Last time on Mockingjay, for some reason yet to be fully explained, bombs. And Prim died.

The next set of explosions is far stronger.

The balls of flame that erupted from the parachutes shot over the barricades, through the snowy air, and landed in the crowd.

I’m really having trouble picturing that. Explosions are generally caused by fire expanding outward, not a wizard casting a dozen fireball spells. I don’t know enough on the subject to know if this is impossible, and they do have magic technology, but it’d definitely be a lot harder to manage and I can’t for the life of me figure out why when a regular explosion would do fine.

Katniss gets hit by one because the series will not let that damn “girl on fire” phrase go already.

transformed me into something new. A creature as unquenchable as the sun.
A fire mutt knows only a single sensation: agony.

Apparently they didn’t cover stop/drop/roll in soldier training, so Katniss, surrounded by snow I might add, instead runs around to help the flames burn better.

Also, at some point the book decided “mutt” was the term to use for all changes. Earlier, Peeta was using it to mean how he was when he was crazy. It didn’t make sense then, but I assumed it was because he’d drawn some link to what Johanna (<3) said. She, of course, was talking in the sense that it was like the capital had created a different, fake version of him and using the word correctly.

I sort of want to call this appropriation. It’s just, there’s really no reason to be saying she’s a mutt because she’s on fire. She’s pulling up a completely unrelated concept for drama’s sake.

After running around waving her arms and generally being a one woman What Not To Do When On Fire poster, she finally collapses into mere unconsciousness. I’m pretty sure she should be dead. I mean, she’s saying her arms have turned into wings of flame as she waves them. From the sounds of it, she was pretty much engulfed.

Then it’s hallucination time. In what I’m sure is meant as some sort of symbolism, Katniss dreams that she’s in the water and the dead people she liked are birds while the ones she didn’t like are some scaley things under the water with teeth. She can’t fly because she’s all wet. Prim tries to pull her out but can’t, and she’s dragged under. Then she just hangs out underwater and finds breathing an exhausting trial. She’s upset she doesn’t seem to be dying.


Trapped for days, years, centuries maybe. Dead, but not allowed to die. Alive, but as good as dead.

In short, Katniss has managed to actually look overly dramatic in a situation where her little sister died in front of her and then her skin was burned off. Epic, epic fail, book.

They give her morphine and she wakes up sort of. Um, no, you keep burn victims drugged into unconsciousness for hopefully obvious reasons. Also, if you’re on painkillers you don’t have super sensitive skin or a good kinesthetic sense in general.

But the book will have none of that. Katniss can immediately tell they’ve got her in some sort of foam despite not even knowing that was a treatment before now.

Foam. I really am floating on foam. I can feel it beneath the tips of my fingers, cradling parts of my naked body.

Her hands were on fire. She is not going to be feeling anything on the tips of her fingers right now, if ever. And she’s still in an enormous amount of pain, so she shouldn’t be able to separate out things like texture from the fact everything touching her skin, including probably the air itself, hurts.

In the dazzling white Capitol hospital, the doctors work their magic on me. Draping my rawness in new sheets of skin. Coaxing the cells into thinking they are my own.

Nope!

Skin grafts are done with the person’s own skin, to avoid an immune response. For best results, you should do the laboratory culture version, although this is a lot more fragile and takes longer to recover. Otherwise, you cut off a chunk of their surviving skin and start using it.

For severe burns, you can also use temporary grafts. Like from corpses, or simply an artificial mixture often made up from animal parts. The point of these is just to cover up exposed flesh, because they’re inevitably rejected.

The problem is absolutely not trying to convince the transplanted parts to believe they’re part of you. The issue is the rest of the body rejecting them.

Given the capital has magic science that can make humawolves, and current science is capable of cloning your own skin, I would assume they should be able to grow complete skin grafts. Failing that, they could definitely slap on a coating of live skin cells over exposed muscle and then cover that over with corpse skin. (One thing they shouldn’t be lacking at this point is spare parts.) Doing that should cut the pain, since that’s mostly coming from the whole exposed to the elements thing.

Isn’t science cool?

I hear over and over again how lucky I am. My eyes were spared. Most of my face was spared. My lungs are responding to treatment.

