My thoughts about SOTR (spoilers)
I just finished SOTR (finally) and I need to rant about things. This will be disjointed because I have A Lot of Thoughts.
First of all: Mags and Wiress. I always thought after Mockingjay that Mags' inability to speak was unlikely to actually be the result of a stroke. Katniss mentions that she thinks it's the case, but Katniss has no idea who Mags is, and no idea what the Capitol does to Victors after they "win". I thought that Mags' speech difficulties might be the result of Capitol torture AND I WAS CORRECT. Wiress was someone I didn't consider originally, but I love the way Suzanne Collins wove her in. As soon as I realised she and Wiress were Haymitch's mentors, I noticed that Wiress was speaking normally, and seemed at least mostly sane. This contrasted starkly to her portrayal in the 3rd Quarter Quell where Katniss mentioned she would trail off her sentences and forget what she was saying. Then we found out about the conspiracy to blow up the arena, and I thought "oh." Snow leaves no-one unpunished if he thinks they are a threat. Now I'm wondering - we see Mags in a wheelchair at the end of Haymitch's Games. She is held back by the Peacekeepers, so we never get to see the full extent of what they did to her. We don't hear her speak, so we don't know how badly she was tortured at that stage. We do know that she had to go on and mentor Finnick Odair, 15 years later. I wonder if she faced worse torture for trying to shield him after his Games the same way Haymitch mentions her shielding the boy from an earlier Games. It's also making me believe in the theories I've seen going around about Annie Cresta. Did she really go mad after her district partner was beheaded? Or did the Capitol get her too?
Next: Haymitch's family. We knew that they were going to die. It was heart-breaking, knowing that their end was coming, but not knowing exactly how or when. The one point when I really knew, though was when Haymitch was watching back the (heavily edited) footage of the Games, and he noticed that his family was not featured in the Reaping footage. That's when as readers we knew that they were doomed - even though we already knew objectively, that moment was incontrovertible proof that they were gone, and it was going to happen soon. What I also noticed was the parallels between Haymitch's family and Katniss' family 25 years later. In the 75th Games, Katniss is panicking that Prim and Gale and her mother are being tortured because of the Jabberjays mimicking their screams. Peeta reassures her and says that they can't possibly torture or kill Prim because they need to do the Tribute family interviews at this stage in the Games. Johanna then points out that all of Panem loves Prim, so even the Capitol citizens would riot if she were killed off by the government. Prim is well-known and well-loved by the entire Capitol at this point - she has been featured on many broadcasts about Katniss, including the wedding dress shoot, so the Capitol can't touch her without risking retaliation from even its own citizens. Haymitch's family do not have that protection. By erasing them from the Games footage, Snow is ensuring that nobody in the Capitol knows about them. If nobody knows about them, they can be killed off a lot more easily than if people did. Ma and Sid are both literally and figuratively erased from the narrative. It's also worth noting that the firebombing of D12 likely wasn't just a message to Katniss. It was a message to Haymitch too. A reminder. Look what we can do to you and the people you love. Remember what we did before.
