My first impulse is to scramble from the tree, but I’m belted in.

Yet another reason why you shouldn’t sleep in trees.

The world has transformed to flame and smoke. Burning branches crack from trees and fall in showers of sparks at my feet.

You’re already dead.  No, really, at the point where there are burning branches right next to you, you are already dead.  The fire has caught up to you.  You are in a fire. 

You are dead.  It’s possible to survive a forest fire…if you take the precautions before the fire reaches you.  If you stay asleep right up until the fire is at your feet, then you’re dead.  If the fire isn’t enough to kill you, something else would, because you’re so unaware of your surroundings that you sleep through the start of a forest fire.  Seriously, those things are noisy as fuck. 

All I can do is follow the others, the rabbits and deer and I even spot a wild dog pack shooting through the woods.

LOLNOPE.  Animals run from fire at the first scent of smoke.  We’ve gone past smoke and have reached actual flames right at your feet. 

One could argue that this is a gamemaker-created fire, so it didn’t get the normal buildup and just sprung into being fully formed.  Okay, I’ll go with that.  But Katniss is a hunter who’s spent most of her life in the woods and has probably encountered a forest fire or two.  She should know how this usually goes, and she’s calm enough to at least slip in a “wtf, why didn’t I hear this coming?” or two.

The heat is horrible, but worse than the heat is the smoke, which threatens to suffocate me at any moment.

Yeah…no.  I mean, yes, the smoke is more dangerous.  But on the other hand the smoke is more dangerous and yet she’s running around just fine.  It presents no problems for her.  She covers her nose with her shirt, which would do shit-all when she’s right in the middle of the inferno.  That’s only going to protect you from a light amount of smoke, not the pits of forest fire hell. 

The flames that bear down on me have an unnatural height, a uniformity that marks them as humanmade, machine-made, Gamemaker-made.

And again I say, LOLNOPE.  Look, the trees are on fire.  It might have been started by a gamemaker, but the fucking trees are on fire.  Unless the arena is made up of nonflammable trees that only light up on command, then it doesn’t matter if it was started by man or started by nature.  The trees catch, and then the fire spreads in the way fire naturally spreads: by burning the fuck out of everything around it.  It could be that there’s a literal wall of fire just shooting up out of the ground that moves independently of the burning branches falling all around her, but in that case, it’s a very unclear description.

Things have been too quiet today. No deaths, perhaps no fights at all.

So, this fire is pretty clearly directed specifically at Katniss, to force her into the career group.  There’s no one else around to be threatened by it.  Maybe some other non-career kids got caught up in a fire, but we never hear about it because this book is so protagonist-centered.  So the idea is that she’s too boring, but for some reason it…wasn’t too boring to watch her wander around for three days looking for water?

Really.  Three days.  She had a bit of romance drama at the end of the first day, but then all of day 2 and day 3 she was simply walking in a straight line.  And for some reason they didn’t get bored of that and try and turn her back towards the other tributes, or just put a pond closer to the cornucopia.

The Capitol didn’t get bored, the author just wanted to throw in some action now that she’s finished with her oh-so-dramatic “almost dying of dehydration” bit.

The audience in the Capitol will be getting bored, claiming that these Games are verging on dullness. This is the one thing the Games must not do.

So, let’s talk about blame for a minute.  Throughout this book, the text has very carefully avoided giving any sort of blame to the Capitol citizens.  They are just dumb sheep who are kept in the dark, supposedly forgiven because they were “raised” on the games and somehow that negates natural human empathy.  Or something.  The point is, up until now, they aren’t blamed for putting on these games.

Then again, neither are the gamemakers.  Katniss comes face to face with the people who are now hurling fire at her back in training, and all she did was get embarrassed because they weren’t paying attention.  She never blamed them, either, and now we’re being presented the idea that they are held accountable by yet another outside party. 

It’s sort of like in The Selection, when the text set up things to say that “fate” had made this system and the people at the top were just as much at the whim of it as the people at the bottom.  Here we have an audience that’s just watching what the TV gives the and TV programmers just giving the audience what they want.  No one is actually to blame for the fact that 23 kids die every year.

