Last time on Mockingjay, oh god we’re doing that thing again where Katniss shows off her sue flaw of not being able to be fake. Also, Haymitch is back. I like Haymitch less with each appearance, so I’m pretty wary.

I can’t pull it off. I can’t stand in a television studio wearing a costume and makeup in a cloud of fake smoke and rally the districts to victory. It’s amazing, really, how long I have survived the cameras. The credit for that, of course, goes to Peeta. Alone, I can’t be the Mockingjay.

Except, of course, for all the times she did fine in front of the cameras. She thought the same thing before the giggling gushing about how her dress was so awesome and the food was so awesome and oh boy she’d never dreamed she’d get to go to the capital and meet such awesome people! Then she did fine for the cameras during the pre-Peeta period of the games, otherwise known as the not creepy parts.

 Coin and her people. Plutarch, Fulvia, and my prep team. A group from 12 that includes Haymitch and Gale, but also a few others I can’t explain, like Leevy and Greasy Sae. 

This is a really common error.

Honestly, Leevy’s appearance last chapter was out of left field already. Okay, she’s Katniss’ neighbor. That might explain why she was willing to help in the second book. It doesn’t explain why she survived the bombing or why she’s one of the only ones to do things. And Sae’s only real distinction is being the only minor character to get a name early on.

The cast is just too small. Much like how the prep team keeps fucking reappearing, the same set of 12 side characters are mentioned. It’s like in a play where they reuse the same actors for every minor part.

But this is a book, it doesn’t have those sort of limitations. There’s no need to reuse these characters. They’re flat and lifeless, it’s not like any time has been put into developing them. Nothing would be lost by using a new name each time, and it’d have the benefit of making it seem like Katniss is part of an actual town, instead of stuck on a cardboard set with a couple of extras.

I’m honestly not sure why people do it this way. It’s like they think they’re so incredibly clever for thinking up a character, and of course it’s always writers whose characters are amorphous bland blobs that pull this. Writers who are good at making interesting side characters make up new ones.

That it’s lampshaded with Katniss not even knowing why they’re there is just the icing of failure upon the tasteless gruel cake.

(Also weird – where’s her mom?)

They replay the footage.

Both my voice and body have a jerky, disjointed quality, like a puppet being manipulated by unseen forces

This is another point where the book has just used up all its credit with me.

If Katniss was presented as less sueish, if things were generally well written, if the narrative didn’t warp everything around for her, this would be a nicely meaningful description.

Instead it just annoys me. How many bad actors look like puppets and how many just look like bad actors? Why can’t she sound false or stupid?

So, let’s all be quiet for a minute. I want everyone to think of one incident where Katniss Everdeen genuinely moved you. Not where you were jealous of her hairstyle, or her dress went up in flames or she made a halfway decent shot with an arrow. Not where Peeta was making you like her. I want to hear one moment whereshe made you feel something real.”

Oh jesus christ no.

But yes. We are indeed then given a scene where the characters actually, honest to god, list off how awesome Katniss is and, by proxy, how awesome the scenes in the book supposedly were.

Then, having reached the bottom of the hill, it pulls out a shovel and starts digging because in this book things have to keep going downhill.

Haymitch holds up the notepad. “So, the question is, what do all of these have in common?”

“They were Katniss’s,” says Gale quietly. “No one told her what to do or say.”

What’s especially ridiculous here is they’re including Katniss’ makeouts with Peeta, but that’s just our standard issues with consistency. It’s quite minor compared to the general suefest.

So obviously the solution is to just let her go because she’s so photogenic on her own.

“Well, that’s all very nice but not very helpful,” says Fulvia peevishly.

By “peevishly”, read “irritated by the fact everyone around is a fucking moron”. As she points out, Katniss had the opportunity to do those things because of the situation she was in. It’s hard to make out with Peeta to save his life with no Peeta around, or sing to dead kids or whatever else.

Haymitch, perhaps a bit more angry at Katniss than he’s letting on, says of course, and that’s why they should film her in combat.

It’s not a bad idea, honestly. Katniss’ whole point to existing is to encourage the war effort. Even if she does die, well, so what? I spent the whole second book explaining why she’s better off as a martyr anyway. In fact, two birds with one stone! Katniss dies, they’ll kill Peeta and he won’t be around to say things on television that for no discernible reason people listen to.

