Last time on Mockingjay, Peeta says they’ll be dead by morning. Peeta, don’t make promises you can’t keep.

The scream begins in my lower back and works its way up through my body only to jam in my throat.

Maybe I just haven’t screamed in shock enough, but back? Really? I sort of perceive it as more of a frontal thing. The back doesn’t seem like it’s even wired in a way for this nervous glitch, it seems to mostly get false positives on touch and a focus on something present where you can’t see.

Haymitch points out the obvious – Peeta’s saying they’re about to be attacked. There’s a moment of idiot ball where other people ask how he could be sure of that, and the obvious fact that the beatings kind of indicate that they didn’t want him blabbing it out on live television. This is actually kind of a big problem. We keep being told this country is a tightly wound war machine, but they really haven’t shown any competence.

That said, all it proves is Peeta believes that. But why would he know about this? Why would they tell a possible rebel all about their plans? This relates to how odd it is that it was a live broadcast, when all doing it live accomplishes is letting mistakes like this happen.

Really, if people in this world had any psychological depth, here’s how it’d go:

The capital people tell Peeta the plan. He’s not exactly experienced in this kind of thing, and even someone who was would be having trouble thinking straight under the circumstances. Then, they get him up on television. For an extra push, gloat a bit to him right before the cameras start about how they’ll launch the attack during, say, the hour-long talk while the rebels are distracted by it.

Then, when Peeta spills the “plan” a few minutes in, guards attack, making sure the cameras are still rolling long enough to catch it. They’re already torturing him, it’s not like they’d be squeamish about a few more beatings. Then do whatever it is you want to do while your enemies are busy worrying about a phantom attack.

Coin says that they normally assume the capital won’t attack directly.

Nuclear missiles would release radiation into the atmosphere, with incalculable environmental results.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about nukes. Nukes are indeed scary. They are not, however, the unstoppable doom devices early scifi thought they were, and the environment especially is actually decent at bouncing back. Getting low amounts of radiation all through the atmosphere isn’t such a big deal. It’s the concentrated blast that kills everything you really have to worry about.

I mean, yes, it’s still cancerous and all, but so is coal dust.

Even routine bombing could badly damage our military compound, which we know they hope to regain.

What? No.

They own all of Panem. Why would they risk losing everything for one area, especially a military compound whose only real use is against opponents who wouldn’t exist once they take it?

Anyway, Coin says that siding with the rebellion may have pushed them into a direct attack, and that it won’t hurt to order a drill.

Katniss says she’s been through a low level drill before

meant for minor crises–such as a temporary quarantine while citizens were tested for contagion during a flu outbreak–we were supposed to return to our living quarters. I stayed behind a pipe in the laundry room

See, we keep being told they’re jackbooted monsters, and yet they put up with this sort of thing from Katniss? The whole point of a drill is it might not be one! It’s actually kind of important to follow the directions.

This drill is less ignorable, since the sound is earsplitting.

My ears pop and my eyes feel heavy. We are coal-mine deep. The only plus is that the farther we retreat into the earth, the less shrill the sirens become.

Remember when Katniss had anxiety issues about coal mines?

Groups of people start going into doors, but Katniss’ group continues down. I think that means there are layers of bunkers and Katniss gets to be at the bottom? So the people higher up are in more danger.

But that’s a far too subtle specialness for the author to even notice, so we have to get some added in deliberately. Plutarch stops her to remind her everyone’s watching.

“The other people in the bunker, they’ll be taking their cue on how to react from you. If you’re calm and brave, others will try to be as well. If you panic, it could spread like wildfire,” explains Plutarch.

wat

These people have been doing this for their entire lives. No one is going to suddenly lose it just because one sixteen year old girl isn’t behaving right.

The only way this could make any sense is if the groups are segregated and this one is full of 12 people only, but that’s exactly why it’d be dumb to segregate them. You don’t want all the new people in their own group, you want them spread out into the general population.

And we don’t even get that much explanation. He doesn’t say that they’re the people of 12 who’ve never been through this. It’s just assumed that whoever’s in the bunker is going to freak out.

And furthermore, panic about what? This is a bit tense, but it’s really not that bad.

So Katniss heads over to the direction list, which tells her to get a pack for everyone in her compartment, so she goes over to the guy in charge of that and requests three packs.

I turn to find a group rapidly forming behind me. “Excuse me,” I say as I carry my supplies through the others. Is it a matter of timing? Or is Plutarch right? Are these people modeling
their behavior on mine?