Every year.  For 73 years before this one.  1,679 dead children.  And no one is held accountable for it by Katniss or the book.  As far as this book is concerned, the system itself is to blame, but not any of the people who prop up that system.

Except, inexplicably, for Effie. 

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

There is the Career pack and then there are the rest of us, probably spread far and thin across the arena.

The gamemakers are stupid for making this arena.  If having them spread out is so dull, then don’t give them the ability to spread out in the first place.

I hurdle over a burning log.

So, back to the matter at hand.  The fire is now in front of Katniss.  She’s deader than dead at this point.

See, the thing is, you can’t outrun a forest fire.  The way they spread is pretty fascinating, actually.  The heat from the fire will dry out the vegetation all around the fire, which means that once the actual flames arrive, everything lights up right away.  Plus, fires make sparks (as Katniss already noted in the opening) and those sparks float in the breeze until they land on all that conveniently dried out vegetation.  Boom, new section of fire.  They don’t have to wait for one tree to catch on fire before spreading out to the next tree; they travel in leaps and bounds.  You cannot run fast enough to stay ahead of one.  If you are already in one, you can’t run fast enough to get out of it and then also keep head of it.

So, Katniss is at this point completely surrounded by fire.  (Fire which, by the way, is hot enough to catch the actual logs and branches on fire, not just the leaves and mast, so it’s a pretty fucking hot fire.)  There’s this other handy way fire spreads, called “flashover.”  That is the temperature at which everything is so hot that it spontaneously ignites on fire.  Items (like clothing) can get so hot that they burst into flame without coming in contact with the actual fire first.  Katniss herself won’t catch on fire this way, since the human body needs very high temps to do this, but it’s entirely possible that her gear could.

However, even if a body doesn’t catch on fire, that doesn’t mean it’ll function just fine.  Forest fires can easily reach several hundred degrees (trees need roughly 500 degrees for the living wood to catch fire) and the surrounding air isn’t much cooler.  The human body can withstand about 200 degrees if special precautions aren’t taken first.  Katniss should be feeling the effects of the heat as her internal fluids literally start to boil.  Which, admittedly, will take a while, but as I already covered, she isn’t getting away from this fire.  So the fire has plenty of time to keep burning and boil her in her own skin.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover smoke inhalation, which technically should have killed her before she even woke up.

In short, Katniss is dead.  She’s so very, very dead.  And yet she’s inexplicably alive, thanks to the magic of shitty research and lazy writing. 

On the other hand, this book would be so much better with zombie!Katniss.

In a matter of minutes, my throat and nose are burning. The coughing begins soon after and my lungs begin to feel as if they are actually being cooked.

They are being cooked.  And also, stop moving around.  You’re dead.

I could keep going with all this as she runs, hides under a rock, and vomits, but there’s nothing more to say except “you are currently surrounded on all sides by fire that you can’t outrun and also you’re dead.”

You get one minute, I tell myself. One minute to rest. I take the time to reorder my supplies, wad up the sleeping bag, and messily stuff everything into the backpack.

One minute of resting IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING FOREST FIRE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU NO REALLY AUTHOR I’M LOOKING AT YOU NOW DO YOU REALLY THINK THIS IS HOW FIRES WORK?

Would there be any way I could travel parallel to the fire and work my way back there, to a source of water at least?

I … just … what … what am I even looking at?  Fire moves.  It expands outward.  It doesn’t sit still in a solid, slow-moving wall that you can run parallel to. 

And also, IT’S ALREADY FUCKING IN FRONT OF YOU, YOU HAD TO JUMP OVER A BURNING LOG TO MOVE FORWARD, JUST REALLY, WHAT IS THIS?

Also, also, you’re already dead and annoying me from beyond the grave.

Katniss decides that she can go around the fire to get back to her pond, because apparently she assumes that fire moves so slow that she can walk next to it for several miles.

the first fireball blasts into the rock about two feet from my head.

And now things are no longer confusing, they’re just silly.

