They resemble huge wolves, but what wolf lands and then balances easily on its hind legs?

…stupid ones?

Humans can run.  Oh, man, can we run.  We can run all day long.  Well, the basic structure is there, at least.  Before we invented fancy weapons such as “sharp rock tied to a stick,” we used to hunt by chasing prey until it just collapsed from exhaustion.  Or fell off a cliff, if there was a handy cliff nearby.

Wolves can run.  Oh, man, can wolves run.  They are awesome runners.  They have stamina that could impress even our non-weapons-having ancestors. 

However, wolves and humans are completely different.  It’s not a matter of “us, two legs; them, four legs.”  Every part of how we’re put together is different.  If you had something that even looked vaguely like a wolf, that had a wolf torso and wolf joints and wolf feet, it would suck at running.  Any wolf-shaped creature that can walk upright is going to look about as scary as a Halloween decoration, and be just as prone to blowing over in a stiff breeze.

The pure gold surface has been designed to resemble the woven horn that we fill at harvest,

We?  Katniss…you have horn baskets in District 12?  And…stuff to harvest?  Whaaaaa?

Now’s my chance to finish him off. I stop midway up the horn and load another arrow,

[…]

Cato waiting at the top and whip around, but he’s doubled over with cramps and apparently more preoccupied with the mutts than us. He coughs out something unintelligible.  […] “He said, ‘Can they climb it?’” answers Peeta

Katniss’s first response in all this is to shoot Cato, but Cato’s first response is to ask if the crazy mutant killer wolves that are chasing them can climb.  He’s not only exhibiting proper priorities, but also very normal human behavior by (somewhat) banding together with his fellow humans against an immediate outside threat.

And I’m supposed to believe that he’s insane and Katniss is normal?

The blonde hair, the green eyes, the number… it’s Glimmer.

A shriek escapes my lips and I’m having trouble holding the arrow in place.

Alright, so the wolves have the basic appearances of the dead tributes.  …and?  So?  They’ve created a wolf that is for some reason forced to walk upright, why is that less important than the fact that they’re color-coded?  Seriously, hair and eye colors.  Purely decorative.  Who the fuck cares.  Focus on the teeth and the fact that they can apparently communicate and make plans.

I hear Peeta’s gasp of recognition. “What did they do to them? You don’t think… those could be their real eyes?”

And if they are…so what?  Eye transplants or just they grew ones that matched.  Who cares?

Seriously.  Why are we stopping the action to angst about eye colors?

I guess it’s a bit of body horror, and it would be slightly freaky…if not for everything else that’s going on.  Seriously, imminent face-chomping should be a priority here.  We don’t know if these are reanimated tribute corpses, if only the eyes and nothing else were transferred, or if the wolves are just color coded to match.  Maybe the capitol made all these things ahead of time and there’s Katniss and Peeta wolves in a lab somewhere, they just didn’t get “activated” or whatever.  We don’t know what’s going on, and on the whole, it’s an academic question anyway.  It has no relevance to the fact that these wolves are trying to kill you.

What about their brains? Have they been given any of the real tributes memories? Have they been programmed to hate our faces particularly because we have survived and they were so callously murdered? And the ones we actually killed… do they believe they’re avenging their own deaths?

Again, it’s an interesting question…but entirely academic.  I mean, they’re all acting as a group and communicating, and they’re all gunning for all three living kids, not singling anyone out or acting individually.  So it’s a question that doesn’t have much basis.  And even if these wolves do have “special hate,” does that make dealing with them any different from how you’d deal with “mindless hate” wolves?

Stop angsting over this just because the author thought it was cool to have color-coded wolves.  It’s a non-issue.

the arrow ends up taking out a mutt that can only be Thresh. Who else could jump so high?

…was Thresh a particularly good jumper at any point in the games?

Was that what was in his pack at the feast? Body armor to defend against my arrows? Well, they neglected to send a face guard.

Yup.  So I think it’s pretty clear that the gamemakers were picking Katniss to win.  I wonder if Cato realized this when he saw the lack of head protection.

Peeta’s lips are turning blue. If I don’t do something quickly, he’ll die of asphyxiation

So…Cato sucks at headlocks.

When you get someone in a headlock, you’re not trying to cut off their air.  You’re going for what’s called a bloodchoke. 

See how the elbow is right in front of the windpipe, thereby not putting any pressure on it at all?  Yeah, that’s because what you really want is to press your forearm and upper arm (that V made by the elbow) up against the carotid arteries on either side of the neck, cutting off blood flow to the brain.  It’s both faster and safer for putting someone unconscious.  A person can stay conscious and fighting you for several minutes without air, but they’ll go down in 30 seconds without blood.  Also, it’s really easy to crush a windpipe and do lasting damage, whereas with a blood choke, if you let up on the person as soon as they go down they’re fine.  Granted, I’m sure Cato doesn’t care about Peeta’s windpipe, but the “30 seconds or less” bit is still very important. 

And if he’d been “trained” at anything, he should know this.  I’m starting to wonder if any of these career kids were trained at anything or if Katniss just assumes they were.

But it’s one second too late because, by that time, my arrow is piercing his hand.

Where is Cato’s hand at this point?  Because…did the arrow go through his hand?  And…into Peeta?  Did Katniss dial back the tension and give it less “oomph” so it wouldn’t go all the way through?  Does the book just not care?

