Forever a Gale Hawthorne defender and you all can fight me on that. I see SO MANY people in the fandom hating on him when (imo) it's completely unwarranted.
Gale is just as much a victim of the Capitol as anybody else. Gale and Katniss have incredibly similar storylines, yet their similarities get glossed over so much, especially in the movies.
Gale lost his father in the same mine accident that killed Burdock, leaving him the oldest with a pregnant mother and 2 younger siblings to feed. Like Katniss, he had to step up as head of the house to make sure everybody stayed fed. Katniss tells us that she and Gale knew they could be executed for their hunting, but had both agreed a bullet to the head was quicker than starving to death.
Katniss and Gale had a pact that if one of them got reaped, the other would make sure their family didn't starve. And for as paranoid as Katniss is in all of the Hunger Games book regarding everything, she never once questions whether Gale will honour that pact. And think of how that must have been for Gale, here goes his hunting partner to a slaughter she will most likely die in, leaving him with two extra mouths and one less hand to do the work with.
Katniss and Gale care about each other's siblings, we learn from Katniss that when Katniss got Lady the goat, Gale carried her home and she suspects it was mostly to see Prim's face. Katniss gets a request from Gale's mom to take his younger brother out to learn to hunt, and Katniss considers it. Gale protects Prim and Astrid during the bombing of 12 and helps get Prim and Buttercup into the shelter during the bombing of 13.
Unlike Katniss, Gale did have to go to the mines, the same ones that killed his father. Katniss tells us how horrified she is of the mines, that when they have the yearly tour through school she often gets so sick from stress that her mother keeps her home. Gale probably had very similar trauma but couldn't avoid it.
Gale was with Katniss during their stint in the Capitol, he was exposed to just as much trauma as she was. All the death, the fear, being hunted, and the bombs after. He was likely just as traumatized as Katniss from it.
Yes, Gale designed the bombs that killed Prim, but he wasn't the only one working on weapons development. Beetee and the other scientists were working with him, yet Gale constantly gets the blame for Prim's death. He wasn't the one who ordered them dropped, he certainly wasn't the one who sent Prim to the Capitol as a 14 year old who had no real business being there. I saw a theory that Coin allowed (or even pushed) for Prim and Astrid to become field medics for the express purpose of their death, because with her family to fight for, Katniss would always be a threat. Eliminating them took Katniss out of the threat pool for Coin. Coin killed Prim, not Gale. And she probably used a weapon Gale had a hand in to further isolate her from her support network.
Gale was a hungry, scared teen just like Katniss and the fandom writing him off as some asshole who was only out for himself is blatant falsehood. He was eager for the rebellion, but so were all the other rebels. He did plan on using the deaths of others for rebel gain, but so did all the other rebel strategists we see. He was a victim just as much as Katniss.
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