Last time on Mockingjay, a bunch of people got together to tell Katniss about what their favorite awesome moments of her being awesome were, because she’s so awesome. Then they decided to send her into the field with a film crew so she could be awesome while they recorded it.

The TV crew consists of a pair of burly Capitol cameramen with heavy mobile cameras encasing their bodies like insect shells, a woman director named Cressida who has a shaved head tattooed with green vines, and her assistant, Messalla, a slim young man with several sets of earrings. On careful observation, I see his tongue has been pierced, too, and he wears a stud with a silver ball the size of a marble.

See? People shouldn’t be treating her prep team as weirdos if tattoos and other fashion things are still markers of the people in charge. Weirdness should be a mark of important strangers.

Anyway, Katniss is now in District 8, which we learned houses people more awesome than her. This trend continues.

The wounded from this morning’s bombing are being brought in. On homemade stretchers, in wheelbarrows, on carts, slung across shoulders, and clenched tight in arms. Bleeding, limbless, unconscious. Propelled by desperate people to a warehouse with a sloppily painted H above the doorway.

Okay, first off, wow the writing is awful. I’ve been doing my best to ignore it because how many times can you complain about sentence fragments, but jesus christ sentence fragments.

But moving on.

Here we see actual suffering. These people fought, their uprising was brutally put down, and then they rebelled again and are still fighting even despite all this. For a fucking month.

Meanwhile, Katniss was napping in linen closets and being a dick to people, then saying it was justified because encouraging people would just make it worse.

Katniss says she doesn’t want to be filmed there. Actually yeah. We know Katniss is a much better hunter than she is healer.

Just let them see you. That will do more for them than any doctor in the world could.”

And by “we know” I apparently mean me, because this fucking book is still on the females are nurturers train. Katniss does not need to make an appearance to the unconscious dying. She could just as easily see the rest of the population, who (for reasons unfathomable to me, admittedly) thinks she’s awesome and want to know she’s still alive and fighting with them.

Of all the allowances to make Katniss, “can’t deal with injured people” is the only reasonable one. So, naturally, she’s shoved in anyway.

We meet another woman in charge! The book is doing much better than before. Now it just needs to not make her evil.

Her dark brown eyes are puffy with fatigue and she smells of metal and sweat. A bandage around her throat needed changing about three days ago. The strap of the automatic weapon slung across her back digs into her neck and she shifts her shoulder to reposition it.

…

Beside her, in my spanking-new outfit, scrubbed and shiny, I feel like a recently hatched chick, untested and only just learning how to navigate the world.

Personally I’d feel bad for having a brand new outfit and superbow when it’s obvious that both supplies and workers are limited. Also, I’d feel bad that the reason I didn’t know this stuff is I’d been fucking around for a month.

“You’re alive, then. We weren’t sure.” Am I wrong or is there a note of accusation in her voice?

If all there is in her voice is a note, she has more self-control than most people.

“I’m still not sure myself,” I answer.

I’m sorry, what was that?

The wounded from this morning’s bombing are being brought in. On homemade stretchers, in wheelbarrows, on carts, slung across shoulders, and clenched tight in arms. Bleeding, limbless, unconscious. Propelled by desperate people to a warehouse with a sloppily painted H above the doorway.

Remember this? You’re surrounded by the dead and dying. Be fucking grateful you’re alive instead of some whiny bullshit about how your life is so hard. You dick.

“Been in recovery.” Boggs taps his head. “Bad concussion.” He lowers his voice a moment. “Miscarriage. But she insisted on coming by to see your wounded.”

And you, Boggs, I see you hopped onto the dickery train after her! Then when you reached Asshole Station you climbed on board Fucker Express and kept going.

I can see why she’s so certain he’s a great guy.

“You think this is a good idea?” says Gale, frowning at the hospital. “Assembling your wounded like this?”

I don’t. Any sort of contagious disease would spread through this place like wildfire.

What, is Katniss opposed to the basic concept of hospitals? That is pretty much what a hospital is, a bunch of sick, injured people in close quarters. Also, it’s full of people who’ve just had limbs blown off. They’re not going to live long enough to get sick no matter how fast that disease moves.

“I think it’s slightly better than leaving them to die,” says Paylor.

“That’s not what I meant,” Gale tells her.

She knows full well what you meant, dumbfuck.

“Well, currently that’s my other option. she explains even more clearly, instead of screaming well-deserved obscenities at this fucking oblivious asshole. Whether this is because she is full of patience and grace to shame mortal men or because she is too damn tired to muster the energy is, I believe, left as an exercise for the reader.

