“I greatly enjoyed my colleague Amy Davidson’s post hypothesizing that Collins’s trilogy “is a story about a long counterinsurgency campaign,” and Collins herself has said that it was inspired by a conjunction of reality television and the Iraq war. But I think there’s something else going on, something that resonates both with some of the high lines of modern history and with the tone of the times (and that the latter is one of the things to which its success with young readers is, in part, due): in order to lead a revolution against the prevailing authorities, you first have to win at their game. For all the movie’s rebel spirit, it’s a story of playing the game as if one’s life depends on it.”