Last time on Mockingjay, Peeta isn’t dead and will probably end up featuring heavily in this story ::::(

District 13 confiscated my tube of skin ointment for use in the hospital, and my bow and arrows because only guards have clearance to carry weapons.

This is interesting. She and Gale are both given the title of soldier, but from the sound of it, it doesn’t mean what we would think if being a soldier isn’t enough to carry a weapon. It might even be a meaningless title that’s like calling them comrade.

I can see the validity to this. If everyone’s a soldier, you’ll need to further divide them into the ones actually trusted to fight.

So, “soldier” seems to be what the entire population is. That’s actually rather dire.

Assuming we’re connoting the same things as usual with the term, it means people who are obligated to obey without question. That’s not really a safe attitude for running a community. In fact, I’m not sure it’s even a viable one. A situation like that rapidly concentrates all power in a few hands, and lacks any of the normal feedback. You don’t need to run a community by democracy, but in everything short of a suicide cult, you need to consider the needs of the group instead of just what you want. The chain of command is something that only works during times of crisis, when you can’t afford to argue about what’s a good idea or not. Arguably, even our current military is overly reliant on it and that’s the root of a lot of problems – that people continue to blindly follow orders when timing isn’t critical and refusal isn’t fatal. An order to shoot the people shooting at you needs to be obeyed as fast as humanly possible. An order to shoot prisoners or burn down a house is less of a time crunch.

That’s why a military is supposed to be a branch of the community, not the whole of it. They’re meant to be for, and  answer to, the people (not the civilians, but the people, which they’re part of). If everyone’s in the army, then the only thing they’re for is whoever’s at the top.

So far, 13 seems to be avoiding the sort of excesses and cruelty I’d expect from that, so either their leadership is amazing or this isn’t an army that runs on blind obedience. But it would be good to clarify this, because these books are terribly American in outlook, and the American army has not learned this lesson.

Katniss is up thinking about her stuff because she can’t sleep. She nuzzles her pearl and her sister wakes up.

You know, I don’t know why I find stuff in this series so creepy. I’m not sure if it actually is or if something, possibly Peeta’s creepiness in the first book, has lowered my threshold. But god, Prim sounds like one of those characters that’s pretending to be an innocent kid to give terrible advice.

“You could tell me, you know. I’m good at keeping secrets. Even from Mother.”

Ever single line of hers is just faintly sinister. Consider, why exactly couldn’t Katniss tell her mother this? It sounds more like Prim is encouraging Katniss not to seek other, adult perspectives on this.

“Tomorrow morning, I’m going to agree to be the Mockingjay,” I tell her.

“Because you want to or because you feel forced into it?” she asks.

This is a thirteen year old girl?

I think what it is is that she’s just too self aware.

Katniss may have seen the ashes, but Prim saw thousands of people burning alive. Of the people who made it out, plenty of them must have died of shock that first night. But instead of saying, “But isn’t that a good thing?” she asks a question tailored to exactly what’s on Katniss’ mind. It’s not simply that she’s showing an extraordinary amount of tolerance for Katniss’ let’s just go with month of waffling and refusing to help, but even she’s able to look at it from Katniss’ perspective. And this when the two of them aren’t even particularly close – Katniss doesn’t confide in her sister and they haven’t been spending time together recently either, because we know Katniss is ditching work to sleep in closets.

Katniss, of course, says both and then no, and stumbles through an explanation that it’s just because she wants to, which is because she feels she has to, and then that she’s still hesitant because if her side wins she figures they’ll kill Peeta. Katniss, let me help you out here: the capital is going to kill him if they win. And probably if they don’t, for that matter. People who firebomb districts of thousands of people don’t have a problem shooting one guy in the head.

 “Katniss, I don’t think you understand how important you are to the cause. Important people usually get what they want. If you want to keep Peeta safe from the rebels, you can.”

Seriously she sounds possessed. This is how it goes in the stories where the little girl is actually the devil or something. Just listen to her.

Kids don’t talk like that. They say, “But Katniss, can’t you just tell them not to kill him?” There’s a reason people talk of wisdom out of the mouths of babes, and part of it is how kids tend to phrase things as if it’s obvious, because they’re legitimately confused as to why you’re ignoring this option. They aren’t going to lecture their much older sibling about how her viewpoint of the situation is wrong (unless this is actually Katniss’ mother’s opinions getting filtered through Prim – I could easily see a kid repeating this after she’s heard other people say Katniss doesn’t get it.) or talking about “the cause”.