After nobly walking up to the guy and asking for the packs, Katniss heroically finds her sleeping area and bravely unpacks the supplies. Then she awesomely sits on the floor to wait for new directions. (Why don’t they have books or something? I’d think you’d want people to have something to do besides waiting and passing around rumors.)

Finally, her mom shows up, only to say that Prim left before she did and should have gotten there already.

I squeeze my lids shut tight for a moment, to track her as I would prey on a hunt. See her react to the sirens, rush to help the patients, nod as they gesture for her to descend to the bunker, and then hesitate with her on the stairs. Torn for a moment. But why?

I am trying to find an appropriate insult for this and failing.

Here you see her television writer background yet again. Or more exactly, here you see that she is a hack who blindly apes the behavior of others with no concept whatsoever of what any of it means. Which is pretty much a television writer.

No one visualizes someone hesitate “torn for a moment” without already knowing why they’d hesitate. You see this in television all the time because they’re showing you a flash of what happened, then as the viewer wonders “but why?” the other character explains. It makes absolutely no sense as an internal thought process. Katniss can’t visualize this until after she knows that there’s something Prim would want to go back and get.

Anyway, Katniss’ internal hunter senses show her the psychic vision of Prim hesitating, so after a moment she realizes it must have been the cat.

We both know I’m right. We’re pushing against the incoming tide, trying to get out of the bunker. Up ahead, I can see them preparing to shut the thick metal doors. Slowly rotating the metal wheels on either side inward.

Have I mentioned the writing’s terrible? Jesus christ it’s terrible. There’s a disjoint here where they’re already in the process of trying to leave the bunker when they realize the cat’s missing, and what the hell is with that sentence fragment? Why can’t that bit about the wheels replace the general bit about shutting them? Also, they’re not preparing to shut, they’re in the process of shutting, it’s a different thing dammit!

Katniss shoves her hand between the crack in the doors, which for no reason means the doors stop closing, and this keeps the doors open long enough for Prim to run down with Buttercup, and then they’re closed permanently.

You know, I don’t quite buy this. The doors are the least of their protections, opening them up for a straggler or two wouldn’t really be the end of the world. I mean, I’ll grant that the missiles are probably invisible to radar given they’ve got general invisibility (…although if they can make them invisible why would the hovercraft have to decloak? But then, decloaking didn’t make sense in the first place.)

Katniss grabs the cat by the scruff. Okay, first off, that’s hard to do at the best of times without hurting the cat. It’s really only kittens that are designed for it, and the mothers know where to grab, it’s not just anywhere in the general area of their neck. Next, kittens are light. This is a tomcat. That is, it’s a large cat and most of the weight is muscle. He could easily be fifteen or twenty pounds. When you do this to a cat like that, you are hurting them.

His ears flatten and he raises a paw. I hiss before he gets a chance, which seems to annoy him a little, since he considers hissing his own personal sound of contempt. In retaliation, he gives a helpless kitten mew that brings my sister immediately to his defense.

I’m sure the author thinks this whole thing is hilarious and Buttercup really is just trying to bother Katniss. But that’s fundamentally not how cats work. She’s got just enough cat behavior here to match with how an animal might act and this kind of anthropomorphizing really is how some people think. Those people are not allowed near any of my pets.

Prim has Buttercup installed on the lower bunk, draped in a blanket so that only his face pokes out. This is how he likes to be when there’s thunder, the one thing that actually frightens him.

This, meanwhile, is just regular cats-don’t-work-like-that. Very few cats will tolerate blankets. A lot appreciate nests of some sort, with pressure against their sides, and when stressed most will want something solid around them. I had a cat once who would fold herself up tightly enough to sleep in shoeboxes. What they’re not so interested in is light pressure all over them. The few times I’ve had cats be anything beyond tolerating a blanket involved getting the cloth tight enough that they could press against it with moderate force.

Finally, the bombing starts.

The lights go out and I experience the disorientation of total darkness. Speechless human sounds–spontaneous shrieks, ragged breaths, baby whimpers, one musical bit of insane laughter–dance around in the charged air.

Oh come on, it’s not that big of a deal! They hear a distant boom and it gets dark for a minute, you wouldn’t have everyone going nuts over that. The babies crying (and it would be crying, not whimpering) and maybe one or two startled sounds, a few kids scared of the dark…not a general freakout.

Prim explains they must be bunker bombs, which were apparently covered in the orientation Katniss skipped along with the rest of her classes. Katniss worries they’re nuclear.

