Peeta lays the morphling on the sand.

She’s not even a person.  She’s “the morphling.”  She’s a thing.  She just died for your precious boyfriend, and you can’t even be bothered to call her by name or even think of her as a person.

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

God, she couldn’t even call her a morphling addict.  An addict at least includes the idea of being a human being in it; “morphling” is just a made-up drug that the author invented so that she wouldn’t have to do any research on real drugs.  (Because, seriously, this is not even close to morphine addiction.)

Blood slowly trickles from them, making them look far less deadly than they are. The real damage is inside. By the position of the openings, I feel certain the beast ruptured something vital, a lung, maybe even her heart.

It’s not the heart because if the heart had been punctured you’d see bright red arterial blood spurting out of the wound, not a slow trickle.  So, probably lungs, then, and hey!  Penetrating lung wounds are actually pretty easy to treat.

No, really, stick something airtight over that sucker and drive on.  The plastic off your flotation belt (or, even better, off hers; always use the casualties first aid material first, in case you yourself get injured later) would probably do the trick. 

See, your lungs are not a muscle.  You don’t actually need it whole in order to have it function.  Bits of it can even be removed completely and it’ll still work, because it’s basically just a big air sponge.  What’s far, far more important is the vacuum in your thoracic cavity.  Your lungs don’t expand because you’re making them move; you make your diaphragm move, and the vacuum inside you makes your lungs stick to your diaphragm.  When the diaphragm goes down, it drags your lungs with it, and thereby the expand. 

So in order to fix a hole in your chest/lung, what you need to do is fix the hole n your chest.  Put a cover on it as you breathe out, tape it down on all sides, and that will restore the vacuum and you’ll be able to breathe again.  (They used to suggest leaving one side untapped so that air could escape, but it turns out that’s a really inefficient method that causes problems, so unless you have a special chest-wound bandage with a valve on it, just don’t bother.)

Now, there’s a whole host of other issues that could come up.  You could develop pockets of air or fluid in your chest cavity that interfere with breathing.  And of course, a patch of plastic won’t last forever.  But when we’re talking about just fucking doing something and trying to help and not sitting around like a useless and ungrateful lump, then the plastic bandage is a good deal.  Maybe you’ll be lucky and not develop a tension pneumothorax.  That’s common enough.

Everything about her speaks of waste — her body, her life, the vacant look in her eyes.

Oh, fuck off.  It’s bad enough that here we have a dying woman and Katniss takes the time out to describe in exacting detail how awful she looks.  It’s bad enough that we’re focusing on her appearance over any part of her personality.  But to say that she’s a picture of waste?  She’s no different from Haymich, drowning trauma and sorrow in mind-altering chemicals, at least so far as we know.  But Katniss never calls Haymich a ‘waste,’ just this woman here. 

Why not say that she speaks of hopelessness, or desperation, or sorrow, or – here’s a thought – THE UTTER CALLOUSNESS AND CRUELTY OF THE CAPITOL, SERIOUSLY KATNISS, FUCK YOU FOR TALKING LIKE THAT ABOUT A GOD DAMN TRAUMA VICTIM WITH NO SUPPORT SYSTEM.

There is nothing we can do. Nothing but stay with her while she dies.

As I already said, yes there is.  Given her condition, first aid might still not help, but Katniss doesn’t even try.

And this is really starting to bug me.

See, giving first aid is messy and traumatizing, especially when the victim dies anyway.  It’s really, really hard to deal with, and it’ll fuck up your head.  You’ll (probably) spend days or weeks or the rest of your life replaying that moment in your mind, wondering if there was anything you could have done, any one little small thing you could have done to turn the tide, to keep them alive, to help.  It’s painful and there’s usually crying and copious amounts of bodily fluid around.

But instead of going through any of that, here we have Katniss just sitting by, above it all, unaffected and just observing this rather mess-less death.  She’s never required by the text to get messy, not in a physical sense or an emotional sense.  She’s given a cop-out, a free pass, by saying that there’s “nothing we can do,” and therefore she’s allowed to sit by the side and not feel a moment of guilt or panic or desperation or REALLY JUST ANY EMOTION AT ALL.  She’s held apart from it, never needing to get her hands dirty.

This is not how you depict the horrors of war and death.  This is not how you share with people the utter waste and hopelessness of watching an innocent person die.

This is…clean.

For a moment, the morphling’s face lights up in a grin and she makes a small squeaking sound. Then her blood-dappled hand falls back onto her chest, she gives one last huff of air, and the cannon fires. The grip on my hand releases.

Clean and cinematic and fake.  This is a fucking Lifetime movie.

And you know what else?  We never find out where she came from.  Even the text admits that she popped up out of nowhere, but there’s no attempt to explain where she was, how she got in the middle of their monkey fight, or what she was doing before all that happened.  She basically didn’t exist until it was time for her to pop up and die a very clean, messless and guiltless death.

Because apparently that’s all she’s good for.

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

Peeta’s found a good vein and the water begins to gush from the spile.

Seriously, there’s got to be pipes in the trees or something.

Which makes me wonder how Haymich knew that a spile would work.  Did the gamemakers give them cheatsheets? Or did he just expect them to be normal trees and drip sap out for them and it was a happy coincidence that these ended up being indoor-plumbing-trees?

He saved Peeta and let Mags die and I don’t know why. Only that I can never settle the balance owed between us.