More, just listen to what her advice is here. “Important people usually get what they want.”? And that makes it okay? What on earth is the whole of the capital if not a lot of important people getting what they want? This is the thing the villain says when trying to tempt the hero into evil. It’s not that people will listen to Katniss if she asks because she’s shown she raises good points, it’s that people will be forced to go with what she wants because she’s important.

And again, look at how Prim’s viewpoint is still completely missing from this conversation. She doesn’t think the rebels won’t do that because they’re good people or advise that Katniss ask and be reassured it’s fine. And neither does she think what they’re doing would be valid and they should kill him. She doesn’t care. She’s living in a bunker surrounded by them and she doesn’t care about if they’re good people or not. She accepts the idea that they’ll kill him and that this is bad, and it doesn’t make her fear for her own safety at all. Perhaps she thinks she’s protected by Katniss’ importance, but if she believes Katniss is all that she has, she should be worried about what will happen if Katniss continued to disobey, or if Katniss ends up dying being the mockingjay.

Katniss, despite her saying exactly that she knew she was important and could make demands in the first chapter, treats this as new information.

“You mean…I could demand that they give Peeta immunity? And they’d have to agree to it?”

“I think you could demand almost anything and they’d have to agree to it.” Prim wrinkles her brow. “Only how do you know they’ll keep their word?”

Prim keeps phrasing things like a master manipulator. Her sentences are questions or statements arranged as compliments, and they’re all gently spoken. She’s coaxed Katniss into the idea and is skillfully moving the conversation on can really think about it. And she, the thirteen year old girl, is so politically astute as to assume that the people in charge won’t keep their word. Yet still, she’s absent from the conversation. She thinks 13’s president would lie about sparing a teenage boy and yet she doesn’t seem to have any worries of her own. She says her sister can ask anything, yet she has no requests of her own.

Katniss figures the only way to do it is to demand it be a public announcement. That’s actually a terrible idea on a political level. A large scale announcement about how Katniss demands the traitor be pardoned by virtue of her being important is going to rankle in a way the government just leaving him alone wouldn’t, while all it’s actually preventing is them from trying and sentencing him officially. They can still very easily find his corpse killed in the crossfire, or just never recover his body.

Prim smiles. “Oh, that’s good. It’s not a guarantee, but it will be much harder for them to back out of their promise.”

If this was a TV show we’d zoom in on Prim’s expression to see the evil glinting in her eyes.

I feel the kind of relief that follows an actual solution. “I should wake you up more often, little duck.”

“I wish you would,” says Prim.

Now, despite how I’m now pretty sure Prim is the antichrist or something and only wants this so she can tempt Katniss further into sin, the ending is kind of sweet. Going on the intent, which is Prim being there for Katniss to bounce her thoughts off of, the ending shows Prim cares about and misses her sister, and wishes they’d talk more.

Next morning Katniss heads to breakfast.

a bowl of hot grain, a cup of milk, and a small scoop of fruit or vegetables

Huh, that sounds perfectly good, especially when Katniss complained the food was tasteless crap. I mean, in the first book she’s rhapsodizing over how a cup of goat’s milk is an expensive but delicious treat.

The vegetables are, of course, turnips. It’s a cliché, but one that comes from a reasonable place. Turnips are productive and nutritious.

All of it comes from 13’s underground farms.

Uh. That’s going to be really, really hard to do. It takes enormous amounts of power to replace sunlight. It also takes enormous amounts of effort to dig out large open sections underground.

Katniss gulps her food down.

wishing for seconds, but there are never seconds here

There were never seconds at all for her until she won the Hunger Games and became rich. And most of the people of her district seem to have been even more desperate than she was.

They have nutrition down to a science. You leave with enough calories to take you to the next meal, no more, no less. 

Bullshit.

Picture a concentration camp. That’s what “enough calories to take you to the next meal” actually means.

It takes more food to run your brain than it does your body. Starving people also can’t reproduce, they don’t react quickly, and they get exhausted easily. Oh, and they get sick easily and this is a country entirely made of enclosed spaces and recycled air. They have no reserves, in short. This is the exact opposite of what you want out of an army, which is healthy alert people capable of springing into action in short, intense bursts when necessary.

