If you loved the idea of Beetee and Wiress together after reading Catching Fire but are disgusted with yourself for having shipped them after the new revelations in SotR, stop. Hold on. I want to talk to you.
First of all, no one is going to be changing their longstanding ships because people entering the fandom from SotR declare the new (retconned) canon LAW. (This also applies to Hayffie, Haysilee, and so on.) Just because Collins decided to reconfigure a few details of established characters to fit the needs of the prequel’s plot does not mean we are not allowed to appreciate the adult relationship we admired in CF, with the details we had then. Beetee did not have children, or a wife, that we knew of. He and Wiress were both middle aged and clearly connected in a special way. None of SotR’s “revealed backstory” changes how I view their relationship. It’s fine if you shipped them once and now prefer not to, but to say that you feel guilt or shame (or are guilting and shaming other fans) because you could not predict a future retcon from a book we never expected to get is a bit much. You can still let people enjoy the canon we had from the original trilogy.
SotR fans: District 12 is a small town, of course everyone knows everyone/is best friends with Significant Characters/is connected to the Covey!
Also SotR fans: But that doesn't mean anyone ever communicated anything ever, and gossip about What Happened With Haymitch or the Covey wouldn't have spread because people in small towns never talk to each other, which is why Katniss Knew Nothing.
This scene in the movie is so peak Snowjanus that I had to write out the alternative way it should have gone. As much as I love Snowjanus, I do think they'd fall apart as a couple for much the same reason that Snowbaird did. Coryo wants too much control and Sejanus refuses to abdicate his own sense of personal power. But the draw is there nevertheless, at least until the wrestling for dominance begins.
(These comics were made in Photoshop and DAZ Studio, ain't no way I was hand-drawing those backgrounds. I'm still exploring workflows for using DAZ3D in comics, and projects like this are a great way to experiment with visual styles.)
every day I wish to wake up and see that suzanne collins said sotr isn’t canon and that it was an experiment in propaganda/implicit submission, and then release the REAL sotr that is actually good.
I think we’ve now found ourselves at an interesting point. Someone from Lionsgate once said (and I read this years ago in some interview so I have no idea where to find that now) that they’d love to continue the franchise somehow after the success of the trilogy films, but the only way to really do that is to tell arena stories, which goes against the very message of the books and essentially turns us into the Capitol.
But with SotR, the book that has stripped all nuance and political message in favor of a flashy arena, plot gimmicks, and a few token references to “propaganda bad” and “implicit submission bad,” we’re left with nothing but theatrics to bring audiences to seats. SotR is at its core an arena story, and its success proves Lionsgate’s point: if all they did was pump out stories of every Games in HG history, people would eat it up. It’d be a simple formula: pick a tribute, give them a wacky reaping story, throw them into a creative arena. Maybe add a couple arena-destroying gimmicks in there too, because repeating those is a tactic that worked. Since it’s clear the franchise isn’t interested in exploring the social and psychological implications of how this system impacts the tributes (as is so often explored in fanfiction), all we’re left with is ever flashier arenas, ever twistier gimmicks, ever escalating rebellion attempts. Things that translate to cinematic blowouts. Things that sell popcorn and get asses in seats.
By the way, if you like the spectacle of kids killing each other in creative settings, I’m not trying to shame you for that. This post isn’t about how “we’re just like the Capitol if we enjoy the arenas” so much as it is about analyzing the way that the continued success and survival of the franchise (from a moneymaking and particularly film-oriented standpoint) relies on becoming the very Capitol the books are meant to critique. And that was a threshold I think the creative teams behind this franchise did not want to cross, exactly. But with the screaming, stomping success of SotR, I think they’re going to be taking a hard look at that stance.
