“Tonight, turn your weapons to the Capitol,” says Katniss Everdeen, heroine of the Hunger Games. “Turn your weapons to Snow.” So opens the trailer for Mockingjay Part 2, the final film in the hit franchise. Amid a firestorm of shootouts and sexual tension, Katniss, dressed in black and wielding her explosive arrows, stands ready to lead an army against the tyrannical President Snow.
It’s an image as old as storytelling: the glamorous warrior confronting injustice. And it’s one young readers have embraced with new energy since the books launched seven years ago. From the Occupy Movement to student protestors in Thailand, activists all over the world have found inspiration in Katniss’s defiant struggle. In Ferguson, civil rights protestors graffitied words from the book onto a local landmark: “If we burn, you burn with us.”
Content from our partners
