Panem exists in a dystopian future, which makes Catching Fire a work of science fiction by default. Where The Hunger Games film played the CG tech-wizardry card with a heavy hand, Catching Fire lets technology play more of a background role. Because they’re used sparingly, the sci-fi elements here seem more realistic — Katniss uses a simple, floating touchscreen to activate an archery exercise rather than throwing screens around the room like Tom Cruise on the hunt for precrime. Display terminals radiate like fans from simple vases on desks, and chromed-out bullet trains look more like classic cars than spaceships. The design world feels more true to an actual future than an imagined one: it will age treacherously, not cartoonishly. Think THX 1138 instead of Logan’s Run.

With Catching Fire, it feels like Katniss and company have reached some sort of tipping point. It’s not the Subway tie-in, it’s not the recently introduced Nerf Rebelle line of crossbows marketed to tweenage girls, and it’s not really even the massive fan-art movement that dominates photo-sharing services. What tells me The Hunger Games is a new paradigm of entertainment is the existence of another young-adult trilogy about a dystopian future called Divergent.

If you haven’t seen the books at Target or the ads for the upcoming film adaptation now saturating televisions and movie screens, Divergent is a wholesale ripoff of Suzanne Collins’ franchise in all the most explicit ways. A teenage girl in a dystopian world finds herself at the center of a genocidal government conspiracy — her logo is a flaming circular crest, she fights for nothing more than her pride and her family, and she finds herself in the midst of a harrowing love triangle.

But Tris and Four are no Katniss and Peeta; like a pair of poorly constructed Air Jordan knockoffs, the Divergent universe does nothing more than provide a ho-hum foil to amplify the importance of its inspiration. As long as fully formed products like the Catching Fire movie keep coming, the odds will be in The Hunger Games’ favor to continue being celebrated as the definitive popular moral tale of the early 2000s.