Last time on Mockingjay, Katniss murdered Coin.
In the stunned reaction that follows, I’m aware of one sound. Snow’s laughter.
My theory he masterminded all this just gets more plausible by the second.
But the real question now is, who’s in power?
Boggs was Coin’s second in command, or so Katniss said, anyway (the actual things we see him doing, which mostly amount to babysitting, don’t match up), but he’s dead and we never heard if she appointed someone new. Whoever it is will have had that position for barely longer than Coin was president of the country.
Did they even establish how succession works? I assume 13 has some system, but it’s unlikely it matches with that of the other districts. In fact, the other districts may not have any system at all, since anyone important were always appointed from above. It’s unlikely this will transfer power to whatever vice president equivalent they have, and trying to do so might spark rebellion from the other districts, because it’ll look like 13 trying to keep in power instead of letting someone else take the reins.
And as I outlined last time this came up, the likely non-Coin candidates are almost uniformly awful. In fact, things are even bleaker now – of all the groups, the tributes had the most potential to produce one or two people who were moderately sane and decent, but there’s no longer a large pool of tributes to draw from, just the seven messes we saw last chapter.
Plus, there’s no hope of an orderly transfer of power. This was going to be their first ever attempt at an election, something Katniss had never even heard of. It’s something that only exists in theory even to the people who know of it in the first place. With an existing leader, they’d at least have stability while they tried to sort things out for their first election.
The Games Katniss voted for will still go through, if we’re lucky. Because the alternative is they kill all the capital citizens or are too distracted by another bloody civil war to deal with them. Any possibility of avoiding that is gone.
She’s likely doomed all the other victors in the process. Given they were willing to murder every tribute they got their hands on except those Katniss demanded a immunity for when there was no evidence tributes were traitors, and Katniss just showed herself to be a traitor in front of the entire nation (and this after Peeta’s antics, no less) executions or simply lynchings are quite likely.
I think of what my brief future as the assassin of Panem’s new president holds. The interrogation, probable torture, certain public execution.
Katniss, there will be so much more than that happening. It’s about more than just you now.
Also, I feel like you kind of deserve whatever you get for willingly working this entire time with people you think use torture without batting an eye.
That’s really the problem with having 13 be evil. It begs the question, over and over again, of how Katniss could have blithely gone along with this without even attempting to stop them. She doesn’t raise objections. Gale, for all he’s getting treated as the evil ragey guy, is the only one who even attempts to think in general terms and of the future instead of on a case by case basis. Katniss has no interest in fixing anything, just protecting a limited number of people from it.
The prospect of facing my mother, who will now be entirely alone in the world, decides it.
So she decides to kill herself first rather than give her mother a chance to say goodbye. Katniss: committed to dickery right to the very last.
Unfortunately, somehow Peeta had gotten all the way over there and when she tries to bite her delicious poison pill she hits less nummy flesh instead.
Katniss’ accidental bite somehow causes him to bleed all over the place. First, it takes a lot of pressure to actually draw blood, and you’re not going to do it if you’re just trying to get your teeth around something. Second, your teeth are blunt. I’ve been bitten hard enough to break the skin and my flesh was crushed, not cut. For a wound to be bleeding badly, you’re going to have to really work at it, like biting and trying to then rip what you’ve got off. I fully believe someone could do this purposefully. It’s accidentally that I have an issue with it.
Anyway, Peeta ignores her begging him let her kill herself, because Peeta is also a dick. Katniss is completely right to expect execution, probably after being tortured, and that’s what Peeta was afraid of just a few chapters back. I can understand stopping someone from committing suicide out of despair, but that’s really not what’s happening here. Nothing about this reads as selfless or kind – he’s overriding her wishes because he doesn’t want to lose her, even knowing that she’s probably going to be killed shortly anyway.
Katniss screams for Gale, but of course, he won’t kill her either. This isn’t really a surprise, the “love” we’ve seen them show for her has always revolved around what they want, not what she wants.
She’s dragged off and thrown in a room. Her skin is bleeding because the skin grafts are so delicate, even though magic science and full body polish and book one burn medicine that regrew skin perfectly within days just by being put on the wound. Katniss, ever emo, figures she’ll bleed to death.
No such luck. By evening, the blood clots, leaving me stiff and sore and sticky but alive. I limp into the shower and program in the gentlest cycle
Supposedly, Katniss wants to die. But instead of clawing the clots off and trying to bleed out in the shower, she washes carefully and applies the medical salve they’ve left to her skin.
I need to focus now on the manner of my suicide, Katniss claims, ignoring what I just said. Instead, she lists conventional suicide options like hanging and jumping that she doesn’t have.
She decides to go for death by starvation instead, even though someone who’s actually been starving should know it takes quite a long time to actually happen. But then she goes into the heroin withdrawal the book claims is what prescribed morphine withdrawal is like, and decides instead to commit suicide by morphine, despite the fact morphine is not toxic you fucking idiotic book.
i will become a yellow-skinned bag of bones, with enormous eyes.
THAT’S JUST THE STARVATION IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TAKING MORPHINE OR NOT BESIDES THE FACT THE MORPHINE MAKE IT EASIER TO STARVE YOURSELF, AND FUCK IT, KATNISS, YOU CAN’T EVEN MUSTER THE SPINE TO STARVE YOURSELF ON YOUR OWN? BECAUSE YOU COULD HANDLE THAT SHIT BACK IN BOOK ONE.
We learn Katniss has been kept in complete isolation for days.
Human brains start to fry within minutes of being put in solitary (it’s not so much a matter of literally needing people around as needing to believe you have access to people). Knowing the duration of it is a bit of a buffer, but even then, within a week there are massive changes in brain chemistry. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact point that it shifts to permanent damage, but whatever it is, it’s definitely within a few weeks.
