“Peeta. About what I said yesterday, about running —” I begin.

 “I know,” he says. “There’s nothing to explain.”

No, there’s plenty to explain!  Like, why did you all collectively decide to stop giving a fig about death threats?  I’m fine with Snow coming around to kill them after all, because that makes sense, but none of them have bothered to change their minds.  It’s like Katniss just came up with this crazy notion of running because she was bored or annoyed, and her dropping it is treated like a child who finally stopped throwing a temper tantrum.

If you guys thought Snow wasn’t going to kill you, then you should have said that instead of agreed to run.  If you thought he was going to kill you, then why aren’t you more concerned about that?

I think of his agreeing to go with me yesterday, his stepping up beside me to protect Gale, his willingness to throw his lot in with mine entirely when I give him so little in return. No matter what I do, I’m hurting someone.

…

Katniss, did it ever occur to you that he could be stepping to help Gale for the sake of helping Gale?  You know, that relatively innocent person who was just trying to feed his family?

Because if the only reason he does good things is to get into your good graces, then he’s actually a terrible person.

Actually, the whole way this is framed creeps me out.  It’s like it doesn’t even occur to her that he could have a sense of justice or anything like that.  To Katniss, everything is personal.  The only reason anyone has for doing anything is if they either do or don’t like a person that’s involved.  That’s really fucking bleak.

I wish that Peeta were here to hold me, until I remember I’m not supposed to wish that anymore. I have chosen Gale and the rebellion, and a future with Peeta is the Capitol’s design, not mine.

What even is this?  She wants to be comforted after having a nightmare, but she can’t because she picked a different boy?

And what is that ‘Gale and the rebellion’?  The two are not linked.  You can side with the rebellion without having to also fuck Gale.  You can side with the rebellion because it’s the right thing to do.  But by phrasing it that way, the book implies that she sides with the rebellion because of Gale, because she’s picking him over Peeta, and that makes her otherwise-rebellious choice into just another case of a woman following her man around and letting him make all the decisions.

In fact, linking Peeta and Gale to the different sides is several kinds of creepy.  It takes what should be a moral dilemma about starting a war and risking lives, and instead turns it into more love-triangle bullshit.  It’s trying to be symbolic, but it utterly fails in context, because then we get bullshit like this, where Katniss paints herself as a whore for wanting Peeta in a non-sexual way.  It doubly fails since Peeta isn’t advocating for the Capitol.  He isn’t linked to them in anything except Katniss’s insanity. 

On top of that, there’s the weird note that all male-female interaction is inherently sexual, which is just really depressing.  Physical comfort (hugs, touching, any kind of contact) can and often is very important for a person’s mental health, especially in times of stress.  It’s not true for everyone, but it’s something Katniss wants, so it appears to be true for her.  And yet she’s being denied what she wants and made to feel bad for wanting it simply because we’ve removed the idea of platonic physical comforting from our society and made it overly sexual.

I welcome the blizzard, with its ferocious winds and deep, drifting snow. This may be enough to keep the real wolves, also known as the Peacekeepers, from my door. A few days to think.

A few days in which those poor starving people that make up most of the district run the risk of freezing to death.

But go ahead, dear.  Make it all about you.

I must accept that at any moment I can be arrested. There will be a knock on the door, like the one last night, a band of Peacekeepers to haul me away.

You…weren’t running on that assumption anyway?  Then why did you think you had to leave?

There might be torture.

Do you know why people get tortured?  For information.  Do you have any information worth knowing, Katniss?  No you don’t.

A lot of things are handled like this in these books.  They’re thrown out there because the author knows they’re bad stuff, but she doesn’t have the right understanding of them to use them properly.  People can’t come to a proper appreciation of the horror of torture if it’s being presented like some sort of boogieman, if it’s continually being cheapened like this.  It’s no different from Cassandra Clare using rape as a shorthand for evil; Collins is throwing in torture just to show off the Capitol’s “evilness” without giving the subject proper respect.

I mean, it doesn’t get really blatant until the third book, but I felt like ranting early.

I imagine these things and I’m terrified, but let’s face it: They’ve been lurking in the back of my brain, anyway.

“I’m terrified!  But let me follow that statement with an offhand phrase that downplays all my supposed terror.”

Word choice: turns out it’s important.

I pull the blanket up over my head, and my breathing is so rapid I use up all the oxygen and begin to choke for air.

…because you sleep with an airtight blanket?

Now comes the harder part. I have to face the fact that my family and friends might share this fate. Prim. I need only to think of Prim and all my resolve disintegrates. […] I can’t let the Capitol hurt Prim.

