yall. the difference between Haymitch and Katniss narrating is about priorities in observation
Katniss observes like a hunter. anything that isnt a threat or a potential meal isnt important. she watches for movements, strengths and weaknesses, recognizeable physical details so she can spot her target again later.
Haymitch observes like a village kid. who is whos father or brother or ex boyfriend, who picked a fight with whom, who has which niche skill that he might need later. he keeps track of everyone the way you can only learn from regularly gossiping in a place where there isn't much else to do
They both tell you what they think is important. for Katniss its survival. for Haymitch its community.
i've been trying to pinpoint why haydove does not work for me, and I think it's john steinbeck's fault. In his book East of Eden, Steinbeck writes about a relationship between two characters, Aron and Abra. (Warning for heavy East of Eden spoilers)
Aron represents Abel. He embodies everything good. He is handsome, kind, and pure, and he believes the best in people. He builds them up in his mind to be perfect. Essentially, he puts them on a pedestal. To him, they can do no wrong.
He constructs an image of college, and when he goes to school, he finds he hates it because it is different than how he pictured it to be, and he wants to return home. He grieves his mistake and isolates himself. He wants to become a priest, yet he is uncomfortable when told a woman who runs a brothel attends his services. To him, the church is a pure place, where everyone is free of sin. That is how he goes about life— he creates perfect images of people that are not true.
He constructs an idea of his own mother, whom he believes to be dead, as a golden woman, a woman who has never sinned in her life. When he finds out she is alive and runs a brothel, he enlists in the army and gets himself killed. He cannot cope with the fact the images he has built of these people are not the truth.
As a child, he falls in love with a girl named Abra. Abra's namesake is a quote from a novel:
Abra was ready ere I called her name; And though I called another, Abra came.
It is revealed later that Abra's father wanted a boy, so when she was born a girl, he felt he had called for someone else, and she arrived. Hence why he named her Abra, but Aron does this, too. He calls for Abra, but he does not call for the true Abra. He "called another", as in, the idealized version of her.
Aron spends his life pining after Abra. They grow up together, but around his teenage years, he says he wants to be a priest. He crafts this image of her as a pure woman. When he goes off to the college that he found he hated, he begins to write to Abra. He sends her salacious letters, dripping with want and desire based on how perfect she is. He crafts her to be this woman she is not. He believes that she is composed of only goodness.
This makes Abra uncomfortable. She confesses to Lee that she fears Aron does not love her, but the perfect idea of her:
“’Course I like him. I’m going to be his wife. But I want him to like me too. And how can he, if he doesn’t know anything about me? I used to think he knew me. Now I’m not sure he ever did.”
“Maybe he’s going through a hard time that isn’t permanent. You’re a smart girl—very smart. Is it pretty hard trying to live up to the one—in your skin?”
“I’m always afraid he’ll see something in me that isn’t in the one he made up. I’ll get mad or I’ll smell bad—or something else. He’ll find out.”
“Maybe not,” said Lee. “But it must be hard living the Lily Maid, the Goddess-Virgin, and the other all at once. Humans just do smell bad sometimes.”
She moved toward the table. “Lee, I wish—”
“Don’t spill flour on my floor,” he said. “What do you wish?”
“It’s from my figuring out. I think Aron, when he didn’t have a mother—why, he made her everything good he could think of.”
“That might be. And then you think he dumped it all on you.” She stared at him and her fingers wandered delicately up and down the blade of the knife. “And you wish you could find some way to dump it all back.”
“Yes.”
“Suppose he wouldn’t like you then?”
“I’d rather take a chance on that,” she said. “I’d rather be myself.”
She continues on to talk about the letters, and how Aron has fabricated an image that overlooks all the bad she could do:
“No. When he had all that about going into the church and not getting married, I tried to fight with him, but he wouldn’t.”
“Not get married to you? I can’t imagine that.”
“Cal, he writes me love letters now—only they aren’t to me.”
“Then who are they to?”
“It’s like they were to—himself.”
And when she finally burns his letters, she says this to Lee:
“I burned all of Aron’s letters.”
“Did he do bad things to you?”
