So.
I’ve been writing summations/rewrites between each section break.
But where do I go with this?
The further in we get, the harder it is to picture a rewrite, because there’s more and more problems piling up.
What do we deal with?
I can’t picture any way to save the plot of Katniss’ existence inspires everyone so much it turns the tide of the war. The same for Rambo Katniss.
Wars are not won by a single person. Not only isn’t it possible, it shouldn’t be possible.
Consider the concept of the just war.
The idea is that people rise up in opposition to something wrong, that right grants might, that the armies massing on the doorstep are there because what is being done must be stopped and if that requires death then people will die for that cause. It is, in its way, democracy.
When, last book, the District 8 women said they were on Katniss’ side, I said that was wrong. This rebellion cannot be a matter of supporting Katniss. When you do that, you make it a matter of untold numbers of people dying because of a fight between two people – an ordinary and terrible war, not a just one.
The rebellion is the capital reaping what it’s sown, and that means it must be a matter of people rising up in response to what’s done to them.
There’s a similar if more subtle problem with Katniss being the deciding factor. Again, there’s elements of democracy here. The rebels have soldiers because they have support. If they win, it will be because so many people hated the capital’s abuses that they were all willing to fight. If one person can bypass that will, either by propaganda or by being a super soldier, then all that no longer matters. It’s simply a matter of the side an individual picks. This is especially stark in a story that’s all about how a few people in power have picked a system that hurts everyone else. The decision of one person cannot determine victory in a just war.
And if this is not a just war then –
Well.
Let me tell you something I hate. I hate that people like to act smug about politics, or anything at all, by saying both sides suck. It is very, very rare that two things will be exactly as bad as each other. It’s a cheap way to avoid holding actual beliefs, and worse, to feel superior about this, because obviously you’re better than both, unlike those sheeple who have actual opinions about what one or the other does.
This seems very close to what we’re getting with 13. The parallels are gratuitous at this point, and far beyond the point they could be useful for comparison. There is no actual examination of their relative merits. It’s simply that they both have electric fences, they both have a single leader Katniss doesn’t like, they both have film crews, they both have rules.
Doing this lets Katniss be the hero in the spotlight, with anyone good being so because they follow her and any non-Katniss institutions being wrong. It also makes a mockery of everything everyone else is fighting for – because of course, they’re actually wrong to fight on 13’s side, just as they’d be wrong not to fight. Only Katniss’ personal side is right.
This is something that matters. This is the cause good people are dying for. That their beliefs can be casually pushed aside because Katniss doesn’t like how she personally is being treated by 13 makes a mockery of the entire rebellion. If it is not a just cause, then what is happening is monstrous. You can’t have death on this scale for anything less than a just cause.
There are stories where a single person makes all the difference. But on a narrative level, those stories are for when either people can’t fight back as a group, or the story is set before anything like that has begun. Or, in stories that are less black and white, when the fact a single person deciding for everyone is acknowledged to be manifestly unfair.
(I’m ignoring the very closely related story of where we happen to follow as protagonist the one person who turns out to be able to strike the important blow. That doesn’t work here, because Katniss is important for other reasons, so having her be by chance on whatever the important mission is as well isn’t reasonable. There are going to be some people who will make more of a difference than others. It’s valid to pick one of them to be the main character. But that’s very different than someone being the main character and therefore the one who gets the important mission.)
For this to be a story about Katniss, there can’t be a war. It has to be any of the other plots used in these situations, one more suitable for a small band of individuals than fighting that stretches across a continent.
There isn’t even enough here for a rewrite. What I mean here is that the story itself is a mistake and a different story should be told. It could be any one of a number of those stories, just so long as it isn’t this one. Katniss killing Snow during an interview has a certain ring to it.
Then there’s 13 itself.
There is not really room for 13 in the version of the story that both revolves around Katniss and is not terrible. But there is room for 13 in a story about a war itself, so I’ll write about what 13 should be in that case.
It shouldn’t be evil.
13 can be two things – good, or amoral. Evil is not something it can be in comparison to the capital, to try to make it coincidentally equivalent to what we’ve seen by them is both contrived and serves no real purpose.
If 13 is good, then the easy thing is that their resources are limited. They either simply cannot do much to help or what help they manage is involves a lot of tough decisions and picking the lesser evil. They don’t help the war effort much because they can’t. They don’t feed people much because they can’t. They’re strict about resources because everything lost is one less thing they have to help the rest. They’ve spent their time up to this point with connections to the other districts – taking in people who escape and helping the resistance networks.
If 13 is amoral, then they’ve become so focused on the fight that it’s down to them and the capital, with the districts simply being the battleground. They will do whatever is necessary to win, which still makes them the far better option than the capital which commits evil for evil’s sake. They’re completely, obsessively militarized – not the simple stuff about calling people soldiers, but high alert at all times, treating any disobedience as if it’s treason. No one left alive even remembers a time before the war. They’ve all been raised knowing their purpose is to beat the capital. They have more resources, and they’re all extraordinarily well trained, but there’s no question of using it for anything but a full attack on the capital.
In neither case are they a great military power in their own right, because then they wouldn’t need the districts. What they have are the only nukes in existence. They can’t use them because at best they’d destroy everything else in the process, and at worst they’d kill themselves as well. The capital has most of the weapons, but they have no similar last resort. If their conventional military can somehow be beaten, it’s over.
http://xkcd.com/661/ I hate that too. I’ve found it popular among college students to claim to be an Independent because “I don’t believe in political parties” or some such crap because it makes them sound cool and unauthoritarian. People belonging to the opposite party as I do don’t even annoy me as much as these people.
