“You see it a lot,” says Abby Rowland, joining our Zoom call from her Los Angeles bedroom. “The woman is the housewife. The woman is the abused housewife. The woman is yelled at. The woman is told she didn’t matter.”
Rowland is a young working actor and recent college graduate living in Southern California — a stone’s throw away from the famed Hollywood sign. She’s passionate about storytelling, though her work goes beyond standing in as a face on camera or on stage. In developing independent short films and leading stage plays, she brings a critical lens to the shows she chooses to participate in.
“You see this in a lot of old movies and a lot of old plays… especially plays. I’m a big stage actor. [So many of] these stories are based around violence against women. […] Why do we keep doing plays where women are abused for no reason?”
In her work, Rowland prioritizes stories written by and for women — shows like Men on Boats and The Revolutionists. She is just one in a broader generation of twenty-somethings today who grew up watching films targeting young audiences fronted by strong female leads. Films like Divergent, The Mortal Instruments, and The Hunger Games — all book-to-movie adaptations that prompted franchises and earned blockbuster financial returns — raised people like Rowland.
“The reason I even questioned [this portrayal] when I got to college was because I’d seen stories that could be about women, and be really interesting, and not include violence or abuse. […] I think it’s incredibly important that I saw The Hunger Games. These women are so strong, and they’re not being abused – or that’s not the main center of the film.”
However, for Rowland, her interest in these stories went deeper than simply buying a ticket and purchasing a DVD when the time came. When Rowland was 14, she ran an Instagram fan page dedicated to The Hunger Games. At its peak, @heyitscatnip amassed upwards of 7,000 followers and garnered her entry into a vibrant community of teenagers that were a part of the same online fandom. These teens filled theaters at midnight premieres of Catching Fire. They spent their days exchanging notes via direct message group chats on fanfiction drafts, courting the attention of Lionsgate producers to gain access to promotional teasers, and sharing fan theories about the nuances of character dynamics and potential spin-offs.
While these online networks — formative spaces for young people in the early 2010s — may be easy to forget as bygone moments from early adolescence, the political story of The Hunger Games, and other YA dystopian book-to-movie adaptations, came at a critical time for those like Rowland. They provided visual cues and fictional roadmaps to assist young people in translating complicated news clippings of Black Lives Matter uprisings, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and the rise of the Tea Party — during an era defined by evolving national identity and burgeoning resistance movements.
Today, as the United States grapples with a historic question of how to preserve its own democracy amidst a continued rise of authoritarianism, white supremacy, and extremism, and as The Hunger Games has catapulted back into cultural relevance, with the film series becoming available on streaming services in advance of the franchise’s next release in theaters later this year, yesterday’s fangirls and fanboys are stepping into their twenties, assuming political responsibility, and leading today’s contemporary revolutions.
Erifili Gounari is the founder and CEO of The Z Link, a Gen-Z-led marketing firm to support brands in reaching younger audiences. The London-based entrepreneur was recently featured on Forbes’s Europe 30 Under 30 list — though before this, in 2012, Gounari ran @finnickness, a Hunger Games fan page that amassed 20,000 followers before Gounari retired the account in 2016.
Fan pages like Gounari and Rowland’s appeared on social media platforms such as Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter during the platforms’ early years of popularity. During @finnickness’s stint, Gounari was living in Greece, sharing memes and Tumblr text posts highlighting The Hunger Games, and connecting with others like Rowland, a teenager living in Takoma Park, Maryland.
“I spent a lot of time chatting with like-minded people around the world that were the same age as me and had the same interests,” says Gounari. “It allowed me to get connected to the world in a way that my physical location didn’t allow me to when I was younger. It expanded my perspective and gave me access to a level of connectedness that young teens usually don’t have.”
These fan pages provided space for many young people to congregate online, developing a community parallel to their emerging skills of literary analysis and political consciousness. For Gounari, Katniss’s story in The Hunger Games — and the series’s broader theme of elevated young voices, resonated with her in a way that would steer her towards her eventual work with The Z Link.
