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''The Hunger Games'', by Suzanne Collins, is a trilogy of young adult novels that take place [[After the End]] in [[Meaningful Name|Panem]], a nation in what used to be North America that is divided into numbered districts and a large capital city.
 
In the first book, heroine Katniss Everdeen [[Heroic Sacrifice|takes her sister Primrose's place]] when Prim is chosen to be a contestant ("[[Super Happy Fun Trope of Doom|tribute]]") in '''the Hunger Games''': an annual televised [[Deadly Game]] wherein 24 teenage contestants are [[Closed Circle|locked in an arena]] to fight to the death until only one remains. Her struggle for survival ends up igniting a firestorm that quickly goes beyond her control, until she finds herself embroiled in an all-out war that almost makes the arena look like Disneyland.
 
The three books are:
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** [[Death World]] / [[Everything Trying to Kill You]]: It's sometimes amazing to see what the Capital creates for the sake of killing teenagers. {{spoiler|Or invaders in the local defense's case.}}
* [[Defector From Decadence]]: {{spoiler|Plutarch Heavensbee, his assistant, and some of the other people in District 13}} have fled the Capitol. This was also the goal of Lavinia, the redheaded Avox, and the boy she was with when Katniss first saw her, but they didn't make it.
* [[Deprogram|Deprogramming]]ming: Has to be done to {{spoiler|Peeta}} in book 3.
* [[Despair Event Horizon]]: Katniss passes over it in a matter of paragraphs {{spoiler|at the end of ''Catching Fire''.}} And the rest of the series from there consists of [[It Got Worse|it getting worse]].
* [[Defictionalization]]: You can actually buy mockingjay pins. Interesting, because the citizens of the Capitol displayed this exact behavior in ''Catching Fire''.
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* [[Gray Eyes]]: Apparently fairly common in the Seam, including Katniss and Gale.
* [[Great Offscreen War]]:
** One or two of them--thethem—the civilizational collapse that led to the founding of Panem (we're never sure just what it was or if a war was involved), and the more-recent uprising (~75 years before the books take place) when the Districts rose up against the Capital.
** Most of the fighting in the revolution is also off-screen, up until Katniss gets directly involved in District 2.
** Even then, the majority of the rebellion is off-screen, with the individual Districts' revolts (sans Two and Eight) and even {{spoiler|the final capture of Snow}} being done away from Katniss and therefore the reader. It helps to emphasize the fact that Katniss is only a tool in the war, not a soldier and certainly not a major player.
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* [[Hannibal Lecture]]: Katniss' last conversation with President Snow. {{spoiler|She decides [[Hannibal Has a Point]].}}
* [[Harmful to Minors]]: Only minors are selected for the standard Hunger Games. {{spoiler|The 75th Hunger Game changes the rules.}}
* [[Hate Sink]]: Katniss and Peeta can't exactly attack the directors of the Games, the Capitol doesn't send ''its'' children to die in the Games, and most of the other Tributes are from Districts as oppressed as 12. However, "Career Tributes" from Districts 1, 2 and 4 are ''volunteers'', [[Child Soldier|Child Soldiers]]s have who trained to kill other children since they were able to ''walk''. In addition to their loathsome mindset and superior skills, they always team up to eliminate the weaker Tributes, then gleefully kill each other once everyone else is dead.
* [[He Who Fights Monsters]]: Gale, especially after {{spoiler|setting off what is essentially a giant mine explosion in District 2 to win a battle.}}
* [[Her Heart Will Go On]]: Peeta tries to invoke this in a [[More Hero Than Thou]] dispute. Katniss' internal monologue reveals she'll have none of it.
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* [[Hollywood Healing]]: Due to the advanced medicine available in the Capitol, most injuries sustained by the characters are healed completely. Aversions include Chaff's hand and Peeta's leg, though he gets a prosthetic leg that is rarely referred to again. In the end, {{spoiler|Katniss and Peeta are both covered in skin grafts and burns that the medics didn't bother replacing}}.
* [[Hollywood Tactics]]:
** When the rebels attack the Capitol, direct siege would have included trying to seize or disable the Capitol's nuclear missiles, or else bombarding the Capitol into submission. The narrator mentions that they can't do aerial bombing because of anti-air defenses -- butdefenses—but what about plain old artillery? Or maybe the rebels could have first attacked the anti-air emplacements, and then bombed the Capitol flat. Or they could have just declared victory and negotiated the Capitol's surrender. All of these options would probably have been easier than block-by-block urban warfare through a maze of boobie traps.
** During that same attack, Katniss takes point immediately after being [[Field Promotion|promoted]] to leader of her squad. In real life, a squad leader never takes point, since the point man is the one most likely to die in an ambush, and the squad leader is someone you don't want to lose.
