Slowly, I drag myself out of bed and into the shower. I arbitrarily punch buttons on the control board and end up hopping from foot to foot as alternating jets of icy cold and steaming hot water assault me. Then I’m deluged in lemony foam that I have to scrape off with a heavy bristled brush. Oh, well. At least my blood is flowing.

I’m not really sure why I dislike this so much.  Maybe it’s a personal thing, just a disconnect between how I think I would react in the same situation.  But Katniss doesn’t seem to really care about all this magitech that she’s getting.  This passage strikes me as the reaction of someone who’s used to having million-button-showers.  They don’t care about the shower, they don’t care about what it does, they just don’t care period, they’re just pushing buttons because that’s what people do.  And afterwards, they still don’t care.  They move on from the shower, because the shower has done nothing more than exactly what they expected it to, just in a slightly more annoying manner than usual.

This is the first time since the morning of the reaping that I resemble myself. No fancy hair and clothes, no flaming capes. Just me. Looking like I could be headed for the woods. It calms me.

For once, this doesn’t really annoy me.  This is a moment in which the “clothes make the man” drama isn’t quite as overplayed as usual, and it actually makes sense, because she’s been through some major upheavals since then.  It certainly makes a lot more sense than her whining about wearing a simple dress.  On the other hand, it really highlights how little agency Katniss has.  She clearly places importance on this “look like myself” business, but even the “self”-y clothes that she’s wearing now have been picked out for her.  Even in the littlest thing, she takes no action. 

A young man, an Avox

Stop capitalizing that, book.  It’s not a proper noun, any more than “servant” or “traitor” are proper nouns.

Peeta is wearing exactly the same outfit I am. I need to say something to Cinna. This twins act is going to blow up in our faces once the Games begin.

How?  I really do not understand what she thinks is going to happen.  Is it just the fear that she’ll hesitate when given a chance to kill him?  You know, I’d be more on board with this if she’d ever shown A FEAR THAT SHE MIGHT HAVE TO KILL HIM.  No, really.  She’s acting as if liking Peeta is the only thing that might make her hesitate, meaning that liking someone is the only barrier she has to killing people.

Again, that’s really fucking creepy.  I know she’s being forced into all this by the Capitol, but that’s no excuse for her complete lack of an emotional reaction to the thought of murdering another human being.

But because town families usually eat expensive butcher meat. Beef and chicken and horse.

What the fuck is up with the economy in this town?  It shouldn’t be that hard to understand.  If there’s no one around to buy things, then the merchant class is going to be poor.  You do not magically make money just because you open up a shop.  It should be self-evident.

“And you’re good?” asks Haymitch.

I have to think about it. I’ve been putting food on the table for four years. That’s no small task. I’m not as good as my father was, but he’d had more practice.

[…]

She hits every one in the eye.

So she can hit squirrels in the eye, can hit every squirrel in the eye, but she’s not as good as her dad?  What the fuck, did her father kill squirrels just by pointing at them?

And on top of that, no, you can’t hit every squirrel in the eye.  That’s not showing off that Katniss is a good shot, that’s bending the laws of physics and reality.  No one on earth, not the best archer you can find, can hit squirrels in the eye on every shot.  It’s not impossible to do, but it would take several attempts under ideal conditions, not “hunting in the woods with a 5 year-old homemade bow.”

This book wants so hard to make Katniss superior that it ends up going to ridiculous extremes.  It comes around to the point that I can’t be impressed because I’m too busy rolling my eyes.

“What about you? I’ve seen you in the market. You can lift hundredpound bags of flour,”

And then Peeta gets the opposite problem.  Lifting 100 lbs bags is not impressive.  At least, not as a survival skill.  You have to be fit to do it, but not super-fit, because most of the work is being done by your legs.  Your legs were made to carry heavy weights.  Unless Peeta was carrying those 100 lbs bags half a mile uphill to the bakery and then going back to get more and do it all over again, then it means nothing.  It’s not a sign of exceptional strength or endurance.  (For reference: I am reasonably fit, but not exceptionally so and I don’t often weight lift.  With free-weights, I reach my limit at about 50-60 lbs.  If I put my legs into it, I can lift a 170lbs male onto my back and carry him at a brisk trot.  Not for very long, and my body won’t like me afterward, but for all we know Peeta is just carrying these bags over to a cart.)

“He can wrestle,” I tell Haymitch. “He came in second in our school competition last year, only after his brother.”

