Last time on the Hunger Games, Katniss decided to change things up and turn them into the Hunger Games, and I complain of titling fail.
And now, Rue.
Katniss says Rue clearly trusts her, because the kid passes out as soon as she crawls into the sleeping bag. Or she could just be exhausted, as we’re five days into the childmurder games and she’s been huddling in a tree with no more protection than her clothing each night.
Nor do I have any misgivings about her, as I take no particular precautions. If she’d wanted me dead, all she would have had to do was disappear from that tree without pointing out the tracker jacker nest.
Katniss is very, very bad at this.
By pointing out the nest, Rue got two of the most dangerous kids killed and temporarily crippled another three. One of those kids who died had a bow and arrow, the only weapon that’s a serious threat to her since she’s jumping around in trees to avoid people. Now is a perfectly good time to kill Katniss, especially since she’s shown she’s good with bows as well. See, you should always focus on taking out the greatest threats first. Rue had no chance against the inexplicable pack of trained kids, but she might be able to kill Katniss.
Actually, probably not by a knife in the back. Katniss trusts Rue about plants. Find something full of cyanide and say it’ll help if she chews it. The bitterness means it’s medicine!
Anyway, because the book really hates the idea of us thinking Katniss is actually at a disadvantage…
Traditionally, the Career tributes’ strategy is to get hold of all the food early on and work from there. The years when they have not protected it well — one year a pack of hideous reptiles destroyed it, another a Gamemakers’ flood washed it away — those are usually the years that tributes from other districts have won.
So, remember what I said last time? If this is really a big deal, the kids should be trained to get food of their own. If nothing else, as Gale said to Katniss, it’s all hunting. That girl who never misses with her throwing knives shouldn’t have too much trouble getting rabbit and turkeylike-thing-we’re-calling-groosling.
The trained kids are built up as this huge force, yet they only win if everything goes a particular way. It’s not simply that they did worse those years, they usually all lose. And Katniss says it’s because they’ve never gone hungry.
What sort of training did these kids get that didn’t include how to survive in a harsh environment?
(Plus…if things are that predictable without otherwise, why don’t the people in charge regularly do something to destroy the stores, instead of just twice?)
But Katniss is too tired to plan further.
and the warmth of Rue at my side, her head cradled on my shoulder, have given me a sense of security. I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I’ve been in the arena.
Yeah it sure would’ve been nice to actually see her being lonely, instead of just saying she sure was before but isn’t now.
She finds out what Rue knows about the camp. They’ve been leaving a District 3 kid as a guard for some reason. District 3 is also not a career district, but Katniss has no indignant rant for this.
Rue and Katniss bond some more.
And I come to know Rue, the oldest of six kids, fiercely protective of her siblings, who gives her rations to the younger ones, who forages in the meadows in a district where the Peacekeepers are far less obliging than ours. Rue, who when you ask her what she loves most in the world, replies, of all things, “Music.”
Gee I wonder where this is going.
But there is a point to her liking music. Rue can sing to mockingjays and get them to repeat her songs. When it’s time to quit she sings a particular song so everyone in the orchard will hear. She also loves Katniss’ pin – which Katniss, once again, had completely forgotten about.
Katniss offers her the pin and earns another good person point for it.
The book will have none of my grudging like and promptly ruins this.
“Oh, no,” says Rue, closing my fingers back over the pin. “I like to see it on you.
Never ever do this, people. Do not have the other character say that the main character is just so special and important they must have all the things. Rue goes on to say that her having the pin is why she knew she could trust Katniss, which…what? I was theorizing it was because they were the only friendly-acting tributes and so the least scary, but instead Rue just knew Katniss was nice, even though it was a pin she keeps forgetting everywhere.
We get a bit more of the plan. Rue is going to run off and light campfires, presumably to attract the other kids, and they’ll meet up later. She says she’ll sing to the mockingjays if she can’t get back, so Katniss will know she’s okay. It doesn’t occur to her to have a second song for OH FUCK SOMETHING’S WRONG BLEEDING OUT HERE KATNISS which, when it comes to communication, is probably more useful.
“Are there many mockingjays here?” I ask.
“Haven’t you seen them? They’ve got nests everywhere,” she says. I have to admit I haven’t noticed.
Katniss: Worst. Hunter. Ever.
They split up and Katniss finally starts thinking about what’s going on.
