Rue has decided to trust me wholeheartedly. I know this because as soon as the anthem finishes she snuggles up against me and falls asleep.

Katniss has done nothing to earn this trust.  She doesn’t do anything to display herself as exceptionally trustworthy, has made no move toward Rue except tossing her some leftovers, and they’re also in a muderdeath game.  Katniss has met the bare requirements for “friendly acquaintance,” and that only if you ignore the fact that only one of them can live, and for some reason she’s rewarded with a little sister replacement.

That’s not to say that Rue curling up and going to sleep isn’t possible.  She could be exhausted and unable to care about Katniss’s shadiness.  She could be convinced that she’s not going to win, so it doesn’t matter where she sleeps/when she dies and she figures that going out while unconscious is the better way.  She could be so desperate for a friend in this place that she’s willing to crawl into bed with anyone as long as it gives her a chance to pretend that she’s safe.  All of these are perfectly valid options.  But don’t treat it like Katniss is just so awesome that of course Rue would trust her completely right from the start.

Also, once again, Katniss is utterly convinced that someone who should want to kill her/care nothing for her is perfectly trustworthy…but Peeta’s still the devil any time he does something nice.  Because who cares about continuity, am I right?

Nor do I have any misgivings about her, as I take no particular precautions. If she’d wanted me dead, all she would have had to do was disappear from that tree without pointing out the tracker jacker nest.

You’re stupid, Katniss.

By telling you about the wasp nest, Rue managed to kill two of her opponents and injure three more.  If she’d left you there, she would only be down one fellow tribute and the group would be after her next.  It was in her best interest to let you do the dirty work for her, so stop acting like it was a personal favor to you.  Also?  She scored a fucking 7 in her training, right along with the trained kids, and I refuse to believe anyone was moronic enough to give her a high score just because she could climb.  She’s probably got a perfect willingness to stab you in the face, and the only reason she isn’t doing so tonight is because you have a plan to kill more of her enemies for her.

I will hold onto this image of a smart killing-machine Rue and no amount of bullshit from the text will stop me!  In my headcanon she hunts with a sling and only pretended to be hungry to gain Katniss’s trust.

Needling me, at the very back of my mind, is the obvious. Both of us can’t win these Games. But since the odds are still against either of us surviving, I manage to ignore the thought.

STOP IGNORING MORAL ISSUES, KATNISS!  THINK ABOUT THEM!  PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST TAKE A MOMENT TO ACT LIKE A NORMAL, CARING HUMAN!

I’m pretty sure feeding themselves will be a tremendous struggle. Traditionally, the Career tributes’ strategy is to get hold of all the food early on and work from there.

These kids are trained their whole lives for the games, but no one thought to teach them to hunt and forage?  Just what do they spend all their time learning?  It’s certainly not tactics, and it can’t be weapons because they don’t exactly need to be Jet Li to beat the other starving children.  Are they even trained at all, or are they just fed better and Katniss assumes that training went into ti?

Logically speaking, the best “trained” kid should be someone who can ignore the fuck out of the Cornucopia, get their own food, make their own weapons, and do this in a variety of different environments.  (Since they don’t know exactly where they’ll land before the games start.)  They should be trained not only to kill but to survive without assistance, since there’s never a guarantee of sponsorship, and getting items from the starting pile is so dangerous. 

But instead, in this book, the kids are trained at…swords.  And meanness.  And that’s it.

The years when they have not protected it well—one year a pack of hideous reptiles destroyed it, another a Gamemakers’ flood washed it away—those are usually the years that tributes from other districts have won.

Then why don’t the gamemakers flood away the food in every game?  Or just not leave a giant stockpile of the stuff around?  These guys are really shit at making anything closed to a balanced competition, which means they probably prefer the career kids to win and like watching a one-sided slaughter fest.  Which would be fine, again, if someone would just say so!  Katniss has already whined enough about how evil the careers are, just throw in a line about how the gamemakers always arrange things to help them win.  And maybe show some actual anger over that while you’re at it.

“That’s eight. Wait, and the boy from Ten, the one with the bad leg. He makes nine.”

There’s someone else, but neither of us can remember who it is.

