Last time on the childmurder games, it was a lovely mix of boredom, squick, and terrible implications. Then finally the rain stopped and they accidentally killed another child.

Well, let’s finish this.

Katniss explains what we already know from last chapter, and for some reason summarizes everything the red-haired girl did in general, I guess for readers who skimmed the past twenty-three chapters.

we would have both been dead, too, if she hadn’t eaten the berries first.” He checks himself. “No, of course, we wouldn’t. You recognized them, didn’t you?”

The book is kind of seesawing, I think, between Peeta’s “Katniss you are awesome and know everything” and “Katniss stop doing things I am in charge” modes. I suspect the issue is that the author doesn’t see any contradiction between the two.

Also, so, poisoning in the childmurder games is a matter of painless instakill berries. Why does no one commit suicide?

Or, and this is even more disturbing, what if they did? The non-trained kids die out over in large numbers in the first part of the games, but Katniss never thinks anything of it. They could easily be doing this, either immediately or as things get worse.

I find the leather pouch that belonged to the boy from District 1 and fill it with a few handfuls of berries from the plastic. “If they fooled Foxface, maybe they can fool Cato as well. If he’s chasing us or something, we can act like we accidentally drop the pouch and if he eats them —”

Okay, so I just said a lot about how people trust people. This does not fall under that category and their plan is stupid. People carry things for many reasons, and seeing unknown berries “accidentally” dropped is going to be a warning sign. A plan would be to set it out during meals and if they’re surprised, run off and hope his hunger outweighs his desire to chase them. I suspect we’re too late in the game for that, but it’s how it works psychologically.

I mean, even if you don’t think they’re dropping the pouch on purpose, that doesn’t make it food. If the book ever thought anything through, an obvious use of the berries is coating the tips of Katniss’ arrows.

Anyway, after putting the berries in a container they decide to sit down to eat, doing the exact opposite of my suggestion.

Peeta asks if it’s a good idea to make a fire, and Katniss says Cato probably knows they’re in the area anyway, and that the death of the girl means Peeta’s healed. Since Peeta has no real fighting ability and Katniss has a bow, I don’t see why, but whatever.

And the fire means we’re not hiding, we’re inviting him here. Would you show up?” I ask.

Well, he does need to kill them to win, and also, he can approach your area and lie in wait without showing himself.

Katniss wants to climb a tree for the night and Peeta doesn’t. He wants to go back to the cave, the one that they have to sleep in shifts in because there’s the constant risk of Cato finding them. Oh, and it’s a long walk and there’s no food around it.

Several more hours of walking — or should I say crashing — through the woods to reach an area we’ll just have to leave in the morning to hunt.

But Peeta doesn’t ask for much. He’s followed my instructions all day

What.

No, he hasn’t. He insisted he “help”, even though he can’t defend himself (and even though he isn’t any good at finding plants either) and refused to follow your perfectly reasonable advice in the matter. But it’s okay because it’s totally acceptable for a boy’s ego to be hurt by a girl knowing what she’s doing, so Katniss needs to be apologetic and try to make him think he’s in charge.

and I’m sure if things were reversed, he wouldn’t make me spend the night in a tree.

I have no idea why she thinks this. He totally would, and he would guilt and threaten her about it, and it would be okay because it was only because he was so worried about her getting hurt.

It dawns on me that I haven’t been very nice to Peeta today. Nagging him about how loud he was, screaming at him over disappearing.

Oh my god book why are you doing this.

She wasn’t nagging him. He was loud and scaring away the game they both needed to live. She kept trying to fix the problem by getting him to take his shoes off, and repeatedly lied to say he wasn’t that noisy or that they were both too noisy, then that she was sure he was only loud because of his injured leg.

She yelled at him because he did something incredibly stupid after she told him to keep in contact, which she did as a compromise when he refused to follow her original directions, and she did it because she was worried he’d died.

Note word choice too, nagging, screaming. Shrew, in sum. Bad girlfriend! Be more of a doormat.

I reach up and give him a kiss. “Sure. Let’s go back to the cave.”
He looks pleased and relieved. “Well, that was easy.”

It sure is nice when a combination of irrational guilt and rational fear make your girlfriend unable to disagree with you.

They’re exhausted by the time they get back, since it’s a long walk and they’ve had to do it twice today. And because it’s the cave, they have to sleep in shifts now, keeping watch.

I pull the sleeping bag up to his chin and kiss his forehead, not for the audience, but for me. Because I’m so grateful that he’s still here, not dead by the stream as I’d thought. So glad that I don’t have to face Cato alone.

This is another rare flash of decent. If this and not Peeta’s creepy fixation with her for her entire life was the foundation of the romance, it’d be far better.

Brutal, bloody Cato who can snap a neck with a twist of his arm, He hasn’t said it, but I don’t think Peeta felt good about killing her, even if it was essential.

Yeah but no.

The book seems suddenly very invested in making sure neither of the main characters kill anyone for real. But Peeta joined up with the trained kids.