That is a bit more relevant, but not by much.  It’s really only a useful skill if the other party is equally unarmed.  Pretty much any weapon, including a big stick, is going to beat “come at me, bro.”  (Being sufficiently skilled can counter this, but only to a certain point, and being the best of a backwater hick town doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’re going to be the second coming of Chuck Norris.)

“But you won’t! You’ll be living up in some tree eating raw squirrels and picking off people with arrows.

I’m with Peeta here.  He’s screwed; she’ll be fine.  And now that that’s settled, can we please end the scene where everyone sits around talking about how fucking awesome the other characters are?  It’s a lazy authorial short-cut, just a dialogue heavy version of telling over showing. 

Peeta rolls his eyes at Haymitch. “She has no idea. The effect she can have.”

I hate this whole bit so much.  Katniss here is being displayed as super-special, so super-special that her specialness transcends words and becomes just “that effect she has,” and all of it is completely without effort.  Katniss doesn’t even know she’s this special.  She doesn’t work for it, she doesn’t do anything for it, it’s nothing within her control or that can be credited to her.  It’s a quality that has been given to her, not anything she has taken upon herself. 

In short, she can’t even be responsible for her own specialness; that is how little agency she has in this book. 

Perhaps some of the merchants were a little generous in their trades, but I always attributed that to their long-standing relationship with my father.

A relationship which ended five years ago.  But none of them have any sort of relationship with her mother, who is currently the only HEALER in the whole Seam.  No one cares about her.

This book is feminist, and don’t you forget it!

The plan’s the same for both of you. You go to group training. Spend the time trying to learn something you don’t know. Throw a spear. Swing a mace. Learn to tie a decent knot. Save showing what you’re best at until your private sessions. Are we clear?

Really?  That’s your brilliant advice?  Don’t show your hand too early?  Wow, that’s a lot of help.  I mean, it’s not like anyone could figure that out on their own.

And the rest of the advice is pretty crappy.  They have three days to learn as much as they can, and you can’t learn a weapon in three days.  They should be going with things that are tangently related to their current skills.  Katniss should hone up on her knife-throwing, and Peeta should see if he can learn some new hand-to-hand moves that will help him at a distance, or how to incorporate a weapon into the bit of wrestling he knows.  They should both be focusing on survival skills, things that can be straight-up learned in a cerebral manner, since most fighting is a matter of muscle memory, of just doing an action over and over until you don’t have to think about it.  Katniss should handle the bows from the Capitol and see if they have anything fancier than what she’s been hunting with, or maybe learn about any bow-related tech advances.  (Modern bows have things you can add to them to help with aim and balance.)  Haymich’s advice, on the other hand, is basically “waste time but look busy while you do it.”

“One last thing. In public, I want you by each other’s side every minute,” says Haymitch. We both start to object, but Haymitch slams his hand on the table. “Every minute! It’s not open for discussion! You agreed to do as I said! You will be together, you will appear amiable to each other.

Good lord, this is awkward.  Why does Haymich insist on this?  It makes no sense.  It gives no advantage.  There’s absolutely no reason for it.  Haymich is acting like a particularly poor character from a shipping fanfic, not anyone intelligent.  And we don’t ever get a reason for it!  Ever. 

And it can’t be because he already knows about Peeta’s “I’m in love with her plan,” because 1) it’s supposed to be unrequited love; they don’t have to be all buddy-buddy now for it to work and 2) Haymich doesn’t know about this plan because he’s either been missing, drunk, or with both kids at the same time up until this point. 

The book has simply decided that “oh no, I can’t like him” is a stronger point of drama than “oh no, I’m about to have to decide if I’m willing to kill people despite the fact that I probably won’t win, or if I want to go out of this life without blood on my hands,” so it’s forcing the situation into loops to shoehorn in more of the chosen drama.  And, frankly, I just don’t care that much more about relationship drama than I do about the “am I willing to kill or not” drama that should be more important.  If you’ll notice, Katniss has never asked herself the “am I willing or not” question at any point so far in this book.  She’s willing, and she doesn’t even have to think about it.

Because, in fact, at some point, we’re going to have to knock it off and accept we’re bitter adversaries.

Just let this drama die already!  I’m sick of hearing it, and I’m sick of you continually forgetting about the other 22 people trying to kill you who will probably get to him first.  You’ve already recognized this fact, so why are you insisting on ignoring it?

I have not been as oblivious to him as I imagined, either. The flour. The wrestling. I have kept track of the boy with the bread.

He won second place in your school.  A tiny school, since it’s in a town of only 8,000.  It’s not at all unusual that you noticed something that happened, probably, right in front of you. 

