He began taking screen grabs of the offensive tweets and posting them to Instagram. (She appended her tweet with the hashtag admonishment #sticktothebookDUDE.)Īdam was shocked-Suzanne Collins had been fairly explicit about the appearance, if not the ethnicity, of Rue and Thresh, who, along with twenty-two other kids, are thrown into the life-or-death, “Lord of the Flies”-esque battle that the book is named for. “Why is Rue a little black girl?” demanded to know. Until I learned that a black girl was playing Rue,” wrote. “Naturally Thresh would be a black man,” someone who called herself tweeted. Like the conversations found on message boards, some of the opinions were vitriolic, if not blatantly racist unlike the postings on fan forums, however, the Twitter comments were usually attached to real identities. He soon began poking around on Twitter, looking at tweets that incorporated hashtags-#hungergames-used by the book’s devotees. (The movie, released a week ago today, made a staggering $152.5 million during its first three days of release.) After an argument broke out in the comments section of an Entertainment Weekly post that suggested the young black actress Willow Smith be cast as the character of Rue, he realized that racially insensitive remarks by “Hunger Games” fans were features, not bugs. The young man, whom I’ll call Adam, had been tracking a disturbing trend among Hunger Games enthusiasts: readers who could not believe-or accept-that Rue and Thresh, two of the most prominent and beloved characters in the book, were black, had been posting vulgar racial remarks.Īdam, who read and fell in love with the trilogy last year, initially encountered these sorts of sentiments in the summer of 2011, when he began visiting Web sites, forums, and message boards frequented by the series’s fans, who were abuzz with news about the film version of the book.

On Tuesday, February 28th, a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian male fan of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian young adult trilogy, “The Hunger Games,” logged onto the popular blogging platform Tumblr for the first time and created a site he called Hunger Games Tweets.

Hunger games author