“No. I guess not. Lately I never felt good enough. I always wanted to explain to him that I was not good.”
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?”
“I guess so. Maybe that’s it.”
And they break up. Abra felt suffocated by the Perfect Image Aron created. Essentially, Aron called Abra's name, but another came. The real Abra, not the image he crafted in her likeness.
And Haymitch does the same thing to Lenore Dove.
From the moment we meet Lenore Dove, Haymitch tells us how he's afraid of her doing something rebellious:
“That’s a raven. The bird from my name poem,” she says softly. “It’s the biggest songbird there is.”
“He’s an impressive fellow,” I observe.
“She is. She’s smart as a whip, too. Did you know they use logic to solve things?”
“Got me beat there,” I have to admit.
“And nobody tells them what to say. That bird is who I want to be when I grow up. Someone who says whatever they think is right, no matter what.”
No matter what. That’s the part I’m worried about. That she might be saying something rash. Or even doing something beyond dangerous words.
Haymitch has seen the orange paint on the flint striker, the orange of her lips, and the orange on her nails. She has already rebelled by the time he leaves for the reaping. In fact he knows she has rebelled as a child, and it's important enough for him to press her on it:
It was her, though. Both times. I know it in my heart, even though she’s never quite admitted it to me or her uncles. She says all the Covey girls are a mystery, it’s half their charm. When I press her, she just laughs and says if it’s true, that information could put me in danger, and if it’s false, what does it matter? “Didn’t do much good anyway, did it? Clay’s dead and the reaping’s alive and well.”
Since that year, she’s had a clean record.
He's convinced that she doesn't make trouble any more. He's convinced that she doesn't rebel:
Comments like that make me feel like she’s still got the potential to make trouble, and that side of her is just laying low.
He has crafted this image of a reformed girl. He believes in the Perfect Image of her. He cannot believe that she would rebel again. In the phone call scene, he does not believe she sang to be rebellious. He believes, first, it was his doing:
“Arrested you? When? What for?” Is this because I just joked about the Peacekeepers buying white liquor? Are they taking out my waywardness on her?
And even after he's told, it's still not rebellion, rather, her trying to get herself killed:
“You? It’s entirely my fault you’re there! And I know I’m why you got that score. I as good as killed you, and that’s not something I can live with.”
And so she’s doing what she can to get herself killed? Now I’m mad.
And even still, he doesn't believe it was rebellion or a conspiracy to draw up attention:
It’s not like she’s part of some big conspiracy, so, hopefully, they won’t use methods to force her to talk.
Even in the reaping scene, his first instinct is to stop her from rebelling, not to help her free Woodbine:
This will not end well. Should I get in there? Pull Lenore Dove away? Or will I only make the situation worse? I feel like my knees are glued to the ground.
Rebellion does not work with the Perfect Image he has crafted of her. It cannot be true, because to him, she has a clean record. That part of her is in the past.
Abra, too, felt that Aron once knew her. Haymitch knew Lenore Dove, too, but he has crafted this Perfect Image of her. Her actions do not align with what he tells us. He does not know of her current rebellion, and rebellion worries him:
She worries me, and I’m an Abernathy.
Abra grows to feel trapped by the Perfect Image Aron created. She feels she cannot act. She must hold her breath, she must be conscious of how she smells, she cannot do anything bad, else risk the image Aron has created of her. She knows he loves the image, not her.
So when Haymitch insists she has a clean record, she has the potential to rebel but hasn't, and we know that isn't true from the orange paint on her finger nails alone, that she has continued to rebel, it's him painting this Perfect Image of Lenore Dove.
He does not love her, he loves the image of her. The non-rebellious, sometimes impulsive but never on a rebellious level, girl. Not the Lenore Dove we get to know through Maysilee or even the scenes she, herself, is in.
In his time away at the Games, just like Aron's time away at college, he thinks about his girl. He crafts this image of her more solidly. It's why she feels so dead-wife. Everything comes back to her. The bunnies, the mockingjays, the angels, the silk scarves, the bird songs, the flowers, the porcupines, etc.