And then it hits me. They already have. They have killed her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. They have chosen her as a tribute, then made her watch her sister fight to the death in the Games. She has been hurt far worse than I had at the age of twelve.

Uh, nice thought and it’s a good reason to decide to fight, but in case you haven’t noticed, Prim is alive and doing pretty much alright.  So why do you get to decide that all the shit she’s been through is a good enough excuse to put her in even more danger?

See, Prim’s been hurt, I’ll grant that.  But she’s currently unharmed, well-fed, and living in a mansion.  And Katniss decides that her past hurts are why she doesn’t need to worry about future hurts, because for some reason…I don’t know.  I don’t even know the reason.  I literally cannot work out Katniss’s thought process here.

1.       Prim was hurting in the past.

2.       ???

3.       It’s okay to put her in more danger.

I DON’T GET IT.

So Katniss, having decided that she’s justified in deciding how much hurt and danger is appropriate for everyone else, turns her mind to figuring out how to whip the district into a rebellious frenzy.

Someone with clear and persuasive words, and I’m so easily tongue-tied.

You talk just fine every single time you’ve been asked to give a speech.  Just let this fucking die already.

Of course, I love Gale. But what kind of love does she mean? What do I mean when I say I love Gale? I don’t know.

While it’s nice that they give a nod to the possibility of other kinds of love existing, it falls flat here.  After all, has anyone ever seen this line used where it ended up as something other than romantic love?

It takes two days for the storm to blow itself out, leaving us with drifts higher than my head. Another day before the path is cleared from the Victor’s Village to the square.

…uh, who cleared the path?  The starving people who need to dig out their own un-heated, non-mansion shacks?  Did you do it?  Did the Capitol send you a servant we haven’t heard about?

It’s little things like this, stuff like assuming that roads just get cleared by default, that really show off how little the book bothers to think about what it would be like to live in that setting.

try to remember everything I can about the uprising in District 8, in case it will help us.

You saw a couple-seconds long clip that showed people throwing bricks while they were mowed down with gunfire.  Why do you think that would help you?

I spend the time studying the ten-foot walls of snow piled up on either side of the narrow path that has been cleared,

JFC, ten feet in two days?  And you’re treating this like it’s no big deal, just a normal thing?

And still not thinking about the people literally buried in snow or wondering who had come out here and shovel the path just so that your lily-ass could walk into town for funzies?  (You have a stocked pantry, you don’t need to go shopping.)

We shut up as a team of men with shovels passes us, headed out to the Victor’s Village.

Well, at least that’s something.  But who are they?  Why are they bothering with a ‘village’ where only a handful of people live?  What life-saving duty are they being taken away from?

Because a blizzard that drops 10 feet of snow is not a normal winter storm, you don’t just shrug that off, that’s some really fucking bad weather.  The blizzard that the US got this year only dropped about 3 feet of snow, and even with all our modern living, it still killed people.  In a place where most people live in shacks, there’s going to be a lot more fatalities AND GOD DAMNIT, WHY ARE YOU BOTHERING TO SHOVEL SIDEWALKS FOR THE RICH PEOPLE RIGHT NOW?

Nothing much will happen during the blizzard. That’s what Peeta and I had agreed. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. The square has been transformed. A huge banner with the seal of Panem hangs off the roof of the Justice Building. Peacekeepers, in pristine white uniforms, march on the cleanly swept cobblestones. Along the rooftops, more of them occupy nests of machine guns. Most unnerving is a line of new constructions — an official whipping post, several stockades, and a gallows — set up in the center of the square.

Do you just not fucking know what a blizzard is?

Because, no, no one was out setting all this up in the middle of extremely high winds with limited visibility and thickly-falling snow.  Thread could have insisted on it all he wanted, but it’s physically impossible to accomplish.

An uprising, I think. What an idiot I am. There’s an inherent flaw in the plan that both Gale and I were too blind to see. An uprising requires breaking the law, thwarting authority. We’ve done that our whole lives, or our families have. Poaching, trading on the black market, mocking the Capitol in the woods. But for most people in District 12, a trip to buy something at the Hob would be too risky.

Why would that be too risky?  We saw Cray hanging out in the Hob and eating dinner there, and Katniss calls the Peacekeepers her best customers.  In fact, there appears to be no retribution to using a black market at all; it’s pretty much a legit market.  What’s even black about it?  When we saw Katniss go in there in Ch 1, she was buying coffee and eggs and yarn.  Which of those thing is supposed to be illegal?  The only two named retailers we’ve got are Sae, and her soups don’t seem to have anything untoward in there, and Ripper, but there’s no work on if her alcohol is illegal or not.

