Last time on Mockingjay, the stupidest and most inexplicable assassination plot ever. And we hit the section break. The third section begins: THE ASSASSIN.

Oh dear. This is not going anywhere good, is it.

So Boggs calls Coin and she tells him no, seriously, Peeta stays. Katniss says he’s furious and he orders a round the clock two person guard on Peeta before walking off to explain to Katniss what’s up.

Boggs is Coin’s second in command. Throughout this book, he has inexplicably sided with Katniss and been an insubordinate asshole in the process, lying to his boss to protect Katniss’ right to do stupid shit against orders.

So Boggy tells Katniss that Coin says she doesn’t want Katniss dead but totally does. This makes his calling Coin actually a bit odd, unless he was calling her to point out how stupid her plan was as I outlined in the Ch18 review. Perhaps her refusal to realize this is why he’s now officially cutting ties here and jumping over into full time Katniss sycophant.

Here’s what he says:

Coin never wanted Katniss, she wanted Peeta. It’s never explained why, since I don’t think anyone could have predicted Katniss’ particularly toxic combination of anti-authority sociopathic narcissism that’s made her refuse to do anything, absolutely fucking anything, in actual service to the cause instead of whatever she feels like at the moment.

Coin did not like being forced to give full pardons/immunity, which as I’ve said is perfectly reasonable.

And, for some reason, apparently at the end of the war a new leader will be chosen for the whole place. WTF? The end of a war is the perfect time to further entrench yourself! The districts are all a huge mess. We know 2 had plenty of resistance among the general population, and reading between the lines the same is true in the other districts – probably the main reason the rebellion won so easily is really that capital supporters in the average district had no feasible way of aiding the capital or time to do so. There are going to be plenty of people who don’t like 13 – not, I expect, a majority, but enough to worry about. And in places like 2 it’s definite that a huge chunk of them were capital lackeys. And that’s just what’s actually true. There’s massive resentment toward even those members who were part of the resistance movement (see Gale’s sudden RAEG toward the district 2 victor for daring to suggest that maybe letting people surrender might be a better solution than murdering them all. People in 2 are evil capital lapdogs!!!!!!!!) and I’d expect that a lot of people will believe others have suspect loyalties and can’t be trusted.

You can’t have a change in power while people are still fighting over who gets to vote, who doesn’t get to vote, and who gets a complimentary bullet through the cranium.

I roll my eyes. “Boggs, no one thinks I’m going to be the leader.”
“No. They don’t,” he agrees. “But you’ll throw support to someone. Would it be President Coin? Or someone else?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it,” I say.
“If your immediate answer isn’t Coin, then you’re a threat.

So clearly, the idea here is that Coin is evil and another, nicer person will have the chance to be supreme leader and Katniss will support that person.

So, let’s list the many, many problems with that.

Katniss’ disdain for Coin has never made sense. She hates her pretty much because she looks severe, even though this severity doesn’t show through in her actual actions, which are to feed, clothe and house the refugees. We do get various villainball moments – the insistence kidnapped and tortured victors, one of whom is already a member of their group, be treated as traitors and killed; chaining idiots in a room for stealing bread; and now the whole murder thing, but, and this is the most important part, that isn’t Coin’s decision, that’s 13’s decision. The crowd is upset by Coin’s decision to pardon the victors and the guard seems baffled by the idea that brutalizing people over bread isn’t the appropriate response. Even now, Boggs doesn’t seem at all surprised by the idea of this, it’s just he happens to like Katniss so he disapproves of this specific political murder.

Coin, if anything, seems more willing to compromise than the average person – she was willing to change on both those points, and she was likely the one in charge of integrating the refugees, all of whom whose name isn’t Katniss seem to have nothing but good things to say about 13. Coin isn’t severe and rigid. 13 is, she’s going along with what they want. I mentioned very early on that a problem with a society run like an army is there’s no accountability at the top. We’re also told people currently have no idea of democracy except as something from the history books. But Coin is an incredibly modern leader who seems to be acting as an extension of her own people, not on her own whims. We have yet to see any sign of her going against what the people of 13 want except in wanting Peeta rather than Katniss, and that just seems prescient knowing what we now know about what an absolute shithead Katniss ends up being.

