#thg meta

[annoying-vegan]

Thinking about how Katniss and Peeta’s roles in Mockingjay were strangely reminiscent of their childhoods:

Peeta is being physically beaten and abused by those with power over him, and Katniss is forced to take on a role she is far too young for through no choice of her own.

[sippingdaisies]

although katniss is our protagonist and main character i think there's actually a much more fitting throughline when it comes to the presence of covey girls and their acts of rebellion.

lucy gray

lenore dove

primrose

i don't often see prim mentioned when it comes to covey lineage (most likely because her character is so aligned with their merchant mother in the original trilogy) but all three of these girls actively haunt the narrative.

lucy gray is the ghost whose songs of resistance endure in district 12 long after her name is forgotten. lenore dove paints her posters across the district and its haymitch's promise to her that forces him to keep going, keep fighting back until someone 'just like him but luckier' comes along to do what he couldn't. primrose is reason that katniss volunteers, she inspires a love so great that it defies the odds and brings her sister home.

they all have an immense strength but also an inherent gentleness - their love of animals whether this is lucy gray's snakes or lenore dove's geese or prim's refusal to hunt animals (not to mention lady and buttercup) - they are all drawn to creatures that are not widely seen as valuable or lovable.

they share a deep sense of optimism, each believe in the power of hope to transform one's circumstances. they each believe that a better world is not only possible but they are willing to take action to make it so. lucy gray uses her songs and performances, lenore dove engages in acts of sabotage and vandalises property. prim learns how to heal and chooses to enter a warzone in order to help people - in a world governed by violence, prim is first and foremost a healer.

and ultimately they are all taken from those who love them - they are girls frozen in time, forever filled with colour and light. three generations of covey girls, each doomed by their connection to the games.

[ringtoned]

suzanne collins is such a genius... the cultural phenomenon of her series leading to the hanging tree house remixes, mockingjay being milked for two (bad) movies, the capitol-inspired makeup palettes, the halloween costumes, the explosion of the market for dystopia, the butchering of her characters and removal of disabilities, disfiguration, and racial tension + representation to sell more tickets, the extra gale scenes to fuel discourse, and the audience showing up to cinemas to watch what was pretty honestly marketed to them (the jacob vs edwardification of the symbolic love story and also to watch children fight to the death) it's just so ridiculously ironic i would say you can't write this shit, but she did write about it... in The Hunger Games published 2008

[rosegardeninwinter]

I didn’t expect to come away from a book about Haymitch even more convinced of Peeta Mellark’s crucial role in the rebellion, but I did. Because the book showed that Katniss was not uniquely rebellious. It reminded us that Snow’s worldview hinges on one fact: he is the victor. There is no room in his world for the vulnerability that Lucy Gray caused him. Haymitch recognizes it: Snow will not allow him to die. There must be a singular, selfish victor. Because every lone victor sends the same message to Panem: your will to power must come before any loyalties, any sense of justice. The people around you cannot be trusted. They are your enemies, when the chips are down. It is a a brutal slap in the face of any organized resistance. The idea of two victors is completely and utterly antithetical to Snow’s personal demons, and to his system. He rationalizes his betrayal of Lucy Gray this way. He drives the point home to Haymitch when he kills Ma, Sid, and Lenore Dove: any attempt to sidestep your fate will be met with awful retribution. It probably gave him some personal satisfaction to kill a Covey-girl, but it didn’t matter. She was a dead woman regardless. And Katniss? Okay, she sings some songs. She buries a child in flowers. Beautiful. But if she wins fair and square, she’s less of a threat even than Haymitch, and more of a victory for Snow. Not even Covey-blood are above his rules.

Then Peeta throws a wrench in the whole thing. Because he loves her. And he wears it proudly. But even then, Snow is not worried. This is nothing new. Star-crossed lovers mean nothing. No alliance can last. One of them must kill the other, in the end. That is how this story goes.

And then it doesn’t. Because they refuse. There will be no singular victor. Either there will be none, or there will be two. He says Seneca should have killed them on the spot, and maybe that would have bought him some time, but as soon as Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark determined that life or death at each other’s side was more important than anything else, it was all over. The system really was brought down by a handful of berries.