I turn and head back to the stream, feeling somehow worried. About Rue being killed, about Rue not being killed and the two of us being left for last, about leaving Rue alone, about leaving Prim alone back home. No, Prim has my mother and Gale and a baker who has promised she won’t go hungry. Rue has only me.
Good, Katniss. We’re nearing two thirds into the book, and it really shouldn’t have taken you this long, but you’re finally addressing important points. The bit about what succeeding means – the two of you being the last left alive – is particularly awful to contemplate.
So…what should you do?
Once I reach the stream, I have only to follow it downhill to
Or I guess we could just drop the entire line of thought and get back to your plan to kill people.
She decides to spend some time wondering in circles about Peeta instead.
I struggle again to remember that moment over Glimmer’s body, when he burst through the trees. But just the fact that he was sparkling leads me to doubt everything that happened.
While the bar is admittedly low, I will say the romance in this is certainly less squicky than Twilight.
Hunger Games: At Least It’s Not Fucking Twilight.
So yeah, she eventually gets to somewhere where she can spy on the kids.
There are four tributes. The boy from District 1, Cato and the girl from District 2, and a scrawny, ashen-skinned boy who must be from District 3. He made almost no impression on me at all during our time in the Capitol. I can remember almost nothing about him, not his costume, not his training score, not his interview.
Okay, this kind of works. I’ve been complaining about the way the narrative seems to know who to care about, so having someone be important without getting highlighted in advance is nice.
Weirdly, though, instead of taking the time to start paying attention to him Katniss keeps talking about how blah he is, and the weird way the text and metatext overlap gets obvious again.
Even now, as he sits there fiddling with some kind of plastic box, he’s easily ignored in the presence of his large and domineering companions.
Um, that might be a death box, you should probably pay attention. I mean, they have magic science at the capital, you know.
But she has no idea why the kids left him alive. They’re also all injured.
Even from here, I can see the large swollen lumps on their bodies. They must not have had the sense to remove the stingers, or if they did, not known about the leaves that healed them.
Okay, first off? Removing the stingers is normal behavior. I don’t know why the book keeps telling us to be impressed Katniss figured out that pulling the thing stuck in you out was a good idea. All first aid stuff I know of usually makes a big deal of when not to pull something out, because it’s the first thing people will do otherwise. Next, again, trained kids, why weren’t they trained to handle this? The games normally go on for a while.
Katniss is similarly confused by the way they’ve arranged the supplies. Most of it’s in a big pile, but some is scattered around, and it’s all covered by netting.
My guess is the pyramid is booby-trapped in some manner. I think of concealed pits, descending nets, a thread that when broken sends a poisonous dart into your heart. Really, the possibilities are endless.
If they could rig that stuff up, they could catch rabbits fine and they wouldn’t be totally dependent on the food in the first place.
So then they see one of Rue’s fires and decide to set out. They argue about if they should take guard-kid.
“He’s coming. We need him in the woods, and his job’s done here anyway. No one can touch those supplies,” says Cato.
None of this makes sense.
The whole point of the trained kids being scary is that they totally outclass the regular ones, so why would they need him? Plus, he’s going to be the first to turn on them because he knows he has no chance otherwise.
Next, if his job’s done, then he’s not useful, now is he? And this is the childmurder games.
…So I’d like to talk about how much I love Battle Royale some more. I didn’t realize until reading this just how very much better it was.
See, in Battle Royale, the kids can do whatever they please during their childmurder games. While, once again, I appreciate the lack of rape and the fact the torture seems inadvertent and off camera and I feel like I’m tempting fate every time I mention this, it made a lot more sense. You can see how some teenage boys would form groups to go on rape and murder sprees to do all they can in the time they have left, knowing that odds are none of them will make it to the finish so they might as well enjoy what they can. And how other kids would work together with the intent of at least not being the victims of psychopaths. And some psychopaths would still work together with their friends for protection so the other psychopaths don’t get them. This delays the flashpoint when a group would start to think that, since only one can survive, they should kill first. It helped that there was a much larger starting population (fifty, if I remember) and that they didn’t lose half their members in a staged bloodbath on the first day. (There were also generally a lot more varied reactions, my favorite being the bunch of girls who all hid together since they were doomed anyway, so why not, closely followed by the kid who decided to blow up the people in charge.)
Most of this wouldn’t work with the book’s setup, but that means she needed to do something else to explain how the kids are working together.
