Last time on Mockingjay, Katniss was Jesus, the protagonist of a B action flick, then the sort of asshole who prefers to look at a burning hospital and say that they’re probably all dead so it’s more important to swear vengeance than to concern herself with saving anyone. I’m pretty sure these things are only all compatible with the help of some of the especially apocryphal books.

I turn back to Boggs, see the swelling on his face left by Gale’s boot. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure his nose is broken.

Gale is also kind of a dick.

It’s like, I want to complain about Katniss’ friends and love interests, but I can’t really muster an argument she deserves better any more than I can argue they deserve better than Lady Sociopath.

Turns out Katniss is actually pretty banged up but just didn’t notice thanks to the adrenaline rush. I’m not sure I quite buy this, she just seems too chill during the shooting scene, but it mostly works.

Katniss has to be carried to the hovercraft and starts throwing up and stuff. God, book, I take away “mostly works”. The more exaggerated her symptoms now, the harder it is to believe she just didn’t notice.

She passes out and wakes up with her mom watching her.

“No one even told us you were going until you were gone,” she says.

I’m not really sure where the book is going with this. It seems kind of weird to be pointing out how her mother is pretty much forgotten about when the narrative does just that all the time. Maybe it’s a metatextual attempt for the author to claim that’s on purpose? It’s just reminding me of the problem.

Katniss sort of apologizes, but misses the point – she’s saying it was okay because they weren’t expecting an attack, when normal people manage to say goodbye when they’re going off to get groceries, then admits that yeah, she doesn’t bother to tell her mom stuff.

This is honestly kind of plot holey. Yes, we know Katniss doesn’t give a fuck about her mom, but 13 doesn’t. I doubt they’d give her mother any sort of veto power over what they decide, but they should think to tell her. It’s the same as how it’s odd that her old neighbor who we know she isn’t close to was at the meeting while her family wasn’t. The narrative doesn’t care about familial bonds, for all the plot starts off with that, and it creates this weird distortion.

We’re reminded that Katniss supposedly still has that concussion, but luckily smacking her head into walls didn’t do anything to that. And let’s admit it, it’d be hard to tell if Katniss had brain damage. I don’t even mean she’s stupid, I mean she is just not firing all cylinders. “Okay so this is a hospital but can’t you do it without having all these sick people close to each other?”

Then it’s whiny remorse time. Hey, remember when Katniss shot that apple? And then we had to sit and listen to her go on and on about how this was the worst thing ever, they’d never forgive her she was in so much trouble… Yeah she’s pulling that again. This time it’s about the fact she disobeyed orders and ran out into the open.

Katniss, let me help you here.

Coin does not like you. She is making an effort to keeping you in one piece because she thinks you’re more useful like that. She doesn’t care in and of itself if you die, she cares if you die without being useful about it, just like Snow could not give less of a fuck if you and Peeta were actually in love.

The point of the orders, in short, was that she thought it was the most practical way to accomplish things. It turns out that the most practical way is to let you shoot arrows at shit. She doesn’t care beyond that;

“I have to stop calling you ‘the insects,'” I blurt out to the cameramen. I explain how I didn’t know their names, but their suits suggested the shelled creatures.

Hey, Katniss, that’s actually quite decent of you – not only that you’re going to stop doing it, but you also recognized it was messed up in the first place.

The comparison doesn’t seem to bother them. Even without the camera shells, they strongly resemble each other.

Book could you please stop justifying things. What the hell is this. It’s like you heard me complaining and put this in to tell me that actually it was fine. No, it wasn’t. Shut up.

Same sandy hair, red beards, and blue eyes.

…and yet again, what’s with the phenotypes in this place? I’m going to have to assume the bunkers for the series of unspecified disasters really were filled according to someone’s fetish.

I know before Castor tells me. Pollux is an Avox. They have cut out his tongue and he will never speak again. And I no longer have to wonder what made him risk everything to help bring down the Capitol.

Well, actually you kind of do, because we’re told that getting your tongue cut out is a punishment for betraying the capital in the first place.

It’s true we don’t know quite what gets you branded a traitor. We know redheaded peacekeeper guy gets turned into one, but we also know that was a fuck-you to Katniss, so that doesn’t really tell us what the normal punishments are. And I’d assume that they aren’t cutting people’s tongues out for minor offenses, because why would you want your main, perhaps only, power base to be full of the bitter friends and relatives of those people? Also it just irritates me to say that the capital is oppressed by the capital too. At some point, people made the decision to have things like this. They can’t all be blameless.