He forgoes planning to think of her, escaping into the comfort of the perfect image of her, as Aron did Abra. Aron refused to go out or meet people. He would picture Abra, write to her. It became his only hobby:
I should be planning my strategy in the arena, but I just keep thinking about Lenore Dove, and how much I love her, and wondering if she’s home by now and how she’s doing.
He puts her no where near strangers, no where near crowds, only where he believes she would be safe:
I allow myself a moment with Lenore Dove, imagining her in the Meadow among her flock of geese or watching me on the ancient television Tam Amber manages to keep functional. Not on the square, where anyone can gather to see huge projections of the Games, but privately in the Covey’s funny, crooked house. Forbidden by her uncles to leave. Distraught, but unbruised, unbeaten, unbroken, and safe at home.
He credits his own resourcefulness to her:
I press my lips to the flint striker, hoping Lenore Dove sees me, knows this is a thank-you to her for saving me from the mutts.
He becomes sad when her gift becomes useless, despite needing to survive in a death match game:
Almost makes me sad, seeing Lenore Dove’s gift become obsolete so quickly.
His all-consuming idealization of her overshadows the fact he's currently being hunted. He is preoccupied with this perfect image of her every second he is at his version of Aron's college.
I reach for Lenore Dove for solace, knowing she must be keeping vigil at her television set, living through my last hours with me. It’s much worse for her, really. The helplessness. Thinking of her watching me makes me want to be brave, or at least appear to be.
All he can do is obsess over her. And yet, he doesn't know she does the things that worry him.
It is natural to remember someone through rose-colored glasses, like how Katniss remembers Peeta in d13, but when the "Perfect Image" of Peeta falls, they work through it. However, Katniss develops this image after Peeta is taken from her, not while she's lying with her lips on his neck under a raven's tree. He has the rose-colored image of her before she's even taken from him.
And it wouldn't work. Just like Abra and Aron, their relationship would suffocate both of them. The pedestal would fall.
He called Lenore Dove's name, and another came.
Lenore Dove was ready ere I called her name; And though I called another, Lenore Dove came.
these two instances really stick out to me for their similarities and their differences.
In Sunrise on the Reaping, we see Haymitch struggle with his inaction and what it means about his acquiescence to the Capitol. He failed to act and fight alongside someone he loved and it inspired in him a deep shame.
"Plutarch's voice taunts me. "The question is, why didn't you?" I can't say I'm not a killer anymore. That leaves brainwashed or cowardly."
As a consequence of his inaction, Maysilee (and Maritte) have made themselves direct targets of the gamemakers an act that foolishly leaves Haymitch with only one true opponent, Silka.
Maysilee's death and Haymith's compliance to Capitol authority haunt the choices he makes as he prepares to play the role the Capitol demands of him, in the hopes of of keeping his remaining loved ones safe.
-----
However, in Mockingjay, we see a different kind of inaction. Here is Peeta, a boy he loves - against all effort and against his better judgement. A boy he failed and abandoned to the Capitol just as surely as he abandoned his Newcomers. As he abandoned Wellie. As he abandoned his friends in District 12. All for a purpose, but all with the same sense of failure and loss.
But he gets him back. He gets his boy back. And he knows what this means for the girl, even if she's too out of sorts and ill-prepared to admit it herself. In bringing Peeta back, Haymitch will get Katniss back as well.
He'll have his family in one place. Safe. Away from the Capitol. Away from Snow. Away from the fire and the poison and the snakes.
And then he's faced with a Peeta that is filled with Capitol poison. He sees the one thing he can't even begin to comprehend. And he freezes. And, if Boggs hadn't been there, it would have cost him everything.
----
Two entirely different moments of inaction from Haymitch. For entirely different reasons. But I feel that these two moments likely haunt him just the same.
I keep hearing people say “we all fell for the propaganda” because we believed what was on the recording Katniss and Peeta watched in catching fire, but I need y’all to understand, there’s a difference between buying into propaganda and just being lied to.