This is more melodrama. It might be excusable on the assumption Katniss is an unreliable narrator, except again, the fact she and her district in general were starving is a major part of the story. She knows what it’s actually like to be living meal to meal.

What the book obviously is trying to say is that 13 is strict and only feeds people as necessary for health. The thing is, that’s a huge step up from District 12, which only feeds people as necessary for survival, and not even always that. We’re told (it contradicts what we’re shown, admittedly) that Peeta’s family, town people which Katniss identifies as well to do, can’t even afford to eat fresh bread. There is no way three meals a day is a step down.

Things only get more confusing from there.

 The people from 12 are already getting slightly larger portions than the natives of 13 in an effort to bring us up to weight.

Okay.

So the book has admitted that normal meals in 12 are less that what people in 13 eat, because otherwise people wouldn’t be smaller and thinner. And they’re currently being fed even more than that. So what the fuck is the problem here?

Katniss goes on to say that people are already looking better after a month of this (so that is our timeframe, then.) That means the portions are probably significantly larger than they’re used to.

I try not to stare at his turnips too pathetically, because I really want more, and he’s already too quick to slip me his food.

Why? Nothing about this make sense. Katniss meticulously shares food in the arena when she’s actually starving, and she also goes without eating repeatedly. Yet suddenly she’s desperate for scaps? And Gale does end up giving her a spoonful, which she eats without any real guilt despite the fact he’s on the same supposedly terrible rations as she is. As she eats she does tell him he shouldn’t because it’s probably illegal.

As if it wasn’t obvious yet, she explains they’re strict about food. You also can’t remove food from the dining hall, because they’re worried about hoarding. That is actually a very important thing to be worried about. Hoarders will stockpile food even as they wither from starvation. What bits they do eat later have often spoiled. Humans do not act rationally about food when they get too hungry.

That said – this shouldn’t be such a big issue. We’re told they’re depopulated, so they should have plenty of capacity. Possibly this is a situation where they have scaling issues – they may have a fixed number of people required for guard and watch duty, and not enough people left over to run farms. Of course, the fact that they have underground farms means they have year-round production, which seems like it’d help quite a bit too. And they’re evidently able to feed almost a thousand extra people, and on larger than normal rations at that, which suggests they have enough food. So why not feed people enough that they’re not obsessing about food? They’ll be healthier in general, they’ll fight off disease better and heal faster, and most of all, they won’t be distracted daydreaming of their next meal when you want them doing a job. It’s just impractical to do otherwise.

 For a couple of people like Gale and me, who’ve been in charge of our families’ food supply for years, it doesn’t sit well. We know how to be hungry, but not how to be told how to handle what provisions we have.

Maybe it should occur to you that those aren’t “provisions you have” but “meals that they’re giving you for free”. Also, Katniss at least has bad hoarding tendencies as we saw during the first book, where she nibbled at her food rather than eat properly. Also, why the fuck was Gale in charge of his family’s food when his mother was still alive and didn’t have a breakdown like Katniss’ mother did? Contrary to apparent opinion, households do not run on based on succession of the male line. Control does not default to whoever the oldest person with a dick is.

Katniss remembers what her sister said about how she’s able to get special treatment, so she says she might be able to ask for the right to go hunting.

“Do it,” he says. “Now’s the time. You could ask for the moon and they’d have to find some way to get it.”

Ugh.

This isn’t too bad, though.

Asking to hunt is isn’t inconveniencing others. It’s more like making a request they try something new than making a request they accommodate you at their own expense. (It is, for the record, a terrible idea on the capital snipers front, but if they were going to snipe Katniss they’d have done it back at 12, so the book clearly doesn’t know that.) It’s a pretty good example of what an acceptable use of Katniss’ power is. It’s only Gale’s attitude that rankles. Hunting is actually a pretty good idea if the capital has food production issues. In fact, this is something that Gale should probably be able to suggest on his own, without needing special clout.

She does not mention that hunting is hardly her only demand. As she puts it, she’s thinking about if she should tell him about her Peeta-related demands when breakfast ends, but that’s a cop-out. She made the decision last night, and it should have been the first thing she considered telling him.

Gale also points out she should make sure her sister can keep Buttercup because he doesn’t think 13 has any concept of pets.

You know, it’s been seventy-five years. No one remains a perfectly focused military machine that long. People need downtime, they need stress relief, and animals are good for that. And I’m sure the place has mice and cockroaches.