He chose to do that for his own reasons and you do not owe him.  You are not in debt.  I’m really curious as to what your upbringing was that you have this weird view on debt.  Like I said before, it’s a very middle class concept to be indebted to someone through favors.

“It’s like you’re decomposing,”

[…]

“No, wait,” says Finnick. “Let’s do it together. Put our faces right in front of his.”

Because right in the middle of murderdeath games, after he’s already had one damaging shock to the heart, is the perfect time to scare the living bejeezus out of someone.

If there was any justice at all in this world, Peeta would have stabbed one of them in the face before coming to his senses.

Three or four are the Careers. I don’t really feel like trying to remember who the others are.

That’s because you’re a horrible person who has never cared about others.

And Finnick is a Career.  Stop forgetting that just because he’s your friend now.

For me, the jungle has quickly evolved from a place of protection to a sinister trap.

When did you ever think it was safe?  The very first thing the jungle did was kill Peeta.

(Can we make Team Jungle Deathtrap shirts?)

even if I’d had a list of allies, Johanna Mason would definitely not have been on it.

And why not?  Johanna has literally done nothing to Katniss by this point except talk about fashion, which – and I can’t point this out enough – Katniss has claimed to enjoy and take up as a profession.  They’ve had no other interaction, and Johanna hasn’t been hostile.

Yet Katniss randomly decides that this woman is bad news, based on…fuck all if I know.

…Johanna is the only female so far to get any speaking lines and yet not be incapacitated in some way.  All of our other female victors have either not spoken (Cecelia, the drug addict, Mags, Seeder), been crazy (Wiress), or else they’re declared bad in some manner (Enobaria, Cashmere, Johanna).  Now, you can make arguments that those last three aren’t actually evil, and I’d agree with you, but you can’t deny that both Katniss and the book take a very poor, antagonistic view on them.

So, basically, if you’re a fully-functioning and capable adult female who speaks without requiring a male translator and keeper, then Katniss hates you.  She doesn’t need any other reason, she just hates you.

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

“We thought it was rain, you know, because of the lightning, and we were all so thirsty. But when it started coming down, it turned out to be blood. Thick, hot blood. You couldn’t see, you couldn’t speak without getting a mouthful. We just staggered around, trying to get out of it. That’s when Blight hit the force field.”

I think Johanna is the first person featured in this blog to actually know how to tell a story in the manner in which people actually talk.

I love you, Johanna. :3

We all look over at Wiress, who’s circling around, coated in dried blood, and murmuring, “Tick, tock. Tick, tock.”

“Yeah, we know. Tick, tock. Nuts is in shock,” says Johanna. This seems to draw Wiress in her direction and she careens into Johanna, who harshly shoves her to the beach. “Just stay down, will you?”

“Lay off her,” I snap.

Johanna narrows her brown eyes at me in hatred. “Lay off her?” she hisses. She steps forward before I can react and slaps me so hard I see stars. “Who do you think got them out of that bleeding jungle for you? You — ”

She’s so delightfully normal!  She gets short-tempered and responds to stress by…you know, actually fucking responding.

Johanna has shown more personality in that one line than Katniss did in her first several chapters of moping.

Finnick tosses her writhing body over his shoulder and carries her out into the water and repeatedly dunks her while she screams a lot of really insulting things at me.

And even though she’s angry and stressed and all the rest, all she does is scream insults, which is really quite reserved.  It’s not like she’s trying to fight Finnick or anything, she’s just letting off steam.

But I don’t shoot.

Unlike some people who think that a slap to the face is worth shooting someone over.  The only reason she holds off is find out what Johanna was talking about, not because you shouldn’t fucking shoot people just for slapping you in the face, god, you fucking sociopath.

“It’s good. You’re good with this healing stuff,” he says. “It’s in your blood.”

Katniss did nothing besides wash Beetee off and use some moss for a bandage, which she only thought of because she remembered Mags using it to mop up snot before.  Basic reasoning skills.  But here’s being attributed to her ‘blood’ and her ‘magical, vagina-based ability to be a healer, because duh, all girls are healers.’

It’s not like any of the boys could have done such basic stuff as “put on a fucking bandage.”  Nope, that’s girl stuff, and therefore let’s make the girl do it and claim that it’s her natural place to be the healer of the group.

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

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I got my father’s blood.”

And Katniss doesn’t disagree that the role of healer is inherited and natural, instead of knowledge based, she just thinks that she inherited a boy role.

“I told you — I got them for you. Haymitch said if we were to be allies I had to bring them to you,” says Johanna. “That’s what you told him, right?”

Except not really, because Beetee is part of the plan to get them out.  He had to be in on this from the start, because he’s actually vital to the whole thing going down, so if Johanna was in on this whole “let’s keep Katniss and Peeta alive” thing to begin with, that should be why they met up.  So why lie to Katniss here? 

And why does Katniss not question why Johanna wants to be her ally in the first place?

If it’s really that necessary to keep Katniss in the dark (which I still don’t agree with) she could just as easily say that she and she and Beetee are allies, or that she, Finnick, and Beetee are allies and yeah, she won’t kill Katniss since she’s now part of the cabal, too.

This way, though, just continues to put Katniss in the center of the universe, making everything about her and becoming her ally.  No one can make allies around her, it all has to be connected to her and through her and for her.

And she never bats an eye at this.  She just shrugs along like, oh, okay, that makes total sense, of course I’m the center of the universe.

Uhg, I hate her so much.