Then again, considering the alarming rate at which Katniss forgets things she’s already realized, maybe this is an unusual feat for her.

Almost all of the boys and at least half of the girls are bigger than I am, even though many of the tributes have never been fed properly.

Why, why, why, why, why would anyone write a book about people starving and then not look up some of the consequences of starving?  Life-long malnutrition results in stunted growth and deformities.  These “many” tributes should be stunted (looks different from short) and have malformed limbs and joints that result in a limited range of motion.  For the record, they should also have terrible teeth and hair, sagging skin, poor memory, impaired reaction times…  Katniss should not be shorter than these victims of chronic starvation unless she’s about four feet tall.  And even then, considering the wide variety of problems that come along with starvation, size doesn’t count worth a fig.

combined with the exertion it took to get them have given me a healthier body than most of those I see around me.

They’re starving.  Why do you think that you’re the only person who’s worked hard in the pursuit of putting food on the table?  The only thing you’ve done that they haven’t is be born into a District with a shitty fence. 

Okay, and now we’ve reached the Careers.  Why does everyone not raise Careers?  This isn’t a purely voluntary system.  It’s not like these Career kids had a choice between “murder other kids” and “stay home and twiddle thumbs.”  It’s the option between “send in someone well trained who at least has an option of winning” and “let little kids like Rue get picked.”  Katniss talks about how terrible it is that Rue is so tiny and no one volunteered for her, and yet at the same time she hates the people who volunteer to take the place of little kids?  What, just because they had the foresight to actually do stuff in an attempt to not die?  Someone has to go to the Games every year, that’s not an option, and only three Districts have bothered to do jack shit to try and avoid sending in malnourished and frightened 12 year-olds. 

You know what, I bet in Career districts, no one worries about taking tesserae.  Everyone can take out a ration for everyone in their family, with no worry at all, because they know that even if they’re picked they’ll just be replaced by that year’s chosen Career.  All that drama at the start of the book about how Prim wasn’t allowed to take tesserae?  Could have been completely avoided if her District had a Career system, and then they would have had twice as much grain in the family. 

These districts were handed the same shitty situation as everyone else, they’re being victimized the same amount as everyone else, but instead of shove their heads up their asses and crying, they sat down and said “how do we minimize the damage?”  And I refuse to think badly of them for coming up with a system that protects untrained pre-teens.  And the fact that these Careers are characterized as being brutal?  Still don’t hate them for it.  They were raised for this from childhood; of course they ended up that way.  For all we know, it’s a front that they were trained to put up as sort of a mental defense, sort of “embrace the monster, since you don’t have a choice about doing monstrous acts.”  That’s actually a pretty good sanity defense.  It doesn’t make them any less victimized by this whole situation.

And yet Katniss will continually direct more ire and criticism toward these kids than she does against the people who put them all in an arena together.

Now I see nothing but contempt in the glances of the Career Tributes.

Like the contempt you showed when you assumed that the other starving children are lazy?  Or the contempt you showed when you assumed that the Career system is somehow inferior to your district’s bout of insanity?

When Atala releases us, they head straight for the deadliest-looking weapons in the gym and handle them with ease.

That doesn’t really tell me much.  What are the deadliest-looking weapons?  Because the deadliest in a practical sense aren’t generally considered the deadliest-looking, they’re actually quite plain.  That’s part of what makes them deadly: they have a minimum of complications. 

You get the feeling that the knot-tying class is not the Hunger games hot spot. When he realizes I know something about snares, he shows us a simple, excellent trap that will leave a human competitor dangling by a leg from a tree. We concentrate on this one skill for an hour until both of us have mastered it. Then we move on

Why is knot-tying not a hot spot?  That makes no sense.  The other kids, the ones that are ‘shakily having a first lesson with an ax,’ they should be at the knot tying.  No one, especially no one who is emaciated, is going learn ax-swinging in three days and their own sponsors should know this.  However, human-sized snares apparently only take an hour to learn and don’t require a lot of personal strength to make them work.

“At home. The iced ones, for the bakery,” he says. He means the ones they display in the windows. Fancy cakes with flowers and pretty things painted in frosting.

Who is buying these fancy cakes?  And who is buying them at such a high rate that you can display them in the windows?  It would be better to paint cardboard cakes and just prop them up to remind people that the bakery does that sort of thing, though that still doesn’t get around the question of who is buying these fancy cakes?

We do pick up some valuable skills, from starting fires, to knife throwing, to making shelter.

Katniss is a hunter who lived in a shitty district where all the heating and cooking was done by fire.  But she doesn’t know how to start a fire or make a shelter.