Gale has Nuclear History class, which sort of proves my point – they obviously do things other than sit at the red button waiting for the capital to try anything. Incidentally, Katniss has been skipping that. I’d actually like to know what sort of stuff they’re teaching. We haven’t gotten any good examples of what current education looks like. This wouldn’t shed light on how things go in the districts, but it’d be interesting to see how much of history 13 knows. One assumes they know as much as the districts used to and have less incentive to censor it but that doesn’t mean they necessarily remember much. They might know everything back to our own history, or they might not know much more than we got in Katniss’ own summation – some disasters did something, then Panem, then the rebellion. At the least they’d know a bit of pre-rebellion history, which I get the impression has been suppressed in the districts. (This is probably just an artifact of poor worldbuilding and how the book avoids bothering with it, but Katniss sure seems ignorant of what came before.)

Katniss tells him to cut class and come with her to the meeting.

There, Katniss decides to write a list, because “cat, hunting, Peeta” is something that really requires a list. Then she writes down “Gale” for some reason. Suddenly she’s possessed and her hand adds killing Snow to the list. That’s honestly kind of lame. Snow hasn’t actually hurt her. He’s hurt everyone else.

Anyway, the 13ers freak out just on item one.

while those from 13 spell out what extreme difficulties this presents.

We are not told what difficulties these are. Cats are honestly relatively easy to keep in closed areas, and they don’t eat all that much.

Finally it’s worked out that we’ll be moved to the top level, which has the luxury of an eight-inch window aboveground.

“Luxury” is a very telling choice of words. I would assume those are in high demand. I wonder who was kicked out of their room to a lower, windowless one because they have to do whatever Katniss wants?

The window is so he can leave and hunt, because they’re not feeding him. Also, they warn that if he “causes any security problems” he’ll be shot. Not sure how a cat could do that.

Next is hunting. The argument there is shut down by Coin, who lays down the rules for it and gives the okay.

Then she says she wants Gale, despite the fact he’s standing right next to her.

“With you how? Off camera? By your side at all times? Do you want him presented as your new lover?” Coin asks.

More hamhanded TV talk. Shut up, book.

Plutarch says he’s on Team Peeta he thinks the Peeta romance works better.

A quick defection from Peeta could cause the audience to lose sympathy for her

My, we’re getting meta. I actually don’t think this makes sense. Peeta just told the rebels to stop fighting. That’s the perfect time for Katniss to distance herself from him and send the message that she doesn’t support anything he said.

More importantly, no one fucking cares about Katniss’ love life, okay? They don’t, book. No matter how many times you try to make this into some shitty reality TV allegory, it’s not going to work. People are fighting to the death. The “audience” has concerns of their own, they’re not going to care about tabloid bullshit.

They continue discussing how to handle Gale on-screen. Katniss is all upset they’re assuming she was talking about a relationship, because that totally isn’t what she meant when she demanded she “get to have him”. I have the impression we’re supposed to think they’re bad (immoral?) for how they assume this, but really, she’s the one failing to communicate.

What’s actually kind of nice though is that there’s three named people in charge here, and only one’s a guy. We seem to be finally moving toward overall gender equality.

Anyway, then Katniss says she wants a pardon for Peeta.

Pardoned for what, exactly? Is it a criminal offense to say you want a cease-fire, or perhaps getting kidnapped by the capital is his crime? Even if he wasn’t under duress, he’s certainly done nothing worthy of being killed.

Things only get weirder from there as Katniss demands the same for other two tributes who were taken from the arena, Johanna and Enobaria. A you may recall, Johanna was one of the rebellion.

“They’ll be tried with other war criminals and treated as the tribunal sees fit,”

What the fuck? What crime have they committed by simply being tributes? Enobaria is completely innocent, and Johanna is one of their own.

Katniss’ ultimatum gets Coin to grudgingly say they’ll be pardoned as well, though no one’s bothered to explain what crime the pardon covers.

I think this scene is supposed to be showing that 13 is too harsh and unforgiving. But this isn’t an extreme view of justice, it’s an insane one. To be extremely harsh there must be the core of a reason somewhere but the punishment is too much, and there is nothing resembling that here. One might consider if it’s supposed to be read this way, but Katniss, as well as Prim and Gale by implication (he’s shocked by her request) all consider the basic idea here reasonable. They all agree he’s committed some crime, but Katniss thinks he should be forgiven while Coin doesn’t.