In that light, even killing Katniss doesn’t seem so bad. I mean, it’s still murder and all, but let’s consider who that other leader could be.

If it’s a 13er, odds are that it’s going to be someone much harder than Coin. The only time we’ve seen people dissatisfied with Coin, it’s for going along with Katniss’ request to not punish the victors, so if she’s challenged it’ll be by someone who argues she’s gone soft and running on a kill-those-collaborators-for-being-tortured platform. Either she was always a more moderate person than the average 13er, or her experiences running the place (and perhaps specifically dealing with rebellion members who come from very different backgrounds) have taught her it’s necessary, and if there’s one thing they’re going to need a lot of when unifying thirteen districts, it’s compromise.

If it’s someone from outside 13…

Patriarch is an asshole, for starters. Far more damningly, he’s someone who just cannot be in charge. He has no sense of moderation – he thinks big, then the person he proposes it to, who’s got to deal with actual reality, cuts off whatever they can’t afford. Plus, he’s a propaganda man, not a politician – he’s easily the most dangerous guy for the job, because he’d be very good at getting and keeping power but shit at accomplishing anything but keeping his numbers high. You never want a leader who’s just there to sit on a throne, but this is easily the worst time for something like that, when not only are a lot of decisions going to need to be made, but they’re ones that will shape the direction the new government goes in for generations to come…or, will destroy it entirely. I’d say the same is probably true for other capital defectors – if there are any who aren’t media people, they’re still just not going to be able to make good decisions, they don’t have the background. That’s assuming the best case scenario, incidentally. The worst case is they recreate the capital system with different people at the top. We don’t even have a clear answer why most of them defected. It could easily be that they felt they weren’t getting the respect and money they deserved under the current system.

The victors are popular, but then, Katniss claims everyone hates everyone else’s victors at one point. They’re not a likely choice, but still deserve consideration, especially since some have been prominent rebellion members. The victors would not only be be contentious choices and absolutely no experience running a country, but they also all seem to be various flavors of unwell. At best, they’re going to have hidden stress points – areas they’re just not rational about. Lyme’s behavior in calling for a chance to surrender is actually quite weird. I’d guess a good number of victors would, if in charge, be more likely to order everyone connected to the capital dead. Ones like Lyme may not necessarily be any more reasonable – perhaps what looks reasonable in that instance is actually a more irrational belief that no one should be blamed for going along with the capital because she had no choice in what they made her do, which seems like a wonderful and inclusive view until she starts pardoning people who knowingly chose to support the capital for selfish reasons, and then counter-rebellion forces who are trying to overthrow the new government and bring about a new capital system. At best, she’ll be in a bad position to assure people like Gale that the government is taking that threat seriously, which means the new government will be unstable. There’s a lot of angry, well armed people with experience overthrowing a government around, and they need to be convinced to support this one rather than undermine it. And this is without even considering the possibility of a victor who’s been successfully stockholmed.

Then there’s the old guard – the mayors and peacekeepers and what the comparatively upper class of the districts is. These are people who are already well known and already know about managing people. They’re also largely collaborators. We never got a clear idea of what mayors do, if their job is to protect their people or to betray them. All we know is that in 12, the mayor is living quite well while the major cause of death in his town is starvation and there’s an orphanage full of battered children. Oh, and there’s a strict class divide too. In 11…well, the place is an utter hellhole and I really can’t believe the mayor is doing anything to get the peacekeepers off their back. Certainly the mayor of 12 never does anything about the new peacekeepers. Maybe the mayor of 8 was in on it, but they could have just as easily done it without or in spite of him.