It's been widely speculated that Suzanne Collins was…not fully present for the creation of this book, whether symbolically (under a time-crunch, wasn’t her idea) or literally. It’s easy to believe it was ghostwritten or pressured by the film studio because the quality is so measurably different. (Check out this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1no45rn/the_latest_hunger_games_novel_was_coauthored_by_ai/. Whether you agree or disagree with its conclusion, it was a fascinating discussion.) And whether Collins wrote the book herself or not, whether it matched her intention perfectly or not, if she’s willing to sell her franchise and message out for the sake of a new film, it’s easy to see this going all the way.
Of course, as HG fans, I don’t think we’d hate the opportunity to get more lore, more characters, more time in other districts. That could be great, especially for fanfic writers hungry for more canon to draw from. But if it’s going to be more SotR, I’d rather not see what’s coming. I can no longer trust that further stories in this franchise will be told with the nuance and political awareness that they deserve, because what the hell was Sunrise on the Reaping? If all we as a current audience can handle is spectacle without the analysis, I fear for what comes next.
What do people who don't ship Beeress think was going on in Catching Fire is what I want to know. When the book has Katniss saying she knows Beetee is thinking of Wiress, Peeta immediately assuming an out of it Beetee is using a pet name for Wiress etc. And the movie had Amanda and Jeffrey acting Like That even in alternate takes and the behind the scenes is going on about their chemistry together.
Especially when we canonically have examples of the exact non romantic dynamics people try to pin on them: sibling Victors, mentor-mentee Victors where one basically raised the other. You are lying to my face if you are trying to say that Beetee and Wiress behave or are treated in canon the same way as Cashmere&Gloss, Mags&Finnick.
It bothers me how quick everyone was to not only adopt the retroactive backstory and lore introduced in SotR but to justify it, even bending over backwards to do so. People are so eager to make connections and shout from the rooftops Look How Connected Everything Is and that Collins Had It Planned All Along! But she didn’t. She invented most of it for the needs of the prequel, retconned things, and weakened a lot of the themes and depth of the original series. I wish people felt they could admit that (even if they still enjoyed the book) without their whole world falling apart. We don’t have to pretend like things make sense just because it’s another entry in our favorite franchise.
You know, I don’t think I ever actually made a post - I think I defaulted to linking to Ross’s post, since he and Dana share many of my issues (although I don’t share all their issues, and vice versa.)
Ultimately, I have problems with Mockingjay on multiple levels. One is something that you can’t fault Suzanne Collins for in the sense that she told the story she wanted to tell, which is not the story I was particularly interested in reading. Collins was ultimately more interested in creating an anti-war story that breaks down the heroine and destroys her agency entirely - and, while that might convey the message she wished, I felt it shortchanged her characters. (If you give me an ending that is satisfying on a character level, I will forgive you egregious leaps in logic.)
My main issue with Mockingjay is the entire setup, in which Katniss is reduced to nothing more than a pawn of District 13 (literally becoming “just a piece in their games,” as she’s always feared), Peeta is removed from the story and his character erased in order to further damage Katniss, and Prim is killed for a one-two resolution of an unnecessary love triangle and to completely and utterly destroy Katniss, thus completing Collins’s “war is horrible and destructive and destroys everyone” moral.
But in doing so, she destroys all the characters, along with the arcs that they could’ve had. Gale is thrust into a villain’s role to provide a neatly-tied ending to the love triangle; Peeta’s identity is erased and removed from being Peeta simply to torment Katniss, thus aborting any possible character growth (and relationship growth) he could’ve had with Katniss; and Katniss herself is destroyed. The entire putting-back-together is done in a clumsy “telling instead of showing” manner. After Coin’s assassination, the book feels like a summary of the ending, rather than the ending itself - Katniss isn’t present at her own trial, her fate decided off-screen, and “Peeta and I grow back together” is nothing more than a nice turn of phrase, without any actual development to back it up.
