I wonder if they hadn’t been planning to, or at least considering the option to, start allowing two victors.
It’s an increase in the reward structure for the districts, taking the edge off any existing simmering local unrest. It gives them the possibility, and perhaps occasionally the reality, of a Games with no losses for a district. AND it gives the Games a whole new set of dynamics to play with for the duration: the friendship, cooperation, rivalry, or potential romance of the district pairs; the possibility of dual victory and the dramas surrounding the districts’ dropping out of the running for it as their tributes die; the inconsistency-bonus of a prize they aren’t paying out every year like clockwork, which isn’t guaranteed but might happen.
The Games are a tradition, but they are also a purpose. A combination of entertainment and control, and with the Capitol and perhaps some of the higher-status districts being as decadent as they are—well, we see how much the spectacle and speculation matter to the people running things.
I think the tail is wagging the dog, in terms of what is being prioritized.
The hype and money and emotional investment are outweighing tradition and control; the Games are running on their own hype, have become their own juggernaut, and an evolutionary leap in the type and complexity of the emotional dramas being generated, and this may well have came about deliberately and been under discussion long before Katniss and Peeta showed up on the scene.
I think this was the Hunger Games’ showrunners deliberately shifting the nature of the Games to become better for the Capitol’s purposes, to create a better and more complex spectacle, to open up more avenues to play with people’s emotions, and they would, in any other year, with most other sets of tributes, have had a rousing success with it.
But then Katniss came along and challenged the dynamic, not by “falling in love” with Peeta, but by allying herself with, and caring for, Rue. And Thresh furthered it, by sparing Katniss. Alliances between districts aren’t a new thing, but the way of it, the display of caring for others in a way that rejected, rather than played into, the rules of the Hunger Games, are.
The other alliances in the Games are people who know they’re going to turn on each other eventually. The other alliances in the Games are people who are okay with killing each other. The career tributes plan on efficiently mopping up all their rivals from other districts as a group and then fighting each other to the death. This is acceptable and accepted. It challenges nothing. It fuels some moderate, predictable drama, whose consistency over the years might have provided the impetus for the Games to change rules and generate some new varieties of interest.
But Katniss makes it clear that Rue is someone she was never going to be willing to kill. She cares for Rue, across districts, and avenges Rue, and gives Rue a funeral and, insofar as it is possible, a burial.
And then Thresh, while not going that far, prioritizes acknowledging and returning the favor for the care given, over his own survival interests. Again, cross-district cooperation with care, not self-interest, at the core of it. Reciprocal cross-district cooperation, and while he doesn’t go as far as Katniss or Rue—“just this once”—he goes far enough.
That is what I think kills the two-tributes-survive possibility.
They have to disarm Katniss.
And they just so happen to have given themselves a means to do it: they can retract the rules and force her to kill Peeta, thus violating the principles she is displaying, or forcing her to let Peeta kill her, and thus removing her from play entirely.
She either becomes a tarnished champion, a just-as-bad killer whose principles weren’t worth her life, or a cautionary tale to sell the moral that caring gets you killed.
If they hadn’t introduced the rule change, they probably would have just assassinated her with the environment, either directly with the environment or playing things to give one of the career tributes an advantage, such as having the mutant dogs attack her with real murderous intent while having them achieve “near misses” with Peeta and Cato.
But the rule change did exist, and they chose to use it as their murder weapon, and they tanked their own credibility in the process without even realizing it. They just came out and said that they’re not going to keep their word.
The mistake wasn’t changing the rules, it was trading their long-term credibility for momentary drama.
It’s something Evil Empires do all the time, actually. It’s amazingly underestimated how much systems need credibility to run; how without it, any incentive they offer their subjects for behavior gets undermined to the point of collapse.
You can’t effectively threaten someone into compliance with something they figure you’re probably going to do anyway.
The Death Star destroying Alderaan didn’t just say “this is the penalty for rebellion,” it said “we’ll blow your planet up if we think that one Rebel claims it as a homeworld,” and how many people are confident in the loyalty of their planet’s entire population?
This sort of thing might solve the problem of the moment, but it does so by telling everyone else that they can never be trusted again.
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