Then I know. It’s a wasp nest. Fear shoots through me, but I have enough sense to keep still.

While I don’t contest the reaction, I do take exception at calling it “sense.”  She’s been climbing all over this tree, inviting other people to climb it, shouting, chasing after arrows, and in general making a ruckus while setting up her sleeping bag.  If she hasn’t pissed off the wasps yet, she isn’t going to.  Freezing in fear is one thing; freezing because it’s just so perfectly logical that the next noise, but not any previous noises, might set them off is ridiculous.

It could be the ordinary leave-us-alone-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone type. But these are the Hunger Games, and ordinary isn’t the norm.

Yeah, but “outside the norm” so far has been reserved to inflammable-yet-on-fire trees.  The rabbit didn’t have fangs and try to fight back, and neither one of your ponds had a hidden trap door that dropped you into a watery grave-pit.  It’s fine to say that the arena has tricksy things in it, but it’s fail!writing to have her consider that possibility only when it’s true. 

More likely they will be one of the Capitol’s muttations, tracker jackers.

Oh, book.  You and your third-grade-level word games.  To be honest, the first time I read this, my brain translated “muttation” to “mutation” every time, because why the fuck would anyone make a new word for that?  Maybe if the capitol was specifically making dogs, or crossing things with dogs, but…birds and wasps?  Why make up a new word for that when we have a perfectly serviceable one?

Like the jabberjays, these killer wasps were spawned in a lab and strategically placed, like land mines, around the districts during the war. Larger than regular wasps, they have a distinctive solid gold body and a sting that raises a lump the size of a plum on contact. Most people can’t tolerate more than a few stings. Some die at once. If you live, the hallucinations brought on by the venom have actually driven people to madness. And there’s another thing, these wasps will hunt down anyone who disturbs their nest and attempt to kill them. That’s where the tracker part of the name comes from.

So, the capitol really sucks at warefare.

Here’s the fun thing about land mines.  If you step on them, you die.  Also, they’re hidden, so you can’t avoid them.  Now, it’s a system that can be worked, just like any other, but the basic idea is hidden bomb=instadeath.  It’s actually a pretty good system for killing people, but it’s very much an offence-as-defense move.  It’s a weapon designed to kill, not to contain.

Compare that to the wasps.  These wasps can be avoided by simply not climbing 100 feet in the air and kicking the nest.  The wasps don’t hunt down anyone that wanders into their territory by accident, they only hunt down the people who kick them.  They’re land mines, but placed in fucking trees, because…I don’t know, were the rebels part elf?

They would be a good item to invent for the games, because they certainly add an interactive element to the games.  They can be used to keep people like Rue and Katniss from doing what they are doing, or they can be used as a tool the way Katniss does.  But as a tool of war?  They’re useless.

Why did the rebels lose that war, again?

 When Gale and I come across a tracker jacker nest, we immediately head in the opposite direction.

See?  Easy-peasy.

by the time the sun rises, the Careers will have formulated a plan to kill me.

These careers are pretty stupid, because the plan is obvious.  Light the tree on fire.  They’ve even just escaped from a forest fire, if they really need the inspiration.  Either she gets out of the tree or she dies from the smoke, problem solved.

However, as you’ll quickly see in this book, elements of the plot don’t ever carry over.  They just drop out in favor of something new.  Katniss looks for water for three days and almost dies, but once she finds it, no more looking for water.  After that, she spontaneously finds water wherever she needs it.  Then, the fire.  But we’re done with the fire now and focused on wasps instead, so no one can use fire again for something else.  Once this bit with the wasps is done, no one will try and find another nest to do the same thing.

I’ll have to saw off the branch at the trunk and send the whole thing down. The serrated portion of my knife should be able to manage that. But can my hands?

…

It’s now or never, I think, and begin to saw. Blisters burst on my right hand as I awkwardly drag the knife back and forth. Once I’ve got a groove, the work requires less effort but is almost more than I can handle. I grit my teeth and saw away […] But the anthem’s running out and I’m only three quarters of the way through the wood when the music ends, the sky goes dark, and I’m forced to stop.

Well, looks like your hands can manage it just fine.  Also, it seems she does have blisters, but no swelling?

