This is the nature of the tracker jacker venom, so carefully created to target the place where fear lives in your brain.

God damnit, book, make up your mind.  Are these land-mines-in-the-trees or not?  If they were designed to kill (most die after a few stings, the whole nest hunts down their target so they’ll get more than a few stings) then there’s no point in “carefully crafting” them to be torture-wasps.  On the other hand, if they were made to be torture-wasps, then why the fuck are they deadly after more than a few stings?  Are they some failed torture experiment, where the capitol couldn’t negate the aggression/deadly aspect, so they just said “fuck it, use them for tree-mines”?

My clothing’s damp, but I don’t know whether pond water, dew, rain, or sweat is the cause.

I can no longer tell what temperature it is in this world.  Somehow it’s cold enough that Katniss needs a sleeping bag and Kriss needs a fire, but not so cold that sleeping outside while wet will get you hypothermia. 

For the record, hypothermia can get you in the middle of summer if you’re wet and in the wind/not being careful.  It’s not as easy as in winter, but entirely possible.  So if it’s cold enough to need a fire, it should be cold enough to not lay around wet and be fine.

Peeta! He saved my life! I think. Because by the time we met up, I couldn’t tell what was real and what the tracker jacker venom had caused me to imagine.

Okay, nice thought, but…her hallucinations were all about ants crawling into her eyes and corpses disintegrating and orange bubbles all over the place.  Things that, to her now-sober mind, should be very clearly identified as impossible.  It’s not like she hallucinated that Glimmer sat up and talked to her, or was alive enough to fight for her bow.  And Peeta didn’t show up looking like a talking tree.  There’s a clear divide here between “fantastical hallucinations” and “shit that actually happened,” so there’s not much of a reason for her to be confused about all this.

Or was he actually trying to protect me? And if he was, what was he doing with those Careers in the first place?

The number of times she fails to connect two thoughts that are right fucking next to each other is honestly rather astounding. 

I wonder what Gale made of the incident for a moment and then I push the whole thing out of my mind because for some reason Gale and Peeta do not coexist well together in my thoughts.

Book, we get it.  You made a love triangle.  Congratulations on reaching the lowest common denominator in YA fiction.  None of us are fooled into thinking this isn’t a love triangle, so the only reason for shit like this line here is to hammer in that Katniss has absolutely no agency or even intelligence when it comes to her own love life. 

I do take a minute to shoot a few into a nearby tree. They are more like the weapons in the Training Center than my ones at home, but who cares?

Indeed, Katniss, who cares?  It’s not like you’ll be in any way affected by this difference.  You are, after all, descendent from Athena.  You might as well pack your bags and head out to Camp Half-Blood.

The weapons give me an entirely new perspective on the Games.

Oh?  Does this mean your first impulse will no longer be “murder the fuck out of everyone simply because they annoy me”?

To be honest, we don’t really know what her “perspective on the Games” was before this.  She went on the Great Water Hunt because she had no choice.  It wasn’t “find water or kill people” it was “find water or dehydrate to death.”  One she found water, she didn’t get a moment to sit down and formulate a plan, because then the fail!fire started.  We don’t know that, without the bow, she would have continued to run and hide because we were never given a chance to see that.

I find I’m actually anticipating the moment with pleasure.

Not only has she never sat down and had a moral thought about killing another person, not only has she never shown an ounce of fear or hesitation over the thought, now she’s jumped over all of that and gone straight into “yup, I like killing things.”

Hmm…what was the summary for this book, again…  “But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that will weigh survival against humanity and life against love.”  I guess survival vs humanity turned out to be a pretty easy decision for our little sociopath of a main character.

The little padding I was able to put on by gorging myself during prep time in the Capitol is gone, plus several more pounds as well. My hip bones and ribs are more prominent than I remember them being since those awful months after my father’s death.

Nope.  Not buying it.  She’s been in the games for five days, and she’s as skinny as she is after months of starving?  And this even with a few-pound-head-start?

Also, if she’s that skinny, she’s not going to be functioning.  Like dehydration, starvation comes with this side-effect of “brain no workey,” and naturally Katniss isn’t slowed down in the least by her supposed condition.  She’s not even lethargic or weak.

My mother knew a treatment for them, some type of leaf that could draw out the poison, but she seldom had cause to use it, and I don’t even remember its name let alone its appearance.

Please do continue to point out how utterly useless her mother is.

Water first, I think. You can hunt along the way now. It’s easy to see the direction I came from by the path of destruction my crazed body made through the foliage. So I walk off in the other direction,

It took her three days to find water the first time.  Now she needs to find water again.  She knows the location of one patch of water, which is very close to the wasp tree. 

So she goes in the opposite direction.  Because, sure, whatever, it’s not like it might take three days to find another pond or anything.

After about an hour, I find a stream, shallow but wide, and more than sufficient for my needs.