Incidentally, they haven’t even gotten inside the place yet. This bitching is based entirely on the fact that there are a) injured people and b) they’re put in a building. What the fuck do you want from her?

I glance back at the freak show that is my crew

God damn it Katniss.

They’re led inside. They start in the corpse section.

“We’ve got a mass grave started a few blocks west of here, but I can’t spare the manpower to move them yet,” says Paylor, who does not have a team of workers making her custom outfits and superbows and must do the best she can with what little she has.

Then she gets to the people who are still living, and it’s the standard awfulness.

We have no real hospitals in the districts. We die at home, which at the moment seems a far desirable alternative to what lies in front of me.

So, Katniss just doesn’t like the concept of hospitals.

Also, her mom’s house was their hospital and did indeed fill up with the sick and injured.

Then…oh god.

“Katniss?” a voice croaks out from my left, breaking apart from the general din. “Katniss?” A hand reaches for me out of the haze. I cling to it for support. Attached to the hand is a young woman with an injured leg. Blood has seeped through the heavy bandages, which are crawling with flies. Her face reflects her pain, but something else, too, something that seems completely incongruous with her situation. “Is it really you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I get out.

Joy. That’s the expression on her face. At the sound of my voice, it brightens, erases the suffering momentarily.

“You’re alive! We didn’t know. People said you were, but we didn’t know!” she says excitedly.

“I got pretty banged up. But I got better,” I say. “Just like you will.”

“I’ve got to tell my brother!” The woman struggles to sit up and calls to someone a few beds down. “Eddy! Eddy! She’s here! It’s Katniss Everdeen!”

A boy, probably about twelve years old, turns to us. Bandages obscure half of his face. The side of his mouth I can see opens as if to utter an exclamation. I go to him, push his damp brown curls back from his forehead. Murmur a greeting. He can’t speak, but his one good eye fixes on me with such intensity, as if he’s trying to memorize every detail of my face.

I hear my name rippling through the hot air, spreading out into the hospital. “Katniss! Katniss Everdeen!” The sounds of pain and grief begin to recede, to be replaced by words of anticipation. From all sides, voices beckon me. I begin to move, clasping the hands extended to me, touching the sound parts of those unable to move their limbs, saying hello, how are you, good to meet you. Nothing of importance, no amazing words of inspiration. But it doesn’t matter. Boggs is right. It’s the sight of me, alive, that is the inspiration.

Yes. She’s Jesus now.

This fucking series.

No, that woman isn’t going to get better. Her leg is infected. It’s going to rot, and if she’s lucky the rot will be contained enough that they can amputate it, and then the amputated stump will rot. She will die. Her brother will die. Do you know what the mortality rate in places like this is?

And while people died of injuries and neglect in this festering building, a dozen hovercraft crews were following Katniss around on a sightseeing trip, another crew of people was making her an outfit, and god knows how much time was sunk into her magic living bow.

Katniss is so glad she took the makeup off.

How ridiculous, how perverse I would feel presenting that painted Capitol mask to these people. The damage, the fatigue, the imperfections. That’s how they recognize me, why I belong to them.

What fucking damage and fatigue?

Katniss hasn’t been through war. She hasn’t been living in bombed wreckage. She has a perfectly healed scar from something her ally did to her as part of a massive conspiracy designed to protect her and a concussion that only appears at the whim of the plot. It’s sick to act like she’s the same as they are.

Continuing other people being better than our main characters, the people who are both conscious and with working jaws assure her they know Peeta is being forced to say whatever the capital wants, and they cry when they hear about the miscarriage. Katniss gets a good person point for finally feeling guilty about that and the fact she can’t come clean now. I guess there’s a certain amount of human suffering that she can’t be self-centered about.

A new sensation begins to germinate inside me. But it takes until I am standing on a table, waving my final goodbyes to the hoarse chanting of my name, to define it. Power. I have a kind of power I never knew I possessed. Snow knew it, as soon as I held out those berries. Plutarch knew when he rescued me from the arena. And Coin knows now. So much so that she must publicly remind her people that I am not in control.

…

Yes.

Yes, that’s definitely what you should take from seeing the injured and desperate – how to best turn this to your advantage. Incidentally, thank you for illustrating why Coin doesn’t want you to be in control you fucking sociopath.

Does Katniss kill Coin? If Katniss kills Coin I will have to choke someone. Don’t answer that.

I hate these books.

