Rhetoric: one of the roads less traveled when studying language. What is rhetoric? Many have negative connotations to it and go straight to politics and manipulation. While rhetoric is certainly severely under-studied in academia, a subsection of it called demagoguery is even less studied. In this form of rhetoric, a successful “demagogue” oversimplifies a problem or society to two choices: a “right” one and a “wrong” one. In my thesis, I analyze the ways in which dystopian literature utilizes rhetorical devices in a way that parallels reallife, providing readers political discourse through literary means. My research specifically focuses on Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games novels, including the newly released prequel. This series was extremely influential on many of its readers—aiding to much of this younger generation’s political radicalization later on, including myself. In order to understand the series’s impactfulness, my thesis dissects Collins’s overlying rhetoric—used by the characters—and underlying rhetoric—her own input on real-world society within the series’s context. My research’s main objective is to analyze this series less as literature and more as a sort of timeline of a “real society.” By analyzing the novels’s use of demagoguery and discourse, I aim to display the importance of understanding rhetoric as a form of political dissidence to combat rhetorical manipulation. My objective is not only to analyze The Hunger Games as a whole but also to connect it to current American society. I argue that the similarities between this literature and American society are not coincidental and that Collins is purposeful in her creation of this complicated young adult dystopian society.