Gale reminds us of the fact Katniss is pregnant, supposedly.

“We’ll spread the word that she lost the baby from the electrical shock in the arena,” Plutarch replies. “Very sad. Very unfortunate.”

I really wonder why they didn’t already. I mean, they’ve got to know that’s a time bomb. The quarter quell was announced three months in advance, so Katniss has to be four or more months along given Peeta made it clear the marriage and pregnancy were before the announcement.

Anyway, the more I think of it the more annoyed this makes me.

It’s part of the general mess that is sex in these books. We know kids are apparently legal at sixteen and it’s apparently possible to marry then. The reaping is twelve to eighteen year olds, who don’t know if they’ll die that year. No one’s been picked who was pregnant before?

It’s not so much it’s impossible to make work. In fact, it’d be very easy if only this series that makes all these pretensions to being about how jarring it is to be made a celebrity sacrifice would follow through on any of it. Like the sex vs violence thing that’s never used. Having it be a cultural belief that fetuses are sacred even when you’re killing actual kids would highlight how fucked up everything is, and having them then go behind the scenes to make sure no one made it into the arena visibly pregnant because forced abortions are less upsetting than on-screen miscarriages? Wonderful way to make them horrible on every level.

And then it becomes something you can use. If ABORTION IS MURDER even when actual childmurder is condoned, then saying Katniss lost the baby is a major piece of propaganda they should be throwing in the capital’s face, even if the whole subplot remains fucked up.

Instead we get it treated exactly like in our world, quite unexamined.

“Every time we coach her or give her lines, the best we can hope for is okay. It has to come from her. That’s what people are responding to.”

People aren’t responding to her at all.

Katniss’ big thing was the berries. That wasn’t about personal charisma. It wasn’t even much about nobility. Brave, to a degree, but Katniss was confident their bluff wouldn’t be called. It was smart to do. And what people responded to wasn’t her action, wasn’t her protecting of her partner. They’d already changed the rules, after all. It might have meant something if Katniss had found Peeta after losing Rue on her own, if she’d tried to save him even knowing only one of them could win, but she’d done all that knowing they could both survive, and teaming up with the other person from your district is how things normally go anyway.

What people responded to was that she outsmarted them. She showed it was possible. That’s why the head gamemaster was killed, because he should have let them die. That should be all that happens when you defy the capital.

(If I were Snow? After they died, I’ve have announced another Hunger Games and had another reaping because like dear dead Katniss said to the cameras, they have to have a victor. That’s how you smother the spark of rebellion, by acting like you let it happen, that any rebellion is just there to give yourself an excuse to do something crueler.)

She showed a chink in the armor.

We see how beaten down the districts are. It’s not about fear, it was apathy holding them in place. They believed nothing they did would make any difference. The berries showed their enemies weren’t perfect. And if they weren’t perfect, then even if a rebellion had no chance of success, at least they could hurt their rulers back for once.

They decide to send her down into combat.

Then she and Haymitch have a boring heart to heart about how she’s upset he didn’t save Peeta and he’s upset she split up with him.

“I play it over and over in my head. What I could have done to keep him by my side without breaking the alliance. But nothing comes to me.”

“You didn’t have a choice.

You know, in retrospect that actually doesn’t make too much sense, does it? Since they were all on her side all along. I guess they had to split up the two in order for Johanna (<3) to cut the tracker out, but someone should have knocked out Peeta as well. It doesn’t seem like she needed to cut the tracker out in the first place, either. It’s not like they smuggled her out.

 Katniss says Haymitch has Seam eyes. I forget if this has been brought up before, so if so, my apologies for failing to complain. Haymitch hung out with two town girls at the reaping. Not only are we told that town and miner kids don’t mix at school, but there’s no way they could be. The two groups are way too distinct. A family like Katniss’ must be rare.

Katniss makes a big deal of washing the makeup off and removing the band over her scarred arm because that’s what she really looks like. Then she cheerfully puts on CINNA THE BESTEST AND MOST WONDERFULEST’S custom costume, because apparently that’s what she really looks like too. Finally, he straps a sheath divided into three cylinders of arrows to my back. “Just remember: Right side, fire. Left side, explosive. Center, regular. You shouldn’t need them, but better safe than sorry.”