Fulvia is all bitchy because women are bitchy at every little thing, but everyone else is happy.

We get the SUPER DRAMATIC TELEVISION scene and god this is just getting embarrassing now. The author sounds so self-congratulatory about how awesome her scenes were and how the footage and dialogue make everyone else speechless.

Now comes a truly fantastic montage of the battle. The initial bombs falling, us running, being blown to the ground–a close-up of my wound, which looks good and bloody–scaling the roof, diving into the nests, and then some amazing shots of the rebels, Gale, and mostly me, me, me knocking those planes out of the sky. Smash-cut back to me moving in on the camera. “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?” We’re with the camera, tracking to the planes burning on the roof of the warehouse. Tight on the Capitol seal on a wing, which melts back into the image of my face, shouting at the president. “Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!” Flames engulf the screen again. Superimposed on them in black, solid letters are the words:

IF WE BURN YOU
BURN WITH US
The words catch fire and the whole screen burns to blackness.

I mean, come on.

This has really been a long-running problem. The book is happy to insult television, but it can’t keep it up. It always has to have another scene doing the exact same thing but saying it’s done right this time. It’s not that there’s something questionable about staging and cutting real events to fit a narrative. It’s that those directors are idiots but this way is awesome.

It gets worse. It turns out everyone decided to lie to Coin about what happened and pretend they told Kathiss to go do that.

This is sort of where complaints start that make people say that there’s no way to do it, but here we have the only woman leader in the entire damn series, and she’s getting lied to by her underlings. Not even over something that’s important but petty, petty shit. So on the one hand, hey, you don’t actually have to be a guy to be the leader of some place. On the other, if you are, people gleefully disrespect your authority at every turn and don’t actually treat you like you’re in charge.

Really, the closest thing we have besides that is the soldier running the hospital, and as I’ve already said, taking care of the sick is already the standard trope for women.

No one has ratted out Gale and me. Not Plutarch, whose authority we ignored. Not Boggs with his broken nose. Not the insects we led into fire.

So as I guessed, the point of the insect exchange was to establish it’s fine to call them that. Fuck.

What’s actually interesting here is that the camera crew was a three person affair, and the person giving the directions was a woman – one who was arguing to let Katniss do this at the time. But only the people she directed still exist. Everyone on this list is a guy. And it isn’t that Katniss is only listing people who were against it, because Plutarch was convinced at the time by that vanishing woman and the camera crew went willingly.

There is just something really weird about this series.

There’s more sickening discussion of the other brilliant shorts they’re designing. One of them is to do pieces on the people killed in the games.

Did I say people? I meant people Katniss knows, because we’re right back to the problem of everything taking place on a tiny set reusing the same characters. Their examples are Rue and Mags. Look, I know Mags was not only female but infirm and therefore a double victim, but she won the games as a kid, presumably by killing a number of other kids.

If they’re doing this, it’d make sense to do it focusing on the deaths. A long string of kids bleeding out as a reminder to the districts of the fact that even when they obeyed the capital they were rewarded with death and misery. Definitely not a reminder of hey, remember that time a trained kid slaughtered their way through the games, won, then lived a long rich life? But that would involve remembering that this is supposedly about convincing them instead of revolving around Katniss.

Of course, if they remembered other people mattered we might start wondering why the fuck they’re even wasting time with this when every district but one of them is already fighting. It really is pretty much so Katniss gets to be a television star.

Anyway, she goes back to bed and wakes up to see an angry Haymitch.

See, Katniss, who has no concept of moderation, did not ignore her earpiece, she yanked the thing out entirely. So Haymitch tells her if she ever does it again, he will lock one in place on her head so she can’t take it off, and if she does get that off they’ll knock her out and surgically implant a chip in her head.

Oh no, says Katniss. Having to listen to you all the time? Horrifying!

Haha it’s funny because he’s threatening invasive surgery without consent.

Really, you’d think this would be a thing. The book throws a fit every time someone so much as puts eye shadow on her, but it’s constantly bringing up severe body modification as if that kind of thing is okay as long as it’s not done for a shallow reason, like looking sexy on camera. Katniss wouldn’t want to have anyone thinking she’s like that District 1 whore, after all.

Oh, also he ate her lunch. Katniss, who earlier would not stop whining about how hungry she was and oppression just hrugs that off.

Finnick comes over and they watch the propaganda things together, because obviously the best thing for someone who’s midway through a breakdown is scenes of people dying. One of you said something about PTSD depictions? This is not PTSD. This is not anything.

