“No!” I cry, and spring forward. It’s too late to stop the arm from descending, and I instinctively know I won’t have the power to block it. Instead I throw myself directly between the whip and Gale.

What even is this?  The way things are broken up makes it seem like she jumped forward a bit while yelling, realized the guy wouldn’t stop, and then jumped forward more to protect Gale.  All in the time it would take for a downward swing. 

She’s had a book and a third to be a non-thinking blob so far, and at the point where jumping without consideration is appropriate, now she decides to stop and think?  Or rather, to stop and have instincts?

(Seriously, does math have pheromones now?  Do you even know what instincts are?)

“She’s got a photo shoot next week modeling wedding dresses. What am I supposed to tell her stylist?”

I see a flicker of recognition in the eyes of the man with the whip.

See, the new Peacekeeper didn’t even recognize her when she threw herself in front of him, so he wasn’t thinking about her, so this is not, in fact, ‘meant for [her].’ 

Everything about this man, his commanding voice, his odd accent, warns of an unknown and dangerous threat. Where has he come from? District 11? 3? From the Capitol itself?

You’re the one who supposedly knows all about this country, and you just got fresh off a tour of the place.  If he’s got a distinct accent, you should know where it’s from because you would have just heard it a week ago.

For that matter, we find out later that the Peacekeepers usually come from 2.  So are all her current Peacekeeper buddies from there?  Then she should know the accent.

And if he’s from somewhere else, why?  Why is that important?  You don’t need to ‘other’ him with an odd accent to make him threatening.  The fact that he’s new and whipping people is enough to make him scary, you don’t need to add in “and he has an odd accent” as if that somehow makes him even more scary.

In fact, the more I think about it, the creepier it is.  Focusing on the idea that his ‘otherness’ makes him a danger, rather than his actual actions.  Good job being ethnocentric in the worst possible way, book.

Maybe we’re it. The only three people in the district who could make a stand like this.

Katniss, I swear to god, not five seconds ago you thought this:

It’s Darius. A huge purple lump pushes through the red hair on his forehead. He’s knocked out but still breathing. What happened? Did he try to come to Gale’s aid before I got here?

Stop pretending you’re such a special martyr when you’ve already realized that someone else tried to help and got bashed in the head for his troubles.

“Is that the standard protocol here?” asks the Head Peacekeeper.

Does every district have their own rules for dealing with lawbreakers?  If so, then they could just say that they don’t kill people over turkeys, and that would legit because they’re allowed to make up their own rules.  There’s no need for Purnia to lie to Thread about what ‘standard protocol’ is.  Furthermore, if every district sets their own regulations, then Thread can just say “Well, I’m in charge now, so things will change.”

Instead it seems like there are actual standards, maybe with just a bit of local variance, like a Head Peacekeeper could decide to trade hard labor or confinement for whipping.  Thus Purnia has to lie and pretend like they’ve been doing this all along.  Which means, in fact, that the Peacekeepers and the old Head Peacekeeper have all been sticking their own asses on the line for the people of the district, by allowing them to get away with crimes that are necessary for their survival.  Clearly, being caught out at this gets them in trouble, as we see with Darius later, so it’s a pretty big risk they’re taking.

But that won’t stop Katniss and the whole fucking country from continuing to insist that 12 is the shittiest district. 

By the time we’ve laid Gale facedown on the board, there’s only a handful of people left to carry him. Haymitch, Peeta, and a couple of miners who work on the same crew as Gale lift him up.

Katniss, of course, stands by and watches, because lifting things is hard work, and it’s not like she described herself as ‘muscled’ from all the hard work of hunting.  Nope, girls do not pick things up.  Ever.  That’s what the men are for.

Because this book is feminist!

Really, at the point where you have four people carrying, even if Katniss is significantly weaker than the rest, she can support a fourth of a person.

No one knows what happened to Cray. He was buying white liquor in the Hob just this morning, apparently still in command of the district, but now he’s nowhere to be found.

Like the two other shot victims in District 11, Katniss will never give Cray a second thought or even wonder if she should find out what happened to him.

By the time I showed up, he’d been lashed at least forty times. He passed out around thirty.

