A clock. I can almost see the hands ticking around the twelve-sectioned face of the arena. Each hour begins a new horror, a new Gamemaker weapon, and ends the previous.

[…]

“So we have to move somewhere safe now.”

Eh.  It’s a neat concept, but it’s pretty easy to figure out.  It probably passed by a lot of readers simply because Katniss isn’t exactly on the ball when it comes to observing her surroundings, but even with that there were enough hints to get it before having it spelled out for us.  And in that case…well, a clock just isn’t that dangerous.

See, with the clock set up, we know exactly what will happen and when it will happen.  All you have to do is sit near the edge of a wedge, preferably right where they are now between the fog and the monkeys.  Because for 22 hours out of the day, each wedge is perfectly safe.  Theirs even more so, because the monkeys don’t even attack at once.  They waited a hella long time before attacking our little group here.  And the fog is highly visible.  So all they have to do is sit on the beach, wait for the fog to get sucked up, then move counter clock-wise.  Boom.  Safe.  And as long as they know the time, they can move around and avoid the other traps as well.

It’s a cool concept, I’ll grant that, but it’s far too easy to figure out and far too easy to beat once you do figure it out.

Except these guys are going to act like they’re in mortal danger and must keep moving because…um, because they know exactly when and what is coming.  OooOOOoooOOoo, tension!

She smiles and stands up obediently. “Are you thirsty?” I hand her the woven bowl and she gulps down about a quart. Finnick gives her the last bit of bread and she gnaws on it. With the inability to communicate overcome, she’s functioning again.

Wiress’s treatment during training was bad enough, but here we can see she’s backslid severely.  Before, she was able to communicate fairly well, she just trailed off at the end of her sentences.  Now she’s reduced to speaking in single words and then being fed like a pet.

“This worthless thing. It’s some kind of wire or something.

[…]

There’s something odd about Johanna not putting this together. Something that doesn’t quite ring true. Suspicious. “Seems like you’d have figured that out,” I say. “Since you nicknamed him Volts and all.”

Hey, Katniss finally noticed something!  Then again, the fact that she notices this when she normally can’t put ‘he said he likes me’ and ‘he actually likes me’ together just makes it even more painfully obvious that we’re supposed to pay attention to this.

Of course Johanna already knows what the wire is for because she’s in on the plan, but I don’t understand why she has to play as if she doesn’t.  There’s so much duplicity and lying going on in this group and half of it doesn’t make sense.  It can be left out entirely – not even changed, just straight-up dropped – and the whole set up would still make sense.

But that would also require that Johanna and Beetee openly be allies with each other, not just each going through Katniss, and apparently we can’t have that because…reasons.

“I guess I must have been distracted by keeping your little friends alive. While you were … what, again? Getting Mags killed off?”

My fingers tighten on the knife handle at my belt.

“Go ahead. Try it. I don’t care if you are knocked up, I’ll rip your throat out,” says Johanna.

I think I’m supposed to dislike Johanna right now, or at least view her as a Mean Girl/frienemy, but I really don’t.

See, Johanna didn’t start shit here.  Johanna held perfectly nice conversation with Katniss about something she thought Katniss liked.  Then Johanna didn’t get any return interest, so she left the girl alone.  Then Johanna was told that she had to bust her hump for this little anti-social brat, because this brat was the most important person in the game, which is already enough to try anyone’s patience.  But Johanna did it.  She watched her friend and district-mate die, she worked her ass off trying to keep two incapacitated people alive, she went without food, water, or sleep while navigating a death trap with a woman who could only say “tick-tock” for hours on end, and then when she finally found the rest of her group, she finds out her old friend Mags is dead.  Then this brat, this little stuck-up holier-than-thou girl with all the attention, she pushes just a little too far.

And Johanna replies with insults.

So Katniss tries to kill her.

Then repeat those last two lines: Johanna says words, Katniss goes for deadly weapons. 

But it’s just a matter of time with Johanna and me. Before one of us offs the other.