Cato must have a knife or sword or something, too, something he had hidden in his clothes, because on occasion there’s the death scream of a mutt

Poor Cato.  Injured.  Alone.  Fighting a whole pack of mutants.  Clearly the underdog in a game that favors a couple of jerkass idiots.  Having already lost his partner, had her die while he held her.  And now faced off against impossible odds, knowing he’s not going to make it, but still fighting to his very last breath.

And then, his final fate, after this desperate and futile last battle, is to lay helplessly on the ground all fucking night, in horrible pain and terror, while a whole pack of wolves slowly gnaw him to death.

And Katniss just sits up on the horn doing nothing.

the real nightmare is listening to Cato, moaning, begging, and finally just whimpering as the mutts work away at him. After a very short time, I don’t care who he is or what he’s done, all I want is for his suffering to end.

Here’s a thought: shoot him.  Stop just sitting there and moping and do something. 

We’ve finally reached the one point in the story where it would be a mercy to shoot someone, and all she does is stand there.  And for no reason.  She’s not frozen in fear or hesitant or conflicted.  She doesn’t consider shooting him and come up with a bullshit reason for why she can’t.  She literally doesn’t even think about it.  She just sits there and angsts about how hard it is for her to have to listen to his pain and suffering.  As if there’s nothing she or anyone else can do about it, as if it’s just an unfortunate thing that’s happened and she has to endure.

God damnit, Katniss, DO SOMETHING.  What is wrong with you, are you just being polite and letting the wolves have their fun?

No viewer could turn away from the show now. From the Gamemakers’ point of view, this is the final word in entertainment.

It’s hours and hours of reparative gnawing on a wounded kid.  Cato isn’t even fighting back at this point, he’s just moaning.  How is that entertaining?

Also, hey, remember that conversation about how you don’t want to be a game piece?  Want to “hold the capitol responsible” and all that shit?  How about not fucking sitting there while the capitol treats this horrific death as “entertainment”!!!!!

It’s honestly amazing how much time and page space is devoted to how hard it is for Katniss to listen to Cato’s death.  I have zero fucks to give to Katniss, because she’s a monster and I hate her.

I may be able to take him out. It would be an act of mercy at this point.

It would have been an act of mercy at any point, you jackass.

Also, notice.  Katniss has four kills in the arena.  Two are, in the book’s mind, “accidental.”  One was right after the victim stabbed a 12 year-old girl.  This last on spent two whole pages assuring us that it’s a mercy killing.  For all this book is supposedly about horrors and morally grey questions, it’s done its level best to tie itself in knots assuring us that Katniss is still in the clear moral right, having never made a tough decision once in this entire novel.

I try to remember. Do you have to distance yourself from the dead tribute on the final kill?

Is this why they so politely move away from the dead bodies?  Is there some rule or tradition about it?  Really, what is their deal with this?

“Greetings to the final contestants of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games. The earlier revision has been revoked. Closer examination of the rule book has disclosed that only one winner may be allowed,”

And this is just stupid.  If the point of the games is to pander to the audience, then they’ve just shot themselves in the foot, because now the audience will be pissed off, too.  The entire point of letting them both live was because the romance played well with the viewers.  This rule isn’t as much about fucking over Katniss and Peeta as it is about fucking over everyone watching, which makes no sense if we’re still stuck on the symbiotic audience/producer cycle. 

It would play a lot better if this sort of rule-changing happened all the time, or if the original announcement had been “maybe you can both live,” and that way there wouldn’t be such a sense of “nya nya nya, can’t believe you fell for that.”  That way, there would have always been the chance it wouldn’t work, it would have always been just a desperate hope and not a promise.  This right here, though, is just ridiculous.

I drop my weapons and take a step back, my face burning in what can only be shame.

Shut up, book.  I’m not blaming Katniss for this one, I’m blaming the book.  Because at every turn, it tries to paint her as being worse than Peeta.  Well fuck that.  Katniss drew her bow because she thought Peeta was about to attack her.  She’s perfectly within her rights to react to a perceived threat.  It’s not like she drew on him as soon as the announcement was made.  This is just in here so she can feel bad about not being as perfect and saintly as her boyfriend.

Because this book is feminist.

Because if he dies, I’ll never go home, not really. I’ll spend the rest of my life in this arena trying to think my way out.

But only if Peeta dies.  All those others?  That night of listening to Cato slowly get gnawed to death?  Psh, so not a big deal.  Only Peeta’s death will actually affect her.

Yes, they have to have a victor. Without a victor, the whole thing would blow up in the Gamemakers’ faces. They’d have failed the Capitol. Might possibly even be executed, slowly and painfully while the cameras broadcast it to every screen in the country.

So…they have to pander to the capitol viewers or else they get brutally murdered on television…but it’s okay for them to fuck around with the love story and basically say “suck it” to the audience?

And why do they have to have a victor?  Romeo and Juliette has remained popular has a love story for hundreds of years, and neither one of them survive, so having Peeta and Katniss suicide for each other right here would play right into the viewer’s sympathies.  Is there something special about victors and their relationship to the capitol, some sort of social contract that surrounds them?  Well, maybe you should have established that instead of just declaring it to be so right at the last possible convenient moment.