Politics of the Popular

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series has launched the birth of hundreds of fan sites, a movie series, fanfictions, fan art, and numerous social media pages and accounts dedicated to communicating with and linking together enthusiasts of the popular novels. But what, exactly, is the significance of this fandom, and how does it relate to culture as a whole? John Storey takes into account Henry Jenkins’ theories on “fandom” and fan culture, and he explains:

Fans do not just read texts, they continually re-read them. This changes profoundly the nature of the text-reader relationship. Re-reading undermines the operations of what Barthes (1975) calls the ‘hermeneutic code’ (the way a text poses questions to generate the desire to keep reading). Re-reading in this way thus shifts the reader’s attention from ‘what will happen’ to ‘how things happen’, to questions of character relations, narrative themes, the production of social knowledges and discourses. (229)

Fans of The Hunger Games series have developed a deeper “text-reader relationship” based on the notion that they have spent more time with the novels, and they develop a relationship of symbiosis. The reader-fans rely on the series, and the series’ popularity relies on the readers. As John Storey writes, “Fan cultures are not just bodies of enthusiastic readers; they are also active cultural producers” (229). Because of this, the series’ fan culture is not a passive group by any means – they are constantly creating new materials that keep the popularity of the series alive.

Without the fan base that The Hunger Games has formed, few of these “productions” would exist, and the series might not have ever been brought into pop culture’s eye – dominating magazine covers, tabloids, and countless websites. Henry Jenkins defined the difference between “mundanes” (non-fan readers) and fans as a variance in passion and participation, and Storey adds that, “It is not the commodities that are empowering, it is what the fans do with them that empowers” (230). In this way, The Hunger Games possess the potential to “empower” its readers, but the fans are the source that determines how and allows them to become empowering.