Get your stories straight.

WRONG.

I am starting to get really annoyed with the number of times The Hunger Games gets confused/compared with other series in the media. First, people who write professionally for magazines call it "Twilight meets Battle Royale," which is just ridiculous in and of itself, and then people started all the comparisons between it and Harry Potter-- which, yes, I appreciate, but only to a certain extent-- then came the dystopian YA movement in which every single dystopian book is/was compared to THG, and now THIS?

The Hunger Games is not like any of these things. It's not like anything else at all. This story, these characters... there is nothing like them anywhere, and acting like you can attract people to it by pretending this is the case, it's misleading and unfair. Just as confusing the series and its characters with other series/characters is totally ignorant and wrong. Do some research, Empire Magazine. If you're writing an article about The Hunger Games, you should know that Katniss Everdeen is not "the girl who played with fire." This is not the Millennium Trilogy. Katniss does not play with fire-- she doesn't even particularly like fire. The concept of her having anything to do with fire was thrust upon her by circumstance. The circumstance of being from District 12. The circumstance of being an otherwise unappealing tribute for the audience. And even if you take "played with fire" as meaning "took risks," it's wrong. Yes, Katniss takes some risks, but most of the time she fully thinks out what she's going to do. She doesn't see something as a risk if she's planning her course of action; she sees it as a necessity. 

So, let's think about this.

Twilight meets Battle Royale: So, The Hunger Games is a series in which supernatural creatures fight to the death, and some of them become obsessed with each other and call it "love"?

No, actually The Hunger Games is a series in which normal children who live in a post-modern United States with a dictatorial president are forced to fight to the death in an annual show of the government's power. The central conflict is making it out alive; the secondary conflict is remaining yourself when everything around you is trying to force you to be someone else.

Harry Potter: So, The Hunger Games is about kid wizards trying to defeat an evil dark lord?

No, actually The Hunger Games is about [extremely mature] kids, and a country of people whose hope has been stuffed down one day at a time, until it's no longer visible. But it's still there.

Dystopian YA: So, The Hunger Games is in some way like every single dystopian book out there?

No, actually The Hunger Games is one of the few actual dystopian books out there. The rest are utopian books masquerading as dystopian, which is fine. But they are not The Hunger Games.

Millennium Trilogy: So, The Hunger Games is a murder mystery?

No. They are, in fact, nothing alike.