And this sort of thing is, compared to what’s happening with Katniss, not even solitary. Most prisoners see the guards regularly, and can often hear the voices of others even if they’re not allowed to speak. They’re taken out occasionally. They at least see people delivering their food instead of it appearing when they wake. Many are allowed occasional visits.
But really. This book has never met a bad line of thought it didn’t want to endorse.
Katniss, therefore, does not show any of the typical symptoms of solitary confinement, because there is, of course, nothing wrong with it and it doesn’t universally drive people insane or anything. She does begin to sing a lot, but this is portrayed as a good thing and her healing and the book rhapsodizes about how her voice is so awesome it’d make the mockingjays fall silent just like her dad.
I continue with my own annihilation. My body’s thinner than it’s ever been and my battle against hunger is so fierce that sometimes the animal part of me gives in to the temptation of buttered bread or roasted meat.
While it is hard to deliberately starve yourself to death, if you don’t eat for long enough you’ll stop feeling so hungry. The morphine should also be helping. Suddenly eating food after refusing it, especially something rich, would just make you sick again.
They slowly start cutting down her morphine. This should be devastating, because numerous studies have shown morphine addiction to be a symptom of some other problem. In rats, morphine addiction happens when they’re kept in solitary, cramped cells and goes away if they’re placed in a better environment.
It is, naturally, nothing of the sort. Katniss is weaned off it without incident. She just responds with further defiance. There’s no sign of the desperation and disordered thinking found in anyone kept in solitary confinement.
She thinks, quite clearly, about how if they want to use her for something, she won’t do it. She’s sick of everything.
You can spin it any way you like. Snow thought the Hunger Games were an efficient means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.
This is not so much a broken aesop as just a nonsense one. The problem is, of course, that no one could have thought either of those things, but the book seems to expect us to not only believe a sane human being would think this, but that we should think the same. The question of “would you kill twenty kids a year to ensure peace?” is a very different question from the actual situation in the book, which was “would you kill twenty or sometimes fifty kids a year for the evululz?”.
It’s unclear how much time passes overall. We’re told “weeks” in the paragraph about singing, and then an unknown amount of time after that, during which time she’s weaned off her drug addiction, Haymitch shows up. Katniss does not react to her first human contact in god knows how long, of course, except to be a bit confused by what he said, in exactly her usual manner as if no time has passed at all.
He tells her the trial is over and she gets to go home. I admit, I was sort of wondering how Katniss would inevitably survive this, but as always, I can lower my expectations but I can never think up quite as stupid an option as the author’s boundless imagination can create.
Do they even have a concept of trials? Because they certainly haven’t featured at any other point in this book. You’d think they’d have been somewhat of an issue before now when dealing with, say, the question of if the tributes were traitors.
I’ve never seen Plutarch in such a good mood. He’s positively glowing. “You must have a million questions!” When I don’t respond, he answers them anyway.
Here’s an interesting little fact. Throughout this, the book has kept reminding us that Patriarch is from the capital and a gamemaker. He cried over the idea of weapons of mass destruction that humanity could no longer create. It’s been constantly insinuated that he’s just in this for the spectacle. Snow even referenced him as being behind the bombing: Did you know it aired live? You can see Plutarch’s hand there. And in the parachutes. Well, it’s that sort of thinking that you look for in a Head Gamemaker, isn’t it?
But he gets to live. He gets to live blamelessly, even. This book puts all the blame on Coin’s head – more, even, than Snow himself. After all, the book is happy to claim that for all his faults, Snow would never lie, while Coin’s death hinges on the idea she did so. Snow presided over an evil empire, but we’re told Coin was doing exactly the same thing only she also decimated the districts and capital to get it. There’s no real support shown for this claim, but we’re told so. And in the end, the book does not have Katniss kill both Snow and Coin. Even there, there’s no sense of even equality. Given the choice, she chooses to kill Coin. Coin is the greater evil.
It is a decision as curious as it is suspect.
An emergency election was thrown together and Paylor was voted in as president. Plutarch was appointed secretary of communications, which means he sets the programming for the airwaves. The first big televised event was my trial, in which he was also a star witness. In my defense, of course.
Well, of course he did.
I suspect some of why this isn’t shown is even the author knows this is nonsense. Paylor is a random commander for District 8. She’s mentioned only because the cast list is so tiny and we need to shove someone established as good into the slot so what Katniss did can be shown to be a great idea.
I expected something here to be about how also, Paylor canceled the games, but no. I guess we’re just supposed to know that obviously, only evil, evil Coin wanted to kill capital children in the first place. I bet she was the one shooting all the civilians during the assault on the capital too.
I am instead left to assume they went ahead with the final hunger games. I wonder how they decided how many kids to pick? Maybe 26, a boy and girl for every district? 75, for the years it ran, or 150 so you can have that many of each gender? Maybe take an equivalent proportion to the death toll of district children? Or just the kids of everyone high enough ranked, however many there are left. I expect the age requirement had more to do with five year olds not being entertaining, so it seems quite likely they wouldn’t uphold that. The question then becomes, how young? I wouldn’t think there’d be any point to actual babies, but that’d definitely add another level of horror, especially if you stick siblings in there. And it’s not like there’d be any reason to wait and let them grow up if this is supposed to be the final one.
What I was expecting, early on, was for us to see it and Katniss to gatecrash to stop it. I know there really isn’t anything here to suggest that, but, it’s just such an obvious way for the plot to go. She is supposed to be the hero, after all.