Next up: Lenore Dove's death. We knew it was coming, of course. Like poor Ma and Sid, the end of Lenore Dove's story was written before we even knew her name. However I was kind of thrown by it at first- it seemed so random compared to all the other deaths in the story. Poisoned gumdrops? That she just randomly finds in the Meadow? Ma and Sid's deaths were meant to be dramatic and gut-wrenching. A spectacle for Haymitch's homecoming. Lenore Dove's seemed almost anticlimactic for something Snow orchestrated. Then I realised: of course. Poison. Snow's modus operandi. He wanted to make a spectacle of Haymitch's family, so he did. He didn't really care about them, only so much as he could use them to hurt Haymitch. Fire was dramatic and painful and visible enough to do the trick. With Lenore Dove, he wanted it to be personal. He always used poison to kill off his enemies and people he saw as threats. Lenore Dove was not only Haymitch's love, she was someone related to Snow's former love. He hated her for that alone, even if she hadn't been connected with Haymitch, the failed rebel. I'm sure that Snow hadn't meant for Haymitch to feed Lenore the gumdrop himself. He had no way of knowing if or when Haymitch would go to the Meadow to meet her. He [Snow] knew that she would find the gumdrops in the Meadow, and he knew that she would eat them because she loved them. He would have seen the footage of Haymitch telling Sid to give the gumdrops to Lenore Dove after the Reaping. Would have thought that perhaps Haymitch would find Lenore Dove when it was too late, and figure out what had happened, and be heartbroken anyway. How much crueller it was that Haymitch himself gave her the poison from his own hands. Imagine Snow's sadistic delight when he discovered that (because I'm sure there were cameras somewhere. They were always watching, after all). And I've seen many people mention the purposeful cruelty of Snow feeding Haymitch milk and bread for the whole 10 days of partying - he knew that that would soak up any poison that Haymitch might ingest if he tried to follow Lenore Dove by eating the gumdrops. Lenore Dove, however, had been starved in D12's prison, so there was no hope of her throwing the poison back up.
Also: art and fashion as a metaphor and a vessel for rebellion. Maysilee and Haymitch talk about "painting posters" as code for defying the Capitol. At the Second Quarter Quell tribute parade, Haymitch Abernathy places Louella McCoy's body at President Snow's feet and sarcastically applauds, holding the president responsible for what he has done to a little girl (technically not art, but metaphorically a "poster"). 25 years later, Peeta Mellark paints a portrait of Rue, dead and covered in flowers, to force the Capitol Gamemakers to own up to what they did to her. To "hold them responsible for killing that little girl".
Lenore Dove sings forbidden songs in protest for Haymitch's illegal reaping. 25 years in the future, Katniss Everdeen sings The Hanging Tree - a forbidden song - which in the movies at least becomes the backing song for the revolution. In the books it is used to try and un-hijack Peeta, in itself an act of rebellion, undoing the damage that Snow did to him to try to bring him back to Katniss.
Maysilee critiques people's fashion (also an art form) as her own subtle way of rebelling. Criticising the Capitol audience to their faces for their clothing, helping Effie to change Lou Lou's makeup to make her more presentable for her interview, and brutally taking down Drusilla's fashion choices when the older woman attempts to demean the D12 tributes. She wears jewellery to define herself as an individual, and unites the Newcomers alliance by helping to make their tokens wearable via her necklace weaving skills.
During the 74th and 75th Games, Cinna uses fashion as his own form of rebellion. From making the D12 tributes unforgettable in the parade and their interviews, to helping Katniss "design" her own fashion line (in opposition to the Capitol's insistence that the tributes themselves develop a respectable talent), to turning Katniss' wedding dress - meant to be a humiliating spectacle orchestrated by Snow - into a literal rebel symbol, to designing Katniss' actual rebel costume.
Just - the parallels and the metaphors and the symbolism and the references... I was starting to get super annoyed with how often Nevermore was popping up between paragraphs towards the end, until I realised I was supposed to feel that way. I was being driven to distraction by the song, the same way Haymitch was. And for him it was so much worse. The ending was so bittersweet - Haymitch mentioning that he drank more out of habit than anything now, acknowledging that his liver was failing, and knowing he wouldn't be around a lot longer, but at least he would be with Lenore Dove soon. Finding out that he drove everyone away on purpose to save them from Snow, even though it nearly killed him to do it. The fact that he has had nightmares every night without fail for 25 years, about killing his girlfriend, and being hunted in the arena, and unlike Katniss and Peeta, he doesn't have anyone to comfort him when he wakes up, but saying that Lenore Dove has forgiven him now when she visits in his dreams, because he's learned to love again, and he kept his promise to her - he finally saw a day where the sun rose on his birthday and it was not the Reaping.
