Betrayal. That’s the first thing I feel, which is ludicrous. For there to be betrayal, there would have had to been trust first.

There’s also the fact that she’s whinged repeatedly about how she hates the buddy-buddy routine and wishes Peeta would treat her like she treats him.  In fact, she’s been very consistent and insistent on this fact.  But Katniss will never fail to whine about the situation, no matter what it is, even after she’s been given exactly what she wants.  If the situation thus far had been handled differently, if there’d been any amount of confusion on her part, if she’d outwardly said “we’re enemies” but inwardly enjoyed or even appreciated having a friend around, all this would be acceptable.  Instead we’ve got this mess.

was there some part of me that couldn’t help trusting him?

What is it with authors not understand the definition of ‘trust’?  It’s possible to appreciate someone without trusting them, especially in this situation.

The Games begin in two days, and trust will only be a weakness.

How?  Trust is not the same as affection.  You can ‘trust’ someone to behave in a certain way, then make ambush plans for them based on their future actions.  Basically, trust is an asset in the Games, whether you make a partnership or not.  Nothing about Katniss trusting Peeta precludes her from murdering the fuck out of him. 

And, seriously, it would be nice to see Katniss just once show a hesitation toward killing another human being that isn’t dependent on her warm and squishy feelings for said person. 

I can’t imagine what Effie will have to teach me that could take four hours, but she’s got me working down to the last minute.

And now we’ve got just basic bad writing.  Katniss is simultaneously saying that she doesn’t understand what could take four hours and also that it took four hours.  And all of it in present tense, no less!  It would be workable in past tense, when the narrator is kind of looking back on the story and can skip around like this.  But it just flatly doesn’t work with the way the author decided to write this.

“Well, try and pretend!” snaps Effie. Then she composes herself and beams at me. “See, like this. I’m smiling at you even though you’re aggravating me.”

Oh, Effie.  Here we have another hint that Effie is more than she appears.  She’s not smiling all the time because she’s some simpleton who actually likes what she does, but because it’s expected of her and she has to perform up to expectations.  For that matter, the image of a constantly smiling, constantly chipper official is a sign of low-ranking official.  It’s a way of rolling over and showing your belly, of saying “Don’t hurt me; I’ll play along.”  Yeah, it can also be a sign of someone who is just like that, but here we have evidence that isn’t so in Effie’s case.

But the book will continue to treat her like a moron who deserves our derision.  Because this book is feminist and don’t you forget it.

I kick off my heels and stomp down to the dining room, hiking my skirt up to my thighs.

Effie spent four hours coaching her on things that will help her (well, if we take the book’s claim that sponsors are make-or-break, they’ll help her) but Katniss is going to throw a hissy fit because she doesn’t like it.  And she’s never reprimanded for it, never realizes that Effie was doing a good and helpful thing, never comes to the conclusion that maybe she shouldn’t have acted like such a brat.  I don’t mind teenagers acting like teenagers in books, but I do mind when they get away with it and everything is hunky-dory.  I mean, shouldn’t we be sending a message to the kids reading these books that this behavior isn’t acceptable, rather than that if they act like this a whole country will love them and ‘ship them?

“How we’re going to present you. Are you going to be charming? Aloof? Fierce? So far, you’re shining like a star. […] People are intrigued, but no one knows who you are. The impression you make tomorrow will decide exactly what I can get you in terms of sponsors,”

Apparently this book doesn’t realize that “mysterious” is a valid thing.  In fact, people really like mystery.  A mystery can be anything.  Right now, to the Capitol viewers, Katniss can fit any one of a number of images and therefore appeal to a broad range of people.  As soon as she commits to one image, she cuts down on the number of people who will connect with her.  She doesn’t have to be everyone’s best friend in order to get sponsors, she just has to convince a large number of people that she’s worth betting on.  Someone who thinks she’s a ruthless killer (and likes that) and someone who thinks she’s a noble savage (and likes that) will both be disappointed when she comes on stage and giggles and twirls around in her stupid dress. 

All I can think is how unjust the whole thing is, the Hunger Games. Why am I hopping around like some trained dog trying to please people I hate?

Yes!  Indeed!  Hang on to that thought!  Because you’ve pretty much forgotten it until this point.  In fact, you’ve hopped pretty well, flitting around in fancy fire outfits and showing off your shooting skills.

That you can’t believe a little girl from District Twelve has done this well. The whole thing’s been more than you ever could have dreamed of. Talk about Cinna’s clothes. How nice the people are. How the city amazes you.

In short, act like a perfect little lapdog, giving them only what they want to hear, and never make them feel uncomfortable about the fact that they kill 23 kids a year.  You know, just like how this book never makes its readers feel uncomfortable about their own lives!

Which, if you’re just aiming for survival, isn’t all that bad a tract to take.  But I’ll bring this up again later.