I wasn’t expecting it to be very good – maybe some stuff about how the capital children are all inferior and selfish compared to her, and the whole thing being about how great Katniss is for still sticking up for them – but I was expecting it. If nothing else, it’d be cinematic. And that was, I thought, the one thing the author could manage, not sense but at least scenes.
Katniss asks if Patriarch thinks there will be another war.
“Oh, not now. Now we’re in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated,” he says. “
Well that’s stomach churning.
That’s the response people give about wars of choice. This was not one of those. If the population really is this dispirited, this crushed…then it was all a waste. Their fine ideals of democracy won’t stand up to the first dictator to rise up, because better the dictator than the horrors of fighting that dictator. They might as well have stayed under Snow.
They’re talking here like both sides are equally culpable. It ties, likely, into the same impulse as saying that no one’s to blame for the games, the oppression, the torture, the starvation…any of it. No one is to blame except for when everyone is to blame. It strikes me as a very American way of looking at it.
My favorite example of this are history textbooks. They’ll go on and on about the horrors of slavery…and include a pages about how also, think of the poor slave owners! It was hard for them too. For one thing, they were really worried about slave uprisings. Also, did you know slaves didn’t work hard if you didn’t keep an eye on them constantly and would get drunk if they had half a chance? They had no real work ethic. And slavery really wasn’t that profitable when you consider the cost of giant mansions, hosting expensive balls, and all the other things they were obligated to have due to their class. Really, if you think about it, weren’t they just as much victims of the terrible blight of slavery? Aren’t we all?
Oh, but it can still get worse. Patriarch has more to say!
collective thinking is usually short-lived. We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss.”
“What?” I ask.
“The time it sticks. Maybe we are witnessing the evolution of the human race.
I too hope the human race evolves to the point we refuse to stop murder, abuse and torture! Those fickle, short sighted, stupid rebels! If only they hadn’t fought this terrible, evil war.
They’re headed for 12, for no reason. The place is leveled, and with the death toll of the war, they shouldn’t have the people to repopulate empty areas. Certainly not the resources or motivation to try to build a new city from scratch. The supplies and labor should be busy rebuilding the other places, the ones that still have people living in them.
“My mother’s not coming back.”
“No,” he says. He pulls an envelope from his jacket pocket and hands it to me. I examine the delicate, perfectly formed writing. “She’s helping to start up a hospital in District Four. She wants you to call as soon as we get in.”
I don’t know why the series bothered to give her a mother. It’s not she ever thinks about her mother – the weeks or months she spends in isolation she passes honing her singing voice and remembering her dad. Released, she doesn’t ask to see her. Her mother in book 2 seemed to still care about her, but perhaps Katniss’ constant, hateful disregard throughout the book has broken her to the point all she can do is cut ties. Or the author was bored. Either one.
Sometimes the phone rings and rings and rings, but I don’t pick it up.
Katniss, of course, is in her still intact home, because the victor’s village wasn’t bombed. The author, who has never understood that things are connected, therefore thinks everything in the house must work.
No one comes but Greasy Sae and her granddaughter. After months of solitary confinement, they seem like a crowd.
Actually, after months of solitary confinement people are usually desperate for human contact.
Peeta shows up. Apparently he wasn’t there earlier because he was still recovering.
“I went to the woods this morning and dug these up. For her,” he says. “I thought we could plant them along the side of the house.”
I look at the bushes, the clods of dirt hanging from their roots, and catch my breath as the word rose registers. I’m about to yell vicious things at Peeta when the full name comes to me. Not plain rose but evening primrose.
Oh, for fuck’s sake they’re not even in the same clade!
There are actually numerous plants referred to as primrose. All of them are in the Asterid clade (roses, naturally, are clade Rosids, order Rosales, family Rosaceae, subfamily Rosoideae, genus Rosa) except for one that’s in yet another clade.
This is one of those points where it’s literally hard to do worse if you tried.
Incidentally, Sae has been spending her time cooking meals for Katniss. This has not been good enough for Katniss to stop putting the word “greasy” in front of her name each and every time.
Katniss runs past her upstairs to grab the flower Snow left, I don’t know, six or more months ago? She’s been in the house for quite a few days by now, but this had to wait until now because roses.
We find out where Gale is – off in 2, doing some important job. So the love triangle resolves with a whimper. What a colossal waste of time that whole nonsense was.
She wanders around emoing about how she misses Gale.
I have to remind myself that Gale’s in 2 with a fancy job, probably kissing another pair of lips.
I have to remind you that you told him you couldn’t handle being around him because of the whole dead little sister thing.
Then she runs into Buttercup. I’m not quoting, it disgusted me. Ends with them being friends over the dead little sister thing.
Peeta and I grow back together. There are still moments when he clutches the back of a chair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over. I wake screaming from nightmares of mutts and lost children. But his arms are there to comfort me. And eventually his lips. On the night I feel that thing again, the hunger that overtook me on the beach, I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.
So after, when he whispers, “You love me. Real or not real?”
It’s hard to express how glad I am at the idea of being done with this.
So, epilogue and wrapup, and then it looks like it’s on to Gemma Doyle. That shouldn’t take long, there really isn’t much to talk of. I must remind you, my interest/specialty is obsessing about worldbuilding. That requires worldbuilding, and in a more general sense, details to work off of.
I should also warn you that October’s going to be dedicated to reviewing Homestuck fanfic, with a Oct31st finisher of whatever horror fanfic people have posted in Pokemon that month. In fact, I’m seriously considering finishing up this month by reviewing the carapace fic instead of starting another book after Gemma. I like fanfic. It’s better written than this and when it does something wrong I can yell at the person directly. Then they yell back. I’m really looking forward to it.