Yes, because when you’re going into a place they’re dropping bombs, you really want to be carrying fire and explosive arrows on yourself for your safety.

Finnick shows up to be all mentally ill. Then he’s suddenly back to his old self once Katniss mentions Beetee’s made him a trident, right down to responding to them pointing out he’s half naked in that hospital gown by taking off the gown.

It’s still not as awesome as Johanna, but what can be.

Boggs is glad she dealt with Finnick without any fuss, and Katniss starts thinking that maybe he isn’t evil despite being Coin’s right hand man, because of this and because he was one of the people who spoke up in the Katniss-is-awesome listing earlier.

He’s probably in his mid-forties, with close-cropped gray hair and blue eyes. Incredible posture.

See, he’s even getting friendlier adjectives than Coin.

Katniss does not, of course, consider if maybe Coin herself isn’t the devil incarnate if someone Katniss thinks is lockstep with her is a decent guy.

Katniss is then impressed by the size of the place as the elevator starts going sideways instead.

“Can’t take credit for much of it,” says Boggs. “We basically inherited the place. It’s been all we can do to keep it running.”

This seems like it’s suggesting I’m right about my speculation earlier, the reason they’re so tight on resources is that they have a certain minimum of maintenance that has to be done regardless of population size, and with their numbers so low they don’t have the people to grow extra turnips.

But suggesting is all it is. There’s nothing in the text here that says it, the literal meaning is just him saying his generation didn’t build the place. Which, in turn, doesn’t quite make sense – we know they went underground after the rebellion failed, and since then all the building was underground. If Katniss is right and he’s about forty, then he was born halfway through 13’s history – that should still be within the building period, just because building underground like that is a slow and laborious process. The way he’s talking is as if it’s been generations of stagnation.

One option would be for the complex itself to have predated the existence of 13, so even back then all they could do was maintain what was already there, but that doesn’t fit with its size or the fact we’re told they built a lot of it after breaking with Panem. It also doesn’t fit with them being able to manufacture all sorts of new stuff, like her bow or the hanger full of hovercraft. In fact, we’re told it’s quite the opposite there.

Row after row of different kinds of hovercraft. “Did you inherit these, too?”

“Some we manufactured. Some were part of the Capitol’s air force. They’ve been updated, of course,” says Boggs.

So they’re not barely able to keep the marvels of the past running, they’re still on a normal technological track of advancement over time.

Incidentally, I really need a nickname for Boggs. I need a nickname for most of them, the names are so damn awful. I’ve gotten used to Katniss, but Fulvia makes me cry on the inside every time I type it.

Katniss bitches about them having aircraft but not using them in the rebellion, but he says that just kicking out the capital people in their own district cost them too many people, and they had barely anyone left who could fly. But they still had lots of people who knew how to make weapons?

I think it’s the timescale that’s screwing things up. Maintaining a high tech society is hard, and if you lose a lot of people it takes a long time to recover. It doesn’t seem plausible to me that they could lose most of the pilots but still have enough people left in weapons R&D. I could see a couple hundred years of focus leaving you with a population of highly trained super engineers because their resources are all poured into that while the capital thinks it’s secure since none of the districts can hold a candle to the existing tech.

Also, Boggs says that it’d have ended with nukes and everybody would have died. Katniss said that’s the same thing her precious millstone said, and he says no it isn’t, because the current war isn’t being fought with nukes.

Seriously? That’s all?

It’s pretty damn obvious that nukes aren’t being used because both sides still want the area they’re fighting over. As soon as one starts losing, they’re going to nuke the fuck out of the other side.

Honestly, the capital has probably been watching 13 with as much fear as hope. Their best option is for 13 to fall apart enough that the survivors come back into Panem, but not enough they’re actually wiped out. If the place flat out self-destructed, whoever was left alive would have launched the nukes.