Apparently, I’m too “vulnerable” for ferocity.

Uh, how?  What makes her vulnerable?  In fact, the whole drama in this scene so far is that she’s prickly as a porcupine, so where is this vulnerability coming from?

I’m not witty. Funny. Sexy. Or mysterious.

What the fuck?  Haymich’s whole opening bit was that she was too mysterious, and now it’s saying that she’s not mysterious enough?  Someone please explain to me how this is supposed to make a lick of sense.

And why all the extra periods? 

Haymitch started drinking somewhere around witty, and a nasty edge has crept into his voice. “I give up, sweetheart. Just answer the questions and try not to let the audience see how openly you despise them.” 

Considering anyone would be nasty after that much annoyance, and the fact that he hasn’t altered his tone since they started working, the addition of the alcohol hasn’t changed him much.  Because that’s totally how alcoholism works.

smashing dishes around my room. When the girl with the red hair comes in to turn down my bed, her eyes widen at the mess.

Yeah, you feel real sorry for that girl, don’t you?

I crawl in between the sheets like a five-year-old and let her tuck me in. Then she goes. I want her to stay until I fall asleep. To be there when I wake up. I want the protection of this girl, even though she never had mine.

This is vaguely creepy and I’m not sure I can quite decide on why.  Maybe it’s because this girl has a valid reason to hate Katniss, or at least not genuflect over her, but instead she’s on board with the hero-worship.  Like it would just be that terribly hard on Katniss not to have every single person on the planet be in love with her.  This girl has been through some real trauma, some real horrible hardships, but she’s not the protagonist so it all gets swept to the side in favor of Katniss’s pathos.  She’s turned into a nursemaid and set piece, just an object for Katniss to fret about, but without having any apparent emotions or reactions of her own. 

Basically, the author has taken away this girl’s voice far more completely than the Capitol ever could have.

They erase my face with a layer of pale makeup and draw my features back out. Huge dark eyes, full red lips, lashes that throw off bits of light when I blink. Finally, they cover my entire body in a powder that makes me shimmer in gold dust.

Earlier in the book there was a big deal made over how they had “just enough” make up on so that she still looked like “herself,” and throughout there’s been jabs at the Capitol people and the other tributes and Effie that looking “fake” is something to be derided.  But now it’s time for Katniss to get decked out in layers of make-up and fake eyelashes, so now all that frippery is a good thing.

Really, it’s not that make up is a bad thing, it’s just that those other bitches didn’t do it right. 

Because my dress, oh, my dress is entirely covered in reflective precious gems, red and yellow and white with bits of blue that accent the tips of the flame design. The slightest movement gives the impression I am engulfed in tongues of fire. I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.

And an earlier line says it weights about forty pounds.  Forty pounds of gemstones.  Let’s not even discus the cost of that (because, really, monetary value of gems is relative).  Let’s talk about how hard it is to get gems.  They have to be mined.  Someone has to go down into a mine and dig them up, much like the people have to dig up coal in District 12.  It’s dangerous work, and you know the Capitol people aren’t doing it, so some poor sot in a District somewhere is digging up gemstones when he could have been put to work doing something productive.  Raising goats, maybe.  That’s people out of the workforce just to make something that’s shiny, not something that’s useful, and they’re being underfed and overworked.  Then the gems are given to someone else who has to cut and polish them, so that’s someone else out of the food-and-necessities workforce.  And then they do that again and again in order to get FORTY POUNDS of the stuff.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of manual labor.

For a dress she will wear once.

Does Katniss spare one moment of thought about how this dress is a picture of excess and extravagance and basically a flaming symbol of the Capitol’s willingness to kill people for pretty things?  No, of course not, her only thought in the world is that it’s just so pretty.

It’s as if she has completely divorced herself from the idea that stuff gets produced.  She never seems to connect the things she sees to the idea that someone had to make it.  Furthermore, that someone in the districts had to make it.  She never thinks “and underpaid worker slaving away to fee three starving kids made that” or “a farmer worked day and night for this food and then had it taken from him while he watches people around him eat nothing but mushy grain.”  She acts as if stuff just exists, independently of any production line, and then she’s jealous that the Capitol has all this “appear from nothing stuff” while she doesn’t.

Cinna dismisses the team and has me move around in the dress and shoes, which are infinitely more manageable than Effie’s.
Because the dress weighs forty pounds, but it’s still better than something that nasty Effie bitch had.

“I don’t find you so. The prep team adores you. You even won over the Gamemakers. And as for the citizens of the Capitol, well, they can’t stop talking about you. No one can help but admire your spirit.”

