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Like thousands of other fans in America — and, I’m sure, like many lucky Hypable readers — I had the good fortune to see The Hunger Games at midnight last night. While nothing can replace the book for me, I loved every second of the movie: the eerie reaping scene, the realism of both the poverty in District 12 and the bloodbath in the arena, the gaudy costumes of the Capitol citizens as they watched children kill each other for their entertainment. A moment that particularly affected me occurred when the tributes were still training in the game room. The camera cut to a clip of a Capitol family; a small boy was unwrapping a gift of a toy sword, so that he could “play Hunger Games” with his sister. The boy was ecstatic, and his reaction was meant to remind the viewer of the sickness of a society in which children are indoctrinated to treat violence as an amusing spectator sport. Yet, ironically, I felt that the majority of my fellow theatergoers were doing exactly that with the movie they went to see last night.

Many people I saw in the theater before the movie started were wearing costumes, I observed with delight; a pink-haired girl as Effie Trinket was particularly pleasing. I also saw many groups of (mostly) girls wearing matching, homemade or storebought Hunger Games t-shirts. I was surprised, never having seen a comparable level of enthusiasm for any franchise, book or film, other than (of course) Harry Potter. During the movie itself, my perceptions of the fans around me began to change from delight to alarm. People around me clapped and cheered when Katniss killed Marvel and again when she shot Cato at the end of the Games. While I felt the tears around me when Rue died were appropriate, I did not understand why theatergoers cheered the deaths of children.

Herein lies my problem with the Hunger Games fandom: fans who obsess over the plot twists in the novels, especially the romantic ones, romanticize the violence in The Hunger Games, just as Capitol citizens sigh and swoon over the arena’s pageantry each year. I don’t mean that fans can’t enjoy the love triangle (I am Team Gale all the way, for the record) or root for Katniss as she struggles in the arena, but when we clap as Katniss is forced to slaughter other children, we aren’t thinking critically enough about the source material. Gary Ross has made a brilliant, thought-provoking movie based on a brilliant, thought-provoking book about the glorification of violence in our culture; let’s not ignore the story’s message by making sport out of The Hunger Games in the same way the Capitol citizens do.