Prim is not to take any tesserae. They can get by, if they’re careful, on selling Prim’s goat milk and cheese and the small apothecary business my mother now runs for the people in the Seam.

*inarticulate rate*  REALLY?  They can get by without the fucking tesserae, and apparently without Katniss’s hunting as well, but she still took the extra deathlotto tickets every year?  Why?

This strikes me as being vaguely selfish.  She didn’t really care about her family, because she was willing to be taken away from them.  She willingly, voluntarily increased her chances of death, all because…???  And it makes no sense to say she did it for her family, for their comfort, because the family is better off with her there and hunting for them, rather than with her gone. 

The woods terrified her, and whenever I shot something, she’d get teary and talk about how we might be able to heal it if we got it home soon enough.

Seriously, it’s like this book just flat-out doesn’t realize that first-world problems are, indeed, first-world problems.  What child on the verge of starving is going to see a bag of meat and think “aw, let’s heal it” instead of “yay, I won’t die tonight”?  This is not the reaction of someone in Prim’s situation, with the priorities that Prim should, logically, have.  This is the reaction of some middle-class brat out on a hunting trip with her daddy.

I can’t win.

Remember that, too.  Katniss is resigned to losing, she’s convinced she won’t win, and she doesn’t entertain a moment of thinking that she will.  Not until later in the book at least.  However, this doesn’t stop her from mentally flailing around about how she can’t appear weak on the cameras.  She acts, from the very beginning, like she’s trying to win, but she doesn’t realize that she has a chance at it until she’s already partway there.

Besides, it isn’t in my nature to go down without a fight, even when things seem insurmountable.

There’s “without a fight” and then there’s “without actively changing my behaviors in a strategic way in order to maximize my chances of winning.”

We always wait to trade with him when his witch of a wife isn’t around because he’s so much nicer. I feel certain he would never have hit his son the way she did over the burned bread.

Because this book is feminist and don’t you forget it.

Madge comes in next to give her the pin.  You know, the pin that becomes the central image throughout the whole series?  There’s a reason the movie had to change its origin.  Because here in the book, it’s just a plot coupon that gets shoved on the protagonist with no rhyme or reason.  Katniss doesn’t care about this thing, it has no significance until much later in the book, it never has significance to her, and she can barely even remember to hang onto it, since people have to keep reminding her she has it.  It’s a really, really shitty thing to hang all of your imagery on.  It comes out of the blue so that the author can say LOOK AT THIS THING RIGHT HERE, rather than a symbol that develops naturally out of the story.

Then she’s gone and I’m left thinking that maybe Madge really has been my friend all along.

Katniss doesn’t understand what friends are.  Because that’s going to be a running theme in this book.  Katniss just not getting people.  Earlier, at her house, she mentions that she and Madge do all sorts of stuff together while at school and generally end up paired in every school-related social situation.  But she’s confused about the fact that this indicates friendship.  Katniss also doesn’t understand the concept of people being nice to strangers, or that anyone might ever actually like her for any reason.  Because Katniss is fundamentally flawed and doesn’t have a childhood-level of interpersonal skills.  She’s allowed to use a bow, but she has to give up something ‘girly’ for the privilege.  Compare to Gale, who is an accomplished hunter and able to deal with other people.  He’s already a boy, so he doesn’t have to ‘pay’ to do boy things.

Because this book is feminist and don’t you forget it.

Finally, Gale is here and maybe there is nothing romantic between us, but when he opens his arms I don’t hesitate to go into them.

Hugs: restricted to romantic interests only. 

I have tried copying my father’s bows with poor results. It’s not that easy. Even he had to scrap his own work sometimes.

Making a bow is mostly a matter of patience.  It takes skill and special equipment to make a good, sturdy, professional-quality bow, but a field-expedient bow is pretty much just a matter of finding the right stick and bending it until you can tie the bowstring in place.  It won’t be pretty, nor will it be as reliable as a professional bow, but it’ll kill stuff, and that’s the immediate concern.  But apparently we can’t let Katniss make a bow, because then she won’t be using the super-special one that her father gave her.

“How different can it be, really?” says Gale grimly. The awful thing is that if I can forget they’re people, it will be no different at all.

Remember this line, too.

But I’ve had a lot of practice at wiping my face clean of emotions and I do this now.

You’ve practiced this…when?  Nothing about her life so far has indicated that “pretend emotionless” is necessary for survival, so where did all this practice come from?

I immediately wonder if this will be his strategy in the Games. To appear weak and frightened, to reassure the other tributes that he is no competition at all, and then come out fighting.

So, she recognizes that this is a valid strategy…and then goes right back to thinking that if she cries on camera it’ll mean instadeath.  Eh?

Also, really, she thinks this is a strategy?  That’s her first assumption?  Not that maybe this is a really crappy thing to have happen and some people just fucking cry because they are sad?

It’s not that Katniss is suspicious that he might be strategizing here.  It’s that this is the only option she can come up with for why someone might cry in front a camera.  It’s literally the only thing that occurs to her.  In her brain, the options are “strategy” and “???”  Because, as we’ve covered before, Katniss is fundamentally incapable of dealing with people in a rational way.  She has to be this fucking flawed, not a normal level of flawed, because…um…FEMINISM, DAMNIT.