“[The Hunger Games] taught me that young voices matter. It felt empowering to see that in action and to see communities being created around The Hunger Games as a result,” says Gounari.
With regards to her work with The Z Link, elevating young people in the eyes of clients such as Deloitte, United Nations Peacekeeping, and Everlane, she says that “Gen Z has so many issues that they feel very passionately about right now, and it’s important to amplify the fire of young voices to spread awareness for climate change, racial inequality, and other pressing issues that large demographics tend to ignore or pretend are not there. Empowering Gen Z voices is essential to inspire, educate, and contribute to creating change.”
“What they want is for me to truly take on the role they designed for me,” says Katniss Everdeen, the series heroine in Mockingjay, the final book in the series. “The symbol of the revolution. The Mockingjay. It isn’t enough, what I’ve done in the past, defying the Capitol in the Games, providing a rallying point. I must now become the actual leader, the face, the voice, the embodiment of the revolution. The person who the districts — most of which are now openly at war with the Capitol — can count on to blaze the path to victory.”
Over the course of the three-book series, which would become a four-film blockbuster franchise, with a prequel, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, set to be released this November, Katniss’s initial, small-scale revolt transforms into a nationwide revolution, with coal miners in Appalachia, fishermen on the coasts, and agricultural farmers in the deep South forming coalitions with one another to topple their authoritarian government and constitute a democratic union in its place.
Katniss continues, “I won’t have to do it alone.”
“It was very empowering,” says Rowland, “but we had to go find a community of other 13-year-olds who also felt that way.”
Jeremy Smalls and Jarek Azim are two other former teenagers that Rowland and Gounari came to know during their fandom years, forging a community with one another across borders through direct messages and iMessage group chats.
“I wanted to be friends with everyone,” says Jeremy Smalls. “I used to follow back everyone who followed me. I didn’t realize how big my account was until people messaged me and were like, ‘Oh, I find all my [film] news from you.’”
Where Rowland used her platform to share memes, Tumblr text posts, and her own fanfiction, Smalls tailored his account, @hg_fanboy — which was created in 2013 and amassed a following of nearly 30,000 — to share production updates as the film series progressed. Smalls, and other accounts, would follow the press, production staff, and set extras closely, sharing exclusive behind-the-scenes photos, newly-released posters, television spots, and more while the series continued through its production and promotion phases. Today, Smalls resides in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he works as a freelance videographer and video editor.
“I just wanted to talk with people who read the same things as me, about similar things, and wanted to hear what they had to say too,” says Jarek Azim — a current Boston, Massachusetts resident, and friend of Rowland, Smalls, and Gounari. Azim ran @fictionalfanboy on Instagram when he was younger — a fan page with a following of 6,000 at its peak. Azim, who works today doing diversity, inclusion, and belonging work professionally and spends his time supporting advocacy efforts to decriminalize plant medicine in Massachusetts, values the friendships he developed at that young age. He believes firmly that the community forged through an — albeit cringe — fandom in his formative years that shaped him into an adept political thinker today, eager to face today’s issues with the same boldness as a YA heroine.
“A lot of [that community] formed around that initial safe space, or whatever you call it — a space where people could congregate together around that initial idea. It really matters when you go past that [initial starting point]. […] When those conversations get deep, I think that’s where more action begins.”
“Without community, there is no liberation,” wrote feminist Audre Lorde in her seminal 1984 text, Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays.
These adolescent communities, formed through a common interest in YA dystopian stories, would lead young people to develop a keen awareness of political change happening around them. While they were learning about the branches of government in middle school history class by day, after finishing their homework, they were immersing themselves in fictional supplementary exercises by closely reading the material that their fan pages stood upon.
