no District 12."
    • "President Snow used to...sell me...my body, that is."
    • "My lips are just forming his name when his fingers lock around my throat."
    • "And then the second round of parachutes goes off."
    • As a rule, chapters tend to end with lines that are wham on at least a small degree.
    • In-universe, Peeta is the acknowledged master of the Wham Line, particularly when onstage with Caesar Flickerman. In the first book he sets up the Star-Crossed Lovers thing, and in the second he manages an even bigger one: He claims he and Katniss are having a baby. Double so since just before, he claims they're already married, making sure the reader is blindsided by the baby thing.
  • What, Exactly, Is His Job?: Katniss asks this question regarding the entire population of the Capitol.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: The trilogy leaves quite a few questions unanswered:
    • We never learn why Cinna requested District 12 (as he says he did in book 1) and we never find out if Portia did the same. We also have no clue why Cinna doesn't have a Capitol accent or the Capitol sense of style, despite that not making much sense if he's a fashion designer who's lived in the Capitol for his entire life.
      • Cinna mentioned he thought that the coal miner outfits were weak, tired, and unflattering. It's possible he just wanted to do a better job.
    • In Catching Fire, Johanna says everyone she loves is dead. It feels like it's going to be important for her Character Development, but.... Elaboration? Explanation? Don't count on it. There's a popular guess in fanon, though: most likely Johanna's family was murdered by the Capitol, likely for refusing to be used by the Capitol after she won like Finnick was. Based on her personality and what Finnick says about his family being threatened, this seems the logical explanation.
    • In Mockingjay, Katniss gets a bow with "special properties." She never once mentions them again, uses them, or even explains what those properties are, besides the fact that it can vibrate to say hello. This could be the reason it's able to shoot down planes, though.
    • What happened to Old Cray? He somehow disappeared when Thread took over. It's not pointed out what exactly happened to him.
    • Why were Lavinia and her companion fleeing the Capitol to District 12? It's likely they may have been trying to get to District 13 for some reason, but how did a couple of Capitol kids come to be running away when most adults never develop the courage, or even the inclination in most cases?
    • Bonnie and Twill were also trying to get to District 13 in Catching Fire, and wound up being fairly close to where Lavinia was when she was captured. The last Katniss sees of them, they're successfully hiding out and planning their next move, but when Katniss and co. reach District 13 in the final book, Bonnie and Twill are nowhere to be seen. Katniss briefly Hand Waves their absence, commenting that it must be incredibly rare for those who flee to actually reach District 13... then they're never mentioned again.
    • Commander Lyme is introduced in Mockingjay as a former victor and leader of the rebels in District 2. She's built up as if she's going to be important somehow, but when the surviving victors have their meeting towards the end of the book, she's nowhere in sight and is never mentioned (though the reader must assume she's been killed at some point in the interim, as it is stressed that all surviving victors are present).
  • What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Subverted. Katniss sees Peeta as The Heart and thinks his power to love is much better than her ability to kill things. (During the games, it IS useful to gain sponsors.)
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The Districts have a few geographical clues but otherwise the readers don't really learn where they are. That didn't stop people from trying to map it, though. The few things agreed on are the ones stated outright in the books, that District 12 is meant to be Appalachia, most likely the coal-mining regions of Virginia and West Virginia, and that the Capitol is located in the Rockies.
  • The Whole World Is Watching: The whole thing is about the eponymous Deadly Game that is broadcast all over Panem annually and is treated like a major sporting event.
  • Wicked Wasps: The tracker jackers have been twisted by Capitol biotech beyond any level of aggression that real wasps would display; they act less like territorial animals and more like insanely aggressive living weapons. They can track targets for at least a mile, their stings instantly create agonizing plum-sized lumps, and the hallucinations caused by their venom can drive a person insane. They were created to be an equivalent to land mines to be spread around rebel territories, and have been kept around by the Capitol as a symbol of their power over their subjects.
  • Will They or Won't They?: Left ambiguous throughout the series if Katniss will end up with anyone at all. For one thing, she doesn't want to fall in love, get married and have children that might end up in the Hunger Games, so she resists her budding feelings for Peeta. Gale professing his romantic feelings confuses her and a minor triangle plays out for a few chapters of the second book, then ultimately she chooses to be with Peeta but doesn't start a family with him until fifteen years after the end of the war. The movies play it up like a big triangle by adding scenes that allude to Katniss having feelings for Gale and remove the majority of the scenes that shows she's falling for Peeta, presumably to cash in on the shipper war hype of The Twilight Saga but it's mostly lead to a negative response and was toned down for the third film.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: All the characters who participated in the Hunger Games, especially the Careers, had little choice but to participate in what amounts to mass slaughter. Even Cato and Clove, the most ruthless characters in the first book, were to some degree pitiable, especially the former in the film.
