Diplomacy-based toys probably wouldn’t be as fun as foam darts, but maybe reading about how truly horrific the violence is in The Hunger Games is an important first step to designing toys around it.
NERF REBELLE GAME SERIES
While it’s great that a company like Nerf has realized that young girls might want toys that don’t revolve solely around cooking and hair care, it might not be the greatest idea to base those toys off a franchise where a girl was forced to use her hunting skills on other children to appease a totalitarian government overlord, especially since the series condemns violence-based entertainment and depicts the revolution against the Capitol as a horrible and dehumanizing affair.
Nerf Rebelle Toys Remember that scene in The Hunger Games where Haymitch is watching in horror as a group of children in the Capitol play with toy weapons, pretending to kill each other on the eve of the Hunger Games, where children would actually be murdering each other with real weapons? Well, now you can pretend to be one of those sociopathic Capitol children with the new Rebelle collection of toy weapons by Nerf! The Rebelle toys came out around the time of the first Hunger Games movie, and while they aren’t officially licensed Hunger Games merchandise, the connection to Katniss and her bow-and-arrow are clear, bearing names like the Strongheart Bow or the 4Victory Blaster. You’d think that a campaign that came out of a series so focused on analyzing the evils of abusing power would generate some unconditional acts of generosity, but why do something good for the world if it’s not going to get you any more Twitter followers, right? To make matters worse, the tagline that accompanied Subway’s Catching Fire ads was, “Subway: Where Victors Eat.” It might be unwise to promote your brand by saying that the-child-who-outlived-the-most-other-children-by-murdering-them eats at Subway. However, doing so with a campaign aimed at increasing their social media presence that put the responsibility on customers to increase how much Subway donated is questionable at best. Bad sandwich-based puns aside, it’s ultimately a good thing that Subway donated money to a non-profit organization doing important work. Each tweet with the appropriate hashtag increased the amount of money that Subway would donate to Feeding America, a non-profit organization with a nationwide network of food banks.
Subway’s #SUBtractHUNGER Campaign Coinciding with the release of Catching Fire, Subway started a promotion that encouraged people to visit their nearest Subway location, take photos with the in-store cardboard cutout of Katniss, and tweet the picture using the hashtag #SUBtractHUNGER. Let’s take a look at some of the worst offenders. Clearly, the series deals with some seriously dark stuff, but some of its merchandise has been painfully tone deaf to the major themes of the books, often playing directly into the violent spectacle and superficiality the series explicitly condemns. The series’ success has meant that every company from Covergirl to Subway wants to jump on the bandwagon and come out with their own special Hunger Games product lines. Play The story is essentially an allegory for the way America relies on cheap labor from countries like China and India, and how we glorify violence in our games, movies, and television while turning a blind eye to the very real warfare and famine that is often a direct result of our own greed.
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