Also, the fact that people didn’t rise up before is probably more a nod in favor of the district not being that bad off.  They had a rather benign ‘black’ market and peacekeepers who apparently didn’t do anything.  Now that Thread is putting the hurt on, people are more likely to revolt.  Because, surprise!, people revolt when things are bad, not when they’re hunky-dory.  If you can get by with keeping your head down, then most people will do that.  If you have to chose between eating and getting whipped, that’s when shit starts burning down.

As the days pass, things go from bad to worse. The mines stay shut for two weeks, and by that time half of District 12 is starving. The number of kids signing up for tesserae soars, but they often don’t receive their grain. Food shortages begin, and even those with money come away from stores empty-handed. When the mines reopen, wages are cut, hours extended, miners sent into blatantly dangerous work sites. The eagerly awaited food promised for Parcel Day arrives spoiled and defiled by rodents.

So many questions, so little time.

If kids aren’t getting tesserae, then why are they signing up for it?

If wages are cut and hours extended in the mines, is this forced labor or not?

Are there actual food shortages, or is the Capitol just fucking with the supply?

And most importantly WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

No one in the district has actually rebelled yet, for all Katniss has been thinking about it in her own head.  There’s been no reason at all to close the mines for weeks, or to change the working conditions when they open again.  All of this comes right the fuck out of nowhere.  It seems to be tied to the arrival of the new Head Peacekeeper, but then there’s stuff like food shortages that he’s not in control of.

Things just all of a sudden get really, really shitty, with no rhyme or reason to it, and Katniss has absolutely no fucks to give about that.  No, really, she summarizes the increased levels of suck, but not at any point does she think the question “why is all this happening?”

Supposedly you could spin it as being directed at Katniss herself, for her failure, but notice: SHE’S NOT ACTUALLY SUFFERING.  She’s recounting other people’s pain, whereas she doesn’t note any losses to her own status.  So the Capitol is shitting on 8,000 people just for the sake of it, and no one says a word about it.

I can imagine a regime being this fucking stupid, but I can’t imagine them staying in power for more than a minute, and I can’t imagine a situation in which they do this and everyone acts like it’s just an unfortunate force of nature, like a blizzard with 10 ft high piles of snow (which also go uncommented).

And do they need that coal or not?  If they actually need the coal, why shut down the mines for two weeks?  If they don’t, why have a coal mining district in the first place?

Gale goes home with no more talk of rebellion between us. But I can’t help thinking that everything he sees will only strengthen his resolve to fight back.

DUH!

Author, why did you write a book about rebellion if you don’t understand how it works?

I feel like a pariah when I walk through the streets. Everyone avoids me in public now.

Why?  Because she’s rich and has food and (apparently) refuses to share it with anyone?  Because, that’s a pretty good reason, but Katniss acts like they’re being unfair to her.  Or do they blame her for all the shitiness?  Because they have no reason to link her to it.  They don’t know about the failed rebellion quashing.

There are so many ‘why’s in this chapter.

Dawn is just breaking as I retrieve a set of bow and arrows and begin to force a path through the drifted snow in the woods. I’m determined, for some reason, to get to the lake.

If you ever have to use the phrase “for some reason” in order to make your plot work, go back to the drawing board.

You might as well be saying “because the author told me to.”

Cinna’s clothes hold in the heat all right, and I arrive soaked with sweat under the snowsuit while my face is numb with cold.

Sweating while out in the snow is very dangerous and a great way to catching hypothermia and die.  Staying dry is of extreme importance, and it’s why you want to wear layers that are easy to take off or put on, depending on what your body is doing.  It’s also why when you see winter sports, those people aren’t bundled up like a running gag in A Christmas Story.

My fingers have all but decided to release the arrow when I see the object in the glove.

Katniss sees someone with a gun and responds in kind.  Okay, I’m on board with that.  She then sees and process the fact that the person lowers their weapon and is no longer a threat.  She knows it’s happened; it’s not something she missed in the heat of the moment.  And yet she’s planning to murder this non-threatening person anyway.

Because she’s a fucking sociopath.

More of a cracker, really. Gray and soggy around the edges. But an image is clearly stamped in the center of it.

…no.  That’s not how crackers work.  Bread products do not hold clear images, and they fall apart, especially when soggy, as this one is.  The only reason to put it on food is so you can eat it to hide it, but that’s not good enough.

Put your rebel symbol on paper.  If you’re really determined enough to carry a symbol around, then you can be determined enough to eat paper.