Basically? I would not want those guys in charge. It’s unclear if they know anything about actually running a place and there’s no sign they’ve ever used whatever power they do have for anything but their own gain. The majority of them are probably capital sympathizers to boot, even if they likely shifted their allegiance to 13 as soon as it became clear who the likely victors were (and quite possibly informing on 13’s actions to the capital and saying they were a double agent, because why pick a side when you can play both?). And they’re the most likely candidates for a challenger to Coin.

And yet…

When this is proposed, Katniss seems to, in the same instant she understands Coin’s objection, realize she’ll be acting exactly like that.

“So she’ll kill me to shut me up.” The minute I say the words, I know they’re true.

No consideration of who Coin’s probably successor is. Not that it matters – Katniss is not exactly fond of Patriarch, but she’s far more friendly toward him than she is Coin, and they’ve been allies in the lie-to-Coin thing since early on. So she’s a horrendous judge of character even if she even bothered to consider it, and odds are she won’t, she’ll just be out there waving an ANYONE BUT COIN sign even if the other guy is Stalin. Hell, even if he’s Pol Pot. She doesn’t like Coin’s appearance, therefore the hellbitch must go down.

With that in mind, Coin’s murder plans suddenly look a lot more reasonable. I don’t like the idea of killing your political opponents, but neither do I like the idea of someone fucking over an entire country over a grudge and getting god knows how many people killed in the process, and Katniss is pretty much saying she’ll do that. Coin may be trying to keep her own power, but she’s never given any textual clue that’s an important thing to her, and it goes against the whole spartan devotion thing 13 has going on. We’re told the higher ups don’t get any perks at all, they’re pretty much uncorrupted. So it’s more likely Coin is facing a situation like I just outlined, where she’s at risk of being replaced by a warmongering, inflexible 13 asshole, who’ll be unable to unify the country; Patriarch or someone else, who’ll turn himself into a one-man capital and do nothing but drain the coffers until he’s overthrown or he recreates the old system; an unstable victor, who will be facing a divided nation and their own irrationality; or an untried mayor-collaborator who doesn’t know the first thing about actually running something as the one in charge and is just as likely to want to recreate the capital so long as their own place gets to be in the center this time.

Imagine seeing that nightmare stretching in front of you and thinking you can avert it by killing just one person, one who will set it all in motion by sheer petty hate. It’s a lot more reasonable then.

Anyway, Boggs explains that Katniss has already done the unifying thing and the only useful thing left is to die a martyr. As I’ve been saying, she could have done the unifying thing by being a martyr much earlier on, so this manages to be stupid even as it tries to incorporate what I’ve been saying. Then he says he’ll do everything he can to keep her alive because she’s “earned it”. No explanation how, and we know is he’s been a huge Katniss supporter the whole time anyway.

Katniss, in a moment of vaguely human behavior, feels angry and frustrated. She’s planning on betraying him and stealing his map when she already owes him for a lot, and now she’s going to owe him even more.

Back in camp, Katniss asks when her turn on Peeta murderwatch is and she’s shocked to hear she isn’t in it. Considering she’s his trigger, that seems just practical, but then we’re told the actual reason is because they don’t think she could shoot Peeta.

Right.

So, not that any of us need convincing by this point, but apparently the super sharpshooter group was also the slow children group, so Katniss has to convince them. She actually does so in another pretty decent moment.

I speak up so the whole squad can hear me clearly. “I wouldn’t be shooting Peeta. He’s gone. Johanna’s right. It’d be just like shooting another of the Capitol’s mutts.”

Now, this does require that we ignore, oh, basically everything that happened between Peeta’s first strangling and now, when he repeatedly showed that he’s still there, it’s just specifically the romance that he’s lost. But Johanna, like the book at points, seems to be going with the idea that the whole of him is fundamentally changed to the point he’s unrecognizable as his former self, and I think that when canon conflicts it’s best to go with Johanna’s version.