See?  Only takes an hour.  Because we’re bored with that whole almost-dehydrate portion of the book, therefore we’re going to just plop water down in front of her whenever she needs it.  And Katniss won’t ever once think this is odd, that it was so hard to find before and so easy to find now. 

In yet another thing that would have been cool if it had been played with, the author is a lot like the gamemakers here.  She knows her book can’t get boring, and she knows that more wandering around the woods would bore the readers.  So she’s causing water to spring up whenever it’s needed, for the sake of keeping the story flowing.  She’s acting just like she claimed her evil audience/producer system acted, but neither Katniss nor the text bat an eye at this.  It’s like the author doesn’t realize what a hypocrite she is.

For that matter, the same thing could be said about the love triangle.  Katniss and Peeta are forcing a romance for the sake of the audience, but let’s be fair…the only reason this tumor of a plot hole is in the book at all is for the book’s audience.  And that could have been so interesting if only it hadn’t been played so cluelessly. 

Following the stream against its current seems the smartest course of action.

Because…there might be more kids to kill up there?  There might be fewer kids trying to kill you up there?  There might be more food?  …Reasons?

Oh, it’s so she can find Rue.  Good thing Katniss used her Mary Sue Knowing Powers to go right where she needed to.

Then I spot the tip of a child’s boot just peeking out from behind the trunk of a tree. My shoulders relax and I grin.

…Katniss, you do understand that everyone in this game is under 18.  You’re all children.  Not just Rue.

You don’t realize this, do you?  And thus why it’s okay to murder everyone else, but when Rue dies it’s horrible and tragic?  Yeah, fuck you, too, Katniss.

“You hungry?” I can see her swallow hard, her eye flickering to the meat. “Come on then, I’ve had two kills today.”

How convenient that Katniss has extra food right at the point where she gains an extra mouth to feed.  It means she doesn’t have to show any true generosity by giving up her own food, or going hunting twice.  All she has to do is hand over what she wasn’t eating anyway.

Rue tentatively steps out into the open. “I can fix your stings.”

And for this magnanimous act of tossing Rue her leftovers, Katniss gets rewarded with magic healing leaves.

“Just around. We all carry them when we work in the orchards. They left a lot of nests there,” says Rue. “There are a lot here, too.”

In 74 years, they haven’t been able to get the wasps nests out of the orchards?  This strikes me as very forced, since we’re talking about orchards which are the sole source of orchard-related foods for the capitol.  Either 1) they should have been cleared out at some point in the past 74 years, because there’s people all over those trees working or 2) the capitol should have cleared them out, because they really want their fruit.

“Orchards, huh? That must be how you can fly around the trees like you’ve got wings.”

Animal count: 4

I’ve landed on one of the few things she’ll admit pride in.

This is literally the first time you’ve had a conversation with the girl.  How do you know this?  The same way that you “know” all the careers are evil?

Rue places the handful of leaves into her mouth and begins to chew them. […] After a minute or so, Rue presses a gloppy green wad of chewed leaves and spit on my knee.

Don’t ever do this.  Ever.  Ever, ever, ever.

The human mouth is truly disgusting.  Some people will hold that the bacteria in spit is safe, and a few will even claim it’s good for you.  And to be fair, nine times out of ten, spit won’t kill you.  But that tenth time will be horrifically painful.  There is a compound in the human mouth that will promote healing.  And floating right along beside that compound are a dozen more that will hurt you.  What you get is at any particular time is highly variable.  Also, Rue isn’t spitting.

The reason human bites are considered to be so toxic is that your mouth has many kinds of bacteria in different parts of your mouth.  Anaerobic bacteria – the kind that thrives without being exposed to air – lives in the tiny corners of your mouth, between teeth, along the gum line, etc.  It’s nasty shit.  While this stuff might not be in any given loogie you hack, it will be in stuff that you chew and spit out.

Rue gives a giggle. “Lucky you had the sense to pull the stingers out or you’d be a lot worse.”

Who the hell doesn’t have the sense to pull out stingers?  That’s a basic reaction.  The reason people have to be told not to pull shrapnel out of wounds in first aid is because not pulling goes against our natures.

Of course, this kind of deal can only be temporary, but neither of us mentions that.

Nor will Katniss bother to think about it, worry about it, or have it hanging around in the back of her mind.  Why bother wasting time with someone that won’t be an issue, since she’ll get conveniently fridged later?

Rue contributes a big handful of some sort of starchy root to the meal.

So, Rue works in an orchard and spends all of her time hanging around the tops of trees.  But somehow, inexplicably, she knows all about tubers as well.  Because…if you know one kind of food, you know them all?

Rue’s eyes widen. “Oh, no, we’re not allowed to eat the crops.”

“They arrest you or something?” I ask.

“They whip you and make everyone else watch,” says Rue.  “The mayor’s very strict about it.”

This is evilulz bullshit. 