And, again, why are these not hotspot stations?  They’re much more valuable than ax-swinging.  I get that the Capitol probably wants them to focus more on bloodbath than on camping, but in that case, they should have set things up to make the ax-swinging stations more desirable.  They simply aren’t doing that.  They’re creating a situation where camping is the more valuable skill and then letting kids do whatever, but for some reason the kids are inexplicably ignoring common sense.

If you can hide and feed yourself for long enough, you don’t have to fight anyone.  You just have to wait for ‘anyone’ to die off first.

other times eating at the endless banquet that has been set for them, ignoring the lot of us.

These gamemakers have more obsession with food than Katniss has ever shown.  I mean, having a buffet at meal times is a decent show of decadence, but most people who have been well fed all their lives have no problem with focusing on work during work-hours.  You know who should be distracted by this endless banquet?  THE STARVING CHILDREN.  Even if they aren’t allowed to eat it, they should be distracted by it, looking at it, trying to get close to it, all that sort of stuff.

The Career Tributes tend to gather rowdily around one table, as if to prove their superiority, that they have no fear of one another and consider the rest of us beneath notice.

Or possibly they just have more in common with each other than with you.  If you were raised for the games your entire life and were resigned/confident about going into them, would you rather sit with like-minded people or with the frightened kids that just talked about how much they want to go home?  It’s not a matter of arrogance; that kind of company is going to be disheartening and wear down on the probably shaky resolve they all have, whereas hanging around other boisterous types makes it easier to put up a brave front.

Somehow, although it’s made from the same stuff, it looks a lot more appetizing than the ugly drop biscuits that are the standard fare at home.

Because District 12 is so shitty that even their bread is sad-looking.  They have to be the shittiest ever, because then otherwise Katniss can’t have any pathos.  Oh, wait, yes she can, since she’d about to be thrown into murderdeath games.  I will never understand why the book thinks that isn’t good enough to draw in the readers.

a true story, in which I’d foolishly challenged a black bear over the rights to a beehive.

If there’s bees around, why does no one keep them intentionally?  Why does everyone in this book fail so hard at doing commonsense things for the sake of their own survival?

She’s the twelve-year-old, the one who reminded me so of Prim in stature. Up close she looks about ten.

Thanks to the shitty quality of this book, I can’t tell what Rue looks like.  Does she look like what we’d think of as a ten-year-old, or does she look like a starving ten-year-old?  Because, frankly, every child in her district should look tiny and younger than they really are.  THEY’RE ALL MALNOURISHED, WHY DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS MEANS?

She can hit the target every time with a slingshot. But what is a slingshot against a 220-pound male with a sword?

Victory.  That’s what a slingshot is: victory.  Slingshots are not harmless toys; they are weapons.  More than that, they are ranged weapons.  You can kill small animals with them by crushing their bones.  You can modify them to shoot arrows or pointed sticks and bring down mid-sized game.  That image of Katniss in a tree eating squirrels and shooting people?  Yeah, Rue can do it, too.  She can do it better, given her climbing skills.  She can shoot rocks at people’s eyes and blind them, then sit pretty in her tree while those people starve to death.  She can hit them in the head and disorient them or, if she’s really lucky, in the neck and crush a windpipe. 

We’re not really sure what kind of slingshot she’s got, but given what we know about her later in the book (that she actually works and doesn’t spend all day in school like Katniss) I’m guess that she learned to shoot on a good, sturdy slingshot and not a toy.  Probably used them to keep large pests away from crops.  If it was something that her people picked up on their own, and not a tool issued by the Capitol for that purpose, then it’s probably a sling rather than a slingshot.  The former can be made from anything, the later needs vulcanized rubber to be any use.  Slings are incredibly powerful and can kill a full-grown adult warrior, and they were used in armies before archery was invented.  Not only that, but as I mentioned, they can be made from just about anything.  If you can make a rope from a plant, you can make a sling.  Compare that kind of versatility to Katniss, who keeps thinking that she can’t make a bow and yet is overly reliant on that weapon. 

In short, this book knows shit all about weapons.

Full of endless directions about what we should do and not do in training. Peeta is more patient, but I become fed up and surly.

Because Katniss is special and she doesn’t need your stupid directions about how to stay fucking alive.

“Someone ought to get Haymitch a drink.”

I make a sound that is somewhere between a snort and a laugh.

Stop it, book.  Stop it. 