What went into building this arena, anyway?  Are there canons in the ground at regular intervals?  Are the trees really made out of metal stuffed with fire-ball-flinging technology, and that’s why the fire’s front is inexplicably moving so slowly?  Except the branches are on fire and earlier she ate a pine tree so…

I’m barely on my feet before the third ball hits the ground where I was lying, sending a pillar of fire up behind me.

Fireball = pillar?  What?  Was there something there that caught on fire?  Was…there a pyrotechnic machine under the ground where she was laying and it sent fire shooting up into the air?

Did the series of unspecified natural disasters that pre-dated this world bend the laws of physics into running on Hollywood science?

And on top of that, if the point of this fail!fire is to drive the kids closer together so that they can kill each other better, then why run the risk of having them died at the hands of the arena?  That seems counter-intuitive.

She keeps running until the fireballs stop.  No mention is made of the actual forest fire, which should still be spreading at this point because nothing has stopped it.  And, in fact, since there’s a pillar of fire every time a ball hits, it should be spreading even faster than a normal fire.

I know [Cinna] couldn’t have foreseen this, must be hurting for me because, in fact, I believe he cares about me.

Cinna didn’t do anything but make awesome clothes and sit around being quieter than the people around him.  He’s not really that awesome, no matter how much this book insists that he is.  And now this book is going out of its way to give him contrived pathos even though he’s not even present. 

But Effie is just a stupid pet who doesn’t know what pearls are.

I would drag myself into a tree and take cover now if I could, but the smoke is still thick enough to kill me.

If it’s thick enough to kill you, then it’s thick enough to kill you.  Just die already, please.

I make myself stand and begin to limp away from the wall of flames that lights up the sky. It does not seem to be pursuing me any longer

I can’t tell what brand of shitty writing this is.  Either the book has no idea that a forest on fire is a forest on fire, or else it’s trying to say that the forest isn’t flammable and thus we can do this whole standing-still-fire thing.  And if the forest isn’t flammable, then 1) that’s a description fail and 2) probably shouldn’t have written branches and logs as being on fire.

I hate burns, have always hated them, even a small one gotten from pulling a pan of bread from the oven.

Middle class brat.

These are the small burns that normal people get.  But Katniss’s house is heated by a coal fire and all her cooking is done over an open flame.  She should have more experience with burns by now.

I’m so weary I don’t even notice I’m in the pool until I’m ankle-deep. It’s spring-fed, bubbling up out of a crevice in some rocks, and blissfully cool.

Katniss can’t find any water for three days, but now she literally stumbles into the perfect pond?

Isn’t that what my mother always says? The first treatment for a burn is cold water?  That it draws out the heat? But she means minor burns. Probably she’d recommend it for my hands. But what of my calf?

Well, Katniss, if it draws out heat and makes your hands feel better, stick your calf in there as well.  Yeah, it’s a bigger burn, but…so?

This is the exact opposite of how problem solving usually goes.  The human brain generally assumes that if something works for A, it’ll work for A-squared.  We’ll also sometimes assume that if A gets bigger, then the applied solution needs to get bigger.  Katniss, on the other hand, assumes that if something works for A, then A-squared must need a completely unrelated fix.  She doesn’t even attempt to put her burned calf into the cold water, despite noting that it makes her hands feel better.

Katniss has reasoning skills that are, literally, below the level of babies.

I’m guessing that it’s an injury in a whole different class.

It’s a burn, you idiot.  It’s a different severity, but burns don’t upgrade to abrasions once they get severe enough.

I try to recall all I know about burns. They are common injuries in the Seam where we cook and heat our homes with coal.

I don’t care how scared Katniss is of icky injuries and such, if burns are a common injury, then she should know what to do about them.  If only because she’s either had them before or expects to have them soon and needs to know what to do about them.

What’s funny was, Prim, who’s scared of her own shadow, stayed and helped. My mother says healers are born, not made.

