For 21st-century young adults struggling for personal autonomy in a society that often demands compliance, the bestselling trilogy, The Hunger Games remains palpably relevant despite its futuristic setting. For Suzanne Collins' characters, personal agency is not only the physical battle of controlling one's own body, but includes responding to a multitude of internal and external influences such as morality, trauma, power, and hope, while maintaining a sense of self. This book offers an opportunity to explore personal agency through in-depth examinations of the individual lives of Katniss, Peeta, Gale, Haymitch, Cinna, Primrose, and other residents of Panem, and through the analysis of other themes such as the overabundance of bodily imagery, the social expectations within the capitol, and the problematic parental figures of the series. By looking directly at individual agency and how it is gained, exercised, lost, and reclaimed, 21st-century readers will discover their own "dandelion of hope" through the examples set down by Collins' characters, who establish over and over again that human agency is ultimately always attainable.