And the same goes for the capital. At this point, their only hope is that the nukes are under a very safe command structure where only one person can actually launch them, and that this one person is not willing to take everyone with him. (This, incidentally, is why declaring you’re going to kill the other side’s leader is a bad move, however satisfying.) I am actually mildly fond of Snow, even if he does tell Katniss far too much. Everyone else seems to be doing it for the sheer evululz, but he seems like a relatively levelheaded psychotic dictator. It’s quite possible he’d rather be remembered as a tyrant in the history books than witness the end of human history.

They show up and Fulvia complains about the lack of makeup because Katniss doesn’t have a camera-ready face, except that of course she’s really pretty and shit. Few people do, but by amazing coincidence, Gale is one of them. Ugh.

Look, if she actually didn’t, then they’d have kept the makeup on because it’d have looked better. And I refuse to believe that Gale just happens to be a supermodel. Especially when actual models are still slathered in makeup.

Anyway, pointing out how handsome Gale is makes Katniss uncomfortable given the whole notboyfriend thing. Boggs makes a joke about how they’ve just seen Duke Devlin strip for them so nothing else registers. This probably doesn’t count as gay because it’s clearly supposed to be a thing that everyone just thinks the guy’s amazingly good looking objectively, but still, the basic concept of same-sex attraction seems to be existing in this book, so good for it.

Less good for it is that they’re perving over a mentally ill guy. He is not going to still look hot and fuckable after spending a month sitting around sobbing. He doesn’t have perfectly tanned muscles any more.

But this pushes Katniss over to being sure Boggs is a great guy. So he’s going to betray Coin or, if the book wants to throw a curveball, Katniss for thinking he’d betray Coin in what honestly would still smack of predictability. It’s just all so damn flat. Everything is telegraphed and no one seems like they’re really people. I have no interest in figuring out Boggs’ character, Katniss is just going to explain it to me anyway.

We learn all the districts are at war, so I’m not sure what the point of the Katniss propaganda videos is. Two is the exception. See, they have a favored relationship with our enemies despite its participation in the Hunger Games. They get more food and better living conditions

This doesn’t quite match with Katniss’ original description, which was that all the districts that trained kids were capital favorites, and also that the typical match favorites were the District 1 kids.

After the Dark Days, he says, and I’m expecting to hear something like that 2 was the only one that didn’t rebel or something, District 2 became the Capitol’s new center of defense.

Yes but why?

Apparently their official job is running quarries, but they manufacture weapons (? 3 obviously did that, because the District 3 kid knew how the mines worked) and supply peacekeepers. Okay, that last part makes perfect sense given

“You mean…some of the Peacekeepers are born in Two?” I ask. “I thought they all came from the Capitol.”

God damn it Katniss it wasn’t a plot hole WHY DID YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT ONE.

First, Katniss knows that accent well enough to make fun of it by imitation. Therefore, she’d have noticed peacekeepers having the wrong accent. Indeed, Katniss remarks on the new head peacekeeper having a weird accent she doesn’t recognize. If she thought she knew where peacekeepers came from, or if peacekeepers normally have a capital accent, she’d have found that strange.

Second, no, they can’t come from the decadent city of decadent uselessness, because they’d be decadent and useless, and because it’s obvious the people in charge want them that way. This completely flies in the fact of the repeated plot point that the whole of the capital is oblivious to the suffering of the districts and their only contact is watching them cut each other apart on television. If some people are peacekeepers, then some people are political, and political people can have the wrong kind of opinions. It’s sort of like how the US can do all sorts of shit as long as most of the population is kept away from the army.

Despite how right I am, we’re instead told that some are from the capital, but there aren’t enough people to provide peacekeepers for all the districts. This doesn’t actually give us any idea about the capital’s population, since we don’t have any idea what the ratio of peacekeeper to regular citizen is. I’d been assuming it was extremely high, since they’re the ones who must be keeping the town economy afloat and also because the general deprivation makes a degree more sense if a sizable chunk of the population is tied up watching everyone else to prevent rebellion instead of anything productive.

Another problem getting peacekeepers is that it sucks to be in a district instead of a super metropolis that caters to your every whim. Also…

A twenty-year commitment to the Peacekeepers, no marriage, no children allowed.

That’s rather shooting themselves in the foot.

