We’re getting down to the wire here. Time for..PT MARCH MOVIE MADNESS SEMI FINALS!

From the Netflix smackdown to an intense face-off between The Breakfast Club and The Fault in Our Stars, it’s been crazy. But it’s about to get crazier, because it’s time for–wait for it–HARRY POTTER VS. THE HUNGER GAMES!

Let’s hear from Marissa!

Hungering for Harry: Catching the Goblet of Fire

Imagine for a moment, a world where the only teen movie available, EVER, was The Hunger Games.

Here’s a box of tissues.

I know, that was rough.

Sure, it’s a great film with a kick-ass heroine you can seriously get behind, super fun makeup and costumes and a villain that makes our skin crawl (and our noses itch – all those bloody roses). But it’s a little eat or be eaten for the rest of us.

There’s no fun candy. It’s all dystopia and no Diagon Alley.

If I didn’t get you at no fun candy, Harry Potter also boasts: dragons, golden eggs, whomping willows, Platform 9 ¾, flying Ford Anglias, snowy owls, Professor Sybill Trelawney and her crazeball glasses, Mandrake Elixir, Hagrid, Whammy Rockets, love potions, unicorns, puking pastilles, so many kisses and Professor Minerva McGonagall. (Flossing for a moment – it’s all so fun, I have to dance.)

If you really need a bunch of kids trying to mangle each other in your favorite flick, just check out one of the many fierce Quidditch matches in Harry Potter!

Harry Potter is a cinematic cauldron swirling with dark and light. The stakes, like the Hunger Games, are life and death. Voldemort is totes playing for keeps. While the screws are tightening, friendships are building, love is blooming, hearts are breaking, and we are constantly delighted and thrilled by an incomparable world of magic and imagination bursting to life in front of our movie going eyes, hearts and minds. It’s a movie to grow up with, vs. a movie that projects an image of the future that makes us want to pack it in.

For me, Hunger Games is a delicious appetizer, but Harry Potter is the meal – replete with magic candy for dessert.

Now for Isabel!

In the first round, I introduced you to twelve reasons The Hunger Games should earn your vote as the best teen movie. And as we learned in the final installments of this series, District 13 is still very much alive.

So, too, is there a 13^th reason why The Hunter Games deserves your vote. Yes, even over the world-wide phenomenon that is Harry Potter.

REASON THIRTEEN: The Hunter Games series isn’t afraid of the dark.

During the two-part finale of Mockingjay, Panem is on fire. Peeta has been captured, District 12 has been leveled, and there are no easy answers. While the magical world of Harry Potter pits a series of binary forces against each other—good vs. evil, Death Eaters vs. the Order, Harry vs. Voldemort—Katniss and the other tributes live in a world of gray, where there’s a spectrum of choices and nothing is wholly pure or evil. It’s a world where your best friend can betray you so profoundly it breaks your heart (RIP Prim 😭) while trying to bring down a corrupt and violent system. It’s real in a way that Hogwarts, for all its depth, doesn’t quite manage.

The Hunger Games reminds us that the right thing is also often the harder choice, and it isn’t always rewarded. When Harry slays Voldemort, the wizarding world celebrates the Boy Who Lived as a hero. When Katniss makes the near-impossible choice to prevent another corrupt ruler from ascending to power, she does so with no expectation of applause.

There is certainly nothing wrong with looking to fiction as a place to escape the messiness of our own lives, but for my vote, I’ll throw my support behind the normal girl who unknowingly started a revolution because of her love for her sister.

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