"We need more complex characters!" You guys couldn't even handle Gale Hawthorne.
This is going to be a controversial post and probably very long, but I am and have always been a Gale Hawthorne defender. Not necessarily an apologist but I am a firm believer that the amount of hate he receives through-out the series is largely unwarranted.
I do think this is partially due to the fact that a lot of people who read the books did so when they were too young to fully understand the message. It being marketed as a young adult uprising story, similar to other dystopian series released at the time meant that the critique of politics and war theory wasn’t something entirely comprehensible to the audience it was aimed at. This is partially why Gale versus Peeta is minimised to a simple love triangle when it holds so much more nuance than that.Â
As I said, what a lot of people seem to do when we look at Peeta versus Gale is treat it entirely as a love triangle and minimise the nuance of the two characters and how they work against each other. Both are symbols of the two sides of war and in my opinion are meant to show Katniss a middle ground in her morals and what are the "justified" lengths someone is willing to take in order to achieve relative peace and freedom.
From the beginning of the trilogy we get an idea of the society that these characters live in which I believe is best shown through the tesserae system. Immediately it is apparent to the audience that district twelve is in extreme poverty with food being used as a manipulation tactic by the capitol. Gale, with his father dead and three younger siblings, is forced to have his name in the reaping forty-two times. This sets-up the world view that will shape these two characters and their paths for the rest of the books. They live in a system where you must pick between starving to death or increase your risk of dying in the arena. Gale is quick to condemn the capitol and suggest a way to rebel, saying he and Katniss should run away. Katniss at the beginning of the books has become complicit in a system she cannot change. She doesn’t think that voicing her anger will change anything and so she opts to stay quiet, this causes her to turn down Gale’s wishful request by pointing out the lack of practicality in his plan. Suzanne Collins, with this unsuspecting conversation, foreshadows Gale’s role in the books and in Katniss’ life.
Inherently Peeta serves as Katniss’ moral compass or conscience. There are a lot of subtle ways this dynamic is shown with Peeta. His hope, altruism and kindness shows Katniss one outlook on war and oppression during the course of the books. We see it first when he gives Katniss the bread from the bakery. A small but kind offer with no expectations which isn’t often seen in district twelve due to the society they function in. I also find it interesting that everyone Peeta kills through-out the books is either out of self-defense or mercy. He refuses to engage in violence as that’s what the Capitol wants. This mindset is persistent throughout the books. Peeta isn’t opposed to the revolution but he is firm in his stance that they should always do everything in their power to do the right thing and he believes that violence and sacrifice is not the right thing.
If we look at Peeta as Katniss’ conscience/moral compass, we can look at Gale as her sense of justice and rage. Gale, like Peeta, actually seems to be a very loving character, raising his family after his fathers death, Putting his name into the reaping a multitude of times in order to feed them and his love for Katniss (which he definitely had even if he didn’t do so in the best manner) The first real thing we learn about him past being Katniss' friend is that he is sacrificing his safety to feed his family. From the beginning we know Gale hates the Capitol and wants to rebel and after Katniss goes into the games he is forced to play along with Capitol propaganda, get brutally punished by Peacekeepers and watches district twelve get destroyed. His disdain is only amplified as the books go on and the tyranny of the Capitol persists. He believes that the ends always justify the means, even if it means extreme violence and sacrifice. He is incredibly angry and having not met anyone from the Capitol like Katniss and Peeta, struggles to humanise the casualties of the war.
Both of these outlooks are shown very clearly in the Mockingjay. Despite Peeta not agreeing with a violent rebellion, what I feel convinces Katniss to partake in it is when she sees Peeta on TV after being kidnapped by the Capitol. As I’ve established I feel Peeta is representing her conscience and what is considered the “right thing” to do. Katniss is convinced to join the rebellion in order to save her conscience, Peeta. Joining the rebellion, which Gale is a major part of, is the first time I think we see Suzanne Collins trying to convey that neither side is “right” and that to win a war there needs to be a middle ground.
Katniss is us as we watch both viewpoints and decide where we fall on this spectrum. We are shown the downsides of both ideologies. With Peeta getting hijacked and Gale getting dubbed the "Prim Reaper" by fans. As I’ve said Peeta isn’t un-political, but contrary to Gale he tries to rebel without violence but manipulation of the media. We see Peeta waving out the window of the train trying to charm Panem and again in the interview he plays along with Caesar's jokes. He aims to humanise himself and Katniss to Capitol citizens when he mentions the crush he has on her. He does so again when he says his infamous “if it wasn’t for the baby” line. Now I could give an in depth discussion on the commentary behind this line alone but not today. The main point I’m getting at is that Peeta knows how to play the media. We see that after this line, suddenly the Capitol citizens no longer agree with the Quarter Quell or the idea of the hunger games.