Anyway, in the case Peeta is in fact a freakish body-snatched version, Katniss’ talk here is actually relatively sane. You aren’t obligated to go power-of-love on an insane, brainwashed person trying to kill you, especially with no sign that their original self is there.

It’s also wrong to insist someone’s a nonperson for not being in love with you, but if you think about it, that’s pretty much how Katniss treats everyone, so it’s not like she’s being unfair to Peeta here.

It feels good to say something horrible about him, out loud, in public, after all the humiliation I’ve felt since his return.

whoaaa wait what.

What.

What is this even.

“Well, that sort of comment isn’t recommending you either,” says Jackson.
“Put her in the rotation,” I hear Boggs say behind me.
Jackson shakes her head and makes a note. “Midnight to four. You’re on with me.”

Oh, Jackson <3 And Boggs is obviously thinking that if Katniss wants to kill Peeta and end their problem that’s a win, and Jackson then works within the letter of the command by sticking Katniss with her, where she’ll have to spend the entirety of the watch staring at both Katniss and Peeta.

Gale, having heard this all, asks if she wants him to kill Peeta, presumably because he figures Jackson will be able to take her out if it comes to a fight. Also, because he is psychotic. Gale, stop trying to murder the hypotenuse. Katniss doesn’t know what she wants, so she’s kind of shocked Gale is saying the thing she just said. I think this is another point where we’re supposed to see Gale as going evil. Dammit, book, make up your mind, is Peeta an unrecognizable psycho or not? Gale also says he knows that she’s planning to leave and wants to know if she’s taking him, and she suddenly decides that’s a good idea.

At mealtime, everyone’s glaring at Katniss and it turns out it’s because they’re pissed about what she said. Haymitch asks wtf she thinks she’s doing, does she want Peeta to flip out and kill her.

 “Of course not. I just want him to leave me alone,” I say.

That makes no sense because she said it for everyone else to hear, and also did it so they’d put her on the Peetawatch.

“Well, he can’t. Not after what the Capitol put him through,” says Haymitch. “Look, Coin may have sent him there hoping he’d kill you, but Peeta doesn’t know that. He doesn’t understand what’s happened to him. So you can’t blame him–“
“I don’t!” I say.
“You do! You’re punishing him over and over for things that are out of his control.

Okay, and you know what, blaming him, while irrational, is still understandable. Katniss has been through a lot. She was willing to avoid him (until demanding to be on watch with him) and it’s not like she’s really all that healthy mentally either. If she can’t handle him, she isn’t obligated to.

It would help if Katniss showed a bit more emotion here than just selfishness, of course. On some level she should know that 12’s bombing happened because of something she did, even if she didn’t mean for it to happen and even if she shouldn’t be blamed for it, so hearing someone shout about how it’s her fault and she’s a monster who brings misfortune to everything should actually hurt, not just the fact he hates her.

I think it’s time you flipped this little scenario around in your head. If you’d been taken by the Capitol, and hijacked, and then tried to kill Peeta, is this the way he would be treating you?” demands Haymitch.

It isn’t. It isn’t how he would be treating me at all. He would be trying to get me back at any cost. Not shutting me out, abandoning me, greeting me with hostility at every turn.

…honestly, he would probably be using this to try to convince her they were lovers. Peeta is a creepy fucker, and he’s done everything he can to manipulate her into a relationship before now. And if you’re someone’s personal trigger, I really don’t think it’s a sign of selflessness to insist on inflicting yourself on them in the hopes they’ll remember they love you and return to supporting you.

I huddle in my tent, thinking over Haymitch’s words. Realizing with shame that my fixation with assassinating Snow has allowed me to ignore a much more difficult problem. Trying to rescue Peeta from the shadowy world the hijacking has stranded him in. I don’t know how to find him, let alone lead him out.

a) Not her job. She is not obligated to fix Peeta.
b) She’s his personal trigger.

c)

So she goes on watch with Peeta…and just sits there quietly.

Peeta speaks up to say it must be stressful deciding if she’s going to kill him or not. You know, I kind of like the new, snarky Peeta. He has personality and he’s not such a creepy obsessive.