She could hang herself by stripping off her clothes and creating a makeshift rope. It’s even possible to hang yourself with your own shoelaces, provided that you tie them the right way. Or she could break the shower and slit her throat on the glass (assuming that showers from the future contain glass). There are quicker ways she could commit suicide rather than by starving herself. It’s like the author can’t bear to kill her off. :/
If she refuses to eat and they want to keep her alive, they could just shove a tube down her throat and force-feed her. Not pleasant, but it’s happened many times in real life. Does the book ever mention them doing that? I can’t remember.
Your idea for the Capitol hunger games are pretty interesting. I’ve always liked your rewrites better than what was in the book. Why couldn’t the author come up with that?
“Witnessing the evolution of the human race”? Evolution generally doesn’t work that way.
She takes off her original outfit the first time she goes to sleep and after that she only has paper clothes, so that’s why she can’t hang herself (of course, that’s overkill, especially since she says she’s sure she’s being watched. It’s nearly impossible to hang yourself when you’re under observation.)
They actually just seem to let her starve herself, even when she decides to stop drinking water too. I think it’s just so she can show off how much she’s suffering.
Huh, good point about the hanging thing.
Maybe they’re putting nutrients and liquids in her when she’s sleeping and/or drugged out? It’s impossible for this to go on for weeks. Don’t most people die of dehydration in forty-eight hours?
Katniss seems to be very wishy-washy about actually refusing food and water. The longest she does it in the book is for two days.
Are your other Let’s Reads going to be here or on your LiveJournal?
Here. The point of this was to stop the posts from burying all the really important stuff I post on LJ, like the fact some stranger said something stupid to me.
Well that all seemed very rushed. Plus, let me get this straight, according to Suzanne Collins, not only is war bad; all sides involved in war are evil; the cause may be righteous but fighting for it will turn you into monstrous human being who massacres little children; and any morally ambiguous decisions made and actions taken during a time of war are reprehensible! The alternative; whinge and hide in closets and whinge some more. Nice.
Definitely rushed. Bear in mind she has a strict 9/9/9 chapter formula and likely some sort of word count limit, plus I sort of feel she was losing control of the plot, so she wrapped it up all at once.
I know it’s pretty late in the game for suggestions, but if you like worldbuilding, you should give Wither a look. It’s the first book of a trilogy (it’s the only one out.) It’s a world where due to creating a generation of super healthy, super long-living babies, the children of that super generation die at 20 (women) and 25 (men). Girls are kidnapped by wealthy families to prevent humanity for dying out. If I could pick out some of the things wrong, I bet you could write a book on it.
Hm, that seems creepy and interesting! I’ll stick it on the poll sometime.
God I was just thinking how massively unfair it is that they were going to murder a bunch of children when a fucking Gamemaker is right there in their ranks.
I can’t believe she didn’t even bother to mention that the final Hunger Game didn’t go through. WTF? Is that just not important? I’ve seen multiple fanfics that were supposed to be about that game and the summaries didn’t seem to express it as a “what if,” which I thought was kind of strange but probably just a result of the sort of reading comprehension that is par for the course on the Pit. And yet, no. That is actually a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Also, I vote carapaces.
At the beginning of the book, I didn’t think much of him being a gamemaker, since I assumed he was part of it for the sake of the resistance. But then he spends the book pining after capital luxuries and how awesome planning death devices is. I’m pretty sure he switched sides just because he figured 13 was going to be the winning one.
What would be awesome is for Snow’s granddaughter to win the games and then murder her way through the resistance afterward.
Minor point, but the word you’re looking for is “class”. A clade is a more general concept – it refers to any group of species which includes all the descendants of a single common ancestor and nothing else (or, in some cases, all the extant descendants).
Wikipedia disagrees with you. Or at least Wikipedia seems to indicate there’s been yet another upheaval when it comes to classification, and I didn’t want to figure out what it was because it’ll have changed next week anyway. Clade the only term used to refer to some of the higher level groupings and subgroupings above the rank of “order”. So, if I’m not giving a specific term, it’s something in the “below kingdom, above order” area.
“Clades” are the big new thing in taxonomic classification. It means “a single ancestor species and all species directly descended from it”, so can be used at any level. If you’re specifically looking for “between kingdom and order”, it’s “class”. A year or two back when I was taking upperlevel bio courses my teachers were really into it and going on about how clades are the only thing that matters and how outdated, unwieldy, and misleading all that KPCOFGS stuff is.
Snow lives through all this?
No, he coughs himself to death in the chaos after Coin gets a fatal case of Katniss.
I didn’t think they went through with the Games. If they did, I feel like it would have been mentioned. The trial was, so why not that too? It’s not really something you leave out.
The trial was covered in one paragraph in response to the answering the question of why she’s let go. And by the same token, saying that Katniss killing Coin managed to stop the games isn’t something that should have been left out either. Since it’s not brought up at all, I’m left to conclude it isn’t relevant to Katniss if it happens or not, and then in turn, if she doesn’t care there’s no reason for other people to care enough to stop it.
I don’t think Collins was trying to say Coin was the greater evil. I think it was because Snow was going to get executed anyway, but no one else knew what Coin did. Katniss would only have one shot, so she picked Coin.
Maybe Katniss got a trial because she was so well-loved? Yeah, it’s stupid and Sue-ish how she’s so well-loved in the first place, but it would be consistent. >_>
What history textbooks have you been reading? I must say I’ve never read one like that. ‘xD
I’m not sure of that. Katniss has spent the book hating on Coin every chance she gets, and our ending is saying the rebels who fought against an evil dictatorship are at least every bit as bad as the evil dictatorship. The vibe I got of a situation where by trying to stop something bad you ended up creating something even worse.
Katniss would only have one shot, so she picked Coin.
