Getting the broth into Peeta takes an hour of coaxing, begging, threatening, and yes, kissing

Will this ever not be creepy?  Let’s play a game.  It’s called “how many different ways can Katniss be coerced into kissing Peeta on national television while the text never treats this as odd.”

I automatically look around for a good tree to nest in

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and add that to the animal count.  6

before I realize that’s over. At least for a while. I can’t very well leave Peeta unguarded on the ground.  I left the scene of his last hiding place on the bank of the stream untouched—how could I conceal it?—and we’re a scant fifty yards downstream.

Okay, but we’re talking about kids who couldn’t notice bloody handprints on a boulder.  For all the know, you were just there digging up roots.  Besides, you have an open, clear approach and a ranged weapon.  You should be begging them to come at you.

See, for all I’ve been bitching at her for being murder-minded, now we’re in a part of the story where it would make sense.  Peeta is seriously ill and she’s doing everything wrong when it comes to first aid.  The best way to get him help is to end the games.  If she can kill everyone else before Peeta kicks the bucket, then the Capitol can heal him with their magic science.  And in a better book, that would be something of an interesting dilemma.  After all, it’s one thing to survive and another to actually hunt another person, so can she do that in order to save Peeta’s life?  (Well, it would be a dilemma if she weren’t fine with murder to begin with, but still.) 

In fact, ending the games would…end the fucking games, but instead of thinking about that in order to save Peeta, she continues to have everyone tell her she needs to make out with him instead.

I don’t know what to do. Leave him in the bag and hope the excessive heat breaks the fever? Take him out and hope the night air cools him off? I end up just dampening a strip of bandage and placing it on his forehead. It seems weak, but I’m afraid to do anything too drastic.

Here, Katniss accidently stumbles onto the right thing to do.  You want to heat up someone with a fever, especially when they aren’t eating.  Peeta has a fever right now, which means his body is bound and determined to reach X degrees.  If she cools his body down, he’s just going to burn more calories trying to reach X degrees.  He needs heat right now.  On the other hand, keeping the brain cool is also a big thing, so the damp bandage is a good idea.  A better idea would be to wrap it around his neck to cool off the blood as it goes in, but hey, anything helps. 

It’s weird, really, how Katniss continually thinks that anything she does can’t possibly help.  She seems flatly convinced that only medicines in antiseptic little containers with chemical sounding names can be of any use.  She seems completely unaware that “home remedies” work, and have worked throughout the majority of human history.  Which…is a middle class brat way of thinking about it.  Sure, advil is going to work better than willow bark, so if you grow up with that you can get that idea.  But Katniss has grown up with the fucking tree bark, not the pills.  Even if she doesn’t know exactly what plants Cynthia is grinding up, she should be aware that those plants work.  She should understand that people come to her mom and occasionally get better.  She shouldn’t have to know the nuts and bolts to know that little jars of cream aren’t the only possible solutions.  She should think of the captiol medicines as the magitech that it is, not as the baseline for all healing.  But instead we get this middle class attitude toward manufactured medicines. 

I’m just going to have to trust that whatever instinct sent me to find him was a good one.

Animal count: 7.

You’re a person, Katniss.  You used your human brain to (for some reason) decide that the home district would hate you for not saving him.  That’s what sent you to find him.  Not instinct. 

I came upon a bush of Rue’s berries. I strip off the fruit and mash it up in the broth pot with cold water.

Meat would be better.  Peeta’s been without steady food for days and he’s been running a fever most of that time.  He doesn’t need berries, he needs fat.  The best course of action here is to boil a chunk of animal fat in the water (and throw in some other parts as well, they’re all good) and make another broth for him to drink.

I remember my father doing this very thing to my mother and I wonder where Peeta picked it up. Surely not from his father and the witch.

This book really hates Peeta’s mother.  I guess since she’s not victim enough, she has to be evil. 

lie down, one hand on my loaded bow

It’s not a gun.  “Loading” a bow and arrow generally involves holding the arrow in place.  If she’s got an arrow on the bow while she’s sleeping, it’s just likely to get tangled up when she wakes.  I guess there’s a possibility that this is a future tech bow and can hold arrows for her, but if so, that would be nice to know.

His hand brushes the loose strands of my hair off my forehead. Unlike the staged kisses and caresses so far, this gesture seems natural and comforting.

The “romance” would be a lot more palatable if we got more focus on stuff like this.  It really is a sweet moment between them, but it’s lost in the middle of all the other horror.  Especially since, for all the kissing is “unnatural,” she still never condemns it or the fact that she’s been forced into doing it.

“Peeta, you were supposed to wake me after a couple of hours,” I say.

“For what? Nothing’s going on here,” he says. “Besides I like watching you sleep. You don’t scowl. Improves your looks a lot.”

God damn, are you an ass, Peeta. 