Katniss said she never wanted to kill him, except for the part when she figured he was trying to kill her, which is the most reasonable thing anyone’s said in the book so far.

Ally. I’ll add it to the list of words I use to try to figure you out.” He weaves the rope in and out of his fingers. “The problem is, I can’t tell what’s real anymore, and what’s made up.”

Well, all the video was real. I mean, I guess I can see it not being convincing, but he seemed to figure it wasn’t faked.

Finnick’s voice rises from a bundle in the shadows. “Then you should ask, Peeta. That’s what Annie does.”

Uh, why would Annie be unclear about what’s real and what isn’t? We’re told Peeta’s particular mental illness is very odd and deliberately induced by a complex method, while Annie just lost it because she saw a friend murdered in front of her. Why is everyone crazy in the exact same way?

Also, wow, their relationship has just added another creepy point. Does Annie believe that their relationship is real because Finnick says it is? Does she stick with him because she needs him to help her with this, rather than love? The more dependent and easily manipulated Annie is portrayed, the more worrying their relationship looks.

Peeta points out that they’re a bunch of guards pointing guns at his head, so who’s he supposed to ask.

Jackson says, you saved a lot of lives in Thirteen. It’s not the kind of thing we forget.”

…but he didn’t. If he saved anyone, it was Prim and Buttercup. He only gave them ten minutes early warning, but everyone got into the shelters with plenty of time to spare. At worst, they might not have closed the doors completely by then, but none of the bombs apparently came anywhere near the lower shelter areas.

Now, I can definitely understand appreciating that he tried to help them (though as I said at the time, it’s dubious if he was intending to help them) but saying he actually saved lives, let alone “a lot of lives”? No.

Anyway, Katniss is really sympathetic about what Peeta’s talking about, because she imagines not knowing who was her friend and who was her enemy would be terrifying, but she has no idea where to start. This is because Katniss is not a therapist and this should not be her job. It’s great she’s sympathetic. It’s good she wants to help. It’s wrong to frame it as all her responsibility.

Peeta asks if her favorite color really is green, and she says yeah and that his is orange like the sunset.

more words tumble out. “You’re a painter. You’re a baker. You like to sleep with the windows open. You never take sugar in your tea. And you always double-knot your shoelaces.”

This is the most convinced I’ve been that there’s real affection between the two, noticing those sort of things.

Also, Katniss then runs off because how do you emotions, which again, a pretty good reaction. It’s weird that it’s only with Peeta crazy and hating her that I have any positive feelings toward the relationship.

Jackson has devised a game called “Real or Not Real” to help Peeta. He mentions something he thinks happened, and they tell him if it’s true or imagined, usually followed by a brief explanation.

This is not actually a legit way of dealing with mental illness.

“Most of the people from Twelve were killed in the fire.”
“Real. Less than nine hundred of you made it to Thirteen alive.”
“The fire was my fault.”
“Not real. President Snow destroyed Twelve the way he did Thirteen, to send a message to the rebels.”

Seriously not how mental illness works. Why would Peeta believe them over what he’s been convinced is true? Especially when they have a huge and obvious incentive to lie to him.

So they set up a system where Finnick, Gale or Katniss is always there to answer questions for Peeta, despite the fact Finnick shouldn’t know the answer to most of the questions and I would bet Gale is more interested in fucking Peeta’s head up worse. Yes, he did at one point claim he’d rather Peeta was fixed so Katniss would stop doing her obsess-about-the-most-hurt-one thingy, but he also just offered to take Peeta out and Katniss has made it clear she’s willing to cut ties if Peeta’s different enough.

since Peeta’s greatest confusion centers around me–and not everything can be explained simply–our exchanges are painful and loaded, even though we touch on only the most superficial of details. The color of my dress in 7. My preference for cheese buns. The name of our math teacher when we were little. Reconstructing his memory of me is excruciating. Perhaps it isn’t even possible after what Snow did to him.