Ross and Dana have huge objections to Katniss ever having children; I don’t necessarily share those objections for any possible ending, but the way Collins does it is terribly executed. I can see the point here: Katniss was determined not to have children in a world that could produce the Hunger Games, but changes her mind once the world has changed enough to be safe. The problem? Collins’s world hasn’t changed - or, if it has, we’re not shown it. We’re expected to trust that massive change has occurred on the basis of a few flimsy sentences, sentences that aren’t really backed up by anything we see in-text. And the way that it’s phrased sounds like Katniss was worn down and did it for Peeta’s happiness rather than making an active decision that the world was safe - which is, again, destroying Katniss’s agency, reducing her to a complete automaton in the service of the moral of the story and a pat ending.
For Mockingjay to work, it needed to center around its trio of characters. I agree completely with Ross and Dana about the tripartite rebellion: Katniss is the Mockingjay, the symbol of revolution; Gale is the planner; Peeta is the spokesperson. Those three, working together, should have been at the center of the story of taking down the Capitol. Instead, Gale is suborned into D13 control and sidelined; Katniss is made a symbol without substance; Peeta is taken away completely.
The last third of this book - the Capitol invasion - is the worst part for me. It’s supposed to resemble terse street warfare, but reads like a bad first-person shooter, with traps and levels to get through. It adds nothing to the characters, is ultimately completely futile, and does nothing except provide the setup for Katniss to see Prim killed (and kill Finnick simply to have the obligatory “war leaves children without parents” storyline, an overplayed trope that is really tired, particularly when people are made to have children just so they can be killed off to leave said children without a parent.)
Which leads me to Prim, and Finnick, and all of the secondary characters. Finnick, as I’ve said, is shoved into the dead-new-parent trope, doing him no favors. But Prim - Prim regresses as a character, expands and contracts as Collins needs her to. She’s not consistent. She’s whatever Katniss needs her to be at the moment - a parent figure, more responsible than Katniss, a scared little duck. Prim has no consistency. The other characters - Katniss’s entire team is redshirt cannon fodder, from Boggs to the Leegs to Castor and Pollux. Again, why introduce them? They make no impression. They exist to provide deaths in the video game traps. Again, Ross and Dana are 100% opposed to killing Prim - after all, it’s done for no other reason than to destroy Katniss, and to show that everything Katniss has done throughout the three books is ultimately futile. I can see a universe where Prim dies for bitter irony - but this isn’t a book in which this death works. Instead, it’s again done to torture Katniss, underscore Collins’s futility of war motif, and resolve that triangle, and the setup is so terribly clumsy that it makes me cringe.
But Katniss, Peeta, and Gale - these are the characters that needed to be explored. Peeta’s professed “I’ve always loved Katniss” is treated at face value by the text throughout the series. There needed to be a point in which Collins examined this a bit critically - Peeta hadn’t spoken to Katniss, he wasn’t in love with her, but fandom treats this like a given fact. Peeta might have been in love with the idea of Katniss, might have had a crush on her - but then the innate politician and performer in Peeta took that for the Games and spun it into something to help them survive, and their experiences made it real. That’s what real or not real should’ve revolved around - how something unreal, their performance and Peeta’s perception of Katniss, eventually became something real. (And if Katniss and Peeta had children in the epilogue, it would be emphatically Katniss’s decision, a way of concretely showing that the world had changed and that they had changed it.)
Meanwhile, Gale is treated as some bloodthirsty groundlessly angry person who doesn’t deserve Katniss by fandom - but the fact is that he knew Katniss better than anyone, and that the tragedy and ending of this love triangle (if you needed to play up a love triangle) should have been that two people who understood one another and who, if there had been no war, would have loved and perhaps married one another - were ultimately changed by the Capitol and circumstance and war to the point where they were no longer the same.