This worked very well for a girl, Johanna Mason, from District 7 a few years back. […] But this seems an odd strategy for Peeta Mellark because he’s a baker’s son. All those years of having enough to eat and hauling bread trays around have made him broad-shouldered and strong.

It’s okay for women to use the sneaky “appear weak” strategy, but not for boys.  Boys have to be strong, but women get stuff by being emotionally manipulative.

Because this book is…oh, you know the line by now.

Besides basic reading and math most of our instruction is coal-related. Except for the weekly lecture on the history of Panem.

And somehow this keeps you in school until you are 18?  Seriously, if they aren’t teaching anything but reading, math, and coal, then why are these kids not in the mines and churning out coal as soon as they’re big enough to swing a pick?  Does it just take an exceptionally long time to teach these kids to read?  Are they learning engineering and chemistry and putting it under the ‘about coal’ umbrella?  Really, this makes no sense.  Either they get a well-rounded education and it takes 18 years, or they don’t and it takes less time.  Except in this book, where everything is exactly like first-world America, just a bit dirtier.

a private bathroom with hot and cold running water. We don’t have hot water at home, unless we boil it.

Indoor plumbing, though, that’s just a given.  Because the Capitol can’t be bothered to pass out adequate food, but they’re perfectly willing to build and install water treatment plants, pipes, and sewers in their oppression-towns. 

They were homing birds, exclusively male

They went to the bother of making them all-male, but not to the bother of making them genderless or sterile?  Why?  It would be a hell of a lot harder to get a fertile-but-all-male population than it would be to just make a bird that can’t breed.  I mean, a million things have to come together to make an organism fertile, and only one of those things has to go wrong to make it sterile.

They had lost the ability to enunciate words

Mockingbirds can talk.  Well, they can imitate words.  Which is exactly the same thing that the jabberjays can do, it’s just that jabberjays can imitate a longer chunk of time.  So…mommy bird can ‘talk,’ and daddy bird can ‘talk,’ but baby mockingjay can’t?

Who makes a bird to do their spying, anyway?  Birds don’t make good spies.  They sit up in trees and don’t give a fuck about people and spend all their time hunting bugs.  If a bird suddenly did start hanging around people, 1) that would be suspicious as all get-out and 2) birds aren’t smart enough to think about what they’re hearing.  They can’t stick around until they get the important bits and then fly home, or follow a suspicious train of conversation until they hit paydirt.  They’re going to record 99% fluff, when they get anything at all.  It’s a fatally inefficient system, and that’s without the rebels feeding them false information.

But whenever my father sang, all the birds in the area would fall silent and listen.

Because Dad is everything good and sweet in this world, and Mom gets absolutely no positive traits at all.  And also, you know, this tidbit here is just so important to the story.  Oh, wait, no it’s not, the quality of anyone’s singing never becomes important.

It’s like having a piece of my father with me, protecting me.

Madge gave her the pin.  But Madge is a girl.  Let’s attribute everything to her father instead.  Because the only girl allowed to have any importance in this book is Katness.  Everyone else that’s good?  Boys. 

But I’m stuffing myself because I’ve never had food like this, so good and so much, and because probably the best thing I can do between now and the Games is put on a few pounds.

This is a pretty natural reaction, but if she’s actually starving, she won’t be able to shove a bite in after the soup course.  That’s part of starvation: your stomach actually shrinks.  Also, that much rich food after a shitty diet will make her sick.  Except in this book.  Because despite all claims to the contrary, Katniss never shows any signs of actual starvation.  She’s merely been hungry every now and then, like some first-world girl that occasionally goes a day without eating.  That’s the level of consequence that her ‘starvation’ amounts to.

But I hate Effie Trinket’s comment so much I make a point of eating the rest of my meal with my fingers. Then I wipe my hands on the tablecloth.

Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.  Because if you don’t like someone, that makes it perfectly justified to piss them off for the sake of pissing them off.  I mean, it’s not like talking to Effie and explaining that she’s been classist would do anything here.  Well, it wouldn’t, but neither does petty vindictive mean-ness, and at least talking would be well-intentioned. 

Plus, this comes back around to the idea that an action is moral or immoral depending on other people.  Good manners are a reflection of personal character, not the character of those around you.  You should be polite to polite people and to rude people.  Because manners are a reflection of your own character, not everyone else’s.

But, on the other hand, that’s fitting.  Katniss isn’t a good person.

Greasy Sae’s concoction of mice meat, pig entrails, and tree bark—a winter specialty

No one butchers pigs in the winter.  They do it in the fall, when they’re fat.  In the middle of winter, the pigs are smaller because there’s no food to give them.  Also…uh, entrails are seriously rich food.  They’re packed with good-for-you stuff.  And tree bark is delicious.  So why would any part of that soup be hard to keep down?

“He’s drunk every year.”

“Every day,” I add. I can’t help smirking a little.

Because another person’s trauma is funny!