Possibly a hot take: I understand why the “there was no choice it was always Peeta” talking point is so popular because of stupid movie marketing and the fact that in the books Gale is simply never genuinely believable as a rival love interest…BUT I think we should never downplay the choice in Katniss being with Peeta in the end because Katniss would hate that.
It’s not necessarily choice over Gale but choice over hopelessness, choice over death, choice to find a reason to live over letting herself rot in her losses and pain.
It’s being able to actually choose him when she couldn’t before. Katniss tells us many times that the lack of agency she feels is the part of the star-crossed lovers act that hurts most, maybe most notably when she says: “I could do a lot worse than Peeta. That’s not really the point, is it though?” The point is the loss of choice about who to be with/if she wants to be with anyone, something she told us in THG is one of the only choices she ever thought she’d actually get to have in life.
So with that history, it’s not that romantic to me to just purely say Everlark was inevitable, they’re soulmates, it was always going to be them.
I think there’s something delicious and thematically rich about choosing of your own free will to have the thing you didn’t want chosen for you, and it says that without the freedom to make your own decision to love, that love can’t be truly real.
Yes, she tells us that this would have happened anyway, but I think part of what that statement is meant to communicate is that this would have been her choice anyway, not just destiny or soulmatism or whatever. I think it’s important to her that we know she had agency in what her life became.
dailybridgerton
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
kianamaiart
jacobvanloon
gracieabrams
ellievsbear