Peeta becomes a beloved figure because he does not blatantly voice his rebellion. It’s so subtle that the Capitol Citizens see him as complying to the regime with a joking smile as he discusses something as mundane as the smell of the showers. He talks about how the showers in the Capitol are much nicer. He is playing up to the idea that Capitol citizens believe, that they should feel lucky to be where they are and be treated so nicely. They are not aware, unlike Snow and the other tributes, that everything Peeta says in an act of subtle rebellion. He comes across as humble and charming and a little cheeky. In TBOSAS Snow comes up with ideas to get more people to watch the games. A quote directly from him explains why Peeta’s tactic works so well.
“If we need people to watch we should be letting them get closer to the tributes before the games. To make the stakes personal.”
Peeta never clearly insults or condemns the Capitol making it so no one can recognise his want for a revolution. He becomes personable and likable in order to plant the seeds in the minds of the viewers by being outwardly complicit yet lacing it with a message. When he says that he can never be with his crush because they’ve both gone into the arena together, it saddens the citizens who are rooting for him because even if he does win, his crush dies in the arena, and if he doesn’t he never gets to be with her to begin with. To the viewers it's a movie and you root for a character (much like it is to us as the audience) but in their world, their favourite tribute dying doesn’t hold weight in the same way it doesn’t hold weight to us because at the end of the day they are fictional characters. This perpetuates what we already know, that the Capitol citizens are so desensitised that the tributes aren't real lives or people. There is definitely a message behind this but this post is already ridiculously long so I’ll save that for another time.
We know that the citizens don’t react well to condemnation when Johanna and Beetee speak negatively upon the Quarter Quell and we hear the crowd getting angry. Peeta takes the same approach that garnered him sympathy and love in his first interview when mentioning his crush on Katniss. In "Catching Fire" he says the line “We’ve been luckier than most. I’d have no regrets at all.” This is him once again playing humble and lovable and he makes sure never to blame or speak negatively about the Capitol or the Games themselves. When he says “if it weren’t for the baby.” it doesn’t come across as rebellious but as a genuine unfortunate coincidence. Peeta is an adored undercover Rebel who the media and Capitol Citizens trust to be loyal and well-meaning and also put on a good show
Whilst this tactic worked well in Catching Fire, with Capitol Citizens needing to be mollified, not because of someone speaking negatively about them but because they are genuinely enraged at the circumstances, it is used against him when he is hijacked and he is forced to ask for a Ceasefire in an interview with Snow. Because he is now seen as a trusted Capitol Darling who is known to perform well on TV, no one suspects that he might be saying these things under duress. Seeing this interview pushes Katniss to be the symbol of the revolution. Her symbolic conscience is having his own non-violent form of rebellion used against him and also getting tortured and in order to save him she realises that sometimes violence is necessary.
SOMETIMES being the key point and why Gale is there to show that the other side of the spectrum is not good either. I feel like a lot of people like to point out that Peeta also lived in district twelve and didn’t react in the same way that Gale did. I need to point out that whilst both of them grew up in poor conditions, Peeta lived in the Merchant’s village as the Baker’s son. This is not to say that he didn’t have a hard life. Katniss learns that they couldn’t afford most of the ingredients they baked with and lived off of stale left-overs but we can also infer that the family was never so poor that they were on the brink of starvation like Katniss and Gale have faced. (The way I’m speaking implies that I think the food conditions for anyone in twelve or the other districts were okay. They were not, I’m speaking relative to the world and characters in this conversation.) Gale, in order to put food on the table had to sacrifice his chance of safety from the arena and have his name in the reaping forty-two times and I think this gives an interesting differential between the two when we’re discussing why they took such different paths in their reaction and stance on the rebellion.
Gale believes that anything they have to do in order to take down the Capitol is necessary, even if that means sacrificing people along the way. He is one of the leading voices of the rebellion and chosen to be Katniss’ right hand when she agrees to become the symbol for it. He is the total extreme of the measures one is willing to take and we see Katniss struggle with this a lot. Suzanne Collins took Peeta out of Katniss’ life in the books as a way to explore Gale’s ideology more. With her conscience gone, it leaves Katniss to decide on her own what she deems just action in this fight. The longer Peeta is away the more violence we see Katniss use. When the rebellion goes to district eight, we see her fighting as the circumstance permits. The difference between Katniss and Gale is that Gale doesn’t see the Capitol citizens as people but as numbers to win the war. I honestly don’t think this is absolutely crazy for him to do. Gale, unlike Katniss and Peeta, has never met anyone from the Capitol, and hasn't had the opportunity to humanise them like they have. Given that the Capitol are the people who view the deaths of the children from the district as entertainment and who put them in that environment, I find it hard not to be sympathetic to his outlook. It is not to say it is the right outlook but one I think can be understood.
