[Nota Bene: This post was written before Mockingjay was published! Please enjoy it as the speculative exercise it was, if you like, and then read the many posts that were written about the artistry and meaning of the series after we had the finale in hand. Writing comments on this thread that do not reflect those later posts, especially those questioning the author’s intelligence (!) because of what we know now but did not know then, is an exercise in self-important vanity and will be deleted.]

I will be writing about Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy in this post, and, specifically, I will be talking about the first two books in that series as well as speculating about the finale. Fair warning: if you choose to read this before reading Hunger Games and Catching Fire, if you read a book for the first time (at least) preferring to experience the story without knowing the details of story events or how it turns out, proceeding with this post will almost certainly “spoil” your first reading of those books. For those who have read Hunger Games and Catching Fire, though, this should be a lot of fun. [Read more…]

[Please note that this post was written in 2010 before Mockingjay was published. For an updated discussion of the series in light of the finale, including the alchemical, allegorical, and anagogical meanings, please head over here. Enjoy!]

If you haven’t read the first two books of The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins and you don’t want to read the plot points of those stories before you’ve read the books (“spoiling” them), have a nice day. If you have read The Hunger Games and Catching Fire or you’re interested in a discussion of how to use traditional tools of literary analysis to understand contemporary fiction, then you are in the right place. Find yourself a beverage to your liking and pull up a chair.

Last Sunday, in a post called ‘Who is the Mockingjay?‘, I put forward a theory that the wife of the District 12 mayor, Mrs. Donner-Undersee was the mastermind-puppeteer behind the Mockingjay story being written within the Capitol’s Hunger Games. Many readers have embraced the idea, at least as many have objected to the theory, and I have spent most of the past week answering questions about and objections to it (see here and here and here and here). [Thank you to Arabella, JSavant, Ellie, Ally, all my friends at HungerGamesTrilogy.com and everyone else who checked in with ideas, comments, and corrections.] My task tonight is to explain the premises of my speculation before rolling out the 2.0 version of what I believe Arabella first called the “Pearl Plot.”

Got that beverage? Then let’s get started. [Read more…]

Back into the mailbag! The feedback to “Who is Mockingjay?” we’ll be looking at today, though, wasn’t sent to HogwartsProfessor (except for the opener that came in after I posted Part 2). It’s almost all from the two threads on this theory posted at HungerGamesTrilogy.com and MockingJay.net, two of the busier Hunger Games fandom sites with large forums. You have your SPOILER WArning and my advice to read the Hunger Games, Catching Fire, the Pearl Theory thread, and my responses, Part 1 and Part 2, before entering here. Good? Great.

First, though, this note from the HogPro comment boxes after the Pearl Theory post: [Read more…]