The only thing that even begins to make sense is the timeframe, and that’s assuming it’s there because peacekeepers do acquire bad political opinions and have to be kept away from the population. Even then, it doesn’t say they can’t visit the capital and certainly not that they can’t contact people back home. Then there’s the fact the capital has magic science that seems to stop aging. At the least, we can assume people live out something near the maximum human lifespan and spend the majority of that time in peak condition.

So this is a recipe for disaster. Instead of a short tour just long enough to get disgusted at the districts and how beaten down the people are, spending most of the time among their own kind, they’re kept out well past the point they’d go native. They’re unmarried for twenty years, so they have plenty of time and reason to try to start a relationship with someone from the district they’re in. And unless they’re sterilized going in, we still have no mention of birth control, so they’re going to have a kid sooner or later.

Some buy into it for the honor of the thing

No. You don’t want people with strong enough opinions to think about honor. This is not how you distract a population so you can do whatever you feel like, Snow.

others take it on as an alternative to punishment. For instance, join the Peacekeepers and your debts are forgiven. Many people are swamped in debt in the Capitol

No no no no no, terrible idea!

People who go grossly into debt under the current administration are people who stand to benefit if things get shaken up a bit. At best you have a ready made bunch of people willing to take bribes from rebels.

More, people who go into debt are not happy people, and people who aren’t happy don’t let you do whatever you want. And people have friends, and if their friend goes into debt and has no choice but to go be a peacekeeper, those friends are suddenly going to be more interested in the districts too, and again, you don’t want that.

Now, this argument depends in part on how much things are manufactured and how much the setup was inherited. That said, it’s really easy to create a system where it’s impossible to go into debt by not allowing people to spend what they don’t have, and the result is far more stable and less prone to creating angry, desperate people.

Anyway, back to 2.

It’s a way for their people to escape poverty and a life in the quarries.

Wait, you just said they got special treatment. Pick one!

Possibly he means poverty in comparison to the high flying capital lifestyle, but there’s no sign they ever get near the place themselves. Perhaps it pays amazingly well even by the standards of the capital, but in that case, I wouldn’t expect it to also erase all debt but just be a way to earn the money to do so. And if a large portion of their population is escaping poverty by becoming rich and then going back home, why would there be widespread poverty? They’re pulling in lots of extra money.

He says that because of this, they’re raised with a “warrior mindset”, and that’s why they’re so eager to volunteer for the games.

Cato and Clove. Brutus and Enobaria. I’ve seen their eagerness and their bloodlust, too.

Firstly, wow book, I didn’t think the whole trained tributes are evil thing could get worse and yet it has.

Secondly, that’s not a warrior mindset. In fact, it’s about the opposite of what you want, which is level-headed non-psychos. Even the games don’t match up with what peacekeepers are supposed to do. The games are all about murdering your way through everyone else and then backstabbing your allies. Not what you want a police force doing, no matter how evil your government is.

Anyway, the plan is to retake the districts one by one, then march on the capital.

Gale wants to know who’ll be in charge after that.

Plutarch explains they’ll do it by democracy, which is apparently met by blank stares. He says that it’s worked before.

In books,” Haymitch mutters.

“In history books,” says Plutarch. “And if our ancestors could do it, then we can, too.”

This is seriously being treated like it’s some mysterious lost invention of their ancestors. But Katniss’ district has a mayor. Not only does mayor almost always mean an elected official historically, but it definitely does in America these days, so they wouldn’t have kept the term for something else. And Snow is a president, not something else.

And yes, I know that calling yourself president doesn’t mean you aren’t a dictator, but it does mean you’re giving lip service to the concept of elections, even if you rig them or block all new ones.

If they lose, on the other hand, they’re totally fucked, so now it’s time for the suicide pills!

He takes a vial from his vest, shakes a few deep violet pills into his hand, and holds them out to us. “We named them nightlock in your honor, Katniss

Because it’s more important to remind us of how special she is than to just use cyanide capsules like normal people.

I was told that there was going to be some suicide-related stuff in this book. If this is all, I’m disappointed. This is a bit more direct than the bit about the force fields preventing suicide, but it’s still talking around the real issue, namely what do they think of suicide? Why don’t they use it in other situations? It seems like this is just there to make a big deal of how important everything is.