My mother’s hand strokes my cheek and I don’t push it away as I would in wakefulness, never wanting her to know how much I crave that gentle touch. How much I miss her even though I still don’t trust her.

I wish we had more of this when it came to her mother.  It’s such a sweet moment.  Heck, even when it turns out to be Peeta, it’s still infinitely sweeter than the forced teenage makeouts being normalized.

I woke up yesterday evening and you were lying next to me in a very scary pool of blood,”

She got cut over the eye.  I know head wounds bleed a lot, but not enough to make a pool of blood before clotting over.  Especially since it couldn’t have been more than just a flesh wound.  (Katniss never mentions any concussion effects, which means the knife probably didn’t slam into her so much as just sliced her a little on the way by.)

“Much better. Whatever you shot into my arm did the trick,” he says. “By this morning, almost all the swelling in my leg was gone.”
Along with his puss and necrosis, apparently.

“Foxface will be in her den somewhere

Animal count: 10

“He let you go because he didn’t want to owe you anything?” asks Peeta in disbelief.

“Yes. I don’t expect you to understand it. You’ve always had enough. But if you’d lived in the Seam, I wouldn’t have to explain,” I say.

Bit backward, there, book.  The Seam is a place of extreme poverty and deprivation.  In a situation like that, families and communities band together, because it’s only through combined effort that the group as a whole can survive.  The concept of paying back debts is actually quite middle class.

…Actually, this image Katniss keeps trying to present, of being fiercely independent and stoic and then trying to insist that everyone else is just like that as well…it strikes me as being very similar to the Noble Savage trope.  It’s trying to fetishize poverty, but at the same time completely ignoring what poverty really means.

“The bread? What? From when we were kids?” he says. “I think we can let that go. I mean, you just brought me back from the dead.”

“But you didn’t know me. We had never even spoken. Besides, it’s the first gift that’s always the hardest to pay back.

I think the author has just completely divorced from even an imitation of reality, because she really, really wants to keep Katniss in Peeta’s debt.  I mean, all he did was throw her a piece of bread.  She dragged him out of a river, hauled him into a cave, did her best to heal his leg (did more harm than good, but that’s due to idiocy not lack of care), and then risked her life to go get medicine for him. 

And it’s just so obvious that this is done for shipper purposes.  She doesn’t blather on about being in Cinna’s debt.  What about Rooba, the butcher that all but let her have Prim’s goat by refusing to bid for it?  Doesn’t go on about being in Rooba’s debt.  What about Gale?  He’s certainly helped her out plenty of times, but she doesn’t freak out about that.  Haymich is sending her gifts and guiding her through the games, staying up day and night to do so, but she’s not wondering how she’ll ever pay him back.  Debt, and the inability to pay it back, is only brought up in relation to Peeta, and only for shipper purposes.

I don’t want Cato to kill Thresh at all. I don’t want anyone else to die. But this is absolutely not the kind of thing that victors go around saying in the arena.

First, “anyone” includes Cato.  I’d just like to point that out, since it hasn’t seemed to sink into your brain.  Second, why not say it?  Are you worried that the capitol will murder you via fireball for saying the “wrong” things?  Are you worried that if you sink into sympathetic thoughts, you’ll lose your nerve when it comes to murder?  Or are you just playing the capitol lapdog for no fucking reason at all?

If it hadn’t been for all her previous lapdog-ness, it would be pretty easy to think of this line as an interesting insight into her mind, as a debate between those first two options.  But after a whole book of bullshit, not so much.

“I want to go home, Peeta,” I say plaintively, like a small child.

Katniss by herself: independent, smirks for the camera, claims she can’t even show pain after being burned because the capitol will turn on her.

Katniss when she has to pretend to be in a relationship: “like a small child.”

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

“No. Nobody really wanted to track Thresh down in that grass. It has a sinister feeling to it.

Was the grass playing ominous music?

Really, book, there’s a difference between recognizing that something is dangerous and saying that it’s spooky.  Tall grass is great for hiding in and of course you don’t want to chase a murderer through it.  But using your human brain to figure that out is a lot different from saying that it had a “sinister feel to it.”

