I meant in YA fiction. There is quite a lot of fictionalized retellings of war in that space with far more realism than Hunger Games.

Keep in mind this is me thinking aloud...

The first book is very similar to Battle Royale with a a focus on social construct commentary. It is not a war commentary. This means, as a trilogy the focus needs to shift from social to war. The second book performs this function at the expense of narrative movement. To me it's the prologue of the third.

The third is a revolt using the weakened or broken system of the first. This was pretty smart but it has a flaw in the "heroism" of the first which it ultimately fails to address as a major theme. This ends up feeling, to me, quite disrespectful of it's characters. It has nothing to do with the writing quality but these "rules" which fiction has to adhere to. Harry Potter suffered from a similar lack of respect for its characters in it's final book. Breaking these rules is fine but it's done in a special way, especially within the fairly rigid format of YA fiction otherwise the reader is left without any real catharsis, either in conclusion, failure, or success. I think this fundamentally is why the romance, relationships, or lack of agency is a perfectly valid critique. It gets at, though might not make the connections to, the deeper flaws of the trilogy and it's setup in the first novel.