Also, she wants to kill Snow. Coin says she’ll flip for it. That line would have been so much better if not for the fact she’s named Coin.

Coin then goes off to her next meeting, because she’s a busy woman, while the two capital people remain to relax.

“We didn’t think it would be quite so rigid here,” Fulvia explains to us as she massages Plutarch’s shoulders. “Not in the higher ranks.”

Arg, guess I misjudged there and she’s his assistant or something. Coin continues to be our only other important woman.

The tone of this conversation confuses me. The qualifier with the complaint seems like it’s there to show they’re kind of jerks, especially after Katniss criticizes them earlier for how easy their lives were, but then, the book has shown an amazing inability to recognize that special privileges for the special people is not actually a good thing. But it’s also been willing to be quite hypocritical on this point when it isn’t Katniss getting the special stuff.

Anyway, because she’s agreed to be the mockingjay, Plutarch shows her a book of Cinna’s designs for her mockingjay costume, because apparently she’ll be in costume for this too. Fuck this is dumb. The book constantly bitches about how eeeeeeeevil it is to think about this in terms of presenting to an audience, except when it’s pretty stuff Katniss wants to wear.

 He made me promise not to show you this book until you’d decided to be the Mockingjay on your own. Believe me, I was very tempted,” says Plutarch.

Yeah, well, you know what else Cinna is? Dead. So she wouldn’t have known you made any such promise and you could have given it to her immediately. Also, if this really would have changed her mind and it’s actually true that Katniss’ contribution will help them win the war, holding it back while she sits around meant people died that wouldn’t have.

“You’re going to be the best-dressed rebel in history,” says Gale with a smile.

God I hate these books.

They say they’re going to make a series of what we call propos—which is short for ‘propaganda spots’—featuring you

Okay, if you have to do the runaround of “what we call…which is short for” you would have saved time by just saying the fucking thing directly.

Anyway, supposedly the capital has “sole control” of broadcasts, which is not really what broadcast means, and somehow Beetee is going to hack it.

But it doesn’t matter because the plan is stupid. What exactly is propaganda supposed to do? They’re already fighting. They need help, not the girl in a costume.

They start talking about how they’ll do it, and then they decide to go show Katniss and Gale some secret present Beetee has for her.

“So well intended, and yet so insulting,” Gale whispers in my ear.

“Welcome to the Capitol,” I mouth back

Fulvia didn’t actually say anything insulting. She was discussing how Katniss should look. The book doesn’t even have the THIS IS STUPID defense to call back on, because for once this is being done for something important and not the amusement of the capital. Also, Katniss was fine when it came to making her a special outfit to look pretty in.

They get in the elevator, but it seems there’s been some sort of mistake and it’s the wrong floor. There’s a guard instead who tells them to go to the head office to find out where they should be. Then Katniss hears a whimper from behind the door right by the elevator.

I dart around the distracted guard, push open the door marked 3908 , and find them. Half-naked, bruised, and shackled to the wall.

My prep team.

Huh. Well, I didn’t see that coming, but it doesn’t really make any sense to me, and as always, that’s something that really makes it hard to care about what’s going on.

I assume there wasn’t a mistake, Katniss was sent here deliberately.

But that’s still badly contrived. Even if she didn’t stumble on the floor by accident, they just happen to be behind the door not far from to the elevator, and they just happen to make a sound when Katniss arrives? It’s not even like they heard her and called out. It would have been easy for the guard to get them back in the elevator before any of this happened. And also, the doors aren’t even locked? Why?

There’s too many things that could have gone wrong with this plan, and it’s unnecessary. Whoever arranged this, regardless of if it’s Plutarch or Beetee or someone else, could just as easily have told her about this and she’d have gone.

Also, on a story level, I was pissed off enough by their irritating reappearance last book. Is there some massive fanbase for these characters I’m unaware of? Did people really want yet more of the three of them? It’s not even that I can’t stand them, it’s that they’re minor, disposable characters and for the life of me I can’t figure out why the book keeps acting like it expects me to care about them. The book keeps spending time on them as if it thinks they need screentime in their own right.

So. Third chapter. Katniss is a hypocritical psychopath, 13 seems to be run on lawfulevululz, and also, the worst characters in the book are back again.