Last time on Mockingjay, we end on a (for this book) reasonable line about Katniss picking her boyfriend based on who she can’t live without.

Am I really that cold and calculating? Gale didn’t say, “Katniss will pick whoever it will break her heart to give up,” or even “whoever she can’t live without.” Those would have implied I was motivated by a kind of passion. But my best friend predicts I will choose the person who I think I “can’t survive without.” There’s not the least indication that love, or desire, or even compatibility will sway me. I’ll just conduct an unfeeling assessment of what my potential mates can offer me. As if in the end, it will be the question of whether a baker or a hunter will extend my longevity the most.

Oh, so that’s what it was supposed to mean.

This is so out of left field I’m wondering if we’ve just hit a moment of Katniss not being so reliable. This doesn’t just contradict what we’ve been shown, which is Katniss willing to die to save Peeta, but what we’ve been told – Gale says she falls in love based on who’s hurting. The obvious way of reading it is that he means ‘can’t survive without’ in the Twilight sense.

It’s funny, I think we’ve reached a point the writing is terrible enough to regain the sort of ambiguity a good story would have naturally. Is this supposed to be dramatic irony, where Katniss is thinking this but any reader would know better, or does the author somehow think this is the natural interpretation any reader would have? Or is it actually supposed to be what Gale meant?

If I had to guess, it’d be that the author thinks this is what we think, because that makes the most sense considering the otherwise very lackluster Dramatic Ending Line last chapter. Also, Katniss goes on to claim that she can survive just fine without either of them currently, which is honestly a weird qualifier – she could always survive just fine without them. She’s the one who won the Hunger Games.

Randomly… The story of Cain and Abel is said to reflect the conflict between the people growing grain and those still living off meat. After all, you’d expect it was the guy butchering animals and not the one baking grain who decided to solve his problems with violence, but Cain gets in trouble because his offerings are vegetarian.

Now, you might think the application of that to our current situation is to pick the hunter, who seems to have god on his side, but actually the moral is the baker, because he kills the hunter and you might as well go with the guy who’ll be alive.

However. If we look at the actual historic record, you want meat. Grain fills your belly but it doesn’t actually give you the nutrition you need to grow. The shift from hunter/gatherer to farmer led to horrible deformities and death at the time. Hunters are healthier. Hunting isn’t viable for society, but it’s the winning choice for an individual. And Katniss really strikes me as the sort to be fine with a choice that screws other people over as long as she’s fine.

Okay, back to the story.

The black wave setting off pods gave the rebels the idea they could set off pods by sending things like cars down the street. How the fuck did this never occur to anyone before?

“This can’t last,” says Gale. “In fact I’m surprised they’ve kept it going so long. The Capitol will adjust by deactivating specific pods and then manually triggering them when their targets come in range.” Almost within minutes of his prediction, we see this very thing happen on-screen.

This is terrible, terrible writing. He shouldn’t just happen to mention it right before it happens when it’s been going on for ages.

A squad sends a car down a block, setting off four pods. All seems well. Three scouts follow and make it safely to the end of the street. But when a group of twenty rebel soldiers follow them, they’re blown to bits

Okay, first, they still have access to the pod map, which shows the majority of the pods, and the capital doesn’t know they have that. That means that odds are, any pod they try to keep in reserve will be one of those the people know is there.

Speaking of pods, a number of them release autonomous things, like rats or torturemurder wasps. Those can’t be safely triggered because they’ll chase people down once they’re released.

Finally, this isn’t a big deal at all. Now that the rebels know this is how it’s being done, they just need to move in smaller numbers. The only reason to run across in one big group is if you’re worried about attack from other soldiers. No one does that when the problem is a minefield. Really, this should already have been standard practice.

Looking out, Katniss sees that there are refugees, people evacuating more areas of the capital and coming further in. Tigris goes out to see what she can find out, and Katniss fidgets because she thinks they should be using the incoming refugees as cover to move deeper into the capital and get to Snow. After all, if she doesn’t hurry, the war will pass them by and she won’t get her revenge!