“It was my first time reading about a government that could be bad,” says Rowland. “I don’t think I understood enough about the nuances of our government to know that it could have problems too. I was told in school that we had a democracy, and it was great. Reading these books definitely made me go, ‘Oh, there’s other places that don’t have that,’ and as I got older, slowly realized that there could be problems with our democracy as well. […] Maybe I wasn’t thinking about [politics] actively when I was reading the books at that age, but I do think they had an effect later on. I think they planted [seeds] in my head.”
“It was very obvious there was a clear class difference between the districts, and I think that’s where my political thought really stopped at that age,” says Azim, reflecting back on his first experience reading and watching The Hunger Games. “But if I were to read it now, it’s more than just class. It’s the region, the geography, the types of people you interact with, and Katniss’s gender, obviously. I had the seed planted, but it hadn’t fully developed.”
Even further, in forming close bonds with one another, these young people, living in different states and countries, all with differing home lives and backgrounds, were taking advantage of the early age of the internet to intimately become exposed to different perspectives in a way that was uniquely possible for their generation, being raised online.
“I learned a lot from [other fans],” says Smalls. “I didn’t really know anyone that was different from me. […] I hung out with people [at home] who [were] right-leaning because I’m from South Carolina. I learned a lot from [the online community].”
Today, Smalls intends to use his film work to elevate the stories of people from marginalized backgrounds that may have been overlooked or shrouded in the past. He recently led an effort to chronicle his town, Beaufort’s role in the Civil War, with it being home to a volunteer regiment of formerly enslaved people fighting alongside Union soldiers.
For Rowland, it was the combination of getting to know her online peers and seeing visual imagery through the movies that attuned her to 2012’s context regarding racial injustice in the United States.
“My hometown was not [diverse]. Takoma Park was a lovely place, but very white. I didn’t realize that there were racial issues in this country because I wasn’t around it. Everything seemed fine. It was like, everything is great, everyone is equal, and then, watching the movie, seeing that District 11 were Black people who were treated pretty badly and kept segregated — we were pretty young [watching that movie]. I started to think more about it in this country — the racial injustices.”
In The Hunger Games, after a particularly stunning kill in the arena, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) kindly lays District 11’s tribute Rue (Amandla Stenberg) to rest, delicately placing her still hands atop one another, and plucking white flowers from a nearby meadow to so beautifully frame Rue’s body — a Black child, whose life was cut prematurely short as a result of state-sponsored violence. Upon completing the mourning display, Katniss wanders shortly away from the site, turns to a nearby camera — fascist surveillance is the point of the Games, after all — and raises the three-finger salute in fierce defiance of the constant death that’s become a norm in Panem.
What follows is an affecting cut to those watching in District 11. A crowd of predominantly Black laborers take in the sight, raise their hands in unified protest, and move to action.
“A riot is the language of the unheard,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speech, “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” in February 1967. “And what has America failed to hear? […] Our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.”
The farmers in District 11 ruin their agricultural supply, restrain the state’s draconian Peacekeepers, shatter windows, light fires in presumed government offices, and deliver blows to the militarized police force sent to subdue the riots. It’s the first display of major resistance seen in the film series. It is an action that will eventually spill into the following sequels and throughout all the districts in the fictional nation of Panem.
In the following scene, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harleson) urges Seneca Crane (Wes Bently) — the head Gamemaker and right-hand to the president — not to punish Katniss for her televised protest. “Don’t kill her. You’ll just create a martyr,” says Haymitch. To which Seneca replies, “Well, it seems we’ve already got one.”
In leaving the theater, young people’s early minds may have wandered to the recent memory of news coverage reporting on the outburst of nationwide protests following the vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, only a few months before the release of The Hunger Games in theaters. Martin’s young face had spent weeks plastered on television screens nationwide. Parents fervently committed to catching the five o’clock news to see if Martin’s killer had been arrested and whether or not justice would be delivered in the brewing court case. For many young people, Martin’s murder and the following court case was their first lucid exposure to national outrage at anti-Black vigilante violence — an issue that remains painfully relevant today.