But why would she have only one shot? They could have just given her the quiver of arrows. She kills Snow, then, as everyone’s applauding, turns and shoots Coin. A much more decisive ending if your moral is supposed to be they’re exactly the same. (Mind, “they’re exactly the same” is almost as terrible as acting like Coin is even worse.) It even helps the case of her just being generally nuts and getting off after a trial if she kills Snow as well. The choice for her to only have one arrow was a decision by the author, and it reads as a way of having Katniss pick the person who deserved to be shot more.
What history textbooks have you been reading? I must say I’ve never read one like that. ‘xD
A number! They’re rarely phrased so obviously, of course, but there’s quite a bit of “fair and balanced” going on in history textbooks. A really good example is the treatment of some white abolitionists. You can insult them without making yourself look overtly racist, because while you are talking about a group that was fighting against racism, you’re not calling slaves delusional for not wanting to be slaves. Also, did you know there were many reasons for the civil war, like state’s rights? The idea it was about slavery is just a modern day invention and the north was exactly as racist as the south if not more. And now, let’s talk about how hard it was for the southerners after the war! It was very, very hard.
Very little of it stands out unless you’ve done outside reading and can see the disconnect between those facts and how they’re being presented in the textbook.
Are there any examples you can think of? I honestly don’t remember any white abolitionists being portrayed negatively in history textbooks. Not trying to argue that it doesn’t exist, but I’m puzzled because I’ve never seen that. And I do remember going over the other reasons for the civil war in middle school. I also remember some reading we had to do that was pretty sympathetic to the south, though. I think it was mostly in historical fiction, though, not textbooks.
I do know that history textbooks aren’t always accurate or thorough, though.
Well, John Brown for one. There was also often a note about how the north was buying the south’s cotton, and armed abolitionists, and abolitionists being racist themselves…
And I do remember going over the other reasons for the civil war in middle school.
My point is, there weren’t other reasons. It was slavery. Any list of reasons is just different parts of a disagreement on slavery. You can certainly pick out a couple minor issues that the north and south disagreed on, but none that mattered.
If you ever read the ordinances of succession from various states, there’s nothing about states’ rights in there, other than states’ rights to keep their slaves. And maybe a line or two about not getting sufficient protection from the savages.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the part where it’s revealed Annie is pregnant with Finnick’s child. I thought you’d have tons of objections to that. I certainly found the implications quite disturbing.
What. The Fuck.
I actually missed that the first time through due to it being buried in a paragraph about memories and also wanting to get done with the damn book.
But I don’t really have feelings on it. I mean, Annie’s sanity level is all over the place from basically normal functioning to an incoherent mess, so whether or not she could make that kind of decision depends on which version you think is right. And Finnick leaving her with a newborn baby doesn’t really seem significantly more dickish than leaving her in the first place. (And in Finnick’s defense, while signing up for the army may not make sense, signing up for the fake squad that’s just pretending to fight was a relatively safe decision before Katniss.) As a random detail, it’s stupid and annoying, but hard to analyze further.
Quick question: out of curiosity, how does mental illness affect the ability to consent? Is sex completely out of the question, are they able to give to it after meds, or what? Thanks in advance.
It depends on the person and the mental illness. The problem with Annie in particular is the book was portraying her as completely dependent on Finnick, creating a horrible power imbalance. It doesn’t help that under the circumstances it seems extremely odd Annie would choose to have a child.
(Lili here. Facebook account.)
Annie does seem rather emotionally fragile, but not overly dependent on Finnick. She might not be fully functional on her own, but she does seem at least somewhat functional.
Moreover, how would it seem odd if Annie were to want a child? She could not be fully aware of the responsibilities of having a child, I suppose, but is there anything to indicate that she doesn’t want a child?
And even supposing she didn’t, it’s possible she became pregnant by accident. Abortion, or even contraception, does not seem to be existent in the world. It would certainly make sense if District 13, already short of people, were to ban both.
Alternately, it could be that the child was from her captivity in the Capitol, and they chose to pass it off as Finnick’s.
We’re told at one point she’s such a mess she plays the real or not real game with Finnick, making Finnick the sole arbiter of her reality.
is there anything to indicate that she doesn’t want a child?
Look at Katniss’ reasons for not wanting a kid. Annie’s in a far worse position. Even if she was certain the rebellion would succeed you’d think she’d have waited until it actually finished.
it’s possible she became pregnant by accident. Abortion, or even contraception, does not seem to be existent in the world.
Which means that if she didn’t want to have a baby and yet still had sex, it sounds like she might have been pressured into it.
It’s entirely possible Annie did want a child – for example her reasoning could be wanting to get pregnant now just in case Finnick didn’t come back. But the book has set up a situation where she’s severely messed up and completely dependent on Finnick, has lots of reasons to not want a kid, and yet ends up pregnant quite quickly.
We are told that she asks when she isn’t sure if she is hallucinating or not. We are not told that the only person she asks is Finnick.
Katniss’ reasons for not wanting a kid are her own reasons. Two people can react to the same circumstances in drastically different ways.
What do you mean, ‘it sounds as though she were pressured into (sex)’ because she did not want a baby? It’s quite possible that she wanted to have sex, but not a child, and wound up getting pregnant anyways.
No, I’m pretty sure they directly compare the thing they’re doing with Peeta to what she does with Finnick. And it’s not like there’s anyone else she knows to do it with, and we’ve never seen her do it with the people around her when Katniss is there. She’s definitely quite dependent and really vulnerable.