It used to be standard to give someone 39 lashes, under the belief that 40 lashes would kill a man.  Of course, everyone’s body is different, and you die at 30 or 50 or really just about anywhere.  You can die at 1 if it’s bad enough to send you into shock.  Although 40 is a good number; it’s really easy to kill someone with that.

Which is why that many is used for extreme punishment, not everyday rule-breaking.  Good lord, give someone 5 or 10 for a first offense, not fucking 40 and then some.

“He told Thread he found it wandering around the Seam. Said it got over the fence and he’d stabbed it with a stick. Still a crime.

What even is this?  It’s not possible to enforce a law that says starving people can’t kill an animal that fucking walks right up to them.  I mean it.  Not possible.  Because, despite the way this book presents things, that’s now how starvation works.  Even if you kill people for doing it, they’re going to do it.

Which is why it’s imperative that you don’t make laws like that if you want to be an evil dictator regime.  When you make laws that are unenforceable, it just undermines your own power.  You might as well put up a sign that says “hey, so, here’s the limits of my power.”

And, what, food that’s wandering around the district isn’t fair game?  What about the goat herd?  What about the peas in Katniss’s garden?  What if a turkey flies over the fence, lays an egg, and then someone raises the baby turkey up and eats that?  Would that be illegal?

“New Head,” Haymitch says, and she gives him a curt nod as if no other explanation is needed.

[…]

“Don’t worry,” says Haymitch. “Used to be a lot of whipping before Cray. She’s the one we took them to.”

See, clearly Cray was doing you guys a favor.

I’m filled with awe, as I always am, as I watch her transform from a woman who calls me to kill a spider to a woman immune to fear.

God damnit, book, really?

You know, if it wasn’t in the midst of all the other misogynistic crap that these books have flung at us, I wouldn’t be annoyed.  Of course people are going to act more competent when they’re in their area of expertise.  However, the book has not been good enough for me to grant it that.  Instead, what this book has done is display a woman who gains power and authority only when she steps into her designated female role. 

It’s the ‘transform’ that really does it.  It’s the fact that it displays Cynthia as weak and useless and cowardly with the non-spider-killing part, but she ‘transforms’ into someone useful by taking on her woman-role.  Apparently, while outside of her designated woman-role, she’s just a helpless thing that clutches at her pearls.

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

Even back then, she must have had healer’s hands.

And it’s even worse when Cythnia’s woman-role is implied to be something magical or some shit.  Katniss doesn’t say that she had knowledge from working in the apothecary, or even just access to apothecary shit, no, she says she has ‘healer’s hands’ as if someone without special hands can’t figure out how to mix medicines together.

So, to recap: Cynthia only gains power and worth when she takes on her designated woman-role, but she didn’t earn that role, it’s just ‘instinct.’ 

my mother and Prim go through their meager store of painkillers, the kind usually accessible only to doctors. They are hard to come by, expensive, and always in demand.
Oh, if only Katniss had buckets of money that she didn’t know what to do with!

My mother tries to save them for those who are actually in the process of dying, to ease them out of the world.

So, yeah, that’s not how triage works.  The point of triage is to maximize your changes to save as many lives as possible.  It’s to make the most efficient use of the resources at hand.  It’s not so that you can dole out the strongest pain to the people who are beyond help.  As cruel as it is to say that the dying should go without pain meds, it’s not really any crueler than saying that living should have to suffer for even longer.

On top of that, pain medication actually promotes healing.  Pain puts an enormous amount of stress on the body, which makes sleep and recovery slower.  Pain medication can alleviate that and help the person get well faster.  If supplies really are limited, then smother the dying people and give the pain meds to those who can still be helped.  You do not look at your most expensive, most in-demand, most powerful medication and then give it to someone who can’t even benefit from it.  That’s what you do when you have enough for everyone.

Cray would have been disliked, anyway, because of the uniform he wore, but it was his habit of luring starving young women into his bed for money that made him an object of loathing in the district. In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them. Instead I learned to hunt.

So, we’ve established that Cray did away with the standard practice of whipping everyone to death for the smallest things.  He put his own ass on the line for the sake of this, and his lenient policies allowed the people to have more survival options than would have been otherwise possible.  But everyone would have hated him?