Yes, they used the manipulated footage to spin the story in favor of the Capitol, but anyone that didn’t have all the information would have to take it at face value. That’s what’s so scary about it! The only one alive who knew exactly what happened from start to finish–no cuts or edits–was forced to keep quiet under the threat of anyone he remotely cared about being killed. Even if you watched the games live you’d only have whatever the gamemakers decided to show. Maybe if you were paying close attention you’d catch that some events in the recap were out of order, but what can you do with that? Is that enough to clue someone in on how big a picture they’re really getting?
If you want to see what falling for propaganda looks like, look at Effie. She’s a very empathetic person, but even someone like her can be convinced that hunger games are a ‘necessary evil’. Right after acknowledging that Haymitch is a human being, and that his position couldn’t have been easy, she says “But they really are for the greater good, the hunger games.” It’s like she’s trying to convince herself, or justify the system she’s participating in. The whole spiel in chapter 13 sounds like it could’ve been taken word-for-word from some kind of political ad, probably something that’s been drilled into her head since childhood.
I feel like the theme of propaganda in sotr is a lot more nuanced than “it’s easy to fall for”, it’s more about how it’s used. In the Capitol it’s saying the games are what we have to do to keep the peace (the same conclusion snow came to in tbosas), and in the districts it’s saying the Capitol is all-powerful and resistance is pointless. You can see the effects of that even on Haymitch in his thoughts throughout the book. It’s a valuable lesson because if we know how propaganda works it’s easier to spot it for ourselves. I think that’s what Suzanne was hoping for when she wrote it. The hunger games series has always been a reflection of real life, a way to make our society’s problems more visible by letting us detach and see it from an outside perspective.
Anyways I’ve been yapping for too long, thanks for reading this if you got to the end!
Suzanne Collins has a lot of subtle details in the Hunger Games Books. She also double dips details and meanings. What I’m tryin to say is:
I don’t think Haymitch’s Birthday being Reaping Day is just about making him a sorrier story. Or about compounding on July 4th itself.
The Reaping is a Lottery (SO to Shirley Jackson) and what else in US history is a lottery that regularly takes the young and feeds them to horrors they didn’t vote for? The Draft.
And how did the U.S. make the Draft ‘random’ during Vietnam? They picked Birthdays. (The order the days were pick=the order the boys were recruited until no more were needed)
There’s something I have to get off my chest, and that’s the handling of Beetee, Wiress, and Ampert on Sunrise on the Reaping. This critical analysis is rather long, and you can feel free to skip it if you don’t care for critical commentary on a book you’ve really enjoyed. If you are interested, read on.
[Critical analysis, and spoilers, of Sunrise on the Reaping under the cut.]
Wiress
To save some space in this post, I’ll start by linking an essay I posted on AO3, titled An Analysis on the Missed Opportunity of Wiress's Moral Complexity in Sunrise on the Reaping. In this essay I analyze, and lament, the flattening of moral nuance in the portrayal of Wiress and her Games in SotR.
Beetee
Beetee’s storyline felt like one of the biggest loose threads in the whole narrative of Sunrise on the Reaping. I don’t think the retcon bothers most readers, because it’s a background element and it moves the plot along. But for me, it’s one of the most glaring, and one that I wish Collins had taken better care to craft.
We understand that the narrative needed to bring the District 3 rebels and Haymitch together. Providing Beetee with a traumatic backstory that rivals Haymitch’s is a bonus. But there are so many subtler ways this could have been thoughtfully accomplished.
The notion of a victor’s son being reaped has precedent, as Katniss mentions:
Victors’ children have been in the ring before. It always causes a lot of excitement and generates talk about how the odds are not in that family’s favor. But it happens too frequently to just be about odds.
So, it turns out Beetee is one of those unlucky victors, a fact that most certainly should have been mentioned in Catching Fire or Mockingjay and pointedly was not. Why?
Because it hadn’t been invented yet.
Getting Beetee and Haymitch together
We don’t know much about Beetee’s backstory, and from a narrative perspective it makes just as much sense to reap his son as anyone else’s, given that of all the mentors he’s the one most likely to possess knowledge of the structure of the arena and how it operates. But it also does something else: it gives him, a mentor from another district, the chance to cross paths with Haymitch and hash out the arena plan when he would have had no realistic pathway for doing so otherwise. We’ve got Wiress stationed as Haymitch’s mentor on one end for such things as knocking out the power for Rebel Talk, but there must be a reason for Beetee, one of the masters behind the plan, to gain access to a District 12 tribute, and what better way than putting him on the training room floor as punishment?