The prep team doesn’t have a good reason to like her because they’ve had no meaningful interaction, so they’d probably like anyone.  The gamemakers could just be trying to get her killed for all we know, or simply trying to make good television; they don’t necessarily have to like her to explain her scores.  The people in the Capitol only like her because of Cinna’s clothes and the volunteering thing, and she can’t exactly volunteer twice.  So I’m failing to see how any of this is supposed to be helpful.

Also, “spirit” seems to be a stand in for her Mary Sue powers.  It’s just undefined enough that she doesn’t have to do anything specific to justify it.  Sort of like how in other stories the quality will be “innocence.”  The female doesn’t have to prove it, it’s just something that shines out of her and everyone knows it by looking at her.  That way she can be adored without having to actually put forth any effort at trying to be adored.

Because, much like with being pretty, if you have to actually try that means you’re a fakey-fake.

“Gale,” I say instantly. “Only it doesn’t make sense, Cinna. I would never be telling Gale those things about me. He already knows them.”

Five year-olds have a better understand of playing pretend than this girl does.  I mean, this is not understanding on a truly astounding level, to the point where I think the only reason is so that she can follow it up with “sure, Cinna, you are my friend” line.

Of all the people I’ve met since I left home, Cinna is by far my favorite. I liked him right off and he hasn’t disappointed me yet.

She liked him based on his looks and he hasn’t done anything exceptionally friendly.  Sure, he made her pretty dresses, but that’s his job.  He would have done that for anyone.  I don’t see why him doing his chosen profession should be considered a sign of friendship.

When you’re asked a question, find me, and answer it as honestly as possible,”

More fake-is-bad stuff.  Haymich’s suggestions all went awry because he was trying to get her to be fake, but Cinna, glorious god of all things right that he is, advocates for honesty. 

Two things.  1) Katniss’s real self is pretty shitty so far.  She’s surly and paranoid and does really crappy things for the sole motivation of pissing off other people.  2) Katniss should know how to be fake and toe the party line because that’s what she’s been doing her whole life.  We’re introduced to her saying that she has to watch what she says or else she’d get tattled on and then bad things will happen.  She’s aware of the concept of pretending to like stuff so that she doesn’t die.  Why is it suddenly such a hard thing to understand now?

Because fake is bad, and this book will hammer it in until you bleed this motto out your ears.  Fake is bad.  Say it with me, readers.  Fake is bad. 

“Even if what I think is horrible?” I ask. Because it might be, really.

“Especially if what you think is horrible,” says Cinna.

What?  Okay, I’m all for the idea of telling the Capitol what you really think of them, since you can’t get any deader than dead, but it doesn’t follow out of what came before.  It’s been portrayed so far as trying to get her sponsors and playing along, in which case, no, don’t say horrible things to your oppressive masters.  Also, why is she asking this question as if she doesn’t know the answer?  She’s supposedly been policing her speech her whole life.

Effie can be tiresome and clueless, but she’s not destructive like Haymitch.

She spent all morning trying to teach you how to not offend people, but you’ll still hate her for it.

This book is FEMINIST!

“Remember, you’re still a happy pair. So act like it.”

Stop being such a shipper, Haymich. 

Really, until about halfway through the Games when she “realizes” that she “loves” him, too, there’s no reason they have to appear buddy-buddy.  The narrative works without it.  Better, even, since Katniss isn’t supposed to know about his “love” at this point.  But I guess Haymich and Cinna get their rocks off on forcing awkward teenage romances.

In District 12, looking old is something of an achievement since so many people die early. You see an elderly person you want to congratulate them on their longevity, ask the secret of survival.

Another side effect of shitty living, starvation, and mining is that people will age prematurely.  “Looking old” kind of loses its punch when people start to look that way at 30.

The girl tribute from District 1, looking provocative in a see-through gold gown

She probably had about as much choice in her dress as Katniss did, and now she’s being paraded around in a see-through dress on national television.

I’m going to repeat that, because it bears repeating.  A teenage girl, one who was forced to come to the Capitol to participate in murder-death games, one who has a team of stylists to make all her clothing decisions for her, one who probably can’t say no, is being forced to expose her body on national television for the enjoyment of others.

With that flowing blonde hair, emerald green eyes, her body tall and lush… she’s sexy all the way.

But rather than bemoan the exploitation of this fellow victim, the book does just about everything except outright call her a slut.

I’ll say this for Caesar, he really does his best to make the tributes shine. He’s friendly, tries to set the nervous ones at ease, laughs at lame jokes, and can turn a weak response into a memorable one by the way he reacts.

He’s an actor being paid by the Capitol to make the Games look more like a celebration and less like a horror show.  He’s there to make this entire experience palatable to people who have no concept of the kind of suffering that is going on.  He’s there so that everyone can play pretend and ease their guilt a little bit.  But yeah, sure, go on calling him friend but calling Effie a monster for her participation. 

