Why Sunrise on the Reaping matters more than ever amid student protests and political unrest

In less than a month, we will return to Panem in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, where young people are forced to pay the price for the power and privilege of others.

Yes, it does sound familiar because around the world, students and young people have taken to the streets over underfunded schools, the rising cost of living, housing shortages, examination irregularities, unemployment, corruption and political decisions they believe are failing them. 

There is something quite unsettling about growing up watching teenagers fight against corrupt governments on screen, only to grow up and watch people your own age take to the streets in real life.

I first read The Hunger Games when I was 16. The same age as Katniss Everdeen when she volunteers to take her sister’s place in the arena. At that age, Panem felt like the sort of nightmare you could close a book to escape from. The Capitol was evil, the Games were barbaric, and Katniss was the girl brave enough to fight back.

I loved her for it, and I wanted her to win. 

But as Haymitch Abernathy says, “Nobody ever wins the Games. Period. There are survivors. There’s no winners.”

The original series is brutal, obviously. But Sunrise on the Reaping somehow makes that cruelty feel even more unbearable. Maybe it’s because we already know how the story ends. We know that surviving the Games doesn’t mean escaping the Capitol. We know that even the people who make it out alive are left carrying what happened to them. And we know that the system doesn’t need to kill everyone to win. It just needs to make enough people frightened, distracted or comfortable enough not to challenge it.

Psychotherapist Silvia Dutchevici, founder of the Critical Therapy Institute, told Film Shrine that The Hunger Games makes structural inequality visible by showing how the Capitol exploits the districts. She said, “Katniss isn’t poor because she didn’t work hard enough. District 12 is poor because the Capitol is built on its exploitation. For a generation raised on the myth that anyone can make it if they try, that’s a radical message. It gives us ideas to question the system, not just ourselves.”

Growing up means realising that the Capitol is not the only frightening thing

When I was 16, I could read about the Capitol and know exactly who the villains were. President Snow was cruel, the Games were wrong, and there was a clear line between the people suffering and the people responsible. Real life rarely offers that kind of clarity.

There is no single arena where all our problems play out, no one villain responsible for every injustice, and no guarantee that the right person will arrive to make everything better. Political decisions affect people in ways that can be difficult to trace. Institutions can fail the people they are meant to protect. Those with power can present their decisions as necessary while the people paying the price are told to be patient.

Young people are trying to imagine their futures against a backdrop of system failure and uncertainty. Their reasons are not all the same, and it would be lazy to pretend that one book or film explains them. But it is hard not to think about how relevant Sunrise on the Reaping is right now. 

Dutchevici told us, “Young people are living with real uncertainty: Climate, housing, debt, war, a sense that institutions aren’t working for them. Their anxiety is not irrational; it’s often an accurate reading of the world. Dystopian stories take that unspoken fear and give it shape. They say: You’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone.”

She added, “We’ve seen the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games appear at real protests around the world. Stories help people imagine that the world could be different, and imagination comes before action. And stories connect people that might not otherwise see themselves as similar in values. ”

The most devastating thing about Sunrise on the Reaping is that it doesn’t promise a happy ending

The original Hunger Games gives us Katniss. It gives us a central character whose survival becomes an act of resistance, and whose defiance eventually helps inspire something much bigger than herself. But Sunrise on the Reaping makes the cost of that resistance harder to ignore. 

In an interview with Film Shrine, Niloufar Esmaeilpour, a Registered Clinical Counsellor & Approved Supervisor, said, “As Sunrise on the Reaping revisits Panem’s history, the franchise pivots toward propaganda and systemic manipulation, which are issues intensely relevant to modern students.”

She added, “Youth today operate within algorithmic digital spaces that prioritise curated images, essentially living out the Capitol’s media landscape. The narrative focus on how the ruling class edits reality teaches young viewers to question their sources, recognise corporate or state control, and utilise digital tools for grassroots mobilisation.”

Dutchevici also warns that dystopian stories can make liberation look like the work of one exceptional hero, when real change is “collective”. She said, “It’s slow, unglamorous, built by many people together. Katniss didn’t win alone; the districts rose with her.”

That is worth remembering when the world feels overwhelming. Fiction can make resistance look cinematic, but real people do not get a soundtrack or a guarantee that their sacrifices will pay off. You have to work with other people, keep showing up and live with uncertainty.

And perhaps that is why these books still matter. They refuse to let us pretend that cruelty is inevitable or that power should never be questioned.

Maybe there is a sunrise on the reaping

I am almost a decade older now than I was when I first picked up The Hunger Games. I cannot read it in quite the same way knowing that this isn’t fiction anymore. This is very real.

Sunrise on the Reaping destroys you because its cruelty is not difficult to understand. It is deliberate. The Capitol knows what it is doing. It knows how to punish defiance, how to turn suffering into entertainment and how to make people feel powerless. And still, people resist.

And the ending is not a promise that everything will work out. But it is a reason not to confuse the way things are with the way things have to be. And that is what I needed from these books at 16, and what I need from them now. It’s not the reassurance that one person can save the world, but the reminder that the world is worth fighting for, even when change feels impossible.

There is a sunrise on the reaping. It does not arrive when we want it to, or look anything like the ending we imagined. But we have to keep the revolution alive.

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