War changes people, yes, and it leaves scars - but Katniss is tortured and tortured and thrown back together for an epilogue that doesn’t jell with the complete and utter devastation that Collins has spent an entire book dumping on her. If Collins was going to destroy Katniss so utterly, she needed to spend serious time putting her back together - not reduce her to a footnote in her own narrative, to the point where her story becomes related from a distance until the epilogue arrives to deliver babies and the promise of a dandelion in the spring. Because, as it stands, the writing doesn’t back it up - that dandelion is a false promise. Collins hasn’t earned the ending she’s given her characters. Given the book she wrote, Katniss should’ve committed suicide after killing Coin, or ended up like Haymitch: the ending isn’t deserved. Reader imagination can only go so far: you can’t destroy your characters and then expect your reader to put them back together. The author has to get them to a place where the epilogue is plausible, and she doesn’t do it.
So, basically:
Mockingjay sacrifices the characters and their arcs in the service of an overarching moral of the story that says “war is hell”
But then it also decides that the “war is hell,” utterly nihilistic, bleak feel of the book might be too much and constructs this happy ending that just doesn’t hold up.
I read this book - any book - for the characters, first and foremost. Mockingjay destroyed those characters, destroyed their arcs, and destroyed what could’ve been a tremendously good story. And that’s ignoring a lot of secondary issues - the treatment of Mrs. Everdeen that’s the main point of Ross’s post, the way the love triangle is handled throughout the book and also in fandom at large, the lack of development for other minor characters, issues with the worldbuilding (…so, um, if D12 is no longer mining coal, where the hell is your power coming from? And now D12’s making medicine? Well, who was doing it before?)
I really do love THG and Catching Fire. I love the premise of this story, and the world that was built, and so many of the characters. But I’d prefer to think that Mockingjay doesn’t exist; it’s just that terrible.
Essays like this really drive home for me what kind of Hunger Games fan I am. People speak about their favorite book in the series or their book rankings and my honest answer is that I do not have a favorite book. I have favorite parts, and those parts are driven by the potential I think they had more than anything else. Beetee and Wiress are my everything in this series, and they were introduced in Catching Fire, so I guess I could say that one's my favorite, but not for the narrative. I had many issues with the book itself, but introducing the other victors and giving us a glimpse into their subculture and dynamic was my favorite aspect of the whole series, and one I desperately needed to see more of.
The Hunger Games has captured me not through its execution but through its potential, and there are so many things that can be said for the ways in which I felt the narrative failed. Collins is a thematic writer, not a character writer (at least within this series), and I am a character-driven reader, so there was always going to be profound disappointment on my side when characters got shoehorned into Archetypes™ or sacrificed for some plot contrivance. My issues with SotR is that it amplified this to eleven and absolutely obliterated any chance at human realness or organic nuance. It took the first-person shooter style of storytelling in Mockingjay and rendered it into an 8 bit side-scroller where all you're doing is hitting the A button to jump over obstacles. It was boring, bland, predictable, while at the same time bending over backwards to force all of these twists and wacky scenarios to keep things fresh, all while ignoring the actual impact on the characters going through these experiences. Instead of expanding on the lore and the faulty worldbuilding, we just got more ambiguity. And we can see the threads of these storytelling issues within the original series as well, though the trilogy had more room to breathe and expand on things. So much of what captured me as a reader is not an undying dedication to the series or to Katniss but to the potential for how people would form and develop in a society like Panem. Ideas I for sure want to explore both in fanfiction and my original fiction.
“Katniss didn’t know that Beetee had a family or that Ampert had gotten reaped because Beetee was so traumatized by it he’d never have shared it.”
“Because it would have discouraged her.”
“Because it wasn’t relevant.”
Let me explain why Ampert was relevant to Katniss. Would she have learned about him in CF when watching Haymitch’s tape or conversing with the other victors? It’s conceivable that she would not have for one reason or another. One: they were kinda busy focusing on the upcoming arena. Two: it’s possible Haymitch might have felt that it would stress Katniss out to know about it. Three: maybe it was too personal a detail to share about a guy she met on the training room floor (and mysteriously hadn’t ever encountered through years of reruns and Capitol specials and biopic segments the way she learned of the other victors).