It’s hard to watch my reception in the hospital in 8 since I know what’s coming. When the bombs rain down on the roof, I bury my face in my pillow, looking up again at a brief clip of me at the end, after all the victims are dead.

It’s a bit late to suddenly realize how fucked up this is when you had no problem with the other one, which prominently featured the burning hospital as well.

But Katniss’ sudden personality swap has made her upset by these, so she asks him to turn off the television, but then she notices there’s another Peeta interview about to come on by amazing coincidence.

This is an example of bad writing. The reason to bring up her being upset is an explanation for why she stops watching television. Here, she sees the Katniss commercial and then sticks around for the interview. There’s no point in saying she wants to turn off the TV.

Unlike last time, Peeta no longer looks awesome. He’s apparently lost fifteen pounds in the last five days, which, as I argued back in the first book, pretty much can’t happen. At minimum that’d be three pounds a day, and it’s even more than that – there’s no reason to start torturing him as soon as he finished the first interview. A sane timeline would be that this happened after Katniss showed up to play Mockingjay, which means last night at the earliest.

developed a nervous tremor in his hands. They’ve still got him groomed. But underneath the paint that cannot cover the bags under his eyes, and the fine clothes that cannot conceal the pain he feels when he moves, is a person badly damaged.

I would find it more believable if this was just a matter of stress. The capital really doesn’t have much incentive to flat out torture him. They already hold all the cards. And I’d honestly prefer Peeta having tremors because he’s scared and in a horrible position. People aren’t perfect. Saying he’s in pain from torture is just going too far.

The book does propose the idea that the original interview could have been taped whenever, which would better explain Peeta’s condition. But that too doesn’t make much sense.

Katniss has been out of sight this whole time. I can forgive waiting to interview him until they felt like it might do something – thinking interviewing was a good idea and then waiting ages to actually air it is harder to believe. Not only that, but the longer time goes on the more the situation can change and the more likely it is that what he says will no longer sound right until it can’t be aired at all.

They could have taped that interview a day or two after I blew up the arena, then done whatever they wanted to do to him ever since. “Oh, Peeta…” I whisper.

But why would they want to do anything with him? Assuming this place has even a ounce of competence, it’s just a waste of time. And if they’re torturing him just for fun, I don’t believe he’d be this presentable at the end of it.

“They’re using her, obviously,” says Peeta. “To whip up the rebels. I doubt she even really knows what’s going on in the war. What’s at stake.”
“Is there anything you’d like to tell her?” asks Caesar.
“There is,” says Peeta. He looks directly into the camera, right into my eyes. “Don’t be a fool, Katniss. Think for yourself. They’ve turned you into a weapon that could be instrumental in the destruction of humanity. If you’ve got any real influence, use it to put the brakes on this thing. Use it to stop the war before it’s too late. Ask yourself, do you really trust the people you’re working with? Do you really know what’s going on? And if you don’t…find out.”

Peeta continues the confused pregnant girl story, as well as the idea this is just a bad idea. We have three reasons for why he might be doing this: if he’s trying to pitch it to protect Katniss, if he’s just trying to discredit her, or if he sincerely believes it.

It really shouldn’t be such a mystery.

If he’s trying to protect Katniss, that second paragraph shouldn’t be there, because it involves the idea Katniss is quite able to figure things out from the data she has available and suggests she has influence, ie, blame for what’s happening. He can’t say she should think for herself. The only chance he has with the capital here is making it politically viable to leave her alive at the end of the war (in short, handling it the exact opposite way as her demands for pardons). He should focus on how easily manipulated she is, how naive she is, and emphasize that she should listen to him instead of her current handlers. He should not suggest that she can find out what’s going on, and should say that she’s obviously being kept away from real information. I’d say he should be starting that paragraph by saying he wishes he could talk to her but he’s sure they’re not letting her see this, then going into what he would tell her if somehow she does. Minor lies and an attempt to communicate to Katniss that this is the way out if she’ll just play along too.

If he’s trying to discredit her, it should look similar, but with a nastier slant, a focus on how she’s always being led around by other people. Say how she was coached through everything people saw from her on cameras as part of the argument to not take Katniss seriously now. Say that she’s so trusting she’d say anything, even lie, because she’d believe people when they said it was necessary. He should lie shamelessly about this. If they get Katniss to give a rebuttal, well, she’s probably just reading from a script, didn’t he just say she’s easy to talk into anything? (Perhaps even call into question that it happened at all – after all, Peeta knows she can’t handle sick people and that probably came up in the interviews for the first games as well. She’d only be able to handle something like that if the injuries were all faked.)