Book, it’s all well and good to say that her hands hurt, but pain isn’t really an obstacle.  If she can just grit her teeth and do stuff exactly as she would uninjured, then it’s meaningless.  She can climb trees and saw through branches with the same speed and dexterity as she would normally, and the only difference is that we have to read a few extra words about pain.  An actual obstacle shouldn’t be something that merely annoys the readers, it should be something that presents tangible hardships and prevents normal action.  This right here doesn’t count.

But it’s still oddly subdued if these are tracker jackers. It’s the smoke, I think. It’s sedated them.

Apparently part of the tracker-jacker-making process included crossing them with bees, because this isn’t a characteristic of wasps.

If the wasps are too groggy, if the nest catches on its way down, if I try to escape, this could all be a deadly waste of time. Better, I think, to sneak up here at dawn and send the nest into my enemies.

Crashing around on the way down would wake up the wasps.  Just sayin’.  And “if the nest catches” isn’t something that’s controlled by the smoke, so it would still be a factor in the morning.  Really, her only concern here is that the wasps won’t be awake enough to do the full amount of damage.  They’d be awake enough to scare the fuck out of the kids on the ground and chase them away, giving her an opportunity for escape, but they wouldn’t be enough to straight up kill the kids.

That’s what this really comes down to.  Katniss isn’t looking for escape, she’s deliberately trying to kill.  She’s making plans that are geared toward murder instead of flight.  But she’s not framing it that way, because in her mind, murder is the only available option. 

Like most things in this book, it could be an interesting track to take if it were done deliberately.  After all, those kids do have to die if she plans on living through the game.  She could very well be thinking “I need to kill them now, because if all I do is flee then they’ll have a chance to kill me later.”  Even if murder isn’t her only option in a short-term sense, it is her only option in an end-game sense.  However, she never thinks about this.  All of her thoughts and plans are reserved for getting out of the tree, and she assumes she has to have fully-awake wasps in order to accomplish that short-term goal.  Nor does she, once again, spare a moment of thought or angst or hesitation over deliberately conducting her actions so as to have the highest chance of taking a human life.

Seriously, Katniss, it would go a long way toward redeeming you if you’d just hesitate for a moment.

I dip two fingers in the jar and gently spread the balm over my calf. The effect is almost magical, erasing the pain on contact, leaving a pleasant cooling sensation behind.

“Almost?”

This is no herbal concoction that my mother grinds up out of woodland plants, it’s high-tech medicine brewed up in the Capitol’s labs.

So, let’s talk about medicine now!  Do you know what’s in those fancy pills that people take?  Plant stuff. 

Now, we are talking about the future, so it’s possible they’ve gone beyond what our current medicines can do.  However, there’s a reason when people talk about the rain forest, they talk about it in terms of cures that could be found there.  See, medical labs don’t sit around making up entirely new compounds of stuff out of spare atoms.  They take stuff that’s in plants and refine it and play with it and combine it with stuff that’s in other plants.  In fact, the reason it’s considered superior is not because it’s something non-plant-stuff-y, but because it’s got no contaminants and the dosage can be controlled.  (Okay, to be fair, there’s stuff that isn’t plant-stuff-y.  But that stuff tends to be still derived from nature, not whole-sale invented.)  For instance, willow bark contains the same pain-killing compound you find in a bottle of aspirin.  But you have no idea how much acetylsalicylic acid is in any given handful of bark, whereas you know exactly how much is in a tablet of aspirin.  So you can give the max dosage using pills whereas you always run the risk of too little or too much with the bark.  

That does not mean that the bark doesn’t work.  It does have pain killer in it.  Just like witch hazel and aloe will reduce inflammation.  The implication here is that Mom’s “herbal concoctions” are little more than placebos, whereas the lab-made stuff actually works.

On the other hand, this magical healing cream does regenerate her skin overnight, so it pretty much is far beyond what herbal remedies could do.  That’s fine.  Lab-made stuff from the future could very well be a completely different class.  It’s just the tone and implication, and the hint that, once again, her mother is useless.  It would go a long way to have her use one of these herbal concoctions, and to have it work the way they should, and then say that the natural healing process just isn’t fast enough and thus she needs magitech. 

Now that the pain has eased, it’s all I can do to reposition myself in my bag before I plunge into sleep.

Don’t forget that hole you cut in the bag that’s now letting all the cold air in!

Almost nothing stayed in my stomach yesterday, and I’m already starting to feel the effects of hunger.