But by Mockingjay?
Her learning of Beetee’s horrendous loss should have come up. Period. Because they were fighting against the Capitol, and Katniss needed all the fire she could get, all the reason to want to take them down. If Beetee lost not one but two children to the Capitol’s cruelty, all the more reason. And if Beetee still had a wife and that second child at home getting slaughtered in District 3 while he was safe in 13, that’s…a weird thing for him to not react to, or mention. So we can assume they are dead, and they died at the hands of the Capitol (even if indirectly), which is yet another reason why Katniss fights. She’s given all kinds of context for the victors she spends time with, so why not him? It’s jarring that Beetee had no family and now suddenly does. It’s jarring that Beetee’s backstory was entirely irrelevant/unimportant and now is suddenly very relevant and quite important. But he’s just a background character, so who cares if we get a surgically and retroactively altered version of his story, right?
LOVE what you wrote about Drusilla and what it shows about SOTR as a book. It always felt like a cop-out to have her as a 'hate sink', with a childish depiction of villiany. It's unfathomable that an image conscious, vain, capitolite would have bad breath and leave with frosting on her face! Thank you for voicing it out so accurately and systematically!
Thank you for your kind words! It's definitely not something I've seen a lot of people talking about, and I think it's because Drusilla just shortcircuits our analytical minds with the way she was written and we hate her on instinct, so it doesn't occur to us that the way she was written is the problem. The same thing happens with the Careers. The whole point of the series is to see the human on all sides and understand the complexity of how someone can be shaped by the ideas and systems around them, as well as to understand how those systems impact us in real life. How is writing a character like Drusilla helping to carry that message?
I’m going to step outside of my focus on District 3 for a moment to talk about the character of Drusilla.
This essay will:
-Deeply analyze and critique Drusilla's representation in SotR
-Contain spoilers for Sunrise on the Reaping
So you can decide if that’s something you’d like to experience under the cut:
Do you hate Drusilla? Does anyone not? There’s a reason for that: you’re supposed to. Why? Not because she’s the escort for a cruel tyrannical death match, but because the narrative forces a comically evil image that allows us to feel nothing but contempt for a character we’re supposed to understand is villainous. We’re told to hate her, so we do.
First is the name. Drusilla. Drusilla’s a real name, and it follows the same Roman naming convention as the rest of the Capitol names. It means “mighty” or “strong” which is decent enough as a name in itself if it weren’t being used in a comically villainous context. It sounds like Cruella, a name meant to evoke cartoonish wickedness and devilishness. A character who, by name, you’re primed to believe is awful. There’s just something about it. It easily conveys villainy, and we’re really not supposed to think hard about it.
We’re introduced to her as:
a plastic-faced woman who … has a line of what look like fancy thumbtacks encircling her face, pulling her skin back and pinning it in place.
It’s hard not to imagine this:
She’s garish and repulsive. Capitol fashion comes off that way to the Districts, sure. But even accounting for that, her description is monstrous and revolting. There’s little humanity in her to connect to, which is the point. And because of this, we the audience will not see Drusilla as fully human or contemplate the deeper meaning of her presence within a narrative about propaganda and social control. We simply find her nauseating. To emphasize this, Haymitch notes:
As they lift me, I notice Drusilla has a riding crop clipped to the side of one boot and wonder if it’s just decorative. Her dead-fish breath hits my face. “Play this right or I’ll shoot you myself.”
Don’t want the audience to like your despicable character? Give them halitosis!
It’s hard to imagine that someone whose sole personality traits are vanity and over-the-top cruelty would lapse in the department of hygiene, because how you smell creates an impact as much as the way you look. If you smell bad, people notice. It’s hard not to be aware of the way people react to you if you’re highly attuned to their validation and cognizant of social expectations. So I’m not buying that Drusilla goes overboard on body modifications but just doesn’t give a shit about her body odor. Perhaps because Drusilla is so unapproachable and is surrounded by obsequious sycophants, no one has told her she’s let her oral hygiene lapse. But surely someone must have let it slip as an insult (I can’t imagine she has many friends) and given her the opportunity to correct it. If she knows she smells bad, why isn’t she jumping to do something about it?