** There seems to be a lack of any standard infantry weapons besides assault rifles and pistols. No grenades, shotguns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, mounted machine guns, battle rifles, submachine guns, etc.
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** At one point a character mentions the use of an EMP bomb by the Capitol. Why didn't the rebels just EMP bomb the Capitol to disable the pods?
** Katniss's combat bow, given to her by 13, is supposedly accurate to 100 yards. This sounds pretty incredible, until you realize that the assault rifles wielded by the Peacekeepers are accurate to around 500 yards, shoot on a much flatter trajectory, don't need constant reloading... ''and'' can penetrate body armor.
** Capitol attack aircraft drop their bombs from the dizzying altitude of 100-ish yards. As though to lampshade this idiocy, Gale and Katniss then ''shoot down the planes with [[Trick Arrow|Trick Arrows]]s.'' An arrow taking down a bomber. Wrap your head around that one.
** The third book has Finnick take a trident to war. A trident that he can ''throw''. Tridents are weapons made for spearing and catching things; they are not ideal for killing in a quick-fire situation (though it is certainly possible to kill with one) because things killed with tridents are meant primarily to stick on the prongs. In old warfare, tridents were generally used for disarming (their length and shape allowed them to accurately knock swords out of combatants' hands without having to get too close), but not as a primary weapon except in gladiatorial combat. As for throwing, tridents simply aren't balanced for that at all. Even if a throwing trident were possible, it's extraordinarily unlikely that it would ever be useful in a war fought mainly with guns.
** There is some very odd squad formation. For some reason, the army of District 13 puts two sisters in the same squad, and allows people whom it knows to be psychologically and emotionally unstable (Finnick, Katniss) to go into actual war {{spoiler|for the sole purpose of creating propaganda}}. Boggs, Coin's second in command, is frequently put on the front line.
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* [[Human Sacrifice]]: Tributes are sacrificed by the Capitol to remember the betrayal of District 13.
* [[Human Shield]]: Snow surrounding himself with children.
* [[Humans Are Bastardsthe Real Monsters]]: At the end of ''Mockingjay'', Katniss hits this trope ''hard.''
* [[Hungry Jungle]]
* [[Hypocrite]]: Various characters have their moments, but a few from Katniss stand out. One being that she judges Madge for having an expensive pin that could feed starving families, yet isn't bothered when she herself is later clad in incredibly expensive outfits. There's also her judgement of fellow tributes because of their killing, when she doesn't make any attempt to restrain her own killing - on a few occasions, she even mentions how her fingers are itching for her knife/arrows just because Johanna snapped at her. She also complains a great deal about the wasting of food, when she, in fact, does it herself (when she threw out the gift of cookies from Peeta's father, for example).
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* [[I'm a Humanitarian]]: A District 6 tribute from a past Games named Titus is said to have gone insane and ate the bodies of the tributes he killed.
* [[Important Haircut]]: Or rather, [[Inverted Trope|important lack of haircut]]. In ''Mockingjay'', all the rebel soldiers have their hair cut short, except for Katniss because she needs to stay recognizable.
** And, oddly enough, Katniss having her body hair waxed throughout the series. District Twelve has no fashion to speak of, and the citizens have a lot more important things to concern themselves with, so at home, Katniss lets her body hair grow out without thinking anything of it. Her stylists stripping her bare is just another example of the Capitol changing who she is -- tois—to the point where by ''Catching Fire'', she considers her fuzzy legs a sign of her freedom, and she's a more than a bit sore to lose them.
* [[Improbable Aiming Skills]]: Katniss is repeatedly shown hitting small game directly in the eye, seemingly with ease. The fact that her arrows have large enough arrowheads to take down humans and deer and therefore have tips bigger than the eyes of some of the small game she's shooting is never accounted for.
* [[Incendiary Exponent]]: Two of Katniss, The Girl On Fire's first [[Costume Porn|ceremonial outfits]] in the Capitol fit this theme, though only one of them actually uses fire.
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* [[Obfuscating Stupidity]]:
** Katniss remarks this was Johanna Mason's strategy in her Games: everyone thought she was a sniveling, useless weakling and overlooked her... until she turned out to be a vicious killer who ended up the victor.
** Oddly enough, Haymitch counts -- notcounts—not only is he quite the strategist in the first Games, but he turns out to be a {{spoiler|major figure in the underground resistance by the end of book 2.}} Not bad for someone most people just think of as the town drunk.
* [[Official Couple]]: Katniss and Peeta (at least, as advertised by the Capitol), and Finnick and Annie. In ''Mockingjay'', {{spoiler|Katniss and Peeta end up together for real}}.
* [[Offscreen Moment of Awesome]]:
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