I can’t help, for a moment, comparing him with Gale, who would see that field as a potential source of food as well as a threat. Thresh certainly did. It’s not that Peeta’s soft exactly, and he’s proved he’s not a coward. But there are things you don’t question too much, I guess, when your home always smells like baking bread, whereas Gale questions everything.

The grass is dangerous and scary.  There’s a person in it waiting to kill you, and also probably plenty of gamemaker traps, plus Peeta doesn’t know how to hunt, track, or forage.  For that matter, all those things would apply to Gale as well.  Gale does not know how to live in tall grasses; he’s used to forests.  If you’re telling me that Gale would dive headfirst into an environment he’s unfamiliar with, into an environment that’s dangerous, and then telling me that Gale’s reaction is better than Peeta’s?  You’re an idiot.

Would it shock him? The things we say about Panem?

LOL “we.”  Stop retconning, Katniss.

“Yeah, about that,” says Peeta, entwining his fingers in mine. “Don’t try something like that again.”

“Or what?” I ask.

“Or… or…” He can’t think of anything good. “Just give me a minute.”

“What’s the problem?” I say with a grin.

“The problem is we’re both still alive. Which only reinforces the idea in your mind that you did the right thing,” says Peeta.

I’m not sure who to disagree with here.  Yeah, Katniss was an ass for knocking him out.  On the other hand, Peeta was hellbent on getting them both killed, and Katniss saved his life.  Yet here he is, still acting like he knows better, he’s just searching for the right words to prove it.  It’s like he’s completely incapable of admitting that his “girlfriend” was actually right.

What an ass.

I’m struck by his immediacy now. As we settle in, he pulls my head down to use his arm as a pillow, the other rests protectively over me even when he goes to sleep.

You can keep going on about how awesome the forced teenage make outs and the forced teenaged sleeping together is, book, but I’ll never forget that it’s all forced.

But tomorrow is no better in terms of weather. The deluge continues as if the Gamemakers are intent on washing us all away.

Didn’t Katniss say that there’s some proscription against the games getting dull?  Huh, I guess the viewers really enjoy watching people sleep through thunderstorms.

“You said at the interview you’d had a crush on me forever. When did forever start?”

“Oh, let’s see. I guess the first day of school. We were five.

So, during that earlier bullshit about debt, Katniss wailed about how it was so much more special than any of her shit because they were strangers at the time.  Except they weren’t strangers, HE ALREADY HAD A CRUSH ON HER.

Furthermore, this takes a genuinely generous gesture, and makes it all about how Peeta just did it because he likes her.  It would be different if we knew that Peeta does this for other people, but the only person he does it for is the girl he has a crush on.  Yeah, it’s nice…but at the same time it’s not as altruistic as she’s been making it out to be.  And she never once revises her earlier thoughts about his oh-so-deep-down-goodness.

“Your father? Why?” I ask.

“He said, ‘See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner,’” Peeta says.

…the same father who, years later, agreed to take a special interest in the 12 year-old who looks exactly like her mother?

It seems creepiness runs in the Mellark family.

Even if you don’t read it as child-grooming, it’s still not all that great.  He’s only helping Prim, only giving good deals to Katniss, because he likes their mother.  Throughout this book, the only times anyone does anything good for another person, it’s always because they have some sort of personal emotional investment.  There’s not a single case of actual “just doing a good thing because it’s the right thing to do” generosity or kindness in this book.  That’s…really bleak and depressing.

“No, it happened. And right when your song ended, I knew—just like your mother—I was a goner,” Peeta says. “Then for the next eleven years, I tried to work up the nerve to talk to you.”

Is this supposed to be sweet?  He falls in love with her over something as shallow as a singing voice and then proceeds to stalk/obsess over her for 11 years?  So.  Fucking.  Creepy.

Our lips have just barely touched when the clunk outside makes us jump.

So, yeah, Katniss is being paid to make out with Peeta.  She’s being whored out for the entertainment of a nation.  And she never once thinks about this, is upset by this, or even feels uncomfortable about this.  Unless it’s in relation to Gale, of course.  It’s just so…normalized and accepted and fucking creepy.