So, remember in my Marked review when I ranted about Magical Indians about how when you declare someone’s skills and abilities to be magic, it “others” that person/group and takes away their agency?  Well fuck you, book, because the same thing applies here.  Healers are not “born,” and to imply otherwise takes away from the idea that people who work in a healing profession work and work hard, studying for years.  Not just doctors, but anyone in the field, from nurses to therapists to EMTs, they work their asses off.  To take that all away and say it’s nothing more than some inborn thing is to downplay all that hard work and passion.

Furthermore, Prim in this story is the ultimate girly-girl who can’t even butcher an animal when she’s starving.  She’s got all the earmarks of a “reeking of femininity” character.  Her and her mom both look alike and both are healers, whereas Katniss looks like her dad and is a hunter who hates injures.  There’s a very clear divide in this family, one of “males=hunters” and “females=healers,” and then it goes one step further and says that the women are just “born” healers.  You know what’s another way to phrase that?  Forced.  Saying one gender is “naturally” better at something like nursing or mothering is often used as an argument for why they “have” to do that thing.  After all, if the women don’t, no one else will because the men just aren’t as good as they are!  It’s a form of misogyny that parades around as a compliment, but it’s really just a way to pigeon-hole women into a handful of roles and then guilt them into staying there.

On top of that, this male/female divide in the Everdeen family just plain old pisses me off.  It’s so stark, so clichéd, so clearly delineated by gender lines.  Katniss, as the “honorary male,” has to give up her claim to all things girly, while Prim, as the Platonic female, can’t set a toe outside her clearly marked role.

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

I can’t show weakness at this injury. Not if I want help. Pity does not get you aid. Admiration at your refusal to give in does.

…acting like you don’t need help = getting help?  What?

Also, wow, Katniss sure is a good actor.  Look at her expertly stamping down her fears and emotions in favor of behaving for the camera in exactly the way she thinks she has to.  It’s almost like she’s a pro at this.  Eh?  What’s that?  Her inability to act is harped upon through all three books?  But…but…but she’s acting right here, at a time when acting should be hardest!  What?  People deliberately hide important information from her during the second book based on her inability to act?  BUT SHE’S FUCKING ACTING RIGHT NOW AND HAS BEEN SINCE DAY ONE.

I know there are herbs, if I could find them, that would speed the healing, but I can’t quite call them to mind.

Aloe, witch hazel, comfrey, and plantain.  All of them work as an anti-inflammatory, and witch hazel doubles as an astringent to help stave off infection.  Lavender will also fight infection and make it feel cooler.  Aloe also has plenty of vitamin C and stuff to help you grow new skin.

…you know, going back to that “healers are born, not made” thing, is that why Katniss never bothers to learn anything from her mother?  Because this isn’t the first or last time she’s needed to know something healery and been completely in the dark.  And burns are common in her district, so knowing that she should grab an aloe leaf and put it on her hand instead of go bother Mom about it would be some rather everyday common sense.  But apparently Katniss wasn’t “born” with the right parts to know basic first aid.

The smoke is slowly clearing but still too heavy to be healthy.

Good god, book, either have her hack up a lung or stop pointing out your own plot holes.  That smoke never once presents an actual obstacle to her.

[Her hands] can handle small breaks from the pool. So I slowly put my gear back in order.

So, hands are burned, but she then proceeds to perform several fine motor control functions like unscrew the water bottle cap and roll up her sleeping bag.  Because…yeah, this author has no idea what it’s like to burn your hands.

Burns produce inflammation.  The skin swells up.  Swollen hands do not work properly.  It’s not a matter of just gritting through the pain and doing stuff anyway.  They literally do not work.

I spot some water plants with edible roots and make a small meal with my last piece of rabbit. Sip water. Watch the sun make its slow arc across the sky.

Hey, wasn’t the whole point of that brain-breakingly impossible forest fire that the show was getting dull?  But here she is, eating and drinking water and sitting around, which is exactly the same thing as her plan before the fire.

The only difference being that she’s closer to other people now.  If she’d done all this back at the first pool, she might have had to sit down and think, consider, form some sort of plan based on her morals and beliefs, and then take proactive action.  But heaven forbid we give her a chance to do that, no, fireballs are apparently much more interesting to read about.