Farms produce food waste.  Not everything that grows will grow into a perfect condition.  A tomato might split open and grow over the split.  A squash might have bug bites on one end but not the other.  Currently, about 10% of all crops are straight-up thrown away before they ever leave the farm, either because they are actually damaged or because they are deemed too ugly to sell in a supermarket.  The ugly crops are still perfectly edible, and the damaged crops are still partially edible, or even wholly edible to people who are starving and don’t give a shit.  There is no reason not to let the workers have those crops, because 1) well-fed people work harder and 2) the capitol won’t have to waste resources on them.  The only reason to keep them from eating the junk crops is to show off evilness, not for any conceivable practical purpose.

Maybe being the least prestigious, poorest, most ridiculed district in the country has its advantages. Such as, being largely ignored by the Capitol as long as we produce our coal quotas.

Katniss will continually insist that she’s from the crappiest district, even after she finds out that other districts are far, far crappier.  Because, for some reason, she thinks living somewhere ugly is worse than living somewhere with enormous working fences and regular whippings.

“Don’t you have to be in school?” I ask.

“Not during harvest. Everyone works then,” says Rue.

Except this one district supposedly produces every single food product (except grain?) that the capitol consumes, and not everything is harvested at the same time.  Also, planting and maintaining the food (spring and summer, for fall-harvest foods) takes a fuck-ton of labor as well, but…what, did the series of unspecified disasters change all that?

We have so little communication with anyone outside our district.

That doesn’t keep you from magically knowing that other districts hate careers and laugh at your home!

At Rue’s suggestion, we lay out all our food to plan ahead.

The 12 year-old is more likely to make a plan than our fucking protagonist. 

She’s gathered quite a collection of roots, nuts, greens, and even some berries.

Yup.  Rue is an omni-farmer.

Apart from the food, Rue has a small water skin, a homemade slingshot

So, slingshots are a relatively new invention.  They require galvanized rubber to be any good.  Slings, however, are very easy to craft from found materials.  Even though Rue never uses a weapon in this book, for the sake of my sanity, I’m going to go ahead and assume this is a sling.

There’s a little girl, one of Greasy Sae’s grandkids, who wanders around the Hob. She’s not quite right, but she’s treated as a sort of pet. People toss her scraps and things.

Animal count: 5.

I think of how cold the nights have been. “You can share my sleeping bag if you want. We’ll both easily fit.”

That other girl, though, god, she was just so stupid for not getting a sleeping bag.  She doesn’t deserve sympathy, just ridicule for not being as smart and tough as Katniss.

But Rue is small and cute, therefore she gets to sleep in the bag.

If, in fact, Peeta did save me, I’m in his debt again. And this can’t be paid back.

Damn it to hell, book, I wish you’d stop with this disgusting bullshit.  Or at least make it more subtle.  Katniss does not owe Peeta for acting like a free agent.  He did things on his own accord. 

There’s so many ways this can just go so wrong.  It’s bad enough that there’s Nice Guyism all over this, with Peeta being “rewarded” with a relationship for his actions.  Even if you take gender out of the equation, it’s still pretty sick.  It’s basically saying that human decency and kindness is all reciprocal.  There’s no reason to do a kind thing for someone unless 1) you expect to get paid back or 2) you need to pay someone back for something they did.

Fuck that.  Should Katniss be nice and help Peeta?  Yes, of course.  But that’s intrinsic.  She should be nice because she should be nice, that’s the right thing to do, not because of any of Peeta’s actions.  And that only if we’re talking in general terms, not life-or-nice terms.  Step outside the arena for a moment and call them Peanut and Butter.  If Peanut does a kind thing for Butter, Butter does not have to pay them back.  Butter should do kind things anyway, because Butter should be a decent, non-jackass person.  Yes, they’re both being decent people to each other, but their decency shouldn’t be based on a trade system.

It may seem like a minor point, but it’s really not.  It’s at the root of so many of societal problems.

“Say they didn’t. Say the supplies were gone. How long would they last?” I say. “I mean, it’s the Hunger Games, right?”

Yeah, about that…hunger isn’t really ever a factor in these games.  I mean, sure, people occasionally get hungry, but that’s not the focus.  It’s the muderdeath games.  It’s people killing each other.  When people don’t kill each other quick enough, the gamemakers step in to convince them to be more murdery.  It’s not like this game is all about watching people hunt and forage so they don’t starve.  Hunger is a footnote in the actual running of the games, and it plays a factor in the selection of the participants, but that’s never emphasized in the games themselves.  Which makes the name seem really odd.

To be honest, when I speed-read this the first time, I was flat-out convinced that they were called “The Games” and “hunger” was just added in by the title.  I didn’t realize that was the “official” name of the games until I saw the movie.  Because, really, it makes no sense.

And for the first time, I have a plan. A plan that isn’t motivated by the need for flight and evasion. An offensive plan.

I know you think this makes her awesome, book, but all I can think is that it really highlights how reactive she’s been so far.