Let’s take stock here.  We’re in the childmurderdeath games.  So far Peeta has…sat in a riverbank full of muck for four days.  Katniss has killed three kids, blown up a pile of supplies, and successfully fed herself and two allies.  She’s also established as being a well-practiced hunter who is familiar with doing illegal things in woods and being on the lookout for threats.  Peeta’s a fucking baker.  Which of the two of them is more likely to know what she’s talking about?  Yeah, Katniss.  But here, Peeta thinks he knows best.

On top of that, it’s the childmurderdeath games.  Katniss is the better competitor of the two and failing this game means death.  Her life is on the line.  If she wants to only sleep for a few hours, you wake her up after a few hours.  You don’t assume that watching her while she sleeps because she looks pretty is a higher priority than her fucking life.

My heart drops into my stomach. It’s worse, much worse. There’s no more pus in evidence, but the swelling has increased and the tight shiny skin is inflamed.

First of all, no, this is not what the wound would do.  Remember, she smelled rotting flesh the first time and she did nothing to get rid of the rot.  The wound leaked pus, but she didn’t get all of it out, and then she wrapped it up in a bandage like an idiot and made sure that the pus and putrid flesh had plenty of time to fester in peace.  The wound would not be closed over and shiny.  It would be pus-y, rotting, and smell horrible.  The overnight transition from “rotting flesh” to…this just doesn’t happen.

Except in un-research land, of course.

Then I see the red streaks starting to crawl up his leg. Blood poisoning. Unchecked, it will kill him for sure.

Yes, and?

Blood poisoning – sepsis –  is scary shit.  Today.  That’s because when people are severely injured, they’re given antibiotics as a matter of course.  If sepsis sets in after that, then it’s because it’s a particularly virulent strain that said “haha” to your antibiotics and kept on merrily killing you.  That’s why it’s scary, because it has the possibility of being uber.  Not because every single strain of it ever is deadly.  Peeta’s been laying in mud for four days, so for all we know, this is a minor case.  Plus, it appears to be localized to his leg, so she could still treat it.  She won’t, but she could.

So, for the curious, this is what she should do for Peeta’s leg.  When she found him, she should have cut the wound open and put pressure on it until it bled.  Just press it until all the puss came out and she hit blood instead.  If the skin was dead, she should have cut that out until she hit live skin again.  In this case, blood is a good thing, because blood is going to clean out the wound.  Then, if it was bleeding freely, she should have bound it.  If it started to clot over and was just leaking a little, she should have left it open to the fresh air, which would do a lot more good than spit and leaves.

The next morning, on finding it’s still infected, she should have cut it open again.  Yeah, that’s gross and painful, but the infection needs a way out and the fastest way is to just squeeze it out.  Keeping the leg warm would help as well, because heat slows down infection.  If she could get enough of the nastiness out of his system, his own immune responses could handle the rest.  There’s a hefty chance that he would have gotten sick and septic anyway (again, four days in the mud, those germs had plenty of time to take hold) but he would have stood a much higher chance of recovering and also we wouldn’t have to sit through “oh, wow is me for puss is nasty” BS. 

Gifts go up in price the longer the Games continue. What buys a full meal on day one buys a cracker on day twelve.

This system is so easy to cheat.  Sponsors should be loading up on “just in case” gifts early in the game, when they’re cheaper.  This wouldn’t be so annoying if, again, we weren’t 74 years into things.  By this point, all the loopholes should have been figured out.

“You’re just going to have to outlast the others, Peeta. They’ll cure it back at the Capitol when we win,” I say.

Yay, they figured it out!  So, now what, is Katniss going to go on a manhunt and try to find the others before it’s too late for Peeta?

Oh, they’re…going to sit around and talk all day.  Um…god, why didn’t they die, again?

And while people have no doubt put two and two together that I hunt illegally, I don’t want to hurt Gale or Greasy Sae or the butcher or even the Peacekeepers back home who are my customers by publicly announcing they’d breaking the law, too.

So…don’t use names.  Really, it’s not very hard to figure this out.  Just don’t use names.  Say “I shot a deer and sold it” not “I shot a deer with my best friend Gale and then sold it to the butcher named Rooba.”  You could even say “I shot a deer and when I was dragging it through town, everyone came and took a chunk out of it because they’re just that flat desperate for food where I live” without having to mention any black market at all.

but I tell Peeta I sold an old silver locket of my mother’s.

Saying this, instead, implies to the audience that you are much better off than you really are.  It’s saying “I just fell on hard times for a little while” not “the whole country sucks so much that I have to break the law just to survive.”

Katniss is just playing lapdog again.  She’s catering to the whims of the people who are trying to kill her, purposefully helping them to make a distasteful situation more palatable for the audience.  And for no reason. 

But he’s lucky. Somewhere along the way he saved up enough for these goats and now has something to do in his old age besides slowly starve to death.

So…do people in her district just get abandoned when they’re old?  Do they work until they drop dead?  (Because, really, if there’s no support for the elderly, why would anyone stop working?)  There seems to be a distressing lack of community in her district.  Which really doesn’t fit; people tend to get closer in lean times, not more distant, because not everyone on earth is a paranoid sociopath like Katniss.