Other things we can do with our current level of technology: face transplants! Also, cornea transplants, which it sounds like is all Katniss would need. (It seems they can do full eye transplants because Katniss keeps talking about the humawolves as actually having the tribute’s eyes, and successfully transplanting the eyes of random kids who died a variety of deaths would be pretty hard. Eyes are a delicate organ.) And lung transplants are totally possible to! They can even be taken from living donors, where several healthy people give up a chunk of lung that gets patched together into a whole. Now, this is a major surgery that takes time to recover from, but so is rib damage, and we know they have a magic cure for that, so they probably do for the rest.

Because the author doesn’t understand how drugs work, Katniss being on morphine means she hallucinates dead people to chat with. Then she’s fixed.

I’m really sick of Katniss getting medical treatment. Her injuries are always so fake. She gets them, she talks about how awful they are, they’re cured. If we’re really lucky, there will be a lag period where they prevent her from doing things that don’t matter before they finish being fixed. Despite everything Katniss has been through so far, her current injury count remains at zero. All her actual scars are emotional, and even then they tend to fade out over time as the author forgets about them. Besides, emotional scarring in this is treated with all the seriousness of your typical cool scar.

The doctors’ puzzlement grows over why I’m unable to speak. Many tests are done, and while there’s damage to my vocal cords, it doesn’t account for it. Finally, Dr. Aurelius, a head doctor, comes up with the theory that I’ve become a mental, rather than physical, Avox.

oh my god no. stop right now.

Yes, this seems to be the appropriation chapter. Do we have any other words for Katniss to decide fit her soul’s inner torment? No made up ones I can think of, although there’s still regular old refugee. Or maybe she’ll decide she knows what it’s like to be eaten by lizardmen or trapped in a collapsing mountain or something.

Katniss learns what’s happened since she was out.

people bring me a steady stream of information. On the war: The Capitol fell the day the parachutes went off

Considering the place had already fallen by that point, yeah, no shit it did.

Anyway. There are still some pockets of resistance, for no discernible reason. I mean, the peacekeepers seem to be mostly 2 folk, and the capital guys join because of debt, not exactly the sort of background that makes you want to fight to the death for a cause that’s already lost.

But this actually sounds depressingly plausible if we add in that they’re not allowed to surrender. In that case, “pockets of resistance” mean “pockets of surviving peacekeepers”.

Which, in turn, doesn’t make sense with Coin ordering the mountain stronghold to have a chance to evacuate because they’re running out of people, but hey, neither does the rebels shooting random people.

Oh, and Snow’s been captured and he’ll be put on trial and executed. Coin tells Katniss she saved the guy for her. (I wonder if there was an actual coin flip she did earlier). Katniss does not take this moment to think about what a complete waste of life her revenge attempt was. She didn’t just get them killed (and kill an enormous number of innocent people) for a petty, stupid, selfish desire, but for a petty, stupid, selfish desire that she would have been given free of charge anyway. But Katniss just mopes around grieving for Prim. I think we can say with relative certainty that she wouldn’t have cared about the other dead even if Prim was still alive.

It’s a bit odd Snow isn’t dead. It’s not clear how long Katniss was out of it during her recovery, but they’ve obviously kept him alive for some time. It’d be nice to get a bit of explanation there, like that people decided they wanted Katniss to be the executioner so they were waiting for her to heal. Snow is the boogieman, the one person who everyone blames. They’re going to want him dead and they should have a reason for delaying this long.

Apparently, no one else died. Gale got shot twice but he’s fine, Peeta got burned a bit but also fine, Cressy and the slavemute cameraman are both running around filming the wreckage, presumably for propaganda because that’s just so important.

Eventually, I’m released from the hospital and given a room in the president’s mansion to share with my mother. She’s almost never there, taking her meals and sleeping at work.

I really don’t believe this. She lost one daughter and almost lost the other one – and this after seeing Katniss go through two games. She should be terrified to let Katniss out of her sight. If her mother doesn’t want to leave work, she should have tried to keep Katniss at the hospital.

Katniss goes back to her hiding in closets and napping behavior. That’s a pretty reasonable depression response. I’d actually find this better if it wasn’t the same thing as she was doing before, which seemed pretty much motivated by spite.

My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. There is no District 12. I am the Mockingjay. I brought down the Capitol. President Snow hates me. He killed my sister. Now I will kill him. And then the Hunger Games will be over….

…wait, she thinks Snow did the bombing?