“I’m very hard to catch,” she says in a tremulous voice. “And if they can’t catch me, they can’t kill me. So don’t count me out.”

It’s really kind of sick the way this all plays out.  Especially with Rue.  She’s the tiniest of the tributes, and she’s made to look even more vulnerable by the stylists.  If anyone should be getting sympathy and making the Capitol rethink the morality of these games, it should be her.  But the book doesn’t seem to realize this.  It even makes Rue play along perfectly.

In fact, this whole bit with interviews just plain old doesn’t make sense.  It might with an all volunteer force.  Like I said, people are hardwired to not want other people to die.  It’s why we feel sad when we hear about some random guy getting shot in a park somewhere.  However, that can be supplanted if it’s made clear that the other person willingly takes on the risk/consequence.  There’s still a little twinge in most people, but it’s not a twinge of guilt, so it works.  And when all the tributes stand up and say “oh, gosh, it’s just so nice to be here.  I sure hope I win.  I’m so excited,” then yeah, that’s fine.  It helps the Games go down easier for the citizens of the Capitol.

But don’t sit there and tell me that every single one of these kids for 74 years has played along perfectly.  There has to have been a few kids who get up on stage in their pretty clothes and just cry about how they want to go home and they’re scared and they’d rather be anywhere except facing down imminent, bloody death.  There’s no way, no amount of coaching, that can convince me that every single kid, every single year, has played along.  Most of them don’t have a reason to.  Katniss is doing because she wants sponsors (even though she thinks she can’t win), but what about the District 10 boy with the crippled leg?  Surely he knows that he’s not going to get sponsors.  What’s his excuse for playing along?  Why isn’t he breaking down on stage and calling the Capitol murderers and saying he just wants his mommy?  Even if you tell me that every kid, every year, can be successfully threatened into playing along, not all of them are going to be ABLE to.  At least a few are going to be legitimately scared shitless and unable to play along.

Therefore, the interview system is just a massive game of Russian roulette, since at any moment someone might break down and remind the Capitol citizens that they are doing something absolutely horrifying.  The only excuse the citizens have is that they are apparently clueless, and the Capitol is supposedly keeping them that way, so why stage this entire charade that might blow up in their faces?

This is what I mean about Caesar. He tries to help you out.

Shut up, Katniss.  Stop declaring that everything the menfolk do is altruistic.  Ceasar is being paid to put on a good show, and he’s putting on a good show.  He’s also actively participating in making the games look more moral to the one group of people who might (maybe?  hard to tell) have the power to do something about them. 

so I lift up my arms and spin around and around letting the skirt fly out, letting the dress engulf me in flames. The audience breaks into cheers. When I stop, I clutch Caesar’s arm.

So, this is what you look like when you’re being yourself?  You gush about the food and about how your clothes are so pretty?  Katniss, are you sure you even really hate the Capitol?  Because despite all your earlier protestations, you don’t seem to have any problems with licking the boot that’s on your neck.

I address the balcony. “I’m not supposed to talk about it, right?”

The Gamemaker who fell in the punch bowl shouts out, “She’s not!”

“Thank you,” I say. “Sorry. My lips are sealed.”

Yes, that’s right, dance for your puppet masters.  Do exactly as you are told.  Don’t even think about straying from your regime-loving script. 

“She asked me to try really hard to win.”

Win.  Not “survive.”  Not “come home alive.”  Not “don’t leave me alone.”  Nothing that might make the Capitol citizens actually pause and take stock of their actions.  Nope, just the nice, neutral choice of “win.”

It’s not that she does this, necessarily.  Sort of like with the killing thing; wanting to survive this game is not a bad thing.  It’s that she doesn’t even pause to think about what she’s doing.  She never has a moment of wondering if any of this is right.  She never even has a moment where she decides to sink into lap-dog-ness.  It just all flows smoothly, as if neither Katniss nor the book even realizes that there’s another option.  That she can refuse to play along.  That she’s giving the Capitol exactly what they want without really any prompting.  There were no threats, no promises, no nothing to make her act this way.  She’s just playing along with the child-murdering bastards because…that’s the kind of person Katniss is, I guess.  Yay, role model!

And then there’s Peeta’s bit of confession, which I don’t object to in theory.  On the other hand, jeeze, you could have given her a bit of warning and included her in planning of this mess.  It’s not really up to you to just decide that you know what’s best for a woman, and therefore you don’t have to consult her on anything.  Maybe Katniss would have a real issue with this line (as indeed, she does) and would rather just gamble on her own bow-skills, or just die with a shred of dignity, or she has a different plan in mind.  I mean, we know all that’s not true because we’re the readers, but Peeta isn’t in her head.  He doesn’t know.  He’s just assuming that what he wants to do supersedes all else, and therefore he’s going to do it, no permission or even consultation needed.