why do u think sc killed madge? was it just to show the horrors of war or more a practical decision to not have to include her character in mj? I always felt her death was rather unceremonious. i know she was a relatively background character, but in cf collins builds up her and katniss's friendship more than it was pre-games. then in mj katniss finds out she dies and thats it.
it is very unceremonious. this is Katniss’s only female friend, who she feels very deeply for and who she’s had a decently long (and close! she takes her to the woods!) relationship with. it’s odd that she only gets a couple lines devoted to her death, when even though she’s been a very minor character, all the moments with her are deeply emotionally charged for Katniss. what’s also always been weird to me is why did she kill Madge and not Delly? Madge is a townie. Even though she’s the mayor’s daughter, she could’ve just as easily been friends with Peeta, too, like Delly was! we get less about Delly before mj, and Delly is far flatter as a character! why keep her and not Madge alive?
if we look at it from that angle, I think it reveals two things about why Madge was killed. one, it shows the deprioritization of Katniss’s life outside of Peeta within mj, and two, it also I think shows how heavy handed SC gets with the Peeta = peaceful and good dandelion in the spring blah blah blah to the Gale = rage and fire bs. I will elaborate.
at the end of mj, Katniss has lost every single person that was important to her in the beginning of the trilogy. that includes Madge. now that could be a commentary about the horrors of war, and I think for a lot of these deaths and losses it is, but removing Madge, when she’s a secondary character that could easily be substituted for Delly, for me shows more that Katniss’s internal life and conflict and character development is being sidelined throughout. in mj, SC is prioritizing allegory around just war theory and the love triangle. if she had been interested in further exploring Katniss’s character, keeping Madge alive in Delly’s place would’ve been a super easy way to do it! it would’ve also generated different social allegory, talking about the class divides in 12 and how those shift when they’re refugees in the context of 13. but she is not interested in that angle in mj, which is fine, but to me it’s clear that Katniss’s development on her own is no longer the narrative priority. what is the priority is Katniss specifically as she relates to Peeta, and because she and Madge have something completely separate from that (unlike Katniss and Gale, or Finnick, or Delly, who I’ll get into in a sec but who are all linked to Peeta) there isn’t space for her.
in terms of the second point, all we know about Delly is that she’s said to be a genuinely nice person and that she was Peeta’s friend. there is no complexity to her character, at all. she needs to be in mj because we need to see what kind and good people Peeta is friends with, because he is just so kind and good. that’s the message we’re meant to take away from mj despite having three books written about him where he’s completely morally grey at best, lol. Delly and Peeta used to pretend to be siblings. that’s how similar they’re portrayed to be. it’s not subtle. Delly is there to show how inoffensive and kind and harmless Peeta truly is, which is the message we’re hammered over the head with in the back half of mj. in the interest of space and not too many extra characters (which I agree with! sometimes you have to streamline!) Delly gets chosen over Madge for the surviving town girl from 12 role because she provides more depth for the angle SC is interested in prioritizing, which is Peeta.
I’m still surprised by how little we get of Katniss’s finishing school and finding a career path when it was a factor of her oppression that she her schooling revolved around coal mining and she was excepted to go into the mines that killed her dad and had that looming over her. But then what do we hear about her discovering her dream? Her ambitions? Nothing except becoming a mom. Okay ig but what else? Peeta didn’t get the same school experience, he was on a sports team. Katniss had an after school job at 11. And I can see Peeta reopening his family’s bakery, but we can seriously only see Katniss as a mom?
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