"Trust Me": Volatile Markets in Twilight and The Hunger Games

Abstract

WH E N SU Z A N N E CO L L I N S’S TH E HU N G E R GA M E S W A S P U B L I S H E D I N 2008, it was critically praised as the “antidote” to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, with Collins’s Katniss Everdeen heralded as the active feminist agent to counter Meyer’s passive Bella Swan. Meyer’s series drew to a close as Collins’s began, both in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. Both series are compellingly connected to speculative finance. The Hunger Games caught the imagination of youth punished and excluded by a crash they did not cause, while facing uncertainty about the future; economist Noreena Hertz has dubbed today’s youth “Generation K” after Katniss (Hertz 2016). Meanwhile, critiques of Twilight’s Edward Cullen as “compensated psychopath” (Merskin 2011, 157)