Media and Language as Political Instruments in The Hunger Games and Red Queen

In real life, as in fiction, political leaders use the media to disseminate their messages to the public. In other words, their speeches and statements are televised to reach the widest possible audience, and the messages they convey are linguistically modeled to suit their political goals. When writing about political discourse in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), George Orwell highlights how language is manipulated and kept vague in order to achieve specific political goals. This paper uses Orwell’s observations to examine the political language in two works of Young Adult dystopian fiction—The Hunger Games trilogy (2008–2010) by Suzanne Collins and the Red Queen series (2015–2018) by Victoria Aveyard. After explicating the use of media in dystopian literature, the paper elaborates on Orwell’s claims and delineates how the villains of these two series employ the same strategies and actively find ways to keep their subjects docile, confused, fearful, and divided. The analysis also shows that the series’ protagonists are not deceived by these lies. Instead, the protagonists recognize the false propaganda, question the regime’s inner workings, and, ultimately, rebel against the system through their own use of media and language.