Visiting Fangirl - The Hunger Games Premiere

I’m sure many people who haven’t read the book and have no desire to see the movie are getting sick and tired of all the buzz around The Hunger Games premiere this weekend. However, my friends roped me into going to the midnight showing on Friday, and I have to say, I’m glad I had the chance to be sucked into the fun and magic of being part of a physical fan community again—if only for a few hours.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of screen adaptations of books, but The Hunger Games movie took me by surprise. I read the first two books last summer, but my friend told me that the third book was slow, frustrating, and that the ending was a major cop-out, so I didn’t make the effort to finish the series before going abroad.

And I know, if you’ve read the books, you’re probably thinking, “What effort? You can read those books in 6 hours if you want to.” It’s true; the books are categorized as ‘Young Adult’ fiction, which means they’re aimed at young teens. This is why I was so reluctant to read them in the first place—I was embarrassed by the literary quality and the cheesy, ‘young love’ themes.

Honestly, I did end up liking them—they’re fast, easy reads with great characters, a riveting plot, and some eerie subject matter. My main problem with them was that the author didn’t push far enough with some of the ideas she had developed (intellectually-stimulating concepts but writing style was too simplistic), and spent way too much time on the romantic aspect of the story.

But anyway, let’s just say I just didn’t want to spend the money on the last book, and figured I would find a PDF version online and read it for free if I ever got the chance. And that was pretty much the end of that. I only saw the full trailer a couple days before the premiere, and I had already made up my mind that the movie was going suck because the kids they had chosen for the leads were terrible actors anyway.

However, just being at the theater, sitting in the auditorium for an hour before the actual screening with a bunch of other college-age fans, got me pumped about it. No one was in costume or anything, but you could just feel the excitement in the air when the lights finally dimmed. You could feel the fan solidarity when the trailer for Twilight (another franchise of the same genre) came on, as literally every single audience member guffawed, making their contempt for the rival series known. And once the movie started, you could feel the collective, nervous anticipation as everyone gripped the edges of their seats, the sound of a large clock in the film helping the audience count down the seconds until the bloodbath scene, when the young characters would start to savagely and gruesomely kill each other, gladiator-style.

It. Was. Awesome.

Of course, you can’t please everyone, and there are always fans who are going to say the movies were terrible, disappointing, etc. One particularly annoying instance of this is the ignorant racists who are bashing the movies because they didn’t comprehend that some of the main characters were supposed to be black. But overall, fans seem pretty satisfied with the film adaptation. The movie grossed $155 million on opening weekend; that’s #3 on the top 10 all time opening weekends, and THG is now the biggest non-sequel opener, and the biggest non-summer opener. It also still has an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is better than good.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m a fan of THG series. I read the books, I enjoyed them, and I saw the movie, which I enjoyed even more, but that’s as far as it goes. I have no desire to engage in any kind of online participatory culture around it—mostly because I’m not crazy enough about the actual original media text, but also because the majority of people who make up this online fandom are probably thirteen-year-old girls.

(I did however rush to my go-to beauty supply store and buy four of the nail polishes from China Glaze’s The Hunger Games - Capitol Colours collection—starting with District 2, my favorite character’s district…yes, I am still a geek.)

In other words, not my fandom, but I enjoyed visiting!