There are a couple of real-world explanations for this. Trimethylaminuria or TMAU is a condition wherein the body excretes a fish-like odor that is not a matter of hygiene but genetics. It would be cruel to use this condition to paint her character as wicked and unlovable, because people with the condition can’t help it and common hygiene practices do little to address the problem. This isn’t a matter of badness, it’s a biological circumstance that causes a lot of shame and difficulty for sufferers. Using it as a shortcut to make someone gross because they’re the “bad” character in your narrative is…well, gross. And cheap.
The other, and perhaps most likely possibility, is ill-fitting veneers. Veneers are a common practice in the celebrity/wealth world to enhance the appearance of teeth, but a poorly done job can create gaps between the veneers and the natural teeth where bacteria that cannot be reached by brushing proliferates and causes a bad odor. This, coupled with poor hygiene and other practices that might be common in the Capitol (excessive drinking, consumption of sweets, smoking, drug use) could explain why she likely looks the part but doesn’t smell it. We know she smokes, which doesn’t do great things for your breath or sense of smell, but still.
Maybe she genuinely just doesn’t realize she smells, because some people are not smell conscious.
“Well, what are they staring at? Filthy beasts. Go home! All of you!” She addresses a Peacekeeper. “Get them out of here before their smell gets in my hair.” She sniffs a lock of her hair and grimaces. “Too late.”
Oh, wait, yep. She’s aware.
The problem is when bad hygiene is equated with bad personhood. That’s a lazy, offensive, and unfair trope that’s often used to effortlessly paint an unpleasant portrait of a character we’re supposed to despise. Attempting to strip them of humanity by humiliating them with unbecoming physical attributes is cheap. It’s childish and something you’re more likely to see in a kid’s book where characters are reduced to funny, one-dimensional archetypes. It has no place in a mature series that takes its subject and themes seriously. Her description is something that makes me feel like I’m reading a caricature of a "good versus bad" tale rather than whatever super serious and meaningfully important message SotR is trying to impart.
And then there’s her behavior:
“Shut up!” Drusilla yells at the crowd as a makeup person puffs some powder on her sweaty face. “Shut up or we’ll kill every last one of you!” As if to emphasize this, a Peacekeeper next to her fires a spray of bullets into the air, and a hovercraft passes right over the square.
Are we to believe the Capitolites are so comically cruel because they come from The Bad Place and hate all the innocent poor district folk? That they don’t have even an ounce of integrity or decency? (Well, of course the good characters we’re supposed to cheer for, Plutarch and Effie, have this.) Talk about propaganda! This just in everyone: the Capitol is bad, they're the bad guys, and we are supposed to loathe them!
Take the beat down scene:
“Nasty, disgusting creature,” Drusilla pants. “I will destroy you before you even make it to the arena.”
SotR heavily makes use of “beat the cat” (so to speak) scenes that emphasize a character’s wickedness. Drusilla with Maysilee. Silka with the horse. Another example of short-circuiting readers’ interpretation of the characters and making them easy to hate. Why do such characters need to literally beat an innocent in order for us to see that they play an antagonistic role in the story? Perhaps because the narrative fears we won’t know we’re supposed to hate them otherwise. Then, we might go too far into seeing them as complex human beings living in a complex system of lies, propaganda, and government control, which would drive home the message that anyone can fall prey to it, and we must always be vigilant, because in real life we are not all good or all bad all the time. But people hated being given a chance to look at Snow’s perspective for fear of him being too sympathetic, apparently, so I think Collins felt the need to play it extra safe here.