Many are still out on the street, trying to find shelter for the night. Those who live in the choice apartments of the inner city have not flung open their doors to house the displaced. On the contrary, most of them bolted their locks, drew their shutters, and pretended to be out.

Wow, the author really doesn’t get how this sort of thing works. Pretend you’re not there, and people smash their way in.

But that’s missing the bigger elephant in the room. Vast areas of the capital were already evacuated. Those people had to go somewhere, and I refuse to believe there were empty apartments everywhere to absorb the population. That’s simply not how things work. They must already have a system for the displaced. We’re told peacekeepers are now going around finding places for people, and this should have already happened already, possibly several times.

Tigris returns and they plan what to do. Snow claims he’ll be letting refugees into his mansion, so Katniss says they should head there. They decide to move in groups, with Peeta at the back so he can create a diversion if they need it. Peeta continues to be OOCly unconcerned with Snow capturing him again. Gale hands over his poison pill in what I think is supposed to show that they’ve definitely made friends, but to me looks like yet another attempt to get Peeta to die already. Gale says he’ll be fine, since he’s got explosive arrows and “without hesitation” Katniss to kill him if it comes up. Gale, seriously, the war’s basically over, you don’t need to worry about this. The reason Katniss wants to go is that the rebels, ie your own group, is within a few blocks. It’d make sense for Peeta, because Peeta’s not expected to be rational, but you have no such excuse.

Suddenly, there’s gunfire and the crowd scatters.

a street full of bodies. The little girl who was watching me kneels beside a motionless woman, screeching and trying to rouse her. Another wave of bullets slices across the chest of her yellow coat, staining it with red, knocking the girl onto her back. For a moment, looking at her tiny crumpled form, I lose my ability to form words.

Nope, sorry book.

There’s no reason for them to be shooting indiscriminately at a bunch of civilians and then aiming at one little kid except that you wanted a dramatic war-is-awful scene.

they’re not exactly crack shots. It must be the rebels.

Hello there, extra plot hole! If most of the rebels suck at shooting, it makes the propaganda squad make even less sense than before. I was just barely tolerating it on the assumption that they have plenty of skilled shooters to spare, even if it was still stupid to waste some of the best on that.

we encounter a wounded Peacekeeper propped against a strip of brick wall. He asks us for help. Gale knees him in the side of the head and takes his gun.

Fuck you, book.

They continue and it gets more and more chaotic as pods start to go off.

Peacekeeper, rebel, citizen, who knows? Everything that moves is a target. People shoot reflexively, and I’m no exception. Heart pounding, adrenaline burning through me, everyone is my enemy. Except Gale. My hunting partner, the one person who has my back. There’s nothing to do but move forward, killing whoever comes into our path.

You know.

I’m really loath to say characters are just evil. I’m willing to accept all sorts of reasons why someone would do the wrong thing. I feel bad for Eridan.

But this?

I’m not sure there’s any way you could redeem a character from this. She isn’t killing out of fear. She’s excited and tense, but there’s no sense here that she’s acting without fully knowing what she’s doing. And what she’s doing is murdering her way through innocent people, some of which fought to help her, some of which may be from her own home district or are the same people who rescued and treated them afterward. Some of which, certainly, are children like the one she was staring at and supposedly so moved by minutes ago. And she’s doing this because she wants the right to kill Snow before the war’s over and he’s captured. And it’s called moral.

It just gets gorier. One block ahead of them lights up and the light makes people bleed out of their eyes and die. If the capital has this kind of weapon, why haven’t they just ringed the place with it instead of using it as a one shot trick?

On the next block, we encounter more terrified refugees, but few soldiers. Just when it seems we might have caught a break, there’s a cracking sound, like an egg hitting the side of a bowl but magnified a thousand times.

See, the entire street is splitting open, because apparently the capital follows the same rule of tactics as Katniss, where you trigger the trap before your opponents actually get to it. It’s not that they’re disregarding the lives of their own citizens by not caring if a trap kills some as long as it gets rebels, they are choosing to kill their own citizens instead of rebels.

There is no longer even a pretense that this is a story and not a series of random events.