One option is a point system. Getting rewards (for your district or yourself) per death would be a good motivator, as also make the whole “career” thing make sense. Training up two kids every year for something you have, at best, a one in six change of winning, is going to be pretty hard. But if the rewards for killing the rest of the kids are relatively big, then it makes a lot more sense. There could also be bonuses for surviving each day, or a ranking system where if you die, say, tenth, your district gets more than if you were the first to die. (Or all survivors get a bonus with each death.) There could also be daily awards based on who the viewers like best, which would then explain how Katniss thinks being stoic and/or witty is somehow improving her chances of survival.
All these things would encourage kids to take part even if they had no chance of actually winning, because it stops being such an all or nothing affair. It would also discourage suicides.
Anyway. The other kids leave and then the fox-faced girl appears, or Foxface as Katniss calls her. I’m going to stick with my epithet, thanks.
The fox-faced girl hops around on a weird path, grabs some food and then retraces her steps. Katniss is impressed.
I was right about the girl, too. How wily is she to have discovered this path into the food and to be able to replicate it so neatly?
It’s actually a bit weird – Katniss uses a lot of animal words with the girl. She creeps, she scampers, she squeals. And she doesn’t talk about her the way you would someone using human reasoning.
Here’s how she discovered the path to the food, Katniss: she watched. She’s probably been hiding here or nearby for days. She probably stole some stuff the first night when the trained kids were moving in a pack, but since the wasps she’s been waiting because the District 3 boy has been left on guard. Then, when they set up the trap, she remembered the trigger points and figured out the best way through.
She isn’t “wily” and didn’t “discover”. She’s “smart” and “figured it out”.
Anyway, Katniss realizes what the trap is with a bit more thought. It’s the mines from earlier. See, District 3 is the factories that make everything from TVs to explosives.
The land mines were disabled after the sixty seconds we stood on the plates, but the boy from District 3 must have managed to reactivate them. I’ve never seen anyone in the Games do that. I bet it came as a shock even to the Gamemakers.
Book. Stop with the exceptions. It’s okay to have a character actually know what she’s talking about.
More – the mines are a standard affair. If District 3 is good with gadgets, this plan should have occurred to them a good while ago. They’d have taught kids to do it. So that’s a plot hole. But even if it wasn’t, piling coincidence on coincidence is just not a good idea. If stuff keeps happening that’s never happened before, well, eh. So what? It’ll just get resolved by something else that’s never happened before, which in turn gets fixed by something else that’s never happened before…
Also, from the sounds of it, the mines are disabled remotely, so it’d have been easy to turn them back on remotely if they didn’t like this plan.
(Incidentally, I think there’s an editing incongruity here. It’s not clear if the kids can turn the mines on and off. The girl’s behavior makes most sense if they can, because her hopping implies she’s not sure how wide the safe areas are, and it seems unlikely the trained kids would be willing to travel such a dangerous route, but if there’s a clear path to walk she should be strolling through. The box the kid is fiddling with might do it. But it’s not clear where the remote piece would come from, and there’s a big difference between digging up mines and flipping a switch so they’re armed again and assembling something from scratch to hack it.)
The mines are extremely sensitive and extremely powerful.
One year, a girl dropped her token, a small wooden ball, while she was at her plate, and they literally had to scrape bits of her off the ground.
That’s…actually not very scary. Before, Katniss was just saying it’d blow your legs off, which is ambiguous. But if it paints you across the landscape, that’s about as instant a death as you can hope for. Assuming there’s some sort of punishment for obviously suicidal behavior, “accidentally dropping a token” should be a common thing.
Katniss tries to figure out how to set off the mines. She figures that getting a chain reaction going will be tough because they’re probably spaced to avoid that. But there’s a bag of apples.
The first arrow tears through the side of the bag near the top, leaving a split in the burlap. The second widens it to a gaping hole. I can see the first apple teetering when I let the third arrow go, catching the torn flap of burlap and ripping it from the bag.
You know, I don’t know much about archery, so I’m not sure exactly how possible this is. But it doesn’t feel particularly plausible, and given no research has been done for anything else I’m going to assume she’s just making stuff up here as well.
There’s a tip buried in there. If you do a good job of researching things, if you do need to stretch things at a particular point readers will be more likely to give you it. The more obvious breaks in reality, the less slack you get.
But her super arrow skills cause the apples to fall. The resulting explosion blows her backward, and we end the chapter.