And last but not least, this scene:
Drusilla clatters down the steps in platform boots and a skintight jumpsuit emblazoned with the flag of Panem. Her hat, a two-foot pillar of red fur, jauntily tilts over one eye. A smear of yellow frosting trails out of the side of her mouth. Someone had no problem celebrating my birthday.
“Enjoy the cake?” asks Maysilee. The girl has not backed down an inch.
Drusilla looks confused until Plutarch taps his face. “A little something right here.” For lack of a mirror, Drusilla checks her reflection in the train window and cleans off the frosting with her tongue. Her cheek, where Maysilee struck her, looks slightly bruised under her thick layer of makeup.
This scene exists as nothing more than an easy win for Maysilee, and the reader, because there is no way such an image conscious woman is going to step back into the world of the Capitol and all its cameras with frosting on her damn face. I’m sorry, no. I feel like I’m in middle school reading this, where the Big Bad Bully just got their comeuppance and it’s so satisfying and so utterly ridiculous. Why is this coming off like a cartoon? Because we’re supposed to hate Drusilla, hee hee, ha ha!
“Word got out. Magno was fired for negligence and Drusilla broke her hip falling down an escalator,” Plutarch tells me in confidence. “It seems Maysilee was right about those heels."
Aww, haha, yay! A happy and fitting ending for a character we all loved to hate!
Drusilla is one of many examples of how Sunrise on the Reaping is written in such a way that the thinking and feeling are done for you. You don’t have to think about why you hate Drusilla, or even acknowledge it, because you just do. Effie as a character was off-putting when we first met her but grew into more as the series (and film interpretation) progressed, but we would never see that kind of growth from Drusilla because she wasn’t written to be anything other than simple to hate. In fact, she functions as a piece of propaganda herself, representing the reprehensible Capitol versus the devastated Districts, the Entitled versus the Innocent. In a series that has worked to show the complexities of war and humanize those on either side, it’s strange to see this backward step into one-dimensional characters where the good guys are flawless and heroic while the bad guys are garishly awful. See also: the Careers.
"Jesus, it's not that deep. She's just a simple background character. And she's fun! We love to hate her!"
Sure, because she's a hate sink. The problem with this type of character in a narrative specifically critiquing propaganda, a narrative which implores us to “remember who the real enemy is,” is that it kneecaps its own message by portraying anyone as so one-dimensionally despicable, loathsome, and cruel. Everything the Capitol is supposed to “represent.” And yet, didn’t the original series and TBoSaS show us how much the Capitol is also subject to propaganda and is victim to the mentality of absolute control? Wasn’t the point of the rebellion to free everyone from its grip, including the hapless Capitol citizens who’d known no other world? Didn’t we get Cinna and Katniss’s prep team and the Capitol rebels and even Effie to show us these people are human, too?
So why undo that all for Drusilla? Because the story needed a cheap gimmick and someone to re-enforce the, dare I say, propagandized message that we are supposed to hate the Capitol and root for District 12. Haymitch's perfection is contrasted against the backdrop of the Capitol's wickedness. It’s childish, a cheap cop out for a storyteller who has gone to such depths to tell a nuanced story of the complications of war. This kind of characterization might be fun and easy to ignore in any other series, but in one that has set the precedent for examining morality with nuance, it shows the stark difference between SotR and the rest of the series.
The thing with the "we don't know [whatever] because [narrator] doesn't care" mantra is A. it has to be coherent and SC's choices aren't and B. not caring doesn't automatically equal not knowing.
K knows enough to say that not only are Victors children reaped but that they're reaped often. This alone entails enough familiarity with wider Games culture, even if only through osmosis, that she should be able to name examples of it, especially when it happened in the last Quarter Quell.