From fifty feet below, a vile stench hits my nose, like rotted corpses in the summer heat. Black forms crawl around in the shadows, silencing whoever survives the fall.

A) There is no reason there would be rotted corpses under there when this is the first time the trap’s triggered. Definitely no reason to have something else that just happens to smell exactly like it. Also, it’s freezing cold and snowing right now, which tends to mute smells.

B) No one survives a fifty foot fall into a death pit.

C) If this was a survivable fall, the people would still be trapped, so it’s a waste of resources to have “black forms” picking them off instead of dealing with the people still advancing.

D) We were just told everyone down there is a refugee, so why kill them?

E) Spikes, fuckwits. If you want to make sure people die at the end of the fall, you use god damn spikes. How fucking stupid do you have to be to not know that?

Katniss manages to get to the edge and then crawl along until she’s safely at the other end. She looks back and sees Gale’s grabbed onto a door, but kicking doesn’t produce anyone to open it, so she shoots it open for him and he swings to safety. (Incidentally, the same is true for a number of other people, but Katniss makes no effort to help them. Presumably, eventually they can’t hold on any longer and fall to their deaths.)

Then the white-gloved hands clamp down on him.

No really, fuck off book. If there were peacekeepers in there ready to arrest him, why wouldn’t they just open the door in the first place. More, how the fuck do they know to capture him when he was in the middle of a crowd of refugees?

Gale mouths something at her and she can’t figure out what he mean despite the fact he just had a conversation regarding how he expected her to shoot him if he was captured. It’s only after he’s pulled inside and he shouts at her to run that she realizes a block away that, right, she was meant to kill him.

Yet another plot hole. There’s no reason she should so conveniently forget. It’d have worked better for her to fire and the gun to be out of bullets (to avoid contrivance, say it ran out a bit earlier, but really, that would be the least contrivance compared to the other things we’ve seen), but then, it’d work better to realize Gale is only going to be a prisoner for an hour tops. At this point, the only thing to worry about is that they might just execute him now before the rebels reach them.

And really, if Gale was going to die little miss Without Hesitation here would have just shot him. So he’ll be fine.

A pair of Peacekeepers runs by, barely glancing at the whimpering Capitol girl huddled in a doorway. I choke down my tears, wipe the existing ones off my face before they can freeze, and pull myself back together.

Lucky it’s not rebels or they would have shot you. Just saying, Katniss.

Katniss makes it to the mansion. There, she finds a group of children set in the middle of a concrete barricade.

They’re penned in, guarded on all sides by Peacekeepers. I know immediately it’s not for their protection. If the Capitol wanted to safeguard them, they’d be down in a bunker somewhere. This is for Snow’s protection. The children form his human shield.

Hah, shows what he knows! The rebels don’t give a fuck about shooting children.

But actually, this is a valid way of trying to protect children. (In fact, a small group of kids outside his mansion really isn’t going to do him much good no matter what.) If the rebels weren’t displaying the sort of disregard one normally only sees in particularly one dimensional portrayals of Nazis, having them out in the open, clearly unarmed, is quite possibly the best way to keep them safe. A bunker is for missiles, but the rebels aren’t using those. The fighting is being carried out on a human level, and people are capable of seeing a group of children and not shooting at them. The barricade is four feet high, so the kids are even relatively safe from stray shots. Certainly, they’d be safer than putting them in some hidden location that the rebels might blow up because they assumed it was housing more soldiers.

A hovercraft marked with the Capitol’s seal materializes directly over the barricaded children. Scores of silver parachutes rain down on them. Even in this chaos, the children know what silver parachutes contain. Food. Medicine. Gifts.

I am not really convinced by this. Yes, during the games that’s what the parachutes hold for the victims. But like I just said, the games. The parachutes are tied to being put in a horrible place where you die. And capital children should not see themselves as being similar to the tributes (people who get parachutes) because it’s a fact of capital life that those are the other, nonpeople who you don’t care about. So I’d expect the sudden appearance of something saying they’re tributes and their surroundings are like the games to be met with fear.

