Obviously Haymitch isn’t much, but Effie Trinket is right about one thing, once we’re in the arena he’s all we’ve got.

This reads more like Effie reminded them of the mentor’s role, rather than that she informed them out of the blue.  And, indeed, Katniss knows all the ins and outs of gift giving later on in the book, so it’s not a foreign concept to her.  So why were these two acting all *gasp* at Effie’s comment in the last chapter?  Well, it’s because this book likes to create cheap drama.  Just like in Ch 1, where Katniss conveniently forgot that she could volunteer for her sister.  Here we have them conveniently forget that Haymich has to actually do stuff, all so we can get a dramatic line that will be forgotten two seconds later.

Was it worth it?  Was the brief moment of contrived tension worth it, book?

The idea pulls me up short. A kind Peeta Mellark is far more dangerous to me than an unkind one.

How?  She says that kind people ‘get under her skin’ but…well, it would be nice to see some examples of that.  This line comes up out of the blue and then just hangs there.  We’ve seen people be kind to her, mostly in the fact that they make good trading deals with her.   (Well, the book says they are good trading deals, at least.)  We’ve seen Madge be her friend and even give her an expensive gold pin.  And she gives not one single fuck for any of these people.  Hell, she even takes Madge’s pin and attributes it to her father.  She’s a black hold of kindness.  She sucks it in and doesn’t even notice it, much less return it or feel obligated by it.  So why is a “kind Peeta Mellark” such a danger to her?

I quickly open the window, toss the cookies Peeta’s father gave me out of the train, and slam the glass shut. No more. No more of either of them.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING THROWING AWAY FOOD?  WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!

Do you know how people react to being starving?  They hoard food.  Even if they’ve suffered food shortages for a few months and that’s it, they’ll still hoard.  Once you get used to the idea that every bit of food you have might be the last bit of food you have, you hang onto it.  You don’t throw it out the window.

And on top of that, what did this accomplish?  What did throwing the cookies out the window do?  It wasn’t a gesture that either Peeta or his father could see, so it’s not like it was a way of saying “fuck you” to either of them.  Does she think that if she ate the cookies, she would somehow automatically be indebted to them?  Why not just take the cookies, and any other advantage you can get, and keep them without giving any return?  (You know, like her normal behavior.)

Middle Class Brat.

I grabbed a bucket and Prim’s hand and headed to the Meadow and yes, it was dotted with the golden-headed weeds.

You live in a place where people routinely starve to death and no one has figured out that dandelions are edible?  I’m really supposed to believe that Katniss is just so fucking special that she’s the only person to realize that the most easily recognized edible plant is edible?  And don’t try and pass it off as being because of her book.  People who are starving will eat anything.  They’ll eat grass.  They’ll eat cardboard.  They’ll eat leather.  They’ll eat the stuffing out of their airplane seats.  If there are people starving to death on the streets, they should have already eaten those dandelions just out of the abstract hope that it’ll work.

Except in this book, where Katniss is so fucking special, because she can do normal stuff while everyone around her is fatally moronic.

But my father added other entries to the book. Plants for eating, not healing.

Because Mom’s book was useless.  You know, until her father added to it.  I mean, we can’t have Mom knowing about useful plants, nope.  We can’t have Mom teaching her how to identify edible ones.  Even though she works with plants all the time, she’s not allowed to teach her daughter anything useful about them, instead it all has to come from Dad.

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

Plants are tricky. Many are edible, but one false mouthful and you’re dead.

More like “one false mouthful and you’ll have stomach cramps for a while.”  Toxic plants aren’t deadly unless you get them in high doses.  There’s very few that will kill you in small amounts, and they tend advertise the fact that they’re deadly.  This will be another recurring theme in the book.  (And yet it doesn’t seem to realize that medicinal plants are potent.  Seriously, everything in this book is backward.)

but people had respected him, and they accepted me.

And yet the mere idea of Peeta being nice flummoxes her.  When she started going to the Hob and no one stole her game and punched her in the stomach, did she assume it was because they were secretly manipulating her?  Or does Katniss’s broken-ness only show up when it’s there to create drama and highlight her broken-ness? 

