The Katniss Everdeen to Johanna Mason Pipeline

Gen Z grew up with Katniss as its rebellious icon, but what now?

In the late 2000s, thanks to Susanne Collins, we were introduced to the world of The Hunger Games, an allegory for our modern world and the dangers of succumbing to totalitarianism.

I remember seeing the first movie at the ripe age of 12, identifying as the quiet, and apprehensive Katniss Everdeen, thrown into a world in which she didn’t have the tools to survive. She was forced against her will to fight to the death and naively believed that her victory would lead to peace for her and her loved ones.

While many essays have been written about the historical and mythological inspirations behind the books and their echo to our troubled modern world, I’ve decided to focus on the growing tides of a troubled yet naive teenage hood marked by Katniss and the early disillusioned adulthood of Johanna Mason. 

Firstly, I need to paint a picture of the Western world full of hope we lived in when the first movie came out, in 2012. Obama was president of the USA, gay marriage became a reality and we had hoped for the protection of the rights of minorities across the Western world. Such was the naive view of 12-year-old me, with unresolved trauma, reflected through Katniss’ independence, fierce loyalty mixed with the desire to remain invisible, and teenage naiveté, who thought the world would get better thanks to older, wiser people.

Like Katniss, most of Gen-Z grew up faster than they ought to be. Growing up in a post 9/11 world we couldn’t even remember, seeing our parents lose their jobs in the 2008 subprime crisis, without mentioning the lack of parental control on internet access, meant that most of us had grown out of necessity and survival.

Then, the extreme right rose in popularity in many countries, and diplomatic relations became tense with the threat of nuclear war, financial instability, and minority persecution rising in statistics.

With this came a sense of hopelessness, which ultimately surfaced with the unbelievable first election of Trump, the death of Georges Floyd in the USA, and Adama Traoré in France (my country) where the youth realized we could no longer be quiet in our pain, no longer wait for the bigger people to save us. They were too busy being children in a sandbox.

Completely disillusioned by government entities like Katniss in the second book when she was brought back to the arena to die, we meet Johanna Mason.

Johanna is a bold rebel, unafraid to speak her mind, and deeply cynical. She is abrasive with her pain, unafraid to protest, and recognizes the world is an uncaring place. Instead of being the unwilling instrument of politicians (like Katniss) Johanna is uncompromising, relentless, and rightfully angry. She showed us how to weaponize our anger instead of simmering in it and letting it swallow us whole as Katniss did.

It is fair to say that, with the protests of 2020, the upcoming US elections, and the current election results in France, most of Gen Z has become Johanna, using social media to share their indignation at the current state of the world.

Sure, Katniss might have been the Mockingjay, but she was the unwilling symbol of a corrupt revolution. Johanna was singleminded and skeptical, knew from the beginning she was just a weapon on one side or the other, and had no illusion that the world could improve, no matter who won.

In a way we are all Johanna now, disenchanted by the current political climate, no matter where we’re from, but unwilling to relent from a fight that didn’t choose us as its ‘special weapon’ but that we chose, like Johanna did, when she could have shut up and kept her head down.

Johanna is the product of her world, much like we are the result of ours, but our most singular common trait, is our hopeless will to compromise on a fight nobody wants us to be a part of.

However, there is a part that has started to worry me online. Thanks to the internet age and mainly TikTok where most of us get our cultural and political analysis, everyone is sharing their outrage, shouting louder than the next. Nobody is listening to anyone. There is no conversation, just relentless screaming into the void echoing against the duvet of a doomscroll.

We finally have a space to share our rage and need for change, but when will it gain focus? For, Johanna may have the cunning to unveil the Capitol’s vile inequality, but she was no orchestrator.