But. Then how did she know that the bombs were Gale’s two stage type and Prim had to get out of there, and also, how would the capital have the same idea? And also, what possible benefit would bombing the kids have? It wasn’t even the soldiers who rushed it, it was his own peacekeepers and a bunch of doctors. (And since they had video feed, surely he’d have noticed the rebel soldiers had no problem shooting kids and so why would he think there’d be any aid given at all?)

Also, no, you didn’t take down the capital, and no, the hunger games are already over. They ended as soon as the last district was taken by the rebels, and now the capital itself has fallen. No need to use future tense like they’re still ongoing right this instant.

I eat the food, take the medicine, and am required to bathe. It’s not the water I mind, but the mirror that reflects my naked fire-mutt body. The skin grafts still retain a newborn-baby pinkness. The skin deemed damaged but salvageable looks red, hot, and melted in places. Patches of my former self gleam white and pale. I’m like a bizarre patchwork quilt of skin. Parts of my hair were singed off completely; the rest has been chopped off at odd lengths.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

This is probably one of the best attempts the book’s made, and it’s still a pile of failure.

I find it hard to believe her hair burned patchwork, especially considering how long she was on fire. I find it even harder to believe that if she somehow did have some hair they wouldn’t just shave it all off. Just suck it up and say she’s bald.

If she’s bothered by the mirror, why doesn’t she just cover it? Or smash it if she’s too out of it for a good solution. Either works.

Why is she even taking full, well lit baths instead of doing one of the many things people do to avoid this? She can turn off the lights so she can’t see herself, she could wash in sections so she stays mostly clothed, she could even try climbing into the tub fully dressed. People respond to their environment by doing more than just quietly sulking!

Here, Katniss is telling us she doesn’t like something, but as usual, tell is as far as it gets. She doesn’t do anything about this. Her insanity is limited to an internal narration inside her head, not acting out, and she is completely able to actually do these things instead of ever having a breakdown and refusing.

If this is supposed to be PTSD, it’s a disgustingly sanitized version.

Dr. Aurelius shows up sometimes. I like him because he doesn’t say stupid things like how I’m totally safe, or that he knows I can’t see it but I’ll be happy again one day, or even that things will be better in Panem now.

The whole shrink thing is dumb. If they had spare shrinks for her, she’d have had one since the beginning. There’s no need to worry about her mental state now, not if they didn’t try this back when she wasn’t even willing to/capable of helping them by being mockingjay.

I’m also left with both the sense that the author doesn’t know much of anything about psychology but is still confident she knows more than anyone who’s actually studied it.

Late one afternoon, after a long period in a cushioned window seat behind a painted screen, I emerge and turn left instead of right. I find myself in a strange part of the mansion, and immediately lose my bearings.

Hello plot device. Katniss has been wandering around the place for days and somehow she’s only been exploring one tiny chunk of the mansion. She’s about to find something super important, isn’t she.

She smells roses and freaks out because oh shit lizardmen. Actually a pretty good response. After she’s hidden for a while she realizes there don’t seem to be any, and she guesses that maybe the rose smell is from the gardens that grow them.

Katniss wanders toward the smell and finds a pair of guards (injured ones, no less) blocking the doorway. They tell her she can’t go in. Is this really all Snow merits, two injured guards? There should be so many people trying to make an attempt on his life.

Katniss waits and hopes they’ll let her in because she suddenly really needs to get a rose to give to Snow before she shoots him. You know, okay, I can seen her brain working like that, and while it’s a bit odd she’d think his rose gardens would warrant guards, I can understand why she wouldn’t think the smell meant Snow himself and that a mere two guards doesn’t mean it’s him either.

While she’s waiting and creeping out the guards by just standing there silently, Paylor of 8 shows up. She’s not dead, yay!

“On my authority,” says Paylor. “She has a right to anything behind that door.” These are her soldiers, not Coin’s. They drop their weapons without question and let me pass.

That’s actually a really bad sign. People can’t have divided loyalties like that, it leads to dozens of little tribal groups all fighting over who’s in charge. If Coin’s the leader, army members can’t casually disregard her orders just because someone they know better has a whim. I mean, I’m pretty anti-authority, but even I know there’s a reason why we have this structure.

This would have worked fine if Paylor was just high enough ranked to give the order, but I think the point here is that Coin sucks and good people won’t follow her orders.