Anyway, they got good footage and Gale is amazed she let the plebs touch her. He also says her mom will be proud, and Katniss shrugs it off. She’s right to do so – Katniss’ mother is so much of a noncharacter she doesn’t even have a name. I just wiki’d this to be sure and she’s Mrs. Everdeen over there.

Katniss starts to ask if it’s like this everywhere (yes) and then something’s happened and they have to run because bombs are being dropped.

They scamper off toward a bunker, Katniss going on about her awesome outfit without a glimmer of recognition about not everyone’s so lucky, then she realizes the bombs are targeting the hospital.

Seriously?

It’s not that I doubt people would be willing to do this, but it’s a bad idea. In warfare, the aim isn’t to kill, it’s to maim, because the injured combine the uselessness of corpses with the resource demands of living people. No one runs that because they believe it’s a practical way of healing people so you can get them back on the front lines, they do it because people aren’t willing to just kill their injured. It’s one thing when the hospitals actually function, but that wasn’t a hospital, it was a morgue.

Gale and Katniss are shocked, anyway. Those are Katniss’ valuable worshipers.

…so they run out to help.

You don’t help against bombs, you weather them and dig through the rubble afterward.

But the District 8 people have machine gun nests set up.

Look, let me explain how dropping bombs work. You have bombs, and then you drop them. From way above.

You can manage to shoot bombers down with machine guns, but it’s not something that actually works that well. It’s really more of a deterrent to discourage them from getting in close where they can aim better and the fact it’s not like you’ve got better options.

Paylor asks if they know how to use guns, and they say they’ll use their bows and arrows. No.

A bullet can bring down an aircraft by virtue of two factors: speed and quantity. An aircraft is a distant, fast-moving object. You fire a lot in its general direction and hope some of the bullets overlap with its actual location. Arrows are not fast enough to hit before it’s moved on, and you can’t fire enough of them blanket the area either. Also, they can’t even reach in the first place.

Paylor, though, is completely out of fucks to give, and probably she’s out of guns as well If the idiots want to use bows, fine.

They have to drop their sight shields before they release the bombs.

Hello, random plot device.

This is a bad trope. No, they don’t have to drop their invisibility cloak, that’s dumb. They absolutely definitely do not have to drop it well in advance of the actual bomb-dropping so you have ample time to aim. Acceptable substitutions would be that when they open up to drop the bomb, that part isn’t cloaked. I quite liked how Escaflowne did this, and Escaflowne was a fantasy/romance anime. When that’s kicking your ass at believablility, you have done something horribly wrong.

“Better start with fire,” says Gale.

I nod and pull an arrow from my right sheath. If we miss our targets, these arrows will land somewhere

Why, yes, that would be yet another reason why your super arrows are a bad idea.

Suddenly, they appear in the sky, two blocks down, maybe a hundred yards above us.

Oh my no they did not.

Bombs are dropped from high distances, precisely to avoid the whole issue of being shot down. For precision, planes will dip low, but no matter how willing they are to get close, past a certain point they literally can’t – they’ll get hit by the explosion from their own bomb.

Bombing altitudes are measured in the thousands of feet, and that’s for things like dive bombing. Technological advances have largely been focused on making it so people can drop bombs from higher and higher up with as good precision. No one dips down to three hundred feet just so that, by coincidence, they’ll be in the range we were told earlier for Katniss’ bow.

They also don’t fly perfectly straight while doing this, because that too is stupid.

I estimate the lead time on the hoverplanes and let my arrow fly. I catch the inside wing of one, causing it to burst into flames.

THIS IS STUPID

Anyway, they massacre the hoverplanes.

Missed arrows and downed planes full of bombs hit the warehouses around, which Katniss figures are probably deserted because it’s more convenient that way. But enough made it that the hospital was hit.

A group of rescuers has assembled, trying to clear a path to the inside. But I already know what they will find. If the crushing debris and the flames didn’t get them, the smoke did.

Gale’s at my shoulder. The fact that he does nothing only confirms my suspicions. Miners don’t abandon an accident until it’s hopeless.

It must be nice being able to tell at a glance that you don’t need to bother even trying. I mean, otherwise you’d have to do something, and unlike shooting down the planes, I guess clearing wreckage and actually trying to help people isn’t cool enough for the protagonists.

Instead, it’s time to go.

Katniss points out the plot hole: Why would they target people who were already dying?

Gale does his best to justify it.

“Scare others off. Prevent the wounded from seeking help,” says Gale.

He fails miserably.