We have to accept that the demands of the narrative entail that Beetee needed a plausible avenue to speak with Haymitch, and a plausible motivation to destroy the arena, since Haymitch could not have accomplished this task on his own. What I can’t swallow is how it was rolled out to us.
“And no doubt you’re wondering why I’m here, Haymitch.” Beetee removes his glasses and polishes them on his shirt. “It’s because I’m being punished for coming up with a plan to sabotage the Capitol’s communication system. I’m too valuable to kill, but my son is disposable.”
We remember from Mockingjay that he “redesigned the underground network that transmits all the programming” years after this takes place, making this a throwback of sorts, but it raises too many questions. After he had demonstrated the intention and capability of sabotaging such an important piece of infrastructure, why would the Capitol allow him to continue working on such projects afterwards? Why would they allow such unmitigated access to their tech, designs, and infrastructure after what he had done?
We’re supposed to understand that he’s the Only Genius in Panem (he’s not; the Capitol has loads of brilliant scientists working on tech, communications, development, etc.) and that he has megawatt plot armor (the book refers to this over and over as he’s “too valuable to kill”). Most importantly, he’s alive by Catching Fire, so we know they don’t kill him. But the fact that he continued to do his work for the Capitol and was able to successfully rebel years later suggests that he has no history of treason. The trust they have in this man is astounding, especially because, as the book beats us over the head with, we know “how Snow works.” If his redesign of the underground network was an act for the rebels that we’re learning had failed in this past attempt, it’s even more inconceivable that the Capitol would have allowed him continued access and trust given that he had already committed treason. And not once, but twice by SotR’s end.
“I’m too valuable to kill, but my son is disposable.”
This feels like a blunt instrument hammering the obvious to the reader in a not very satisfying way. Yes, your son is disposable. So why take the risk of putting him in danger? It strains plausibility that Beetee ever would have.
In other words, it’s another example of how SotR is stitched together with the original trilogy in ways that make sense on the surface but not under the hood. Of course the brains behind the 75th arena breakout would have attempted something like this before, and had good cause to try. And I think we can accept that without much issue. What I cannot buy is how someone who knew the risks of what he was attempting, and knew the stakes in no uncertain terms, would be willing to do what he did with a son who’s just reached reaping age. How convenient. (Are we to assume his communications breach had been going on for a while and that they waited until Ampert was 12 to dole out the punishment?)
Besides giving Beetee parallel trauma to later-Haymitch and emphasizing Snow’s cruelty, which did not need further emphasis, the purpose of this was to place Beetee in Haymitch’s path. In other words, it’s contrived, and it does not respect the deep intelligence of the man that has been saddled with being the Tech Expert Archetype ™ in the story.
"At the time, I was just thinking of the science of it all."
I know it’s not fair to hold the books to something stated in the movies, but all the same, the sentiment remains. This line now makes no sense, because the science of this particular project would have had a different gravity to it considering it earned his son a reaping. And if he’d been involved in treason that had rendered such painful consequences all this time, the archetype of the scientist getting caught up in their work before realizing what they’ve brought into being is a little less believable, because he definitely should have understood the stakes at this point.
Crouching Rebel Hidden Family
I think the whole scene in the training room would have made more sense if Beetee had been subtle about what he was getting punished for, and without telling (expositing, info-dumping-real-quick) everything we need to know about WHY he was there. Haymitch doesn’t need to know. Hell, Beetee probably doesn’t know the Capitol’s intentions, entirely. And we don’t really need a callback to his redesign of the underground network/communication system hacking. It could have been anything else, and it would have made perfect sense. The point is that Beetee was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing, and Ampert was a warning. Not a full takedown, just a warning.
Perhaps it could have gone something like:
“Hello, Haymitch.”
“Hello,” I say.
“Impressive thing you did out there.” He adjusts his glasses. “The parade. What happened in Twelve. It was very brave, what you did.”