If he sincerely believes it is, ridiculously, the closest match, despite the whole fact he’s being tortured and you don’t torture people who agree with you. But we know he’s lying to protect her about how close she is to the rebels, and if the idea here is to make an appeal to her using him, making him lie to start isn’t going to help convince her. The whole thing should be presented as Peeta having asked for the chance to talk to her directly, instead of the ridiculous interview setup of leading questions – why even do this besides the chance to reference past scenes? And Peeta should be trying to address the question of if he’s being forced to say this.

This all pretty much goes with how it’d look if it’s the capital making him say this to either convince or discredit Katniss, it’d just sound less like his words and more like theirs. You might get a mix if he’s trying to do one thing and they want another, but if they want him to say something and he says something else, they can just do another take until he stays on script. His only real leeway there would be that if it sounds too unlike him people will be suspicious, but the only one left who knows much about how he should sound is Katniss, so that’s only a factor if the object is convincing her. In that case, he’d be able to argue a bit on phrasing and could sneak in some other clue if he’s trying to do something else. Otherwise, he’s going to say what they want and nothing more.

This capital mouthpiece fits better with him being tortured – they’d have reason to do it if he wouldn’t play along. So the best option is that the capital’s going with convincing Katniss and Peeta didn’t want to go along with it – except that Peeta is just saying the same stuff as he was saying the first time, pre-torture.

Did anyone watch the live-action Death Note movie?

To spoil the end, the main character is threatened by someone with a gun. She’s taken his girlfriend hostage. All he has to do is scribble down a name and she’ll have a heart attack and it’ll be over. He’s trying to talk her out of it, but at the same time he’s fiddling with his pencil, close to just killing her before she can do anything. Little does he know he’s watched on camera by the police team trying to prove he’s the killer…

Then it turns out that he engineered the whole thing to remove suspicion. Which is a brilliant plan, except then why was he acting like he was seriously considering using the death note during the confrontation? The desperation he showed pleading with her works fine – he’s acting for the cameras. But who is he acting for by pretending he’s seconds away from giving himself away as the killer? It was minor twitches only noticeable to the movie viewer and he has no reason to be acting in any way people can’t notice, because that defeats the entire concept of acting. And if it was clear enough that anyone in-universe could pick up on it, it’d just look suspicious when the whole point of that display was to remove any suspicion.

It’s there for the sake of the audience.

Peeta’s behavior has the same problem. No matter what’s going on, there’s no reason to be vague enough to leave the other interpretations room to breathe.

I will need to repudiate them. But the truth is, I don’t trust the rebels or Plutarch or Coin. I’m not confident that they tell me the truth. I won’t be able to conceal this.

And this is the same problem from a different angle.

Katniss just saw the truth. It’s people being killed for opposing the capital. It’s Peeta being tortured. Those people aren’t lying to her, if for no more reason than the fact she doesn’t even bother showing up at meetings to give them a chance to. She doesn’t have to make an official statement that she trusts Coin completely. She just has to say that he’s wrong, the fight is justified and if the capital is so concerned about the loss of human life, they could try not dropping bombs on people.

Finnick immediately tells her to say they didn’t see it.

Apparently, when Katniss talks of repudiating Peeta’s statement, she means to the people of 13. Katniss, no one fucking cares! They might want you to give a counter-interview because apparently people listening to Peeta is something they’re worried about, but why would they demand you prove ideological purity? Coin especially, since we’ve established she (rightly) can’t stand you and is just using you because you make propaganda with the figurehead you’ve got, not the one you want. Katniss has shown ample contempt for everything relating to the rebel cause already. It’s not like it’ll surprise anyone if she says she doesn’t like them.

In a really bizarre twist of writing, Finnick says that they’ll say the first propaganda short was so upsetting that they turned the TV off. This is honestly an easy explanation. What confuses me is why it has to be nearly true. It works just as well as an excuse without Katniss actually being upset and asking him to turn it off.

(Incidentally, this whole thing took place in the hospital, so apparently Katniss is in a private room and surrounded either by soundproofed walls or corpses, because the issue of people nearby having heard the TV isn’t mentioned.)

They’re believed, of course, because after all, this book has clearly told us that Katniss is a great actor and can easily say things she doesn’t believe and sound convincing.

Our dramatic ending line is No one mentions Peeta. which is clearly sinister and not at all that Katniss is currently hospitalized after getting a second head injury and maybe they think telling her about Peeta isn’t the best idea.