MovieChat Forums > The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) Discussion > Questions about the districts

Questions about the districts

posted 8 years ago by StephenMalovski
8 replies | jump to latest

So I found this book called the guide to The Hunger Games, The guide to the districts!
and this is what I learned...

District 1 is in Montana, Vyoming and Idaho (potato country) and despite the fact that those are mainly argocultural
somehow everyone is a goldsmith and jeweller and they have a magical machine that can turn graffit into diamonds!

District 2 just north of the Capitol near Colorado and Nebraska (those aren't north of Denver where the Capitol is supposed to be! the richest District and the peacekeepers are recruited from there!
(why would they recruit soldiers from the richest district)

District 3 is located near Indiana, Illinois and Idaho and is producing all of the technology and all it has all the technicians and innovators there but is considered among the poorer districts?

District 4 is located near California and Nevada and its main industry is fishing and is considered among the richest districts?! I don't know for sure but I think that usually fishing communities are pretty poor! It doesn't make any sense!

Discrict 5 has nuclear and solar power plants is located near Utah and Arizona! (just a question... if Panem get it's energy from nuclear, solar and probably has dams that produce hydroenergy why are they mining coal in district 12?

District 6 is located near Wisconsin,Michigan and Minesota and they specialise in transport which means that they are making the hovercrafts, train carriages and other stuff! They are underperforming in the Hunger Games because the lack of hard labor in their district! Now if you have worked on a treadmill(transport are always made on a treadmills) you'll know that work like that is a pretty hard labor

District 7 is in Washington and Oregon lumber district which has a lot of forest with plenty of lumberjacks(that are pretty good with axes cause chainsaws doesn't exist despite the fact that Panem has nuclear power) if you have 115 industrial lumber mills in a state like and you get your lumber solely from there you'll run out of wood very fast!

District 8 is located near Washington or Michigan and their main product is textiles and they are making all of the uniforms!

District 9 main product is grain and is located in Kanzas and is underperfoming in The Hunger Games cause is an urban Dictrict that is filled with farms and grannaries(again it doesn't make any sense)

District 10 main product is livestock, it's located Texas and they are all cowboys Y'all

District 11 is located in Georgia and Alabama it's the poorest and it's filled with black people that pick apples and cotton all day(seriously that is not a joke)
It suplies the capitol with Fruit and probably District 8 with cotton despite the fact that it has only 12 acres of cultivated land which isn't nearly enough to supply absolutely anything!
Not enough land for supplying an entire country with apples and cotton.

District 12 main product is coal but it baffles me why is this district considered poorer than district 11 which basically is filled with slaves!

[–] dawnantonis 8 years ago

Very cool, thanks!

[–] EtaoinShrdlu001 8 years ago

Dist 4:
Yeah, because, you know, Nevada = Fish

Dist 7:
Nuclear powered chain saws.
The lumberjacks would glow and be able to chop down trees at night.

That's quite a book!

You Fill Me with Inertia.

[–] Spielburger 8 years ago

Dist 4:
Yeah, because, you know, Nevada = Fish

Nevada's probably a stretch, however Panem is meant to be what remains of North America following a series of natural disasters, so I've always thought of D4 as being what the late, great, Bill Hicks referred to as "Arizona Bay": i.e. the result of California finally being torn away from the mainland by earthquakes.

TBH I tend to be very sceptical of these maps and descriptions of Panem as most of them aren't canon, and Collins gave very few details of the geography of Panem.
All we really know is that D12 is somewhere in Appalachia; D11 is centred around Atlanta (Collins confirmed this in interviews); and the Capitol is in or near the Rockies. IIRC Collins also confirmed later that D4 was around California.

As an aside... The unofficial guides to Panem frequently make a couple of false assumptions that annoy me:
1) That Panem is entirely based on the "Lower 48". Collins described Panem as being formed from the ashes of North America - not specifically the USA, and given that one of the natural disasters she refers to is rising sea levels, it's reasonable to assume that Mexico and Western Canada would make up a lot of the surviving land mass.
2) The districts are usually portrayed like present-day States that border each other. In the books they're actually described more like "land islands", with an awful lot of wilderness between them. For example, D11 is the nearest district to D12, but on the Victor's Tour Katniss and Peeta travelled a long way before they reached it.

--
"So I've got bullets, but no gun. That's quite Zen."

[–] Bubbathegut (18242) 8 years ago

Sorry Indian dude, but Battle Royale isn't going to happen. It's only known now as a film with fleeting similarities to Hunger Games. Won't be long before it's completely forgotten again.

[–] CharlesTheBold 8 years ago

A lot of that is just guesswork and speculation by that writer. The original books didn't specify.

Some of the major fanfic writers have made different assumptions. That District 1 is in California (or what's left of it after a big earthquake; District 3 is on "a lake" (presumably the Great Salt Lake, ergo Utah); District 6 is in geographical center of the country, presumably Kansas; District 8 is in Ohio.

Some speculations are even wierder. One French map put District 11 in Canada (Collins' hints about it being the Deep South apparently got lost in translation).

[–] shieldsdraeger 8 years ago

The "Official" Panem Map(I wonder if they actually consulted Collins) from Hunger Games:
The Exhibition can be found here: http://www.bustle.com/articles/78168-what-does-panem-look-like-this-official-hunger-games-map-shows-where-all-the-districts-are

[–] Spielburger 8 years ago

The "Official" Panem Map(I wonder if they actually consulted Collins) from Hunger Games:

I wonder about that too.
Apart from the fact that many of the districts are way too big, one of the first things I noticed is that they've put D8 directly between D12 and D11...

--
"So I've got bullets, but no gun. That's quite Zen."

[–] LeiaOfLothlorien (1980) 8 years ago

Interesting. Is that a trustworthy source?