Andrew and I have had quite the series of discussions about this series. He has posted a good review of it on his blog, most of which I agree with.
Andrew's Review of The Hunger Games
I would add that Collins missed her chance to make a much bigger impact on our society because of the last chapter of the trilogy. Katniss, having killed the rebel leader, goes back to District 12, wallows for a little while in her nightmares about all the people she's brutally killed, but then here comes Peeta with his bread and they frolic more or less happily in the Meadow with the two children Katniss never wanted to have, but did so because
Peeta wanted them. What could have been an incredible and independent female character was neatly put back on the shelf as a submissive woman, back in the place where she belongs, doing things because her male counterpart wants it. Why?
In my BYU critical theory class we learned about Stephen Greenblatt's Subversion and Containment: this is when a text (or a play, or a movie) within a society calls into question a critical element or an ideology of society.
King Lear, for example, calls into question the divine right of kings—a no-no in that era—and the text has to work extra hard to overcome its subversive nature. The author creates a tiger, but then creates the cage in which to contain it.
In the case of
The Hunger Games, the tiger was a young woman who didn't follow the correct societal pattern of I Need Protection Because I Am Female, Must Find Husband, Must Have Children. The tiger, or mockingjay if you must, was not just in the arena creating havoc; she was causing us, the readers, to have these subversive thoughts against the status quo. What? A woman that has a valuable physical skill (hunting)? A woman that was intelligent enough to anticipate and beat her enemies, over and over again? A woman who didn't feel the need to jump into the arms of two handsome, yearning young men? A woman who didn't want to have children?
No. Don't worry. It was contained. The cage was built for this mockingjay. In the last little bit of the last book. Collins gives in to the Hollywood need for a happy, socially acceptable ending, because ambiguity and unresolved problems don't
sell. Collins enacts authorial control upon her own subversive female character, Katniss, and Katniss is contained, marrying the man she didn't want to marry and having the children she didn't want to have.
One of the best discussions of ambiguity that I have
ever, ever read—and still read on a frequent basis—is Bruce C. Hafen's
On Dealing with Uncertainty (available online). We humans can't handle ambiguity. We must have causes for effects, reasons for actions, answers to questions, however inaccurate or oversimplified those causes, reasons, and answers may be. Hafen discusses Dostoevsky's
The Idiot, "
where the question is seriously raised whether it is possible for a true Christian to love unselfishly . . . As you might expect, he leaves that huge question unresolved, forcing the reader to ponder it for himself." Hafen's discussion of "leveling up" to the type of attitude where we can emotionally, mentally, and spiritually handle the gray areas of our lives is a very important skill that is often overlooked in our make-it-better,
soma-soothed,
relief-of-pain-please society.

Because subversive texts like
The Hunger Games are contained, we are not left with the task of handling the subversive material. Why is it considered unusual, unnatural, or even evil for a woman have a valuable physical skill, intelligence, and a desire to do something other than have a husband, children, and a nicely decorated,
Pinterested home? Why (as Andrew discusses in his review) do we consume violence as part of our corpus of entertainment—even, paradoxically, within
The Hunger Games themselves?
Sometimes we need to be left uncomfortable, to grapple with the gray.