The political interrogation skills these former fanboys and fangirls developed through close and consistent analysis of The Hunger Games’ story served as an onramp to their political action. For many, that leap came for the first time around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as Rowland, Azim, and Smalls retired their accounts, finished high school, and looked to vote for the first time.
“That election changed a lot,” says Smalls. Having spent his childhood growing up in South Carolina, a state with a heavy campaign presence during presidential primary cycles. “I remember [in 2016], I stood up in front of my church and made people aware of how their voices truly mattered and let them know that they shouldn’t sit back and watch [the election]. [The years] 2018 and 2020 were even bigger for me. That’s when I decided to donate to a campaign myself. Those were the first years where I could vote in midterm and presidential elections.”
Azim agrees. Growing up in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state targeted by Democrats and Republicans in recent years, he believes that “2016 was a very important year” for himself and for others. “A lot of us in this similar age group finally had some power in our voices.”
Rowland would credit her time moderating @heyitscatnip for allowing her to consider the threat of Donald Trump and the movement that he represented as being legitimate. Her close reading of fiction in her childhood offered a critical lens to the headlines that played out in front of her as a high school senior during the election, watching Trump’s promotion of racist “birther” conspiracy theories, admitted sexual assault, and more. Trump’s policies and grotesque politicking would eventually lead to the January 6th insurrection on the United States Capitol — a conservative lashing against the country’s democratic rejection of Trump in the 2020 presidential election, and whose scale broke historic new ground.
“[Panem is] a different United States, but [The Hunger Games] does take place in it,” says Rowland. The fictional nation of Panem is set within the ruins of a failed democratic state in North America, in which a subdued liberatory revolution has led to an authoritarian norm. “Can we imagine a [United States] that looks like that? I think it’s important that we do because things could always go that way. We had Trump for a president — who thought that was [going to] happen?”
“I think fiction has a very powerful way of giving us the truth of reality in ways that kind of trick you into understanding it. As a 13-year-old, it was very accessible and nice to have. I’m very lucky to have that,” says Azim.
As the series surges back into popular relevancy, and as The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes promotion begins, it does so under the context of book bans increasing at a rapid rate throughout the country — targeting children’s literature featuring themes of queerness, anti-racism, and resistance.
MacKenzie Lansing, a New York-based actor who will be starring alongside Rachel Zegler, Hunter Shafer, and Tom Blyth in the film as Coral, one of the tributes from District 4 in Panem’s tenth Hunger Games, believes that the book and the film’s message is particularly urgent at this time:
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes speaks to our past — moments in time where we might have lost our foothold on democracy and given into oppressing people, but it also warns us of how that might already be happening in our present, in ways that we need to become aware of.”
If Suzanne Collins’ novel is to be followed closely, the film promises cinematic reflections on the creation of celebrity agitators, hauntingly familiar imagery of children in cages, and a collapse towards violence during the tail-end of a reconstruction era, among others.
“Fueled with the terror of being prey,” says Viola Davis in the film’s newly released trailer, “see how quickly we become predator.” Davis will portray Dr. Volumnia Gaul, Head Gamemaker of the 10th Hunger Games.
Lansing is eager for audiences to see the film and is encouraged by the growing voice of Gen Z in today’s political and cultural spaces — voices like Rowland, Gounari, Azim, and Smalls, who’ve been inspired by The Hunger Games and practice resistance today. Their early support enabled the franchise to continue reaching a new audience of young people today.
“I’m super excited for this generation’s voice and how involved they are,” says Lansing. “There is a resurgence of passion for the books and for the movies among Gen Z viewers. I’m just so excited for that audience and their voice and how they’ve been using it so actively.”
These former fanboys and fangirls are eager to step into the conversation to continue advocating boldly for social change — and credit their fandom days for stoking their fire.
“I think we can trace it all back to that,” says Rowland. “Having those stories that I loved so much.” While Azim concludes, “I blame the internet, but it’s a good blame.”