It’s quite possible that she wanted to have sex, but not a child, and wound up getting pregnant anyways
Knowing one leads to the other, women usually refuse the first to avoid the second. Note that’s exactly what Katniss spends the whole trilogy doing. It is entirely possible Annie chose otherwise, but pressuring women into having kids is extremely common in abuse, so when we see the vulnerable unstable woman end up pregnant really fast when she has every reason to want not to be, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Having her on camera doing anything other than just being crazy, vulnerable and dependent on Finnick would have let the author avoid this – one line about her actually wanting a baby and we’d be good. But the author doesn’t see anything wrong with men pressuring women into anything ever, so she doesn’t see any need to assure us that’s not happening here.
The fact that it took me less than ten seconds to look up “primrose” on Wikipedia and realize it’s not an actual rose makes all the other research errors in this book all the more unforgivable.
The one thing I could never figure out is why Collins made Coin, 13, and the resistance evil to begin with. I heard it suggested that 13 and the Capital are supposed to be the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, but that doesn’t make any sense since the Districts have perfectly valid reasons for rebelling against the Capital. It’s weird; the book’s plot is about a society that revolves around a yearly ritual of killing children, but it’s incapable of dealing with any sort of moral depth. The failure to deal with anything but black-and-white morality also strikes me as rather American, now that I think about it.
Gemma Doyle never struck me as bad, just weird and kind of confusing.
I heard the Soviet Union thing as well, but never anything confirming it. Considering the subtlety of the rest of the book and the fact she’s given a number of interviews, if that was the idea I think it’d have come up.
Besides, 13’s government is functional. I do think there may be an edge of socialism being evil, but in a more indirect sense – I think a lot of what makes me think they’re nice, generous people is meant to make them look like assholes, because everyone knows rationing food makes you joyless evildoers.
Oh, for fuck’s sake they’re not even in the same clade!Thank you Thank you! Sigh. Google is a magic place?
How about and she and Haymitch lived happily drunk ever after –the end. Not better, but it is faster. (And logical beings he took her home — and she was his uhem Victor)
“Actually, after months of solitary confinement people are usually desperate for human contact.”
Not always true. I’ve been reading about it since you mentioned it, and solitary confinement *can* leave one unable to tolerate/properly handle socialisation, with repercussions such as released inmates having yet another reason to have problems reintegrating into society.
Of course, after *months* of solitary, Katniss should be a gibbering mess, with a ruined attention span and easily driven into a frenzy by regular stimuli, nevermind something as complicated and engaging as human contact, so it’s not like the depiction was a good one. But still, it’s not necessarily unrealistic that she wouldn’t feel comfortable dealing with people right now.
Oh, it certainly fucks you up good but there’s nothing that can really make people stop wanting to be around people. You’re right that she’d probably have trouble handling it, I was annoyed because she doesn’t seem to have any reaction but that it’s a low-grade imposition on her – even a moment of relief of finally someone followed by her actually getting upset because it’s too much and she can’t deal with it would be so much better than her just flatly observing it all.
Peeta isn’t a horrible person for taking away Katniss’s suicide pill. If she’s just going to be killed anyway, he wouldn’t bother, even if he just wanted to be selfish. From Peeta’s perspective, there’s at least a reasonable chance that Katniss won’t end up being killed by whoever’s now in charge, and even if they did choose to kill her, they wouldn’t necessarily want to torture her, unless they were just as bad as Coin, which is unlikely. Execution may or may not happen, so Peeta just wants to keep her alive in the event that whoever’s in charge choose not to be evil sadists. Plus, it’s not like he hasn’t tried to keep her alive before, even if it meant he had to risk a lot personally in the process. He nearly died fighting Cato to protect her, which was before the rule change was announced. He tried to stop her from risking her life to get him the medicine to save him. Instead of killing her after the rule change was revoked, he told her to kill him, knowing fully well that she might just do it. And he saved Haymitch’s live by volunteering for him in order to protect Katniss, even though he could have chosen not to volunteer and lived out the rest of his life if he wanted to be selfish. Peeta couldn’t have possibly benefited personally any of these times, and he sacrificed a lot in the process. It’s the same thing here; once again, he’s doing it for Katniss’s sake, not his own.
It’s not up to him to decide what’s best for her. She’s an individual, not his pet.
So you’re saying that people can never decide what’s best for others? Usually not dying is considered a preferable option to dying. Katniss’s life is on the line, Peeta’s not a horrible person for trying to preserve it. Peeta’s always treated Katniss as an individual throughout the entire series. Look at what ends up happening; Katniss is able to live out the rest of her life instead of dying right then. And I don’t think it was that unlikely an outcome for Katniss to be allowed to live. It was the same thing with Gale here; he didn’t shoot Katniss because he didn’t want to kill his friend, not because he was thinking of what he could do to be the most selfish person imaginable and somehow that involved not shooting a human being.
She’s not his child, she’s a fully capable adult. He doesn’t get to decide what’s best for her.
That you’re buying into the party line of these books is exactly why they’re so damaging. Women deserve agency, end of story.
Not only are you completely ignoring the basic point of what I’m saying–that Peeta isn’t a horrible person for stopping Katniss from killing herself because Katniss’s life is too important–but you’re also accusing me of saying and suggesting things that I didn’t. I never said that Peeta should treat Katniss like a pet; people don’t stop their pets from killing themselves because pets don’t do that. And I never said that women don’t deserve agency, or anything along those lines; that’s completely besides the point. Did you actually read my comments, or are you just horrified at the idea that Peeta may not have been a horrible person for ten seconds of his life?
Aren’t you the one who is terrified that Peeta may actually be horrible?