Oh, so you’re dizzy, weak, lethargic, prone to having your mind wander, and find small tasks extremely difficult?  No?  You’re just going to throw out that one line and assume that counts for anything, aren’t you?  Fuck you, book.

By her position, leaning up against the trunk of the tree, I’d guess Glimmer was supposed to be on guard, but fatigue overcame her.

1) Now Glimmer is a whore, has a stupid name, and also falls asleep on guard duty.  Man, she’s shaping up to be such an awesome character for this “feminist” book.

2) Hey, Katniss, want to escape?  All of the kids are asleep.  Forget the wasp nest and run for it.

Oh, wait, that’s right, you don’t give a fuck about non-violent options and will instead murder your way through everyone without a second thought.

Besides, if I’m going to die today, it’s Rue I want to win. Even if it means a little extra food for my family, the idea of Peeta being crowned victor is unbearable.

So, again and again I hear about Katniss’s love and devotion to her sister being a point in favor of her being a strong character.

LOL, Katniss doesn’t actually care whether or not her sister gets to eat.  Or rather, she cares, just not as much as she cares about petty vengeance and bullshit like this.  She is quite literally saying that her sister’s health means less than her irrational hatred of the popular clique.  In fact, after volunteering for her, Katniss pretty much forgot about Prim.  Her sister hasn’t influenced any of her decisions and she’s barely been present in her thoughts.

Then the same noise again a bit farther off. I realize she’s leaping from tree to tree.

Katniss hammers us in the head with the notion that she’s “naturally” small and really good at climbing.  Why can’t she at least look around and see if doing the same thing is an option?  I mean, if she can’t do it, fine, because it’s no easy thing to jump from tree to tree.  It’s also a really good way to fall and go to the emergency room.  But Katniss isn’t an eight year-old tomboy out on a lark; she’s trying to get away from six kids attempting to kill her.  That totally changes the “acceptable risk” consideration, and she should at least think about it.  Or, you know, if she weren’t hellbent on going for to the most destructive and dangerous option at every turn, she should be considering it.

Is this what she showed the Gamemakers? I imagine her flying around the training equipment never touching the floor. She should have gotten at least a ten.

Katniss, you’re stupid.  It’s a purely defensive move.  She might be able to outlast people by staying the trees, but she sure isn’t going to provide any good muderdeath television that way.

Compared to the agony of last night’s climb, this one is a cinch.

More of a cinch than saying “I got 30 feet up in the air before the others arrived” and then “I climbed 20 extra feet just to taunt them”?  What, are you literally flying this time?

I feel a second sting on the cheek, a third on my neck, and their venom almost immediately makes me woozy.

…So, what was that description of these wasps again?  “Most people can’t tolerate more than a few stings. Some die at once.”  Well, Katniss, you’ve got a few.  ”And there’s another thing, these wasps will hunt down anyone who disturbs their nest and attempt to kill them.“  And since they stung you/saw you while you were messing with the branch, that means the rest will be after you to hunt you down and stab you to death.

Oh, wait, no, only those three bother her.  Because these wasps may be “trackers,” but they also suck at it.

I cling to the tree with one arm while I rip the barbed stingers out of my flesh.

Alright, book, do you want these to be wasps or bees?  Because you’re saying wasps, but you’re writing bees.  Are you aware that there’s a pretty big difference between the two?  And that difference is that wasps are hellspawn creatures that can sting you multiple times?

The rest of the insects have targeted their enemies on the ground.

Your enemies, Katniss.  Yours.  Don’t sit there as if you didn’t do this, as if it’s all the fault of the wasps.

I can hear cries of “To the lake! To the lake!” and know they hope to evade the wasps by taking to the water.

In addition to putting their land mines up in the trees, the captiol also apparently set in a time-delay function, because only two of the four die in this attack despite the fact that the nest lands right in the middle of camp.  So these wasps are pretty shit at attacking en mass, since they can’t seem to get “more than a few” stings in despite having the whole nest out and in track/attack mode.

I mean, it’s not like they’re outrunning the wasps.  The wasps woke them up.  The wasps are already there. The wasps are in stinging position before the kids can get on their feet.  And they just…don’t sting more than a few times?

Such polite evil mutations, aren’t they?

The girl from District 4 staggers out of sight, although I wouldn’t bet on her making it to the lake.

This girl will never be given a name or thought of again.  Just like the District 8 girl.