(And why include this contrived mess?  She’s going off to fight to the death with 23 other kids.  Was that not enough drama for you, book?)

But no tears come. I’m too tired or too numb to cry. The only thing I feel is a desire to be somewhere else. So I let the train rock me into oblivion.

Why do so many books think that “numb and don’t feel anything” is an acceptable tract to take?  Give me some emotion, damnit!  It’s why I’m reading this book in the first place, to get in another character’s head.  I don’t want to arrive inside said head and realize it’s got nothing except puppet strings.

She’s muttering obscenities under her breath. Haymitch, his face puffy and red from the previous day’s indulgences, is chuckling.

Because Effie wears wigs and is cheerful, so it’s okay to harass her and then laugh about it.  Feminism!

I’ve only even tasted an orange once, at New Year’s when my father bought one as a special treat.

Oranges are cheap and travel well.  If you’ve ever bought any kind of fruit, it would have been oranges.

Then I stuff down every mouthful I can hold, which is a substantial amount

Since, you know, she hasn’t been starving.  If she’d been starving before now, she would only be able to stuff down a small amount.  Really, stomach shrinking is one of the first things to happen.

One time, my mother told me that I always eat like I’ll never see food again.

And her mother doesn’t eat like this as well because…?  Because the family isn’t starving.

Katniss can tell me she’s been starving and underfed until she’s blue in the face, but every single point of textual evidence we have concerning this girl and food indicates that she’s never starved a day in her life.  At best, she’s been hungry, but that’s a far cry from starving.

“Well, what’s this?” says Haymitch. “Did I actually get a pair of fighters this year?”

Because all they’ve done is knock his glass out of his hand and be mildly threatening, but that’s more than any other pair of kids has done in the past 23 years?

Sure, why not?  We’ve already got Katniss being the only one to realize you can eat plants.  I guess we’ll go with Katniss also being the only one to show spunk on her way to the Capitol.  Because if you can’t make your character actually special, just make everyone else in the universe an idiot!

Immediately after this, Haymich starts giving them good advice and acting in a perfectly rational manner.  Because that’s totally how alcoholism works.  When you’re drunk, it doesn’t change your brain chemistry or anything.  Nah, all you have to do is try a little and you’ll be able to function just like always, even to the point that you can play complex social/political games.

Actually, outside of him being a little dirty, we never see any effects from Haymich drinking.  He’s rude when he starts out, but that goes away until he’s just a stock snarky character.  He only stumbles around when it’s for laughs as he falls off the stage.  He doesn’t have interpersonal problems from drinking (a few caused by the games, but none that can be drawn back to drinking).  Hell, he doesn’t even come up with any health problems from it.  It’s mentioned repeatedly, but that’s it.  It’s mentioned.  As if the book thinks that’s all there is to this whole alcoholism shtick.  It’s just a footnote, just a costume piece, never an addiction with actual consequence.   

Sometimes, if I’ve wounded an animal with an arrow, it’s better to get a knife into it, too, before I approach it.

But putting an extra arrow into it would be too much trouble?  Book, throwing knives are very different from hunting knives.  You can’t throw just any old knife.  So unless Katniss has wasted money (money that could be spent on food) buying specialized knives, then she shouldn’t be throwing anything.  She should just shoot the animals twice.  It’s not like she’ll waste the arrows.  She can get them back after her prey is dead.

I yank the knife out of the table, get a grip on the blade, and then throw it into the wall across the room.

…  *sigh*  Fine.  We are now in an alternate universe where the laws of physics don’t count and you can substitute a table knife for a throwing knife. 

Since the rebels had to scale the mountains, they were easy targets for the Capitol’s air forces.

Riiiiiiight.  The mountains were a disadvantage to the rebels.  Sure.  And that’s why Russia totally curb-stomped Afghanistan.

Oh, wait, no, it went the other way around.  Because rebels love mountains, whereas they are the bane of large armies everywhere.  Even barren mountains offer tons of great places to hide, and the Rocky Mountains are far from barren.