There's a point in the book where Katniss comes across a Capitol citizen and when she goes to speak in order to warn people of their arrival. Katniss shoots her through the heart. She does this to the woman because if she doesn’t, they will almost certainly be caught, tortured and killed. Before she does this she describes how the woman looks. She isn’t just a number to Katniss, she is a human who she has killed. This is one of the best examples of the middle ground of the book and poses a question. Was it morally justified for Katniss to kill this woman? Most of us would say yes given the alternative. This is Katniss straying towards Gale’s view where the ends justify the means but the description of her beforehand, the humanising, that’s Peeta pulling her back to the middle. Yes, the woman had to be killed in order to protect Katniss and the rebels but she also acknowledges that it was A PERSON she killed, not a just another tally mark in aid of ending the Capitol.
It’s now time to discuss what we’ve all been waiting for. Prim Reaper.
Now, this is one of those conversations that I don’t think I’ll win anyone over if you don’t already agree with it to begin with. I do not think that Gale is the person to blame for Prim’s death. He was definitely complicit in it with the creation of the bomb, but if that’s the reason everyone blames him for her death, why not blame Beetee too? I also think it's worthy to note that Gale did not authorise the attack that killed Prim. We learn that he didn’t even know it was a plan, and it places doubt on whether it was actually Gale’s technology that killed her in the first place. The reason Suzanne Collins killed Prim was to show, like with Peeta getting hijacked, that too much of one ideology will eventually result in failure. Killing Prim, a character we know, rather than a group of random healers, portrays this enough for both Katniss and us as the audience to entirely rule out Gale as a plausible option in both his war tactics and as a love interest. Prim’s death is when Katniss, through personal loss, realises that whilst violence is necessary, sacrifice to the extent that Gale views as sufficient is no longer justified but rage fuelled vengeance.
To me, blaming Gale for Prim’s death is like blaming the gun rather than the person who pulled the trigger. Gale is as much of a victim of the Capitol as anyone else in the books. He becomes a ruthless revolutionary not because he is a horrible bloodthirsty monster but because he is a teenager raised in a society where he’s always been forced to make sacrifices in order to keep himself and his family alive. If the Capitol and the games did not exist, Gale would never have been in an environment where he had to become so desensitised. Is he a good person? No, but is he a bad one? Definitely not. He is there to show how any extreme ultimately results in disaster, as is Peeta.
The scene where Katniss shoots Coin and leaves Snow to be mauled to death by the citizens is where this attitude is best shown. The suggestion of a game for the Capitol children is completely obscene to Katniss. She knows that Coin is extremely similar to Snow. One could say they’re two sides of the same coin…! She chooses to kill Coin in order to achieve peace. These are the two ideologies finally settling in the middle ground. Ending the cycle of violence to achieve peace with one final violent act. It’s hard to predict how the books would’ve concluded without Gale. Would Katniss have rebelled so publicly in catching fire were it not for Gale’s influence? Would she agree to be the Mockingjay? Would Peeta’s rescue mission be successful if Gale hadn’t been the first to volunteer for the team? Would Katniss have shot that citizen or let their location be given up and have it ultimately result in their death and torture? Would she have killed Coin or let the tyrannical cycle continue? Obviously I can’t answer any of these questions because we simply don’t know what the books or Katniss would look like without Gale’s presence because he is important. He is fundamental in the war efforts, whether his actions are ethical or not.
I think the final note I want to leave is what Katniss thinks the final time we see Gale in the trilogy. Katniss, right before she goes to kill Snow and ultimately decides to kill Coin, speaks to Gale in the aftermath of Prim’s death. He hands her the arrow she’s meant to use, which I think is symbolic, the final act of violence handed off to her by her sense of vengeance before they never see each other again. After he leaves she thinks.Â
“I want to call him back and tell him that I was wrong. That I'll figure out a way to make peace with this. To remember the circumstances under which he created the bomb. Take into account my own inexcusable crimes. Dig up the truth about who dropped the parachutes. Prove it wasn’t the rebels. Forgive him. But since I can’t, I guess I’ll just have to deal with the pain.”Â
Katniss can’t forgive him because it’s just too personal, but she understands why he did what he did, knows that he did what he felt he had to do in the situation he was dealt. Do you really think Suzanne Collins aimed to villainise Gale? I don’t think so. She is too complex a writer to make us hate a victim of oppression. Katniss’ thoughts after their final interaction doesn’t scream to me that she thinks Gale is a villain of the story. Just another victim who ultimately went too far in their attempt to reach their goal. The line “Remember who the real enemy is.” is so consistent through-out the series that it baffles me that people have decided they hate Gale more than Coin or Snow. Gale Hawthorne is by no means a perfect person, no one in this book is. But he is not a bad person either, he’s simply a boy who couldn't see the middle ground through his need for vengeance against an oppressive power.
All that being said I may have completely missed and I am entirely open to hearing opposing opinions of this discussion. These books are so complex and there is no way I could do an entire in depth analogy of Gale or Peeta or their environment. That being said I hop you enjoyed my attempt to articulate my thoughts on Gale