They’re on her before she can escape. I know it’s a girl now, I can tell by the pleading, the agonized scream that follows. Then there’s laughter and congratulations from several voices. Someone cries out, “Twelve down and eleven to go!” which gets a round of appreciative hoots.

Peeta was there for that. And Peeta’s the one who, when they get into an argument about it, says fine, he’ll go back and make sure she’s really dead. And then he kills her.

I can’t pretend I’ll miss her, but I have to admire her.

She never hurt you in any way at all.

The same can be said for many of the kids, but Katniss avoided them and it’s only by implication that we notice they seem to not kill each other. But we did see her, and we know that at each point she avoided engaging. She didn’t threaten Katniss. She didn’t set any sort of trap for Katniss. She didn’t suggest she wanted Katniss hurt or dead. The only thing she did that did anything to Katniss was stealing a tiny bit of cheese a minute or two before dying.

Katniss, for her part, insisted the girl didn’t look trustworthy, talked about her like she was just a clever animal, and was planning on shooting her in the back just because she could.

When they leave the cave, they find the stream is dry. Seriously, book?

Look, if they can control water like that, it should have come up by now. I really get the impression either the author’s bored or the idea they can mess with things strikes her as really clever but she only thought of it halfway in and doesn’t want to go edit, so she’s stuffing as much as she can in now. What’s particularly irritating is if this had been done consistently, it’d have been interesting.

Katniss walked in a straight line for three days looking for water. That was boring as fuck and all I did was read it for a couple minutes. They should have made a pool of water pop up early on so she’d get back to the business of murdering. After she finally finds the water, she then keeps running into new ones each time she needs one, and doesn’t seem to pay attention to their locations. Having the water actually appearing and disappearing would have been cool, and Katniss could have referenced the futility of keeping track of water, as well as making it clear that there was no sense in trying to plan ahead, the gamemakers tend to give resources only as needed. And it would be incredibly disorienting, as well as likely resulting in paranoia – if you see berries when you’re hungry, maybe someone put them there so you wouldn’t starve, but what if you’re not starving, if you don’t need it maybe it’s a trap? And things like the wasp nest, were they even there originally or planted to give her a chance? This kind of perpetual game balancing would make it a lot clearer that the main purpose of this is to amuse onlookers, not a straight test of survival.

And this kind of thinking would go a long way toward justifying Katniss’ behavior. If you’re taught that they can do anything, of course you’re not even going to think about opposing them until you’re pushed to the point you don’t care about anything.

Anyway, it’s obvious that they want the kids to meet up for the finale, and they’re removing the water so they’ll go to the lake.

“Maybe the ponds still have some,” I say hopefully.
“We can check,” he says, but he’s just humoring me.

So the only time he does what she wants it’s humoring her in something completely futile.

This is a return to the earlier situation where the book kept insisting every outcome was the worst thing ever, even if it obviously wasn’t. They’re just had a couple good meals in a row. They outnumber him two to one. She has a ranged weapon. Neither of them is injured while Katniss thinks Cato was in the fight against Thresh. Right now, their greatest danger is Cato managing to ambush them, dying trying to find more food, or the gamemakers getting bored and sending fireballs again. Forcing Cato out to a location they know about is great for them.

Incidentally, this isn’t actually a neutral choice. The longer they wait, the longer Cato has a chance to get there first and set a trap, and the more of a risk they run with running out of water. I’m pretty sure they’re also not able to get any more food now, so they’ll be going into it hungry as well.

They’re driving us to the lake,” I say. Where there’s no cover. Where they’re guaranteed a bloody fight to the death with nothing to block their view.

Because ranged weapons don’t work at all in situations where the other person has to cross ground where there’s no cover.

It’s funny. I feel almost as if it’s the first day of the Games again. That I’m in the same position. Twenty-one tributes are dead, but I still have yet to kill Cato. And really, wasn’t he always the one to kill? Now it seems the other tributes were just minor obstacles, distractions, keeping us from the real battle of the Games. Cato and me.

I keep staring at this paragraph and no, I just can’t do it. I don’t know where to begin.

There is not something wrong with you if you like this book. But there may be something wrong with you if you write it.

I don’t care now that Peeta’s footfalls send rodents scurrying, make birds take wing. We have to fight Cato and I’d just as soon do it here as on the plain. I frown at the shrinking sun. “We don’t want to fight him after dark. There’s only the one pair of glasses.”

Yeah because as long as Peeta can see he’ll totally be so useful in the fight, with his mighty knife.

Anyway, because symbolism or shit, Katniss sings to the mockingjays and they all start singing Rue’s song, and then suddenly they start giving warning cries instead and it’s Cato.

Really, it’d be a perfectly good scene if the writing wasn’t so awful and inconsistent, but the writing is awful and inconsistent and fuck you for fridging Rue, book.

Cato smashes through the trees and bears down on us. He has no spear. In fact, his hands are empty, yet he runs straight for us.

So. While I doubt the book thought much about this, because I really don’t think the book actually thinks about why characters are doing things unless their name is Katniss, this actually makes sense to me. As I said, the situation was completely in Katniss’ favor. While she was emoing for no reason, Cato was likely realizing that the gamemakers had fucked him over in favor of the popular lover pair. That he wouldn’t want to show up makes perfect sense, and only would if forced.