Ampert was not censored from the record. It would actually have been far more compelling and marginally more coherent in canon if he were. K watches the tapes for the 50th, she watches the replays of the reapings for the 3rd QQ. During training she is surrounded by other Victors and by Games culture. Ampert's name if not his relation to Beetee would have been mentioned at some point. It's the kind of information that's important because it would/should colour her perception of Beetee. It's exactly the kind of thing that she would care about.
This. A thousand times this!
People have made the argument that the reason we don't see any new victors or rebels introduced in SotR is because it "wouldn't make sense that they don't appear in the original trilogy." Uh, except, Ampert doesn't get a mention and no one has any problem with that. The amount of full-on brawls I have had in this fandom when I’ve tried to say that it's weird Ampert didn't come up at all in the OT, that Beetee had a whole ass family and his son got reaped and we are just NOW finding out about this, is unreal. People do Olympic backflips to defend the retroactive choices Collins made in this prequel while also arguing the very same thing we are by saying, "it doesn't make sense to establish new characters that we SHOULD hear about in the OT but don’t." Yeah, exactly. Which is why it makes no sense that Ampert exists now, that Katniss (or at the very least Peeta who actually did care about this type of thing in an active way) would not have known about him. Or found out about it. Because the Capitol loves to gossip about this very thing.
I will never not resent the hell out of Collins for this retroactive addition. I know, they’re her characters and her story and she can do what she wants with it all. But it feels like a betrayal for her to add onto Beetee and Wiress’s stories retroactively in such a careless way, and we're all supposed to think it makes sense and matches what she wrote originally. Because they're "just background characters" no one is really all that attached to. Because “Katniss didn’t care” or “Katniss didn’t need to know” or “it would have discouraged Katniss so everyone hid the truth from her.” Get out of here with that.
It really breaks my heart how many people still think Wiress was some clueless nut who just happened to “figure out” the 75th arena, boiling down to her only contribution. This is especially in the context of conversations surrounding why Haymitch acted the way he did when Katniss suggested she wanted Wiress as an ally, considering we now know Wiress was his mentor. People say that his reaction had nothing to do with his thoughts on Wiress as a person (consider that Catching Fire led us to believe that few of the victors, including Haymitch, held Beetee and Wiress in high regard, so forgive those of us who walked away with that interpretation) but about the fact that he knew Wiress could not help or protect Katniss in the arena. And, sure, they offer, she did figure out the structure of the arena, so at least she wasn’t totally useless. Gee, thanks.
Are we really not considering that, due to Wiress’s proximity to Beetee and Beetee’s proximity to the whole entire plan and to Plutarch, she too would know the schematics of the arena going in? Plutarch even told Katniss about it. “It starts at midnight.” Granted, he couldn’t tell her much, but what do you suppose he was able to tell Beetee and Wiress? Or any other victors deep in on the plot? Especially Beetee, who was vital to the most important part of it. If Beetee had died in the bloodbath or at any other point, Wiress would need to take over and carry out his part with the wire. So yes, she needed to know everything he knew.
So I’d like it if the fandom could give Wiress more credit, and not assume what we know from Katniss to be the whole story. (Remember how much you love making that argument about everything we now learn in SotR?) From Katniss and Peeta’s perspective, Wiress appeared to “discover” the arena because she could not simply have told them without outing the D3 victors, the rebel plot, and Plutarch. So she did it in code and let Katniss put the rest together. Why would Katniss have known any different? But we, the readers, can see the bigger picture, which was Plutarch’s intentional involvement with the rebelling victors and the aid he provided as Gamemaker.
I know it's not the proper meaning of the song, but I always felt that Fourth of July by Sufjan Stevens was a conversation between the higher, spirit self and the lower, material self who doesn't understand why death has to happen. The higher self has that wide perspective and understands that all things are part of a cycle, and patiently tries to explain this to the lower self that struggles to understand the meaning of it all. That's always been my head-canon interpretation of the song on a personal level, but I could just as well interpret it as a conversation between an older self mourning the death of the younger self. Perspective and all that, blah blah.