Unexplained is how these memories were messed with in the first place. It’s easy to see how they could have fucked with his recent memories, they’ve got plenty of tapes to show and we’re told that showing something while high on venom will rewrite the memory. It’s also easy to see how they could have fucked with general perception, since we’re also told that you can do something similar by telling someone to think about a subject and avoiding thinking about a person is hard.

But they don’t know about his pre-tribute life. They have a couple interviews that were probably manufactured nonsense going by the fact the interviewers rewrote Gale into Katniss’ cousin without a problem. You might think that blatantly lying all the time about a tribute’s life is a bad idea, since what if the tribute says something contradicting it in the arena. The answer to that is there was nothing stopping Katniss from mentioning Gale, her unrelated male friend she spends a lot of time alone with, at any point during or after the games. So Peeta’s life is just as open to a bland rewrite. Showing him those videos might be mildly confusing, but it’s unlikely they had any real detail to fixate on and they probably didn’t contradict much either.

So, why would his early memories be a mess? All they have on him is the bit where he said he saw her at age five with his dad, the bit where she sang that same day, and her own story of the bread. I don’t think they fucked with his memory of math class, or what incidental food Katniss likes. And if they’re showing him videos to warp into nightmares, why would details of dress color be warped? Katniss didn’t think Glimmer’s outfit changed colors, she just thought the girl was rotting away in, presumably, the same outfit as usual.

Coin and Plutarch are unhappy with the quality of footage they’re getting from the Star Squad. Very dull. Very uninspiring. The obvious response is that they never let us do anything but playact with our guns.

This begs an important question: why the fuck are they using the best sharpshooters they have, instead of the best actors they have?

So they decide to go into a block with active pods to film more shooting because of the poor acting job. Isn’t that what they were already doing? We’re told the idea is to shoot at various things and only get the pods every now and then, to pretend they don’t know where they are. And we know one person’s died by hitting a mislabeled pod, meaning they’re going into blocks with active pods and being filmed shooting. So what exactly is the difference?

Well, besides the fact that the gun Peeta gets only has blanks. I really don’t see how this makes it more realistic than before.

Anyway, Peeta notices that the camera guy is one of the capital’s mutes, and immediately tells everyone about how he knew these two other guys.

Darius and Lavinia, but the guards mostly called them the redheads. They’d been our servants in the Training Center, so they arrested them, too. I watched them being tortured to death. She was lucky. They used too much voltage and her heart stopped right off. It took days to finish him off. Beating, cutting off parts. They kept asking him questions, but he couldn’t speak, he just made these horrible animal sounds. They didn’t want information, you know? They wanted me to see it.

I know I’m supposed to care, but…this is so fucking stupid.

Darius and Lavinia (Lavinia? Really, book, did you really go there?) were both people Katniss and the reader knew. It would make some slight sense to torture them in front of Katniss, and their deaths are obviously chosen in part because they’re characters we’ve met.

Do you know who Peeta knew? His own prep team. We know the capital had them and we know the capital didn’t care about killing them just because they were citizens, because they’re executed when Peeta’s rescued. Not even arrested to see if they were involved, just killed immediately in a show of pettiness. If the capital’s willing to throw them away like that, they’re definitely willing to torture them here. If anything, their slavemutes are probably more valuable than a fashion team. I mean, their slavemutes actually do things.

Peeta then demands they tell him if that was real or not. Look, I know Peeta’s supposed to be crazy, but from what we’ve been told so far, Peeta is capable of asking questions based on what the other person knows. He isn’t cornering Finnick and demanding he talk about first grade math class, on the rotation he asks each person questions they’d know the answer to. Yet here he’s asking a group of strangers if they know something that happened in a sealed room happened or not. Everything about this is forced.

Before Peeta can get too upset, Boggs says it’s real as far as he knows. See, this is what I mean, why should Peeta believe anyone? Boggs either means that he’s heard that kind of thing happens in other situations, so it sounds plausible, or he’s just telling Peeta that because they want him to hate the capital rather than Katniss.

