'The Hunger Games' Spawns Racist Twitter Trends

The Hunger Games Racist Twitter" src="//cfm.yidio.com/images/article/images/_410x273_5671.=89" style="margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px; float: left; width: 300px; height: 227px; " />For all its legitimate value and applications as a communication tool, few platforms unfortunately function quite as effectively as Twitter at helping tools communicate.

Despite setting box office records this past weekend to near-universal acclaim from fans and critics alike, "The Hunger Games" also became a catalyst for some audiences who probably own original prints of "Song Of The South" and "Birth Of A Nation" to display the very worst examples of making nice between people of differing skin colors. A rash of tweets sprang up among some fans complaining about black performers - or, as the case may be, even simply mixed-race actors - filling key roles.

That's the bad news. The "good" news is that this is, after all, still the Internet. For every platform that facilitates people diminishing others, there are platforms for publicly holding these glorious specimens of the human race accountable.

Lenny Kravitz - who, it's worth noting, is half-black, half-white - portrays heroine Katniss Everdeen's stylist and friend Cinna. Dayo Okeniy plays Thresh. Amandla Steinbergi plays Rue. Cinna's appearance could be up for interpretation - this is, after all, a book we're talking about adapting - but the Suzanne Collins novel explicitly describes the latter two characters as having dark skin. Therefore, it smacks of a pretty oblivious reading of the book that someone actually tweeted "Why does rue have to be black not gonna lie kind of ruined the movie."

Or, for that matter, "Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you pictured."

Reading, kids. It's fundamental.

For your continued amusement, by all means, enjoy Hunger Games Tweets. It focuses primarily on naming names and gleefully trolling these stupid, stupid little illiterate racists. To actually catch up on the insane bigotry itself, Tumblr user blarghargful has posted a little round-up of the worst casting complaints. Enjoy a sampling.