It’s Nell.  Stop ignoring her.

Look, there’s only 24 kids in this game.  It shouldn’t be that hard to keep track of them.  Furthermore, it’s in your best interest to keep track of them, because you need kill/outlast all of them if you wish to survive.  The fact that you continually ignore the people who don’t matter is just a painful plot hole in the book, not anything near logical or even normal.  Human beings, when placed in a dangerous situation, automatically pay more attention to their surroundings.  That’s how we evolved; the unobservant people got eaten by tigers and didn’t pass on their stupid-genes.  The fact that you can’t be bothered to keep track of the people trying to kill you is like going up to Darwin and kicking him in the nuts.

Oh, wait, that’s right.  You are keep track of the people trying to kill you, but there’s only three of them now, because the author knows that the rest of the kids don’t count and therefore she doesn’t give a fuck.

My guess is the tribute who died today was a victim of the Careers, which means they’ve recovered enough to be back in the Games.

Because no one else in the game is actually killing people, just this small group.

And yet, Peeta can’t figure out how to not be a game piece. 

We don’t get much hunting done though because I’m too busy getting every scrap of information I can out of Rue about the Careers’ base.

So…why not just sit down and talk, instead of this failure at multitasking?

Book, Katniss does not have to be hunting every second of the day for us to remember that she is, in fact, a hunter.

“Not much that I could see. A spear. He might be able to hold a few of us off with that, but Thresh could kill him easily,” says Rue.

Thresh isn’t in your group…  Are you planning on running around and gathering up all the remaining kids to make an anti-career alliance?  No?  Then what the fuck are you talking about?

I unclasp the pin and hold it out to her. “Here, you take it. It has more meaning for you than me.”

“Oh, no,” says Rue, closing my fingers back over the pin. “I like to see it on you. That’s how I decided I could trust you.

The pin that was given to Katniss out of the blue, the pin that she can’t be bothered to care about, the pin that Cinna retrieved and gave back to her, the pin that has absolutely nothing to do with Katniss herself.  And that’s what gets her this helper-child.

And once again, people are insisting that she keep it.  Because she’s just that special.

“It might not work. But if you hear the mockingjays singing it, you’ll know I’m okay, only I can’t get back right away.”

That’s all well and good, but how about a song for “Holy shit, I’m not okay, this kid about to spear me in the gut.  Katniss, stop eating fish and come help me”?  After all, signals are generally supposed to tell people to do something, not to not do something.

I turn and head back to the stream, feeling somehow worried.

…somehow?  Are you confused over the fact of being worried while in an arena where people try to kill you and you’re new helper-child?

Also, Katniss finally manages to actually be worried about Rue, right on time for her to die a horrible stabbity death.  It’s just so convenient how Katniss’s emotions line up with the plot.

My proximity to the Careers’ camp sharpens my senses,

…do they have some special senses sharpening device at the camp?  Is it surrounded by magitech flowers that make you hear better?  Look, if you paid more attention as you got closer, that’s fine.  But don’t word things to imply that something about the camp spontaneously gave you spider-senses.

but I do notice some of the things Rue has mentioned. Patches of the sweet berries. A bush with the leaves that healed my stings. Clusters of tracker jacker nests in the vicinity of the tree I was trapped in. And here and there, the black-and-white flash of a mockingjay wing in the branches high over my head.

This is our hero, ladies and gents.  The oh-so-wonderful hunter that couldn’t notice dangerous insects and berry bushes until they were point out.  I mean, it’s not like being a good hunter requires you to actually pay attention to your surroundings-oh, wait.

Even now, as [the boy from District 3] sits there fiddling with some kind of plastic box, he’s easily ignored in the presence of his large and domineering companions.

Katniss, stop ignoring people.  For all you know, that box he’s fiddling with has a death laser or something.  I mean, the other kids left him alive for some reason, and you seem to insist on thinking that only people who are of the same strength level can pair up.

Also, I’m going to name him John.  Hi, John.  I’m sorry you’re about to die.  You seem moderately intelligent. 

“He’s coming. We need him in the woods, and his job’s done here anyway. No one can touch those supplies,” says Cato.