Owning a nanny goat can change your life in District 12. The animals can live off almost anything, the Meadow’s a perfect feeding place, and they can give four quarts of milk a day. To drink, to make into cheese, to sell. It’s not even against the law.

Then why doesn’t everyone have a goat?  Seriously, if this guy has a herd of them, then why aren’t they being bred until they reach the limit of sustainability?  Or are they already at that limit, and it’s just that the district doesn’t have enough weeds for more than a small herd?

You should have seen Prim’s reaction when we walked in with that goat. Remember this is a girl who wept to save that awful old cat, Buttercup.

Um…book, are you talking to me?  Strange, you haven’t been talking to me at any other point in this novel.

“Well, I knew that goat would be a little gold mine,” 1 say.

“Yes, of course I was referring to that, not the lasting joy you gave the sister you love so much you took her place in the reaping,” says Peeta drily.

Stop being so middle class, Peeta.  We’re talking about a family that’s near to starving.  Katniss isn’t some money-grubbing here, she’s glad that her sister isn’t going to die of malnutrition.  That’s a valid thing to be happy about.  Devaluing that and saying that some ephemeral emotional state is more important is just so…middle class.

And you’ve seen the starving orphans, too, you should know better.

“Of course, I’m not going. Give me some credit. Do you think I’m running straight into some free-for-all against Cato and Clove and Thresh? Don’t be stupid,”

You have a bow and the Cornucopia is surrounded by a large open field.  Katniss, don’t be stupid.

“You’re such a bad liar, Katniss. I don’t know how you’ve survived this long.”

She’s been lying non-stop through the games so far and hasn’t so much as stuttered over doing so at any point.

“I can follow you. At least partway. I may not make it to the Cornucopia, but if I’m yelling your name, I bet someone can find me. And then I’ll be dead for sure,” he says.

Peeta, you’re a dick.  He’s basically saying that if she doesn’t do what he says, he’s going to make sure they both die.  She’s got a bow; going to the feast is not a death sentence.  But rather than let her make her own choices, he’s going to threaten self-harm. 

This is roughly the same as someone saying “I’ll cut myself if you break up with me,” only with death on the line.

“What am I supposed to do? Sit here and watch you die?” I say. He must know that’s not an option.

And Katniss doesn’t even have the wherewithal to get mad over it.  She takes it in stride, as if this is just something guys do.  As if this is just something guys are allowed to do.  As if of course men are the ones in control, and if they aren’t hale enough to control in the normal way, then they’ll have to do it this way.

So fucking creepy.

We’re at something of a stalemate.

That’s not a stalemate; that’s blackmail.

“Then you have to do what I say. Drink your water, wake me when I tell you, and eat every bite of the soup no matter how disgusting it is!” I snap at him.

And…he wasn’t supposed to do that anyway?  Is she really saying that she has to make a deal with him just to get him to follow basic life-saving instructions?  That the man gets to just decide things, but the woman has to make a deal in order to give instructions in turn?

Feminism?

The air’s gone cold even though the sun’s still up. I’m right about the Gamemakers messing with the temperature.

Would have been nice if we’d seen more of this, especially earlier with the no water/suddenly there’s water thing.  It would have been nice to have someone point out that the gamemakers are fucking with the arena, instead of having it be due to just shitty writing.

This is also why I have a hard time believing that the water thing was gamemaker-done.  Why does Katniss calmly point it out with the temp but not even think about it with the water?  Because Katniss has Knowing Powers, and she Just Knows that the water was natural and the temp is not.

I can think is that he’s going to die if I don’t get to that feast. I’ll keep him going for a day or two, and then the infection will reach his heart or his brain or his lungs and he’ll be gone.  

You know, there’s a reason Katniss isn’t going with my “kill everyone quickly” plan.

It’s because the author doesn’t really want to have her get her hands dirty.  For all she’s been a sociopath in her own mind, the story has been carefully crafted to avoid putting her in morally “bad” situations.  Well, assuming you agree that deadly wasps being deadly is a surprise.  It framed her murder of Glimmer and Sarah as being just an accident, and it carefully set up Marvel’s death so that she wouldn’t have to feel guilty over it.  At no point has Katniss sat down and thought about killing someone, but also, at no point has she had to.  Because this may be the murderdeath games, but the author doesn’t actually want to make her character anything less than a perfectly moral saint.  (She goes about it badly, but it’s clear what she wants.)  Which is why Katniss can’t go on a manhunt here, because that would be outside the very clear black-and-white morality of this book.  And we just can’t have that.

I uncork the vial and take a deep sniff. My spirits fall at the sickly sweet scent. Just to be sure, I place a drop on the tip of my tongue. There’s no question, it’s sleep syrup. It’s a common medicine in District 12. Cheap, as medicine goes

It’s also really, really sweet.  Sweet enough that it makes berries suspiciously sweeter.  And yet elsewhere in the books, Katniss says that sugar is rare.

Do you know what makes medicines sweet?  Sugar.  Apparently this is a really fucked up world where you can get cheap sugar in your sleep medication, but not in your candy.  Because…reasons.