My first arrow hits his chest and inexplicably falls aside.
“He’s got some kind of body armor!” I shout to Peeta.

Hey, remember all that talk about how Katniss was an awesome and always shot prey in the eye? Because god knows the book doesn’t.

(Also, why the fuck are you telling Peeta this? He’s not the one shooting. It changes nothing.)

he rockets right between us with no attempt to check his speed. I can tell from his panting, the sweat pouring off his purplish face, that he’s been running hard a long time. Not toward us. From something. But what?

Okay, so I’ve been talking about human behavior a bit. This is the opposite. This is one of those cues people pick up on. There is exactly one of information that matters, and Katniss isn’t even going to notice anything else until that’s addressed: a person is running very fast away from something.

In a well-acted movie, there would be a beat when they stared in surprise at him running past them. There would be a second beat as they looked at each other. Then they’d start running. (I must admit a certain curiosity if the movie will do this, or if it’ll be as bad as the book.)

See, the idiots who stood around contemplating what the other person was running from got eaten/trampled/roasted. They do not breed. Their genes are the genes of failure. If someone is running from something you can’t see, it means that waiting before you start running is waiting way, way too long.

Katniss and Peeta proceed to show yet another reason they should never reproduce by instead being idiots who stand around trying to get a look at what the thing Cato’s running from is. In fairness, it occurs to me that they’re probably very, very inbred by now.

Anyway, a “creature” “leaps” out of the forest (what’s wrong with walking?) and then there’s a dozen of them, and finally it occurs to Katniss that hey, running is actually a good idea.

And on that honestly too vague to be really dramatic note, we end the chapter.

Let’s consider Katniss so far.

Katniss has, by my count, done exactly two things of her own volition. She blew up the food, which was okay, and she put flowers on Rue, which as defiant acts go was pretty pathetic. Everything else has been reactive.

Let’s see how much I recall:

Katniss decides to sacrifice herself in Prim’s place. She wasn’t explicitly prompted to do so, at least, but neither did she ever really think about this and intend to. Peeta starts a fight with Haymitch about Haymitch not doing his job, Katniss backs him up. Katniss follows the directions of Haymitch to do whatever people tell her. Katniss follows the directions of CINNA THE MOST WONDERFULEST PERSON IN THE WORLD. Katniss follows the directions of Haymitch about training. Katniss is upset by how gamemakers are treating her and shoots the apple. Katniss follows the directions of Haymitch and CINNA THE MOST WONDERFULEST PERSON IN THE WORLD about the interview. Katniss listens to Peeta having moral thoughts. Katniss wants to grab some supplies that were put out to tempt her into doing that and Peeta stops her. Katniss follows Haymitch’s directions to seek water. Katniss runs from flame. Katniss runs from other kids. Katniss follows Rue’s clue about the wasp nest. Katniss catches some food to eat. Katniss allies with Rue when Rue shows up.

All that before her first actual decision, to blow up the food.

After that, Katniss waits for Rue, then looks for Rue, then kills someone for killing Rue. She decides to do the flower thing. Then is depressed, then finds out she and Peeta should work together, then looks for Peeta, then helps Peeta, then is given something to knock him out, then goes to get the medicine for Peeta, then huddles in a cave, then goes out to find food because they’re starving, then is forced to go out and fight Cato by the gamemakers.

Katniss doesn’t make decisions, she just gets shoved around. And worse, she doesn’t even seem to notice or chafe under this. We’ve reached the very end of the childmurder games, and Katniss’ only act without getting handheld the whole way was blowing up the food.

Now, I was wondering if maybe this is part of the author’s general reluctance to have Katniss do anything wrong. It’s obvious that she doesn’t want Katniss to kill people, and she’s gone to great effort to say most don’t count as “actual” kills, and that the one she thinks counts was done in defense of someone and without any premeditation. But that doesn’t explain why Katniss can’t do any of the good acts on her own either. Katniss doesn’t think “I should ally with Rue” and then wonder how to find the girl. Katniss cooks some food, Rue happens to show up, and then she decides to ally. In fact, that would certainly help with my perception she’s a bad person. If when given the chance to plan and act of her own volition, she did good things, while her bad actions were when pushed in that direction, it would suggest that her situation is the one to blame, which I certainly thought was what the book would involve but it really hasn’t.

It’s possible to have a decent story that’s largely reaction-based, but the only real interest in a reaction-based story is either how far they’ll end up going or if they’ll rise above it, and in this one there’s always a single obvious action she’s pushed toward that’s always the right one, and she’s not even reacting under heavy stress most of the time. You can’t sell someone as heroic when they’re being led around by the nose, and there’s no real interest in a non-heroic person blundering around not doing anything wrong either.

The closest decent thing Katniss has done so far is caring for Peeta for pretty much no gain – once she gets him healed he’s even more trouble. And this fails because she’s doing it because circumstances have conspired to Draco and Hermione levels of forcing them together, like everyone in the entire country is suddenly a shipper. It pretty much reads as several chapters of OOC.