This is in response to the user posted article: Book-to-movie films: You can’t have it all, so get over it.

I have to admit I am quite new to this fandom business as The Hunger Games was really the first series that I read a great deal of time before the movie adaptation came out, in regards to any novel. With that being said, I used to think that the emotions felt after seeing the Hunger Games movie would be about the same as those felt after seeing a Harry Potter, “A good supplement to the book, entertaining, but not a replacement, and fans should be grateful that a movie was even made.” But being that I had read Harry Potter after I’ve seeing the first few movies and after getting addicted to MuggleCast, this experience was completely different.

It is safe to say that a great deal of Hunger Games fans came from the Harry Potter fandom, those seeking for that next book series to fulfill their obsessive needs as born fans. It is also safe to say that a lot of Harry Potter fans became fans of the series after the first movie, so images of Harry, Ron and Hermione were somewhat generated in their heads when they decided that they were intrigued enough to start reading the books. The Hunger Games fandom is not the fandom that Harry Potter was or is. We already know the conclusion of the story by the time the first movie came out, we have our own visions in our heads how the characters look and sound like and how the costumes and settings look like. This also means that we cannot conjure potential Horcrux theories, ship Team Gale or Team Peeta, or even predict what the arena will be like in the 76th annual Hunger Games. However, what we can do, and what we are doing is milking what we do have: three novels that complete a story that one day we will read to our kids in hopes that our future society doesn’t mirror that of the Capitol’s.

This gets to the crux of my argument. The main reason why fans are being nitpicky about an excellent movie, a movie many argue to surpass the adaptation’s of the Potter movies, is that we already know what happens and we are attached to this finite story that we were given. We know which scenes that we think they should include because we know how it ends. We know that the subtle build up of Katniss’ unstable emotions, especially toward Peeta, are relevant to the coming sequels. We know which characters make it to the end, which characters don’t and which characters cause us to feel emotions only felt by encountering a well-written literary character. We know that the Mockingjay pin is more than just “from my district” as Katniss states in the movie. We know that it was and will be a symbol of a rebellion to come, that it was a symbol on all the books, on the movie posters, and has caused a wave of fans to purchase identical pins for the meaning of what the pins stand for rather than to just look cool. Say that you just watched the movie without reading the book, tell me what was the significance of the Mockingjay other than the fact that it was a good luck charm that would grant nothing bad against the wearer of the pin.

There are always going to be people that love, and people that hate the movie adaptations of any book. And I think their love, hate, dislike, or their observation of a slight flaw in the movie is justified. We are fans of this series because we are fanatical, attached to this series, and everyone has their own reason to why “this series” in particular tugged at their heart strings, whether it be the story, the characters or even the message. Say your image of Peeta, the Cornucopia, or the games itself were interpreted differently by the movie makers than you how you interpreted them in your head; wouldn’t you be at least a little disappointed?

Personally, I watched the movie three times, including the midnight release. I was greatly entertained each time, but it felt a little too short each time, although, I got goosebumps and almost teared when they showed the rebellion in District 11. Despite how much I loved the film, my biggest gripe of the film was after finishing the movie, I didn’t feel the same way as I did and do after I read and re-read “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins. There was some ominous thing that I couldn’t pin point that was missing, which I noticed when I watched the movie each of the three times. Everyone has their reason(s) for being a fan of The Hunger Games, and wouldn’t you too be nitpicky if they didn’t include that particular thing that you were so looking forward to? In my case, that “thing” was my emotion towards the story.