While it’s possible that I am, there isn’t any reason to think I am from my comments. On the other hand, there actually are reason to believe that you are horrified of the idea that Peeta may not have been acting horrible here. You haven’t addressed anything I said except for the first sentence of my first comment, which leads me to believe that after reading that first sentence, you just assumed that the rest of my comment must be completely irrational and didn’t bother reading it, and didn’t think of the possibility that I might actually have backed up my opinion with valid reasons. Or maybe you didn’t read it because you were afraid of hearing a rational argument saying that Peeta wasn’t acting like a horrible person here? Part of me also thinks that you did read my comments and you might actually agree with what I said, and you only disagreed with it because it went against your predetermined assumption that Peeta’s a horrible person and will always act like one, and you were unwilling to change your mind. Your second comment is just a re-hashing of your first comment, so either you didn’t read my first comment, or you read it but completely disregarded it, because apparently you didn’t have any problems with the comment itself, just the idea I’d proposed. Apparently you didn’t read my third comment either apart from the last sentence, too. All of this leads a person to believe that your opinion is just a biased, predetermined assumption and not something you rationally concluded by looking at what’s actually in the books.
You’re hitting so many rhetoric bingo points, this is kind of wonderful.
there isn’t any reason to think I am from my comments.
Except we’re thinking you are based on your comments. So clearly there’s something about them that makes people think that from your comments!
“people don’t stop their pets from killing themselves because pets don’t do that”
They totally do, actually. I mean, pets rarely deliberately go out of their way to die, but they do stuff that will result in their death all the time.
My cousin’s cat died after eating that shiny Christmas plastic decoration. Another cat I knew died due to the inability to realize that it can’t actually fly and jumping from a balcony.
The scene with Peeta does look similar to what I do when I push my cat away from stuff that would be bad for it, up to the bite.
And I never said that women don’t deserve agency, or anything along those lines
Could you tell me what you think “agency” means? (To help you here, it doesn’t mean “having another person decide your life for you”. We all get that you think women should have that.)
Do you know Katniss DID THE SAME THING TO PEETA EARLIER IN THE BOOK?
So you’re saying that people can never decide what’s best for others?
It is really astounding you even wrote this.
The only situation where removing an agency from a person is justified is when the person doesn’t have an agency to begin with due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, severe mental illness or something along those lines.
It doesn’t appear to be the case here: Katniss seems to think clearly enough and presents her argument for wanting to kill herself. By contrast, Peeta doesn’t try to reason with her and convince to live. He just removes the option from the table altogether.
Now, it is possible that he believes that Katniss is not of sound mind. It’s not impossible to imagine. But if he believes that, him entering a relationship with her becomes even more creepy than it’s already is, since by extension he should also believe she is not in the condition to give an informed consent to it.
“The only situation where removing an agency from a person is justified is when the person doesn’t have an agency to begin with…”
That’s a completely contradictory statement.
I don’t think Peeta ever had the chance to reason with Katniss and convince her to live. I don’t think he would have been allowed to visit her when she was in solitary confinement, and even if he was, it would have been too late. She would have eaten the pill and died by then. The only time to act was right when he did.
It says here that “Katniss is completely right to expect execution, probably after being tortured.” This is just really odd. Katniss notes in the first book that if the Capitol were to execute her and Gale, they would give them a bullet in the head. So apparently even the people who have been murdering 24 kids a year for three quarters of a century and have left the population to starve when they could have easily done something about it aren’t interested in torturing people. Why would Katniss suspect that the people who’ve worked to overthrow the Capitol would be even worse than them? As long as whoever’s in charge can recognize that Coin was a horrible person and understand Katniss’s reasons for killing Coin, she probably won’t be executed, let alone tortured. The end result–that she got off entirely–wasn’t really that surprising when you think about it.
So basically you’re saying that anyone who tries to stop someone from killing themselves is a horrible person. Even if Peeta made the wrong decision in taking away Katniss’s pill, which I agree is true, it still doesn’t make him a horrible person. He was just trying to preserve her life. The main flaw in this idea is that Peeta (and Gale) are being horrible people here because they’re acting for obviously selfish reasons. This is just completely untrue. Here it makes two assumptions:
1) It’s almost certain that Katniss will get tortured and/or executed, which is why Peeta taking away her suicide pill is such a terrible thing to do.
2) Peeta takes away the pill because he “doesn’t want to lose Katniss”, not just because he doesn’t want a human being to die.
These statements are completely contradictory. If it’s so obvious that Katniss is going to be tortured and executed, why would Peeta bother taking away the suicide pill, even if he were thinking about it from a completely selfish perspective? The author says the reason why Peeta is so terrible is because he’s acting selfishly here. But he clearly isn’t, so from the author’s own admissions, Peeta isn’t really being so terrible here.
“I don’t think Peeta ever had the chance to reason with Katniss and convince her to live.”
But he doesn’t even try to desperately shout anything to this effect to Katniss. Just takes the pill away, and that’s it.
There certainly was time enough for Katniss to ask Gale to kill her and for Gale to refuse.
“Why would Katniss suspect that the people who’ve worked to overthrow the Capitol would be even worse than them?”
I don’t know, but the book pushed for them being evil with backroom torture, reinstating murder games and Katniss shooting Coin in what is supposed to be a justified act.
So yeah, Katniss was right to expect being at least killed, if not tortured, and why shouldn’t she decide where and how to die?
“So basically you’re saying that anyone who tries to stop someone from killing themselves is a horrible person.”
It’s OK to stop suicide when you have strong reasons to believe that the person’s mind is addled to the point where they could not take responsibility for their actions.
From Peeta’s perspective, there’s at least a reasonable chance that Katniss won’t end up being killed by whoever’s now in charge, and even if they did choose to kill her, they wouldn’t necessarily want to torture her
And Katniss gets to decide if she wants to take the risk that they might not torture her.
He tried to stop her from risking her life to get him the medicine to save him.