Now, if these weren’t exactly the sort the tributes were sent, I think it’d work better. A really good setup would have said that there were festivals in the city where gifts were dropped like this, and the games were using the same imagery because capital viewers already associate it with gifts, in the same way we associate wrapping paper, bows, and sparkly pine trees with gifts. It’d even have highlighted just how fucked up their perception of the games was.

The hovercraft vanishes, five seconds pass, and then about twenty parachutes simultaneously explode.

Wait, so it was the rebels? But why would they bother with this, they’ve already won. They’re currently in the square itself.

The peacekeepers pull down the barricades to try to help the kids? But they’re only four feet, they could just climb over. Anyway, through the gap because apparently climbing over is too much work a bunch of rebel medics have appeared out of nowhere? Why are they there? Shouldn’t they be dealing with all the people who were already wounded? Is that why the rebels dropped the bombs, to give their medics a chance to go in and help the kids for PR purposes? That seems a really convoluted plan.

I notice the duck tail formed by her untucked shirt. I have the same reaction I did the day Effie Trinket called her name at the reaping. At least, I must go limp, because I find myself at the base of the flagpole, unable to account for the last few seconds. Then I am pushing through the crowd, just as I did before. Trying to shout her name above the roar.

Ooh, shit, so it’s the double explosive? But then why would they send their own medics in, wouldn’t they know that and stay away so only the peacekeepers would rush in? And why is Katniss assuming this because it really just doesn’t make any sense.

for just a moment, she catches sight of me, her lips form my name.
And that’s when the rest of the parachutes go off.

Well.

There’s definitely a good dramatic ending line. The whole last section is quite suitably horrible – first the kids getting blown to bits, then Katniss desperately trying to get to her sister before it happens. That’s horrible, and it actually shows a selfless moment since she’s rushing toward danger to try to get someone else out.

I just don’t get why any of it’s happening. The rebels have already won. They’re in the square surrounding the mansion. There’s no need to sow chaos by exploding the kids, and if it was the plan, they should have kept their own people away. And I don’t understand how Katniss realized Prim was in danger either.

Three chapters to go. I hope there’s a good explanation for this.

So, looking over the recommendations:

House of Night:

Wikipedia tells me this is about an enormous sue. Also, it’s a long series, and I’m relatively sure I wouldn’t do any of the rest of the books. The problem with sues and series is that if a character is already warping reality with how special she is, trying to pile on the same amount of specialness again each book gets awful fast.

Mortal Instruments:

I don’t wanna read stuff by a plagiarist, you guys. I was never in the Harry Potter fandom or familiar with most of the shows she was ripping off then, so I’m not at all qualified to tell what she stole, and I don’t want to be going through saying, “Well, this part is good,” when it’s not actually hers.

Battle Royale:

This would be fitting after all the time I spent comparing the Hunger Games to the manga, but it’s translated, and almost every translated Japanese book I’ve seen has been terrible. (Boogiepop being the one shining exception, to my unending relief and gratitude.)

Temeraire:

It sounds interesting, but I seem to remember the main debate about its possible faults was centered on the race/cultural axis, which is not exactly my specialty.

Eon, and the sequel Eona:

Never heard of it!

WWZ:

Read it. Found it very hit or miss, but if I do this one, it’ll probably be summaries and my thoughts more than a line by line thing.

And Then There Were None:

I have absolutely no experience with mysteries. If you want to read the exciting adventures of Farla failing to understand how the book works, that’s one thing, but don’t expect anything enlightening here.

OSC/Ender’s Game:

OSC is insane. I liked Ender’s Game when I read it as a kid, but I’m not touching the rest of his work without a sizable bribe. And I don’t mean cookies here, I mean along the lines of my weight in tiramisu. My positive memories of Ender’s Game include that the writing itself was not noticeably bad, so I’m not sure how extensive my commentary would be.

Gregor The Overlander:

YOU CAN’T MAKE ME

Divergence:

I heard this completely sucked, and in a boring way. I’d rather read the Sexteen thing, since that one sounded like it was a head on trainwreak.

Sabriel:

I love the Old Kingdom series. Love love love.

Perdido Street Station:

I also love China Mieville.