That would actually be a very good idea. The best place to let off a nuke is underground. It’s quite possible to make a relatively clean nuke that’d make the place deadly for a few months before decaying away. The only flaw would be that it’s unlikely it’d kill fast enough that no one would be able to make it to their own red button and fire a retaliatory strike. But this sort of reasoning would require an understanding that goes beyond that nukes are bad, so I’ll assume she’s wrong and these are regular bombs.

We get a reminder that Peeta was kind of crazy. It doesn’t go anywhere.

At this point the author remembers how Katniss has been ignoring Prim and halfheartedly just has Katniss think of it and decide to pay attention now, which doesn’t really do much to explain it. Katniss asks what Prim thinks of 13 and learns that Prim hopes to be a doctor.

Apparently this was impossible back in 12, even though her mom is the village doctor. Also, in that case where do doctors even come from? This seems to prove the capital isn’t willing to train district people for important jobs, but it doesn’t seem likely that they’d be sending capital doctors out either.

The short exchange done, we move back to Katniss and her many important problems, and once again Prim is back to being creepy antichrist girl.

“What about you, Katniss? How are you managing?” Her fingertip moves in short, gentle strokes between Buttercup’s eyes. “And don’t say you’re fine.”
…
now Prim turns her attention to me. Pulling me closer, brushing the hair back behind my ears with her fingers.

Seriously, this is just not how thirteen year olds act. And you can’t very well say it’s just that living in these situations cause people to be more mature, because just look at Katniss. But Prim is once again perfectly in tune with Katniss. I might give a line or two a pass, but she’s just too accommodating. She’s utterly selfless in her interest. No frustration over Katniss’ endless drama, no opinion on Peeta, no anger at how she’s constantly pushed to the side. She’s not even grateful for the warning.

Katniss explains everything to her perfect confidant of a sister until the whole story, complete with gory details that are probably more than you should tell a kid, is out.

and there’s this piercing sort of pain where my heart is. Maybe I’m even having a heart attack, but it doesn’t seem worth mentioning.

That’s not even how heart attacks work.

“Katniss, I don’t think President Snow will kill Peeta,” she says. Of course, she says this; it’s what she thinks will calm me. But her next words come as a surprise. “If he does, he won’t have anyone left you want. He won’t have any way to hurt you.”

…

“So, what do you think they’ll do to him?” I ask.
Prim sounds about a thousand years old when she speaks.
“Whatever it takes to break you.”

So, what I’m getting here is the Prim is evil. She’s obviously setting the groundwork to talk Katniss into something, and that something sounds sinister. She’s already led Katniss into abusing her power to get special treatment and in the process worsening the rift between her and the rest of the rebellion, and that was probably just the preparations for whatever master plan she’s setting in motion.

I’m not sure where she’s going with this, but it doesn’t seem good. It’s reinforcing Katniss’ existing belief that everything happening to Peeta directly relates to her, even though Snow has yet to make such connection clear. He’s not issuing ultimatums and we’re told they’re doing this best to hide the extent of the torture rather than showing it live and demanding Katniss give herself up. There is some suggestion that his treatment relates to Katniss’ behavior, but other clues it doesn’t – if we take it as true that the first interview was taped long before and his poor condition in the next video did not all happen in the intervening days, then they were torturing him at a point they didn’t even know if Katniss was alive, and keeping that torture a secret.

But that’s not how Katniss will see it. Now she believes that they will break him to break her. Not only will she be a mess of guilt, but she’s going to want to do suicidal things like infiltrate the capital to rescue him. Possibly even give herself up for him, but that doesn’t seem quite how Katniss likes to do things. Unless Prim has some subtler plan in mind – convincing Katniss to throw herself into the fight in the hope of ending it sooner, convincing her to try to get them to lessen up on the war effort a bit so they won’t want to hurt Peeta so much. Or maybe just to drive Katniss mad, where exactly what she ends up doing isn’t the point, just wreaking her is the aim.

…

See, this is sort of what the terminal stages of readership looks like. The more interesting a story is, the more willing I am to read with the author’s intent. This is not directly a quality issue – there have been a number of fanfics I’ve read that were written and plotted better than this, but which just weren’t very interesting, and a evil interpretation both made more sense and was more engaging. And once I’m doing my own interpretation, I’m writing half the story myself. My need for the author’s contribution steadily diminishes, and by the time we’re reaching the end, it’s usually gone. Endings are all about tying up plot threads and giving answers, and when I’m doing this I’ve already come to my own conclusions about what the ends and answers are.

This is one of the more decent chapters, since at least something’s happening instead of hearing about makeup, but the execution is, as always, lacking, and it stuffs in plenty of Katniss sueism to distract and annoy.