Still, they are closing in, just like a pack of wild dogs

People aren’t really people in this book, they’re just animals. 

Which, given the situation presented, could be an interesting tactic to take.  If it were done deliberately. 

I pick a high tree and begin to climb. If running hurt, climbing is agonizing because it requires not only exertion but direct contact of my hands on the tree bark. I’m fast, though, and by the time they’ve reached the base of my trunk, I’m twenty feet up.

Again, not how burns work.  It’s not just pain that she can grit through and keep moving.  It’s hands that don’t fucking work.

Even so, look at their weapons. Look at their faces, grinning and snarling at me, a sure kill above them.

…

…

I’m looking, and all I see is a page with words on it.  Why don’t you describe some of it to me, idiot?

Now I smile. “How’s everything with you?” I call down cheerfully.

This takes them aback, but I know the crowd will love it.

Because Katniss is an awesome actor who instinctively understands people and knows exactly how to– wait, isn’t that supposed to be Peeta?

Okay, okay, I know I’ve gone on about that a lot this chapter, but it comes up a lot.

On top of that, I wish she’d shut up already about the fucking Capitol.  There’s no sense that she’s actually doing this to a point or purpose.  There’s just this amorphous “audience” that she has to play to, and somehow this will help her down the line, but this isn’t explained in any clear way.  And, really, in every instance when she says that “the audience” will love it…I get the feeling she really means “the book’s audience.”  These things are done to entertain, and only for that reason…and they’re meant to entertain us, the reader.  Katniss has no reason to give the fuckers watching her a good chuckle, but the author has every reason to give us one.  So every time she goes on about doing something for the Capitol, she’s not really.  She’s doing it for us.  Which…could be interesting, except I also get the feeling the author doesn’t realize this.  The concept doesn’t really go anywhere, it’s just used as a shorthand for “well, now I guess this has to happen, but I’m too lazy to make a reason for it.”  There’s no attempt to say anything about this audience pandering or to make a point out of it, it’s not even satirized.  It’s just…there.

“No,” says Cato, pushing away the bow. “I’ll do better with my sword.” I can see the weapon, a short, heavy blade at his belt.

A sword.  While climbing a tree. 

And…these kids are trained?  At what?  Clearly they aren’t trained at how to fight out of doors, nor are they trained at how to make sure a kid is dead, so just what are they “trained” at?

The girl with the arrows, Glimmer I hear someone call her—ugh, the names the people in District 1 give their children are so ridiculous

Because “Katniss” is so much better.

I would just like to point out that this is the same girl who was all but called a whore for daring to be put in a see-through dress, and now the book is mocking her name as well.

She tries to shoot me and it’s immediately evident that she’s incompetent with a bow.

Having been trained all her life for this event, of course no one ever thought to teach her how to use (or make) a ranged weapon.  I mean, that would be just silly.  No, see, the “trained” kids just sat around eating food, lifting weights, and practicing their scary faces.

One of the arrows gets lodged in the tree near me though and I’m able to seize it. I wave it teasingly above her head, as if this was the sole purpose of retrieving it

Hey, Katniss, how are your hands?

All the relief from the pool water has gone, leaving me to feel the full potency of my burns.

Ah, they’re hurtin, are they?  Well, then fuck off, they’re probably barely burned.  Since clearly you don’t have any swelling or loss of dexterity or, heaven forbid, blisters to deal with.  I mean, blisters are icky and ugly and Katniss isn’t allowed to be ugly.

The heat of the bag’s too much for my leg. I cut a slash in the fabric and hang my calf out in the open air.

Congratulations, now the rest of you will freeze.

Please just die already.  Or at least turn into the fun kind of zombie.

The eyes of some animal peer at me from the neighboring tree—a possum maybe—catching the firelight from the Careers’ torches.

It’s Rue.  To be fair, a moment later she mentions that Rue does not have opposum eyes, but I’m keeping a running count of comparing people to animals.  If we take Nell’s name as one count, we’re up to three.  If there’s been others in past chapters that I can’t remember right now, remind me and I’ll add to the count.