 The choices the characters make and the strategies they use are often morally complex . The tributes build a personality they want the audience to see throughout the Games . Library journal Voice of Youth Advocates names the major themes of The Hunger Games as " government control , ' big brother ' , and personal independence . " The trilogy 's theme of power and downfall , similar to that of Shakespeare 's Julius Caesar , was pointed out by its publisher Scholastic . Laura Miller of The New Yorker finds the author 's stated premise of the Games – an exercise in propaganda and a " humiliating as well as torturous [ ... ] punishment " for a failed uprising against the Capitol many years earlier – to be unconvincing . " You don 't demoralize and dehumanize a subject people by turning them into celebrities and coaching them on how to craft an appealing persona for a mass audience . " But the story works much better if the theme is vicissitudes of high school and " the adolescent social experience " . Miller writes : 