“Thanks,” I say. How did he witness any of what happened in 12? It wasn’t aired to the rest of Panem. And for that matter, why is a victor, a mentor, here operating a training booth?
He must see this question in my eyes, because he says, “I’m here to demonstrate how to turn a potato into a battery.” He lowers his voice and glances past my shoulder. “But as for why I’m really here, I suspect it has something to do with the Capitol detecting me digging around in places I shouldn’t have been. I can’t be certain, but I can reasonably guess that’s why my [son/nephew] was reaped. As punishment. As a warning.”
“Oh,” I say. I’m not really sure what he wants me to say.
He looks over to Ampert, and I follow his gaze. “My presence during his training is an essential component, I should think. And, if there were any doubts as to whether I’m being targeted for my breach, this is my answer.”
This establishes that Plutarch has a link to Beetee and is feeding him information behind the scenes. We don’t see it, because Plutarch and Beetee appear to work independently with Haymitch, but both are most certainly in contact with each other. That at least answers the question of why Beetee requested Haymitch’s presence at his booth, why Haymitch stood out to him as an acceptable agent for hacking the arena. And I like the idea that we don’t really know what Beetee was up to. Was he working for the rebellion? Was he just digging around because he was curious? Something else? It makes his character more nuanced if his motivations aren’t explicitly spelled out for the audience.
Having Ampert as a nephew instead of a son solves two problems: One, it retains the impact of the emotional trauma (suppose they were very close, suppose Ampert spent a lot of time growing up with his victor uncle, like a son) while removing Beetee from having made the overwhelming and nonsensical gamble of raising a family when we know Snow is vindictive as hell AND that Beetee is one of the biggest threats against the Capitol this side of the Dark Days. It was pretty much a given that this would happen to him. Snow has dispatched family for way lesser reasons. And two, it absolves Collins of the need to contrive a “reason” for him to stay alive for the wife and unborn baby that Snow will almost certainly also terminate. If it’s a nephew, the message is still clear and the emotional impact is still heavy, but Beetee is not in control of what his siblings choose to do or what becomes of their children. He is only in control of his own fate, and he knows he’s chosen the side of the rebellion, for better or worse. But will Snow stop at targeting his siblings’ children to make a point? Of course not. Emotional impact retained.
Katniss says something early on that stuck with me:
I know I’ll never marry, never risk bringing a child into the world. Because if there’s one thing being a victor doesn’t guarantee, it’s your children’s safety. My kids’ names would go right into the reaping balls with everyone else’s. And I swear I’ll never let that happen.
You’re telling me that Beetee, a man who’s committed actual treason and is highly connected to the Capitol for his work, is not only going to risk having a family knowing what his work entails, but is also going to deliver this as an explanation for such imprudent actions on his part?
“I took a risk. I didn’t suspect that I’d been found out until the reaping. The timing was calculated. If I had known, I could have killed myself, and Ampert would be safe at home. That is how Snow works.”
You don’t say, seeing as how the whole book hammers this point home continuously. We saw Snow do this and worse in other books, too. Why use Beetee to communicate something so patently obvious? It does a disservice to him and to the audience. The fact that he then goes on to father another child with an offscreen wife when we know what becomes of the living family members of anyone Snow wants to punish, to say nothing of the victor’s purge in Mockingjay, suggests…well. That they got the Ma and Sid treatment back home. So what was the point of their inclusion in the story? Wouldn’t their deaths only fuel Beetee’s desire to off himself even more?
Personally, I think Beetee’s renewed commitment to the rebellion after SotR, coupled with the need to be there for Wiress, would have been more than enough explanation for why he continues living.
Allies
Then there’s this. In Catching Fire, Katniss reports:
I shrug. “But I don’t want Brutus. I want Mags and District Three.”
“Of course you do.” Haymitch sighs and orders a bottle of wine. “I’ll tell everybody you’re still making up your mind.”
Haymitch’s reaction now makes little sense here, considering how vital all three were to him in his Games, and considering how profoundly he had shaped them in turn. We’re meant to understand, given the prior scene with Peeta explaining the Nuts and Volts dynamic, that Haymitch sees these three as weak, elderly, infirm, or irrelevant. We’re certainly led to interpret them that way at first. That now seems cruel and heartless given how important the three were to Haymitch, and him to them.