If the wounded don’t seek help, they just die quietly without being such an inconvenience. Carting them to a hospital and blowing resources and manpower on them? Much more of a resource sink. We know 13 was sending in both medical supplies and medics, so that’s draining them of resources and people while tying up their own hovercraft doing so. More, 13 obviously has limited manufacturing capabilities, so not only can they not afford to be wasting supplies, but even trying to get those supplies likely means other things they could be producing are being pushed aside.

“Those people you met, they were expendable. To Snow, anyway. If the Capitol wins, what will it do with a bunch of damaged slaves?”

Use them, obviously. You don’t need both legs or both eyes to run a textile machine, and obviously workers are going to be at a premium by the time this is over. Especially when there’s no slack in this system – as I mentioned before, they can’t move people from a more populous district in to replace anyone, because each district is the only one who knows how to do a job.

Cressida, flanked by the insects

Oh, and also Katniss has been calling the camera people insects this whole time, because casual dehumanization is just how Katniss rolls.

“Katniss,” she says, “President Snow just had them air the bombing live. Then he made an appearance to say that this was his way of sending a message to the rebels. What about you? Would you like to tell the rebels anything?”

Still, this seems good. Katniss can say something simple yet badass. Or maybe she can point to the hospital and say that the message he’s just sent is their lives are worthless, so surrender isn’t an option. Seriously, Snow, what are you thinking?

“I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there’s a cease-fire, you’re deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and what they do.” My hands go out automatically, as if to indicate the whole horror around me. “This is what they do! And we must fight back!”

Yay!

“President Snow says he’s sending us a message? Well, I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb us and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that?”

Uh, Katniss, maybe you should consider quitting while you’re ahead.

“Fire is catching!” I am shouting now, determined that he will not miss a word. “And if we burn, you burn with us!”

Dammit. That’s really not that much better than shouting about a hunger for justice. Really, fire is catching? That’s our shoehorned-in fire metaphor this book?

And I’m basically for threats about how if you go you’re taking the other guy with you, but this doesn’t even make too much sense. They don’t seem like they’re at all able to attack the capital back. Also, didn’t we just talk about nukes? If you burn, you’ll burn them, but if they burn they’ll nuke you and then they’ll be nuked and everyone’s dead. This is really not the best time for this sort of rhetoric, especially when we’ve even been told that their entire military plan hinges on both sides acting rationally and not just saying “fuck it, bombs fall, everyone dies”.

(Actually, you know what would have been better? If 13 had the only nukes and understandably only wants to use them as a last resort because, you know, nukes. One could also add that their targeting system is crap, so they couldn’t just launch one, and that the capital would have a decent chance of shooting them down if they tried restraint, so the nukes are an all or nothing option that’ll destroy half Panem at best. That avoids the elephant in the room that the capital is obviously going to start nuking the fuck out of everyone if it looks like they’ll lose.)

Anyway.

This chapter has a lot of what I like in a story, namely stuff actually going on. But it’s just not working.

When Katniss was stuck in the childmurder games, her self-centered viewpoint made a lot more sense. There were bad things happening to other people, but bad things were indisputably happening to her right then, so focusing on her misery seemed reasonable. Things were pretty equal.

Each book, though, builds up Katniss more and more, gives her more and more, while worsening the overall situation. Last book Katniss was going to fancy parties in fancy dress while people rebelled and died. Now we have an even more exaggerated version of that. At least with Cinna there was no real sense it was being done instead of something more valuable. Here, the war effort is happy to shoot itself in the foot so Katniss can have what she wants. And after all that, having her show up and see how much worse things are, but still making it into a vehicle to tell us about how special she is? It just doesn’t work.

Neither does making her a super soldier.

Her skills at the childmurder games worked because the whole idea was it was designed to be within the limits of people’s capabilities. The main opponent was the other children. The first one had was mostly about survival and endurance. The second one involved a degree of intelligence. Both were designed to be solved. The players were supposed to be able to succeed as well as fail. And the whole thing took place on a small scale, with twenty-four players in a limited area. Weapons and required skills were similarly restricted – a bow was a great weapon because most of them were armed with nothing more than knives. The games are all about a single person being able to win.

Vast wars are not won by dramatically shooting down your enemies with fire arrows. I would have had more respect for her as a character if she’d actually pitched in – if she’d helped wash bandages or tried to dig away the rubble. Instead she only does the fun part of shooting down planes. Katniss should come away from this horrified by how little she can do and desperate to find a way she can be of more help no matter how dangerous it is, not thinking she’s a badass singlehandedly winning the war or of what a great photo op this is and how it’s a great chance it is to respond to Snow.