Inside…is an actual rose garden. Katniss wanders through (disappointingly, all the colors she sees are valid rose colors. There’s even one “pale blue”. You have genetic engineering and you won’t even use it to make a proper blue rose?) until she finds a perfect white rosebud. She decides to clip it off.

None of this is really rational, since she’s not meant to kill him right now, but it actually works well. Katniss seems like she’s in a dream state, grasping random ideas with little ability to view any larger picture.

Right as she gets it, of course, Snow speaks. So he’s being kept in a rose garden. That doesn’t make any sense.

No, it seriously doesn’t. These are his special roses, so the odds of him having something nasty hidden in here is actually quite high. If nothing else, there might be a couple poison ones. A major consideration with prisoners like Snow is suicide, since people with no other options will often decide they’d rather kill themselves and deny anyone else the satisfaction. And that’s without the outlandish possibilities here, like some of the roses are so deadly Snow just has to shove someone into the bush, or that the whole place is mined and Snow can set it off, killing everyone. You wouldn’t want him even kept in the mansion, let alone his private garden of unknown genetically modified plants.

Anyway, Snow is looking worse for wear, but not, as you’d expect, because his guards have beaten him or anything. His skin’s looking green and apparently he’s been coughing blood inter a handkerchief. I’ll assume that he required dedicated medial care to stay healthy and that this has been withdrawn by Coin because he’s just going to be killed soon anyway, so he only needs to live until then.

I’d supposed he would be secured in the deepest dungeon that the Capitol had to offer, not cradled in the lap of luxury. Yet Coin left him here. To set a precedent, I guess. So that if in the future she ever fell from grace, it would be understood that presidents–even the most despicable–get special treatment. Who knows, after all, when her own power might fade?

…well that’s completely out of left field.

What’s really amazing is how completely the book has failed here. It regularly has characters doing completely immoral things by accident, and it’s deliberately given Coin a number of atrocities to her name.

But I really can’t see her as anything but a good leader. It’s hard to explain. I mean, she was saying that people the capital had imprisoned and tortured were traitors they’d kill. Her people beat and then locked up the prep squad in horrible cells they apparently have because this sort of punishment is normal. But the book is so willing to jump on her for completely made up reasons that it overshadows that. She’s left looking so reasonable in comparison to the narration’s unending, irrational viciousness toward her.

By this point, whenever the book starts telling me she’s awful, this is all I picture:

It doesn’t matter what’s going on. The book has been whining about petty things so long that it doesn’t matter what she’s doing, everything registers as petty nonsense. The only positive thing it’s accomplishing is reminding me of the existence of other, better things to read than this book.

Also, it’s clear this isn’t a widely publicized thing or Katniss would have heard about it. How could she be setting precedent for everyone if no one else knows?

Honestly, the most likely explanation is that keeping him prisoner in his own home is meant to be a display of power. Especially because they just put him through a show trial and he’s going to get killed shortly. That kind of thing is far more relevant that the exact conditions he’d kept in for the days leading up to it. If Coin wanted precedent to protect herself, she’d have sentenced him to spend the rest of his life in house arrest. As it is, well, he’s still going to die shortly.

Snow says he’s so, so sorry her sister died. It was a waste. In fact, he was about to surrender right then (I doubt this, both because I assume Snow was still working frantically on some escape plan or else he was taking vindictive joy in watching as many people as possible die before he did. If he was willing to surrender, the writing was on the wall well before this point.)

Katniss is all ??? because she’s an idiot.

Snow continues to point out the obvious regarding how there was no benefit to bombing the kids. Really, Katniss, didn’t you clue into this about the point where you saw there was absolutely no benefit to him after he did it?

Of course, that doesn’t explain why the rebels bothered either. Snow says that it made the few people still loyal turn against him, but we just heard that there are still people fighting for the capital side currently. So either it didn’t have any real impact, or they’re refusing to let people surrender in which case they don’t care about convincing them to abandon their loyalties.

I’m not with Snow now. I’m in Special Weaponry back in 13 with Gale and Beetee. Looking at the designs based on Gale’s traps. That played on human sympathies. The first bomb killed the victims. The second, the rescuers.

You only just now remembered this?

How can you even be this stupid?

What is the point, even? Was this all supposed to be dramatic irony, where we know and we’re waiting for Katniss to find out? Or does the book actually think we’re so stupid we wouldn’t have remembered either?