If the kid’s job is done, then kill him.  There’s three trained kids left, all of them stronger than anyone they’ll meet in the woods, so there’s no reason to keep John alive.

“When we find her, I kill her in my own way, and no one interferes.”

Even though everyone suffered from those wasps, Cato is now being set up as the “main” career, despite being wholly unimpressive until now.  I guess it’s about here that the author realized she’d need a final opponent to battle, so she set this up.

Heaven forbid we let Glimmer, who’d been the “baddie” with the most attention until now, survive until the end.  Because we can’t have an epic girl-vs-girl fight for the end, no, it has to be against a man to show off Katniss’s badassitude.  And also, Glimmer was this book’s “slut,” so she had to die first.

I could send a flaming arrow into the pyramid easily enough—I’m a good enough shot to get it through those openings in the net

Then why not catch the net on fire?

So, then Nell shows up again.

approach the pyramid with strange little hops

give a sharp squeal

How wily is she

scampering into the woods again

And the text insists on describing her with words usually applied to animals.  So we’re upping the count to 6.

Now, let’s talk about that word “wily” for a moment.  It’s got a variety of definitions, depending on which dictionary you head to, but most of them agree that it’s “marked by skill in deception.”  The word is also often applied to animals like cats and foxes when it’s not being applied to conmen.  Nell is not tricking anyone here, she’s using her human brain to observe and deduce and form a plan of movement.  There’s no trickery involved, except in the fact that she’s subverting someone else’s trick.  The only misleading thing she does is to keep her pilfering to a minimum so no one suspects she’s taking supplies, but that has nothing to do with her navigating the trap.

But, fuck that, the book’s really invested in this “person=fox” bit so it’s going to stick with that.

the involvement of the boy from District 3, where they have the factories, where they make televisions and automobiles and explosives.

Where they make these things and…also allow small children to become engineers?

It’s the same as with Rue; someone from a particular district automagically knows everything that could possibly be learned in that district.  Digging up, taking apart, and wiring together a bunch of mines takes a considerable amount of skill, which would be very different from the skill set needed to stand on an assembly line in a television factory.  And it’s a specialized skill.  Not everyone in every factory needs to know electronics, so there’s no need to teach this to kids in school.  Not if they want to churn out factory workers as early as possible.  Then again, Katniss stays in school all day until she’s 18.  Then again, again, Katniss stays in school all day until she’s 18, so if everyone gets this much schooling, why doesn’t she know about wires and such, too?  Just what are they teaching her that takes so long?

I’ve never seen anyone in the Games do that. I bet it came as a shock even to the Gamemakers.

Well, hurray for the boy from District 3 for putting one over on them, but what am I supposed to do now?

Katniss plays suicide-chicken with berries = defiant enough to start a revolution.  Haymich finds the edge of the arena and uses it to a slight advantage = awe-inspiring and a middle finger to the capitol.  John digs up, rewires, and uses parts of the arena that were never meant to be used = minor annoyance.

Would the boy from District 3 have placed the mines in such a way that a single mine would not disturb the others?

Yes, of course he did, that’s all their supplies right there.  Really, he should have placed them far enough away that even if they all went off, the supplies should still be safe.

But Katniss, of course, decides to release the apples in the hopes it’ll set off a chain reaction.  Because apples that are dropped in one localized area and not all the way around the pile, yeah, that’s a much better option than just chucking rocks. 

Seriously.  With rocks she could hit all around the pile and cover the max amount of ground.  With apples, she’s just getting one section. 

For a moment, everything seems frozen in time. Then the apples spill to the ground and I’m blown backward into the air.

Also, Katniss is dead again.  See, explosions aren’t just really windy or something.  They’re a wave of force that can literally crush shit like bones and internal organs.  That’s why they’re deadly.  The pressure wave that expands out hits with so much force that it crushes your insides when it hits you, and then you die.  Anything strong enough to lift you off the ground and throw you backward is also strong enough to squish your lungs against your spine, rupture blood vessels in your brain, rip your heart out of place, etc. 

But of course Katniss doesn’t die from her massive internal injuries.  Because she’s already dead from the forest fire.  Everyone knows you can’t kill a zombie unless you cut the head off.