3FIGURES
2MAKERS
2014EARLIEST
2018LATEST
THE LEGEND
Katniss Everdeen grew up poor in District 12, the coal-mining edge of Panem, keeping her mother and her little sister Prim fed by hunting in the woods beyond the fence with a bow. When Prim's name was drawn at the reaping for the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss volunteered in her place, and went to the Capitol to fight to the death on live television alongside the baker's son, Peeta Mellark.
She survived by refusing to play the game the way it was written. Her defiance in the arena made her a symbol before she understood it, and the mockingjay she wore became the emblem of a rebellion. Sent back into the arena for the Quarter Quell, then carried off to District 13, she became the face of the war against President Snow. The rebels won, but Prim died in the fighting. Katniss went home to District 12, married Peeta and raised a family: an archer who never asked to be anyone's symbol.
OFF THE PAGE
Katniss was created by Suzanne Collins for The Hunger Games, published in 2008 and followed by Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Collins drew on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and on her own childhood fears while her father served in the Vietnam War. The first name comes from an edible plant, and the surname is borrowed from Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd.
Jennifer Lawrence played her in four films released between 2012 and 2015, the first directed by Gary Ross and the rest by Francis Lawrence, and won several awards for the role. Critics praised Katniss as a complex heroine: guarded, slow to trust, fiercely loyal, and unusually practical, a lead whose real skills are hunting and staying alive. Her three-finger salute then crossed out of fiction altogether, when protesters in Thailand and Hong Kong took it up as a sign of resistance. Few heroines of young-adult fiction have had that kind of reach.
IN SIXTH SCALE
Star Ace Toys made Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss in two looks. The Mockingjay figure wears the black armoured battle suit, with magnetic wings, a quiver, a bow and arrows and a red flag. The hunting version puts her back in the woods of District 12 with her bow and quiver. Together they cover both ends of her story, the girl who hunted to survive and the symbol of a rebellion. Earlier, Play Toy sold an unlicensed take on her first-film look under the coded name Athletics Girl, in a fitted one-piece training suit with kneepads, a bow and a quiver.
Collectors approach Katniss the way they approach most actress likenesses at 1/6 scale: the head sculpt decides everything, and a good one catches Lawrence's wary, set expression. Next comes the bow, which needs a proper string and arrows that sit cleanly in the quiver, and then the braid, which has to fall the right way. She belongs on The Hunger Games shelf, and she holds her own beside the other great screen archers, Legolas among them.
RELEASES BY YEAR
1
2
20142018
BY MANUFACTURER
Star Ace Toys
2
Play Toy
1
FRANCHISES
APPEARS IN
EVERY KATNISS EVERDEEN FIGURE
newest first