“My failure,” says Snow, “was being so slow to grasp Coin’s plan. To let the Capitol and districts destroy one another, and then step in to take power with Thirteen barely scratched. Make no mistake, she was intending to take my place right from the beginning. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it was Thirteen that started the rebellion that led to the Dark Days, and then abandoned the rest of the districts when the tide turned against it.

Okay but that doesn’t actually make sense.

Aiding the districts instead of letting them get blown up would have given them more goodwill, whereas what he’s describing would cause resentment.

Coin didn’t have to cripple the districts to get power, she was already first, second, third and tenth in line as the only person who could possibly step in immediately. No one else is even in charge yet. If anything, extra military aid would just have ensured this was even more true, by plugging every leader into their existing structure and putting them under Coin.

If that’s what happened back then, it should have been brought up before, or at least a bigger deal should have been made of information being totally suppressed so no one today knows how the rebellion was started. And there’s not really much motivation for that. In fact, the capital has two huge reasons to say 13 started it. It explains why they blew it up and left the others. As I said way back when, control works so much better when people believe there’s reasons instead of it just being random. Telling people whichever district starts things next time around is getting blown up does more to quash attempts than just that you’ll kill one out of all of them. And it’d also mean that if 13 did ever attempt anything against the capital (like, say, what just happened) they’d be facing people who were more likely to hate them and assume the worst.

And if that’s what happened back then, why the fuck didn’t Snow realize it was what was happening now?

But it’s pretty obvious this is supposed to be the reveal. So wow. That’s a really stupid reveal. I can see what it’s trying to be, and yes, Katniss learning this could be a pretty cool scene, if it wasn’t for three things:

1) Katniss hated Coin from day one. It’s the same problem as with Finnick being a sex slave, it’s not a shocking revelation if it’s what you already wanted to believe.

2) There’s no reason to believe he’d tell the truth. The book is just going with the idea that he doesn’t lie. This is actually the same problem as with Kyubey, people just assume that a character is the particular archetype when there’s no actual proof – no point at which the character says something that’s true when it’s not in their own interest. A character with a lot of appearances can establish this over time as we match up what the character said verses what actually turned out to be true, but Snow is a minor character with very few lines. We don’t even have verification on some of what lines he does have all the way at the beginning of last book. Everything he’s said has been completely self-serving.

3) Most damningly, the book is being petty. It’s just throwing everything it/Katniss doesn’t like about Coin into one big lump, as if they’re the same thing. I’m honestly impressed the author held herself back from adding “and she’s got stupid looking hair!” at the end. Coin wasn’t even born when the rebellion happened, so trying to tie in their behavior in the first rebellion as her fault isn’t fair. And District 13 did get their entire surface destroyed and nearly died off several times, so their behavior then wasn’t necessarily wrong either, there’s nothing in the description that proves they were acting in bad faith.

The reveal should be “the people you thought were otherwise good have done something terrible”. Bombing children and then killing your own people in the process to make it more realistic is terrible. There’s no need to say that also, just as evilly, Coin wanted to end up the one in power. Having ambition is not the greatest evil. It’s if she murdered kids for the sake of her ambition that it’s wrong, not just that she’s a stupid woman who shouldn’t get to be in charge and it’s evil of her to even consider it. But by the time Snow is done talking, he’s buried the kid-murdering bit under a pile of things that either aren’t as bad or aren’t bad at all, which just serves to distract from the actual crime. And this in turn makes him come off as a manipulative liar, because he’s talking about things only Katniss, with her irrational hate for Coin, would care about.

Katniss regains the power of speech to tell Snow she doesn’t believe this, and Snow mocks her by saying they agreed not to lie to each other. It amuses me that it’s really a lie on both counts – not only does she believe it, but when she says it isn’t as if she doesn’t want to believe it, that’s a lie too. This is exactly what she wants.

…

So, our poll. For some reason Ender’s Game is doing pretty well. I am confused as to what people expect they’ll be getting there. Gemma Dolye is our current leader, and Darkest Powers is a bit behind that. If they stay close I may go with Darkest Powers, because I haven’t read enough necromancy. It’s mostly just a background thing for villainy.

(What I’d really like to see is a society that was actually living symbiotically with the undead, with no secretly evil reveal.)

Along similar lines I’m considering doing WWZ as a breather between now and the next. I have many angry thoughts about the state of zombie fiction, and much like these books were recced as feminist, WWZ was sold to me as zombie fiction done right.