  • The Worf Effect: Thresh proves to be one of the most formidable opponents in the Games, as he is The Dreaded and none of the other tributes dare to venture in the field where he's hiding for most of the games. He also pulls a Big Damn Heroes moment and kills Clove before she can kill Katniss by bashing her skull in with a rock. However, he's later Killed Offscreen by Cato.
    • District 1 seems to suffer from this the most, despite being one of the Career Districts from the beginning. In every game featured in the series, the most they do is have vain names, look pretty, round out the career pack, and kill vulnerable allies of the main leads before dying in horrible and often embarrassing ways ( with the exception of the District 1 Girl during Haymitch’s game, each are dispatched with relative haste in battle . The District 2 tributes by comparison are generally presented as more of a threat overall, and take on the leadership role of the in arena antagonists.
  • The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): The six Career tributes spend their teen years training to compete in the Gladiator Games. However, all of them are killed by untrained tributes like Roguish Poacher Katniss and Scary Black Man Thresh in the 74th Hunger Games, and three of them don't make it into the final eight in the 75th Hunger Games despite being arena veterans due to that year's twist (although Mags is eighty years old and still lasts a while before making a Heroic Sacrifice to save the others from poison fog). Given how there are a bare minimum of 19 living Victors from non-Career districts during the 75th Hunger Games, the Careers apparently lose the Games relatively often despite their training, and even when they do win, only one of them goes home while the other five die despite their training and preparation (something that much of the series' fanfiction explores in greater detail).
  • World of No Grandparents:
    • It's stated a few times that the family of Mrs. Everdeen ran an apothecary in the town. Yet, when she underwent catatonic after her husband died, nobody stepped in to take care of Katniss and Prim, who were in danger of being thrown to a community center until the former forced herself to become the family's breadwinner.
    • In fact, there are only two known grandparents in the whole series: Greasy Sae, whose mentally ill granddaughter is mentioned a few times; and President Snow, whose granddaughter is mentioned by Johanna as a potential tribute for the Revenge Hunger Games. Justified as most of Panem's population barely earn enough a living to sustain two generations, let alone three.
  • Would Hit a Girl: There are just as many girls as boys in each Hunger Game, ensuring a lot of boys hitting girls. Marvel kills Rue, and Thresh kills Clove.
  • Would Hurt a Child: The adult-run Capitol not only is willing to force children into the Hunger Games, but requires that everyone in the Hunger Games be between the ages of 12-18.
  • Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Katniss can't find it in her, and only ends up killing a couple of eighteen-year-olds.
  • Wreathed in Flames: Part of Katniss' symbology (along with being a mockingjay).
  • You Bastard!: Look at the Capitol and then look at you. The book is even stylistically written in a fashion that gets the reader compelled by the violence and the romance but with undertones that this sort of enjoyment is wrong. In fact, anyone who still loves the series for all the shallow reasons is flipped off in Mockingjay, when all their favorite characters die off and their badass heroine becomes a PTSD-stricken shell.
  • You Have Failed Me: Snow has Crane killed after Crane declares both Katniss and Peeta winner of the 74th Hunger Games. Otherwise they both would have died from suicide, and there would be no winner, likely angering many people in the process, especially in the districts, which President Snow warned him about earlier. Snow thought a better solution would've been to simply kill Katniss.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Leads to Cato snapping the neck of District 3's boy in the first book. President Coin attempts this with Katniss towards the end of Mockingjay.
  • You Killed My Father: Katniss understands that if the conditions were not so bad in the coal mines due to the decadent lifestyle in the Capitol and the corrupt government, her father would not have died in the mine accident. And in Mockingjay, President Coin has Prim killed.
  • Your Favorite: Katniss at one point receives food including the stew she stated in an interview was her favorite thing about the Capitol. In Mockingjay, Peeta finds a can of the same stew and presents it to Katniss when the team scavenges a meal.

It's like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.
But there are much worse games to play.

Alternative Title(s): Hunger Games

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