If we want to be charitable, there are a couple of ways to read this that tie his reaction to SotR. Perhaps Haymitch was sighing in response to this being yet another parallel between him and Katniss. Perhaps Haymitch had intended to distance himself from the three over the years, feeling guilty for his role in their fate, and fears rekindling his connection with them again. But the oversight here still stands out. Especially considering that Haymitch should have known how vital Beetee and Wiress would have to be in the plot to break out of the 75th arena. He was already going to work with them on this and knew that Katniss would have to ally with them regardless of who else she picked.
In other words, of all the things that hadn’t been invented until this prequel, Beetee’s backstory is one of the most glaring examples for me. If things had been presented a little more subtly, I think it could have worked. I would love to know how Collins explains to herself (and would explain to the readers) why Ampert and family never came up in Catching Fire or Mockingjay, despite how incredibly important Ampert turned out to be for the early rebellion attempts. His unifying presence was a direct contrast to the notion of district versus district and laid vital bricks in the rebellion.
Which brings me to:
Ampert
We all loved Ampert. He’s like SotR’s Rue. He fulfills the same emotional niche: a precious twelve-year-old who reminds our hero of their little sibling back home and inspires a protective instinct. He’s a character we are genuinely rooting for. Which makes his treatment in SotR a bitter one for me.
District 3 characters have a habit of Serving Their Purpose To The Plot and then getting discarded. Wiress alerts the cast to the structure of the 75th arena and then gets killed off. Ampert serves Haymitch the explosive materials and then gets killed off. The District 3 kid in Katniss’s arena boobytraps and guards the supplies for the Careers and then gets killed off. We only get to keep Beetee because his skills are vital to executing the countermoves against the Capitol. I’m shocked that he was allowed to survive to the end and that he wasn’t given some “heroic” death like Finnick. In every iteration, District 3 characters are absolutely essential to the heroes, but not essential enough to survive.
So what did Ampert do for us?
One: he provided an emotional impetus for Beetee to want to take out the arena.
Two: he provided an access point for Beetee to reach Haymitch to get him on board with the plan.
Three: he had the knowledge and capability to help construct the explosive that Haymitch would utilize in said plan.
What other vital thing did Ampert do? He was the key driving force behind the creation of the Newcomers alliance. And what did the narrative do with that?
Uhh, not much. At the last minute, Haymitch decides to bail on it, and we spend most of his Games away from the alliance members we just spent the training segment bonding with.
The alliance itself is transgressive, since a key point of the Hunger Games is to pit district against district so they will not choose to ally against the Capitol. The Capitol downplayed the Newcomers in the recap of the 50th Games, and forever after Haymitch’s story is one of him going his own way and prioritizing his own survival. So Panem has lost the message of alliance, and the proper narrative of district versus district remains intact. But what did we, the readers, get?
What we should have gotten was a real alliance. What we got instead was Haymitch lone-wolfing it, as Katniss did, albeit for slightly different reasons. When Lou Lou, Ampert, and Maysilee show up (individually), Haymitch remains with them only until they get separated and killed off, but that’s not really the Newcomers alliance, that’s just Haymitch being a decent person to his district partners and that one kid he bonded with in training. Where’s the Newcomers alliance? Off screen.
So what was Ampert’s legacy in this book, then?
Ampert served as an emotional catalyst for Beetee to get involved and help Haymitch destroy the arena. And we’re supposed to really care about his death, but his death is so predictable I could have read the scene with my eyes closed. Haymitch emerges, Ampert is gone. What could have happened? Cutesy cartoon mutts dragging him away and finishing him off Happy Tree Friends style? You guessed it!
TL;DR
My argument is this. I understand that Beetee's whole family backstory served the needs of the plot for this specific prequel, and I understand that it had not been invented yet at the time of the original series, and that is why it did not come up. But this oversight is too glaring of a retcon for me to overlook or handwave it away. It's too significant of a thread for it to not have been present in the original series. And that, to me, is a significant shame and really detracted from my enjoyment of this book.
