As a kid, I really liked The Hunger Games books. I bought the first book and then a teacher lent me the second one, which I read in basically a single sitting. I stayed up later than I’d ever stayed up to that point in my life because I couldn’t put the book down and went to school the next day feeling really guilty about defying my bedtime. The third book hadn’t come out yet, so I had to wait awhile before I could get my hands one it. When I did, I found my self incredibly disappointed by it. Or rather, by the epilogue in which Katniss describes her life several years on from the events of the book. She seemed so broken and that hurt to read. Like I said, I was a kid at the time, so I didn’t really understand that given her experiences, it made some sense that Katniss would still be traumatized twenty years after a war. But the thing that really stood out to me was the way she describes her relationship to Peeta, by then her husband. Throughout the books, I did understand that her obsession with Peeta wasn’t really love. It was something else, something darker fuelled by her rage at the injustices of her world. This comes to a head in the third book and I given how unhealthy their relationship obviously became, even as an elementary schooler I could tell that it needed to end. But it doesn’t. In fact, the epilogue informs us that not only does Katniss stay with Peeta, she has kids with him. I can’t describe how angry that made me. Katniss didn’t want to bring children into the world she lived in. She’d made that pretty clear throughout the book. And the epilogue makes it pretty clear, to me at least, that even though she loves them, Katniss still doesn’t necessarily feel like she made the right decision for herself. She agreed for Peeta’s sake. She does a lot of things for Peeta’s sake in that book. And as a kid, I didn’t understand this. Why was she giving up her own agency, her own beliefs and needs for a character who could not be more literally ‘some guy’ if he tried? This soured me on the books almost immediately. A heroine I loved and looked up to because she was so self possessed had been reduced to a wreck motivated by an obsession with a pathetic man. I put down The Hunger Games and didn’t think about the series again for more than a decade.

AND THEN

Last year, I was reading some Nietzsche. I don’t even remember why, but I was. And as I was reading about how the over-human is ‘drunk on life’ it occurred to me that I had been reading The Hunger Games all wrong as a kid. You see, Katniss Everdeen is an embodiment of the Nietzschean Übermensch. Nietzsche’s view is that the over-human is capable of overcoming the world around them and shaping it totally in their image. Throughout the first two books, this is exactly what Katniss learns to do. In the first book, she periodically is confronted with horrors that drive her to act. However, she doesn’t let her actions be constrained by conventional wisdom or the structures of society. This culminates in that brilliant moment at the climax where she threatens to rob the game makers of the their finale. In the contest between her own will and the structures of power that try to constrain it, power blinks first. It’s brilliant writing! And the reason why I never felt like Katniss really loved (or even like Peeta) is because he too is just an extension of her willpower. His life belongs to her in the sense that she willed him to live when he otherwise would not have. To Katniss, he is not really a person but rather a symbol of her own power, which is why she becomes so obsessed with him.

In the second book, we see the Übermensch at the height of her power. She willingly goes back to the games and in her every action, makes it clear to the world who really possesses power. This again culminates in a victory of her willpower over the game makers as she destroys the forcefield creating the arena, breaking down the physical and symbolic barrier between the artifice of the game and the artifice of reality. This act is what makes her into the symbol of revolution more-so than any other, because this act is the one thing no one else had managed to do. Katniss alone was capable of showing that human will could overpower complex social structures of control. So naturally, she is taken in by the resistance. And this is where things begin to change. Whereas before, the Übermensch was acting on her will alone with no other considerations beyond what she wanted, now she willingly subordinates herself to the resistance. This destroys her power completely, rendering her will impotent. In hindsight, the entire conflict of the third book is between Katniss’s desire to be the Übermensch, to will fully and completely, and her desire to see something beneficial to all built and outlast her. This conflict begins to centre around the question of Peeta. Katniss’s obsession with him grows deeper because he represents what she can be. He is a symbol of what she was at the height of her power, when she was most drunk on life. She feels that by just retrieving him, she can go back to that person and begin to reshape the resistance in her own image. Without any other lens through which she can interpret this need, she rationalizes it as love. The need to reassert herself through saving Peeta becomes an increasing necessity as she realizes that despite using her literal image to fuel the civil war, the new regime is shaping up to be little better than the old one. Thus, it becomes clear that she must once again take up the mantle of Übermensch to right the wrongs of the resistance. But steeped in her obsession and trauma, she cannot remember how to find the will to power. That is, until the resistance murders her sister.

After the unnecessary carpet bombing of the Capitol by the resistance, Katniss finds herself in a state of disorientation. Delirious with rage and grief at the loss of her sister, the one whose life Katniss set out to save in the first book thereby putting all of the events that follow in motion, she is imprisoned with the man she is set to execute. Snow, the president and the symbol of the ancien régime, seems so human in this part and Katniss, possessed by a madness she cannot really understand, begins to see a way forward after seeing him defeated and imprisoned. When she is brought out, broken and angry, to execute him with her bow, she instead turns on President Coin, the woman who led the resistance. And in a moment that now fills me with awe, Katniss kills the woman who symbolizes that to which she had subordinated her will thereby asserting her total will to power and embodying the Übermensch one last time. Killing Snow as he’s bound and waiting to be executed would be meaningless to her, so the Übermensch once more asserts her power to define herself and her narrative by killing Coin instead. Coin, who has repeatedly stood between the Übermensch and her willpower, must die for Katniss to live on without her sister. However, this final act of willpower comes at a grave cost.

You see, what Suzanne Collins recognizes that Nietzsche perhaps didn’t is that human beings are not built to be the Übermensch all the time. Our psyches are fragile things. And for Katniss, whose will to power is always a reaction to trauma, losing her sister proved to be too much. Even as a child, I was able to recognize that everything — everything single thing — Katniss does in these books is downstream from the need to protect her sister. That’s why it’s Prim’s death — and nothing to do with Peeta — that reminds Katniss how to find her will to power again. And at the conclusion of the story, Katniss has nothing left without her. Peeta is a consolation prize, a symbol of the person she is no longer strong enough to be. That’s why she seemed to me to be so miserable in the epilogue. She’s once again subordinated her will to another, to her husband, and while she still might chafe under this yoke she’s chosen, she lacks the strength to throw it off again. Katniss Everdeen is the result of the ultimate mortality of the Übermensch. Nietzsche himself argues that the Übermensch is symbolic of the morality of ancient gods. But Katniss isn’t an ancient god. She’s a woman. A human. And like all humans, she breaks. In this way, she is a hero, but not the kind we’ve grown used to in our modern age. Katniss Everdeen is a tragic hero. And now, as an adult, I love her for that even more than I ever could as a kid.