Fuck it. This girl’s name is Sarah.  She’s been trained her whole life for the games, and she’s never known anything else.  She’s got a sweetheart, another girl in the training program who’s due to volunteer next year.  Even knowing that they’ll both probably die, they often engage in fantasies where they both win in consecutive years and live out long and happy lives together.  On the first night in the games, she snuck away from the group and talked to thin air, hoping that it would make it onto the television, telling her girlfriend that she missed her.

And you killed her, Katniss.

The other girl’s name was Kriss.  Like Bonnie and Twill from the next book, Kriss had to go to school and then work in a factory afterwards, which meant she had very little time to spend with her family in the evenings.  Certainly no time to spend wandering around the woods hunting.  She had an older brother, and they’d both walk home together after their shifts when it was near to midnight, talking and laughing about the events of the day.  It was her favorite time of day, the only time she could relax and bond with any loved ones, since once she got home she had to rush through homework and then attempt to catch a few hours of sleep.  Her brother taught her how to start a fire, and she was thinking of him before she died.

And you wished her dead, Katniss.

Yeah, I can see why you didn’t want to give them names and histories, book.  It really highlights the main character’s sociopathy.  But just because you ignore them doesn’t mean they weren’t people.

The poison from the stingers makes me wobbly, but I find my way back to my own little pool

Please do continue to tell me all about these injuries you keep getting that don’t actually do jack shit to hinder you.

I don’t want to think about what Glimmer must look like now. Her body disfigured. Her swollen fingers stiffening

[…]

This girl, so breathtakingly beautiful in her golden dress the night of the interviews, is unrecognizable. Her features eradicated, her limbs three times their normal size. The stinger lumps have begun to explode, spewing putrid green liquid around her.

So, Glimmer.  She’s first introduced by her appearance, and the text makes special note of the fact that she’s dressed in a see-through dress and comes as close to calling her a whore as it can.  Then her eventual fate is to be disfigured, bloated, and have her appearance dwelled upon again.  Sarah just stumbled behind a bush, but Glimmer gets Katniss to actually linger over how ugly she looks while dead.

Meaning that in this book, you get the poison version of being stoned to death for daring to be sexy.

I haven’t heard the cannons fire yet, so perhaps Glimmer is in some sort of coma, her heart still struggling against the wasp venom.

Well, there’s a perfectly awful thought.  How horrifying, to be poison/stoned, left on the ground, struggling for breath, in a pure panic that’s only made worse by the hallucinogenic venom.  Slowly dying and without even the gift of a moment’s peace or acceptance first-

Oh.  You only bring it up to mention that you can still steal stuff from the body.  You don’t have a moment of balking or fear or even just sympathetic horror that needs to be pushed through?  I mean, yes, go get your damn bow, but could you at least acknowledge that this is a gruesome fate that you have visited upon another human being?

a hovercraft is about to appear. Confused, I think it’s for Glimmer, although this doesn’t quite make sense because I’m still in the picture

The capitol retrieves the bodies, I’m guessing out of some sort of left-over religious sensibility or cultural taboo.  It’s not made very clear why it’s okay to see kids kill each other, but not okay to let the bodies stay put until after the games.  What’s also not made clear is why the kids have to move away first.  The fact that they pick up bodies isn’t a secret or anything, so why can’t they pick up Glimmer while Katniss is still there?  Why can’t they say “nope, you didn’t loot fast enough, I will now knock you out of the way with my body-grabbing claw and then grab the body”?

I can’t help it, I’m hyperventilating now, the whole thing is so nightmarish and I’m losing my grasp on what’s real.

Eh, the whole thing feels like she’s just scared of losing her arrows, with a little bit of “this is icky” on the side.  There’s plenty of horror and revulsion…and how ugly Glimmer is.  Nothing at how Glimmer is dead and Katniss killed her.

Heck, if this obsession with bodies is anything to go by, it would be perfectly possible for Katniss to have some cultural beliefs about “respect for the dead” and be horrified that she has to damage Glimmer’s body in order to loot it.  But there’s none of that.  It’s just “uck, the puss is icky and I’m starting to hallucinate and also I might lose the arrows.”  You’re looting a dead body, Katniss, could you at least feel bad about it?

instead of one string I see three and the stench from the stings is so repulsive I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.

She finally loses her nerve about killing another person (sort of) and it’s only because the whole process smells bad.