On a more personal note, I get it. District 3 isn’t supposed to matter. District 12 is supposed to matter. District 3 has only been present to serve the needs of the heroes, the plot, whatever. And most people wouldn’t bat an eye at that, because it does what it needs to do. We need The Tech Characters, we need The Smart Characters, we need The Ones Who Figure Things Out. But we don’t need to keep them. We just need them to do their job and go.
I've seen a lot of people criticize Sunrise On the Reaping for various reasons, and probably the most common complaint I see is that it feels very contrived and almost fanservicey. I don't disagree. However, I feel that this aspect was intentional. I believe Sunrise is supposed to feel contrived, and that this contrivedness is a brilliant critique of the entertainment industry.
I found the contrived, fanservicey feeling of the book to be perhaps its most fascinating aspect, mostly because it all but confirms a theory of mine which honestly, I believe has been implicitly canon since the beginning.
The Hunger Games is scripted.
I think that a lot of us forget that in-universe, the Hunger Games is a TV show. We've spent so much time in the heads of tributes and mentors, people with direct proximity to the games, that we view them as more of a survival contest. And they are that, of course, but only for the tributes. For the Capitol, the audience, the rest of Panem, the Hunger Games is a reality TV show.
In real life, we know that nothing about so-called "reality" TV is real. But I think we tend to forget that when we read these books. For some reason, even though we're told over and over again that the Gamemakers have complete control, we take the Hunger Games at face value and believe that everything that happens, both in and out of the arena, is random. Organic. Coincidental.
Sunrise On the Reaping shatters that illusion. One of the first things we see in the book is something we've never seen before in the series: a retake. They screw up the reaping and then do a second take! That shocked me and made me wonder, just how often does this happen?
It also made me wonder how much of the Hunger Games is really random, and how much of it is planned. I'd assume that almost nothing about the games happens by chance, inside or outside the arena. There are no accidents, no coincidences.
I'd even go so far as to say that the victors are chosen before the tributes enter the arena. This is implicit in the 74th and blatantly obvious in the 50th. Everything just so happens to perfectly set up the chosen tribute to win before the games even begin. Their training scores make them stand out. Their interviews make them crowd favorites (see how for both Haymitch and Katniss, Caesar asked questions he knew would endear them to the audience, while at the same time sabotaging other tributes, like Panache, that would otherwise be popular). Their backstories are overemphasized, making them unique and compelling to the audience.
Who doesn't love an underdog? Of course the scrappy, irreverent, rebellious bootlegger boy from the small rural town who scored a one in training outwits and outlasts his cocky opponents. That makes great TV! Of course the quiet, abrasive girl who volunteered to save her sister overcomes the arena and fights her way home to her! That makes excellent TV! The ratings must've been through the roof!
(Think about how in the 74th, there was oh-so-conveniently one single bow in the arena. Think about Haymitch was allowed to take a firestarter into an arena filled with flammable materials.)
And on the topic of Mags, Wiress, and Beetee's appearances in Sunrise...it honestly makes perfect sense to me that all three of them were controversial victors who outsmarted or defied the Capitol in some way. It convinces me that the reapings of the 75th (and the theme of the 75th in general) was totally scripted. Because a seventy-fifth anniversary special starring all the most controversial previous victors makes great TV. The entire 75th Hunger Games is, in universe, fanservice. (Or at least intended to be; we see how terribly the theme backfires.)
Haymitch and Katniss aren't punished for winning, they're punished for going off-script. Haymitch was supposed to win; he wasn't supposed to blow up the arena. Katniss was supposed to win alone; she wasn't supposed to defy the rules and take Peeta with her. Of course Haymitch and Katniss weren't killed immediately for their respective acts of defiance; they had already been chosen to win and it was far too late in the games for the Gamemakers to scrap them and choose a different winner instead. They had in-universe plot armor. Better to stick with the planned storyline and punish them outside the arena instead.
Anyway, that's my take on it. Of course, I could be completely off the mark and reading way too much into it, but based on the quotes at the beginning of Sunrise and what Collins said in her interview about it, I very much think that this was her intention.