I’d like you all to sit back for a moment and imagine that a close relative or loved one is an alcoholic.  Statistically speaking, some of you won’t have to imagine at all.  Your loved one struggles with drinking and with the consequences of that every fucking day, and you have to live with said consequences, too.  You watch this person’s life fall apart.  If they’ve attempted to get clean, you’ve watched that horror as well as they relapse, try again, relapse again, and go through horrible physical and emotional upheavals all the while.  Maybe this loved one isn’t all that loved.  Maybe they are violent and destructive and abusive.  Abusive towards you.

Now imagine that you picked up this book in an attempt to get away from that for just a few hours.  You open it up and find an alcoholic character.  You’re wary at first, because it’s played for laughs.  It’s a view you’ve come across before, because alcoholism gets dismissed so often in our culture.  We are, after all, a drinking culture where people celebrate the idea that you have to get smashed first to have a good time.  “No good story every started with someone eating a salad,” and all that.  It’s what keeps you from discussing this issue with your friends; you’re afraid they will dismiss it as no big deal, or perhaps they already have dismissed it because they just don’t understand how terrible it is.

But you keep reading.  And over and over again you see the same issues that keep you from talking to your friends.  Alcoholism is no big deal, Haymich just stops drinking with no consequence, Haymich is perfectly functional, other characters make jokes about his drinking and treat his sobriety like it’s no big deal.  And it hurts, because it just reminds you that you are alone, you can’t talk to other people about this same issue, no one will take it seriously or understand unless they’ve lived through it themselves.  It hurts.

Stop hurting people, book.  Stop it.

“Remember what Haymitch said about being sure to throw the weights.”

That it’s a perfectly useless skill?  He can chuck weights around.  Who cares. 

I’d rather Peeta win than the others. Better for our district, for my mother and Prim.

Then why do you insist at every turn that the two of you will be at each other’s throats in the arena?  Surely this has happened before, where two people will team up because they at least want someone from their district to win.  It really makes the most sense.  If there’s two of them versus the rest of the Games, then odds are one will die before the end of things just from all the fighting they’ll do.  But that teamwork will give the surviving member an advantage, so they’ll be better able to navigate the last leg of the Games.  This cannot be a new thing that no one has thought of in 74 years, especially considering how impoverished most tributes are.  But Katniss will continue to whine, whine, whine as if she expects that she and Peeta will be locked in mortal combat right after the starting bell rings.

It’s amazing.  This girl manages to whine so much about such pointless things that, even though she’s about to go into a murderdeath game, I can’t dredge up any sympathy.  The book just overplays its hand far too much. 

Even as I pull back on the bow I know something is wrong. The string’s tighter than the one I use at home. The arrow’s more rigid.

And this is why that “don’t touch a bow until it’s time to be impressive” plan is shitty advice.  Did you really not see this coming?  Of course every bow is going to be different, and of course the professional bows are going to be vastly different from the ones her father made from dropwood out in the forest.

Despite the fact that there’s a huge amount of difference in the weapons she’s using, Katniss adjusts within a few minutes.  After that, yeah, she’s perfectly perfect and the epitome of perfectdom.  Champion competitive archers can’t hit a bull’s-eye every time, but Katniss can pick up a weapon with different construction and different tension and hit a rope on her second try.

And she’s supposed to be the underdog in this book?  She’s better fed than most of the tributes, she’s already lacking in empathy and doesn’t have to worry about that, she’s been hunting for years and knows how to survive in the wilderness, and on top of it all, she’s basically Athena with a bow.  She doesn’t even have to suffer the ostensible hardships of being from an overlooked district, because she ~*~*~magically~*~*~ got Cinna, the perfect PR helper, to show up like her fairy godmother.  Just exactly what disadvantages is she going to have to overcome in this book?

For a moment, I’m humiliated

Heaven forbid you look foolish in front of the people who are working to kill you.  It’s just so bizarre.  If impressing these people is life-or-death, one would expect her to feel fear or nerves or some sort of “oh shit there went my last chance at staying alive.”  Humiliated, on the other hand, only works if “impressing” is her main goal, not “surviving.”

A few are nodding approval, but the majority of them are fixated on a roast pig that has just arrived at their banquet table.

Whyyyyyyyyyy????  Why are they so much more concerned with food than any of the tributes?  Why are they distracted by it, if they constantly have it?  If they eat all the time, then why aren’t they conditioned to just go “oh, a pig, I shall eat that with one hand while continuing my work” instead of “WHEEE A PIG OMG I LOVE PIG LET’S FOCUS ALL ON THAT”?

And then she shoots the apple, but all the really stupid fallout from that is in the next chapter.