Do you realize this is the exact opposite of what you’re arguing with Peeta taking the suicide pill. It’s sort of like the only metric you’re using for when it’s right for one person to make a decision for another person is which of them has a dick.
The only reason you said in this blog that Katniss is right to expect execution and probably torture is to make Peeta seem like an unimaginably horrible person. From a rational perspective, it’s ridiculous for Katniss to expect torture. As long as whoever’s in charge is not a despicable, unimaginably horrible sadist, that won’t be happening. And even if whoever’s in charge actually is a despicable, unimaginably horrible sadist, I still don’t see why they’d choose to torture Katniss. Katniss was the Mockingjay, the symbol of the enitre rebellion. Just killing her could provoke major resentment from the entire country. Imagine how furious they’d be if Katniss were publicly tortured. (They wouldn’t bother torturing Katniss if they weren’t going to do it publicly.)
You actually think that Peeta telling Katniss not to risk her life for him was the “exact opposite” of him stopping her from killing herself here? How could you possibly have come to that conclusion? How ridiculous is that? They’re similar in that Peeta is thinking of what’s best for Katniss in both cases. They’re not anything close to “exact opposites” in any way. Apparently this ridiculous nonsense was just a set up for that last sentence; I can’t think of the words to describe how ridiculously disrespectful that is. It’s pretty clear that you are just completely incapable of respecting another person’s opinion.
They’re similar in that Peeta is thinking of what’s best for Katniss in both cases.
similar in that Peeta
Peeta
Again: It’s sort of like the only metric you’re using for when it’s right for one person to make a decision for another person is which of them has a dick.
“My theory he masterminded all this gets more plausible by the second”
Plutarch would be my prime suspect.
What if Snow was right when he said that he saw Plutarch’s hand in the bombing of the children?
Coin had nothing to gain from killing Prim. She was already a shoe-in to be the next President, and even if she knew that Katniss wasn’t about to join her fan club, why would she care? Who could Katniss possibly back as an alternative candidate who would have a prayer of beating Coin to the presidency, with or without the support of the Mockingjay? It’s not like Katniss even knows who the possible contenders would be. There is nobody from District 12 who would be a credible leader and she knows next to nothing about the inner workings of the other Districts. Would she even be interested in throwing herself into the political arena?
We have only Boggs’ word for it that Coin views Katniss as a threat to her political ambitions or that Katniss could hope to be able to influence the choice of who is to govern Panem. Katniss believed him but Boggs had previously covered for her when she ran into combat against orders so she was predisposed to think that he was on her side.
Can we be sure that Boggs wasn’t either lying or seeing a threat where there was none?
Coin does not attempt to cultivate Katniss’ good will, as one might expect her to do if she genuinely believed that the support of a traumatised teenager was going to determine who would be the next President. It’s not as if it would have been particularly difficult for Coin to win Katniss over, if she had a mind to; look how quickly she came to like and trust Cinna after he made her a memorable costume and treated her kindly.
Coin also demonstrates concern for Katniss’ safety at multiple points. I believe that she is the only one to raise concerns about the proposal to send her into the field when the staged propos are a flop, and when Katniss runs into combat in District 8, Coin raises the issue at the next meeting and wants to know why the plan changed. She doesn’t want to send her to the Capitol and refuses to consider it until Katniss passes her military training, despite it being a prime opportunity to arrange a suitably moving death in battle and despite the fact that she was unlikely to be called out for sending the Mockingjay into battle, regardless of how unprepared she was for it. There is no suggestion that Katniss was let off easy in training so that she’d pass. When she is assigned to a unit, it’s for show, with a camera crew following them, which makes it that much more difficult to arrange the tragic loss of the Mockingjay.
Sending Peeta to join the Star Squad would be a very stupid way of getting Katniss killed. For one thing, he is a known threat to her so the whole squad will be on alert for any hint that he might be about to harm her and, for another, if he did manage to kill her, the blame would fall squarely on Coin’s shoulders for sending him there in the first place. Why go for that over the more straight forward option of planting somebody loyal to her but unknown to Katniss on the Star Squad to make it look like a tragic case of accidental friendly fire?
Plutarch, on the other hand, has a pretty solid motive to want to see Coin eliminated. He would have to know that there is no way that a Capitol citizen and former Gamemaker, even one who joined the rebellion, would have a prayer of being elected President. Coin would have been a strong, experienced leader who would not have needed him to play a major role in government, and who may not have wanted him to. She’d be fine without him as her second, officially or otherwise. If he was to be sidelined in the new regime, it’s a safe bet that he knew or guessed it. However, with Coin dead, there is no similarly experienced leader ready to step in, so Plutarch can hope to establish himself as a power behind the throne for her replacement.
At the same time, having Katniss kill Coin neutralises any influence she might have had, either in the immediate future or when she was an adult, and she can be bundled off to District 12. As an added bonus, Haymitch and Peeta follow her there.
That fits perfectly.
He might also have a hand in how from the very early book, there’s the whole us/them division of everyone who wasn’t currently standing in 13 supporting the rebellion should be murdered, including people who were captives. That never made any sense, but if it was really about him trying to remove competitors – there were likely a whole bunch of other capital sympathizers or members of the rebellion he needed to eliminate to have any shot at this, especially given he seems like he only joined recently when he realized who the winners would be. The victors are also people who’d remember him as the asshole involved with the games, so removing them from play is helping him shed that past. The taking of the capital is so unnecessary and bloody if the goal is simply ending the war, but it’s all great if the goal is to be the last guy standing. (And I wonder, if you looked at what doctors died past PRIM IS DEAD PRIM IS DEAD, would they have been disproportionately older and worldly – the sort of people who might not like him?)