And, I’m sorry, prostitution made him loathed?  Really?  How do you get that?  Because let’s really look at that.  It says he ‘lured’ girls in with the promise of money, but then he actually gave them the money.  He didn’t lie to them, he wasn’t dishonest, and as far as we know, he didn’t cheat the girls or treat them badly.  No, it’s just the fact that he paid them for sex that made him bad.  In a district where people routinely starve to death – why do you keep forgetting that, book? –  Cray is a bad guy for giving people money in exchange for a service?

There’s a lot of ways that prostitution can be bad.  You could have a situation like in our country, where it’s illegal status means that the girls are probably already desperate to try it and they have little way of getting legal help in the case of abuse.  It’s bad if there’s a pimp system, which takes power and autonomy and choice away from the girls.  It’s bad if someone is manipulating the situation so that girls have no other options for employment.  But just straight-up paying a willing person to have sex with you is not bad unless you believe that sex is inherently damaging. 

Cray was not abusing his power or making the district worse; in fact he was making it better in what limited way he could.  The girls he slept with were not force (by him, at least) into coming to his door; they gathered willingly.  When they left, they had money for food, and to all appearances were unharmed.  The only way anyone could look at this situation and declare it evil is if they think that sex outside of marriage is something automatically demeaning.

(In fact, if you consider Katniss from Ch 1 and how she had to ‘spread around her wealth’ by purchasing things instead of just handing out money, it seems that direct charity isn’t viewed favorably by this book.  So what would Katniss think of as a good action from him?  Send the girls away with nothing?)

Now, he could still be mistreating the women, I guess.  But that doesn’t change the message we’re getting here.  Katniss doesn’t say that he’s a bad person for beating women, she says he’s a bad person for sleeping with them, full stop.  That’s her moral view; if you sleep with someone in order to feed your family, that’s somehow evil.

I don’t know exactly what my mother means by things starting again, but I’m too angry and hurting to ask.

Why do you never remember stuff, Katniss?  Two fucking pages ago we had this:

“Used to be a lot of whipping before Cray. She’s the one we took them to.”

The whippings are starting again; use your brain, jfc.

That’s what nettles me. It’s the implication that there’s something going on between Gale and Madge. And I don’t like it.

The boy is three-fourths dead on your kitchen table; can you take just a moment of a break from the love triangle, please?  This is on par with both boys glancing over the whole “threat against my life!” thing and jumping straight to “but what about the other love interest?”

For the first time, I reverse our positions in my head. I imagine watching Gale volunteering to save Rory in the reaping, having him torn from my life, becoming some strange girl’s lover to stay alive, and then coming home with her. Living next to her. Promising to marry her.

The hatred I feel for him, for the phantom girl, for everything, is so real and immediate that it chokes me.

Katniss, sweetie, think for a moment.  You hate these two fictional characters for doing what they needed to in order to survive.  You’re not even imagining that he’s really being someone’s lover, you’re imagining it being an act. 

And apparently you’re okay with Gale not being okay with that.  He’s in the know, now.  So, basically, Gale is so possessive that he doesn’t like Katniss pretending to pair with someone else in order to save her life.  He’d rather her be dead than with anyone but him.

And Katniss thinks just the same.

These are all terrible people.

The berries. I realize the answer to who I am lies in that handful of poisonous fruit. If I held them out to save Peeta because I knew I would be shunned if I came back without him, then I am despicable. If I held them out because I loved him, I am still self-centered, although forgivable. But if I held them out to defy the Capitol, I am someone of worth.

Fucking fuckity-fuck what?

No.  You are allowed to save yourself.  That does not make you despicable and without worth.  You do not have to be in love or self-sacrificing in order to have worth.

Jeeze, book, do you really want to send that message to impressionable teenage girls?  Did you just get in a bet to see how many terrible messages you could have in one book?

Could it be the people in the districts are right? That it was an act of rebellion, even if it was an unconscious one?

No, it wasn’t.  You haven’t had a rebellious thought since we met you.  The fact that they turned it into a rebellion just means they’re more proactive than you, not that you were ‘unconsciously rebellious.’

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right here and cause all kinds of trouble.”

So…did everyone just sort of collectively decide that Snow isn’t going to kill them after all?  Because it feels like all that “IMMINENT DEATH THREAT” bullshit got dropped without comment.