Consider Katniss’ hallucinations, which were all over the place, and the fact apparently mere footage of her was enough for Peeta to believe she was a genetically engineered abomination set loose to burn 12 down. It would be really easy for him to see a video involving the two and hallucinate that they were there with him being tortured, especially given we know that Johanna and probably other people were being tortured around him.

And again, there’s absolutely no motivation for them to do this. Much better to torture people he actually knows – and you know, horrible animal sounds? Not as bad as horrible human sounds. Definitely not as bad as someone you actually know spending their last hours screaming at you over how this is your fault. If they were going to do this, his stylist was the better choice in every way. It’s written to emphasize how pointless questioning them is, but it’s missing the more obvious issue.

Peeta sags. “I thought so. There was nothing…shiny about it.”

This book consistently is plotted in the worst possible way.

I add them to my personal list of kills that began in the arena and now
includes thousands.

I’d care more if I didn’t know that Katniss’ personal list of kills in the arena, in its entirety, is Marvel and Cato. There is absolutely nothing about her character that supports her giving a shit. She has rare, OOC moments where she cares for five minutes and then stops again.

When I look up, I see it has taken Gale differently. His expression says that there are not enough mountains to crush, enough cities to destroy. It promises death.

I’m really sure the point here is Gale is evil, but as usual, nope, he’s got a point. They’re fighting a war to stop this. Katniss is personally planning on murdering a specific person just out of revenge. I don’t see why wanting to kill torturers is crossing a line that none of the rest did.

So, they playact their way through the block like its a big deal when just a chapter ago it was apparently what they were doing all the time.

Cressida stops us before we can rise, since she needs some close-up shots. We take turns reenacting our responses. Falling to the ground, grimacing, diving into alcoves. We know it’s supposed to be serious business, but the whole thing feels a little ridiculous. Especially when it turns out that I’m not the worst actor in the squad. Not by a long shot. We’re all laughing so hard at Mitchell’s attempt to project his idea of desperation, which involves teeth grinding and nostrils flaring, that Boggs has to reprimand us.

This is so fucking stupid. Look, I know that we’re dealing with dumbasses who couldn’t notice there was the same bird in the corner of their reused footage for seventy years, but there are continuity errors in films all the time and there is no way that won’t be showing up here, especially considering they’re destroying a section of the block, then doing the reshoots, so there’s probably broken glass all over the place that wasn’t there on the way in and stuff like that.

Next, the point of doing this was that they’re shitty actors so they had to let them onto a real block. This is like having the revelation Katniss can’t read lines for shit and then a chapter or two later handing Katniss a script, which is to say completely in line with what we’ve seen but absolutely idiotic. If they can’t act, then they won’t do a good job acting.

Which brings us to the final point, if they wanted actors why in the name of whatever sick writing god allowed this to be published unedited didn’t they just use fucking actors?

But you can see him suppressing a smile as he’s double-checking the next pod. Positioning the Holo to find the best light in the smoky air. Still facing us as his left foot steps back onto the orange paving stone. Triggering the bomb that blows off his legs.

Seriously, I can barely even care about our dramatic ending line, and it’s a character I hate being killed off in the usual convenient manner I also hate. I should be doing the usual YES HE’S DEAD dance followed by listing off how yet again, real conflict is avoided by killing someone off for Katniss, and maybe speculating on who a better person to kill would be.

But look at that writing. I mean just look at it. Is there some sort of sentence fragment lobby? Are they like the Illuminati or something, only they actually exist? Do they have something on the author, like the fact she ran over a kid back in ’89 and also that kid was Jesus, and also he was going to grow up to cure cancer, and they’re demanding she include as many of them as possible? Is this some sort of Ring-esque situation where she’s propagating them as some weird viral meme by putting them in a popular book? Will we all have to write in sentence fragments now?