[justafewberries]

katniss’s first memory of Peeta happens with baby clothes:

She tries to sell the last things she can to survive. When no one buys, she drops Prim’s old clothing in a muddle puddle and leaves them there. She’s too weak to survive, too weak to kneel down and pick them up. She gave up. She was going to let the community home take them— give in to the one thing she had fought so hard to prevent:

Then, Peeta tosses her the bread. She doesn’t tell us if she goes back for the threadbare clothing, she instead runs home to Prim.

He didn’t just save her life, he saved Katniss’s reason to live: preventing Prim from getting taken to the community home.

If we examine this more generally as a metaphor:

Katniss had given up on kids. She dropped the last hope she had about having children in that mud puddle. She spent all day in front of adults, none of whom spared her any food or help. She realized she could not care for herself, never mind a child. The only person who helped her reclaim her position as protector was Peeta.

She was forced to leave the dream of caring for the child behind until Peeta arrived. Until the bread.

So it makes sense he would ask for a child and ensure the safety to care for them in the epilogue. It’s her going back for the baby clothes. Only now, she’s not too weak to pick them back up.

[liberalk1tsch]

does nobody remember this part of mj where haymitch and plutarch genuinely struggle to keep effie from being executed after the war because of the fact that she is so obviously not a rebel and didn’t aid in the revolution?

i’m not saying we know everything about her or that she’s a bad person or that she didn’t have rebellious thoughts/intentions with some of her actions, but she canonically doesn’t have ties to the rebels and they have to lie to keep her alive.

like yeah, she’s a victim of the propaganda of a totalitarian dictatorship. but that’s the point, i fear. she exemplifies someone who likely has the kindness to embrace change, but won’t bring it about of her own accord; she’s the archetype of the average citizen who witnesses firsthand the struggles brought on by a cruel system and still won’t do anything cos she isn’t encouraged to think critically.

again, this isn’t a personal attack on her, and i do find her an interesting character, but making her out to be more rebellious than she is for the sake of making her more likeable makes us as readers also stop thinking critically of her when she is quite literally a part of perpetuating the problem in her acquiescence.

obv this doesn’t include hcs/aus, but i’ve seen a lot of confusion surrounding fanon/canon lately and it’s making me feel like we didn’t read the same books after doing a recent reread of the og trilogy.

[starrrbakerrr]

i read this really insightful post by @thesmileykate and it made me realize how sunrise on the reaping adds a whole new layer to snow’s “convince me.” katniss easily “convinced” the majority of panem and all of the capitol of her love for peeta in the 74th games. but not snow, because he thinks all covey women are deceiving to their lovers. he thought there was no possible way katniss truly loved peeta. he wanted to believe all of her choices were for her own self-preservation. but when he saw katniss’s reaction to peeta’s heart stopping in the quarter quell his belief about covey women was proven incorrect. and once peeta was captured he knew he couldn’t take away katniss’s love for peeta, but he could take away peeta’s love for katniss.

[vivicendium]

i think something that elevates the hunger games franchise is not just the quality of writing but the integrity of it. tbosas isn’t just a cash-grab by suzanne collins in the age of sequels and reboots (though i won’t pretend that didn’t play a part), it’s a character study of the main antagonist with a different structure than the main trilogy. and importantly, it doesn’t just re-hash the same old themes and beats the main trilogy had, it expands on not just the world of the hunger games but the themes as well, it actually has something new to say about the trilogy’s themes about class, capitalism, power, and control, in a way that couldn’t be explored with the main story because the protagonist of that story simply did not have access to the world that’s being explored in tbosas.

i understand the people who call for books/movies to be made about haymitch, finnick, johanna, different years of the games — we love those characters and want to see more of them! i’d kill for a novella on finnick’s days mentoring tributes, or katniss’s parents falling in love. but at the end of the day we probably wouldn’t be very satisfied with those stories being fleshed out if they had absolutely nothing new to say about the world, they’d be enjoyable, but not as interesting and engaging as tbosas has been.