Good analysis on the rest. That’s why we have the trope of The Aragorn. Kid hero can accomplish some small but vital task, but if there’s going to be a war meanwhile, an adult in authority is a much better pov character and strategist-general.
(Again, I like Mistborn for devoting a book to the ragtag band of misfits that killed the Evil Overlord trying to actually run the country and not being very good at it. I hate the idea that a peasant kid hero can actually competently run the country they just killed the “evil” ruler of. Clearly they just get put on the throne as the “true heir” and the bureaucracy and court officials rejoice for having a complete puppet with no idea what’s going on, how things work, or how to work the system nominally in charge.
Ooh, Michael Stackpole’s Age of Discovery trilogy has good moments of that. There are plenty of warrior pov characters, but the imperial bureaucracy is acknowledged as much more dangerous than any of them. Single heroes do appropriate single hero things, but superior organization and tactics is what determines the fates of cities or countries.)
wow, so not believing in political parties is the same thing as thinking that both sides in a particular issue are -equally wrong-? no. just, no. i’m not independent because it makes me sound cool, i’m independent because i do not agree with either political party about everything. it doesn’t mean i don’t know anything about politics; it means i learn about each individual issue that i’ll be voting on separately and think about them for myself, instead of just voting on a certain issue in a certain way because “that’s what a true democrat/republican would do.”
sorry for the lack of caps; my shift key is broken.
Your missing the point. The point is that too often people declare all options to be equally bad instead of investing the time to research the parties and see which is the best option. I am a member of a political party here in Canada; I don’t agree with all of their policies but I agree with more of their policies and stances than I do after examining the other parties
Just because none of the options are specifically tailored to your every belief and whim does not make all the options equally bad.
*I am assuming you are in the US because of your references to “either political party” and Dems/Repubs.
Well, see, that’s problematic too. Parties are more or less a shortcut for people to vote on issues – ‘I agree with Party A on most issues/the issues I care most about, so on issues I just don’t know too much about, I’ll tend towards A’. That sounds lazy, but there’s a reason that shortcut exists – you are never going to be an expert on every single issue that will ever be debated or voted on, not unless being an expert on them is your job. Nobody agrees with either party on everything, and many identify with one party when despite disagreeing with it on almost everything else, that party supports their view on one big thing, such as marriage equality or right to life issues. There are also third parties that ‘I research everything myself, no really’ independents could look into and likely agree with enough to support; they often fail to do so because it means their votes “don’t count”. This is silly. Additionally, your viewpoint assumes that everyone is a straight party-line voter; in reality, those voters rarely exist. (Even the lever that allowed people to vote straight ticket without considering issues individually was discontinued decades ago.)
If you dislike the two dominant parties because they are too alike (and like some light reading) consider looking up median voter theory and some articles on election rules – proportional representation, districting issues, etc. If this is the case, I encourage you to look up third party options and perhaps cast your lot in with one that appeals to you!
tl;dr Political parties are grrrrrreat because they facilitate participation in the democratic process! The two-party system has its own flaws which can be researched separately. Party members still have brains and free will, which they utilize often. Parties other than the Big Two exist as well and supporting them can bring mainstream attention and support to their major issues, so look into them for great justice etc.
A major problem is that our democracy is too far onto the “representative” side as it is, which is especially bad when the pool of representatives is so small and the parties fail to enforce ideological unity. The result is voting in a person of X party doesn’t guarantee they’ll vote according to party principles, but most of the time you also can’t fine-tune who you vote for enough that they’ll match up with your principles.
But the same issue means it’s better to vote along party lines in general, because otherwise the people you elect are just going to cancel out each other’s votes.
And votes not counting is a valid problem, since we don’t have a multi-vote system. It’s only possible to vote for a third party on the local level and only in some areas where a minimum of other people are willing to try the same thing. Otherwise, voting third party is just making it less likely your second best option loses and you’re left with whatever asshole you least wanted. I really wish we’d stop being so smug about how early we got on the democracy bandwagon and adopt ideas from other places.
…I think I like the Australian voting system better.
Do you have 1st/2nd/3rd preferences over there? Wikipedia is confusing me.
I like the Australian voting system better too.
And of course we don’t. That’s socialism or something. You get one vote. So if you think the democrats are moving too far to the right and want to vote for a more left-wing party, your one vote goes to the guys getting 4% of the total vote and all you’ve accomplished is electing Bush president.
This is not the only way in which our entire democratic system is a sick prank played upon the country, but it’s up there.
Yes, precisely what I meant. In the US’s winner-take-all electoral system, that’s what ends up happening in practice with third-party voters. I personally would much prefer we had a multi-party parliamentary system (not that it’s without it’s own problems), but until then I think getting the last choice’s the result.
That’s very nearly the opposite of this issue. Refusing to pick a side on either individual issue because you think both official sides are equally dumb would be closer to it. And people rarely vote against what they think because it’s what that party supports – that’s the same sort of smug better-than-them attitude as saying both parties are just dumb. It’s rare to find anyone who agrees perfectly with whatever party they have.
Mostly people aren’t voting for individual issues, they’re voting for someone else to vote on the issues. You have to pick whichever one will mostly vote for what you want them to. Declaring both candidates equally bad because they’re not flawless is a cop-out we’re talking about here.
Mistborn lost a lot of my goodwill for that point when it became a treatise on why dictatorships are awesome. Trying to run a country that’s built on an abusive class system will be hard, sure. But the main problem shouldn’t be that the merchants are stupid and ally up with the evil nobles and that reasoned discussion is for pussies.