Katniss is clearly the aggressor in this situation.  If one of them ends up dying, it’ll only be because Katniss couldn’t stop trying to shoot her allies just for talking smack, and Johanna will be forced to act in self-defense.

Even if you count Beetee and Wiress out, we’ve got four good fighters.

No, sweetie, you have three.  Peeta’s still useless.

Johanna, frankly, I could easily kill if it came down to protecting Peeta. Or maybe even just to shut her up.

Fucking sociopath.

What I really need is for someone to take out Finnick for me, since I don’t think I can do it personally. Not after all he’s done for Peeta. I think about maneuvering him into some kind of encounter with the Careers. It’s cold, I know. But what are my options?

And this, somehow, is even worse.

Actually, I see this a lot and it never fails to piss me off.  People who refuse to get their hands dirty and commit a crime, but they’ll be happy to let other people do it.  Or at the least, let it happen to someone else.  Stories where the protagonist will cry “oh no, we can’t harm this innocent person right here!” and because of that a whole army gets wiped out be demons or something.  Or where the protagonist will say “no, we can’t shoot the bad guy!” and then later a tiger eats his face. 

In the end, the goal isn’t to keep people alive or end the conflict or stop the bad guy.  It’s just to keep the protagonist from doing anything morally questionable.  Because they have to fit into certain standards to be considered “good guys,” and those standards fit in a vacuum.  It’s like Spiderman refusing to kill villains, or Batman refusing to use guns, even though if Batman would just fucking shoot the Joker already there’d be a lot fewer dead people in Gotham.   It’s not done for the sake of the citizens, it’s done for the sake of the story and the sake of the character’s ideals/archetype. 

Same thing here.  Katniss doesn’t care about Finnick.  She cares about keeping her own hands unsullied.

And even she fails, because there’s nothing morally different between putting someone on top of a trap door and shoving them off a cliff.  You’re still causing that person to die.

Because this is so repellent to think about, my mind frantically tries to change topics.

Mind you, she only thinks that killing Finnick is “repellent” (and only killing him, not his death) whereas she’s perfectly fine contemplating the deaths of Johanna, Beetee, and Wiress.

Because the only barrier that Katniss has to killing someone is affection.  Well, that and debt.

Wiress nods and scampers over to the water’s edge

God, just stop it, book.

“Oh, she’s more than smart,” says Beetee. “She’s intuitive.” We all turn to look at Beetee, who seems to be coming back to life. “She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines.”

WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK IS THIS SHIT?

NO, REALLY, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

ARE YOU SERIOUS?

YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS.

YOU’VE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME.

BEETEE JUST SAID THAT SHE WAS “MORE” THAN SMART BY COMPARING HER TO A FUCKING ANIMAL.

AN ANIMAL WHOSE ONLY JOB IS TO DIE.

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

“It’s a bird that we take down into the mines to warn us if there’s bad air,” I say.

No, that hasn’t happened in a long, long time.  Now there’s little devices to detect gasses that get trapped in mines.  They work a hell of a lot better than canaries, and they’re not exactly complicated to make.

And if the Capitol can make human/wolf hybrids on a whim, I’m pretty sure they can spring the extra five cents for a CO2 detector.

Of course. Johanna Mason. District 7. Lumber. I bet she’s been tossing around axes since she could toddle.

So, just like we don’t do industrial fishing with tridents, we don’t clear forests with FUCKING AXES, SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK?

I saw an axe throwing demonstration once.  It was fun.  They also demonstrated log cutting.  Know what they used for that?  FUCKING CHAINSAWS.

Know what they use to clear trees on an industrial level?

FUCKING BULLDOZERS.  BECAUSE DUH.

I realize it’s just another disadvantage the District 12 tributes have faced over the years. We don’t go down in the mines until we’re eighteen. It looks like most of the other tributes learn something about their trades early on.

But why?

Telling me this doesn’t actually clear anything up.  There’s no reason for why you’re in school until you’re 18, but Johanna and Beetee aren’t.  Especially Johanna, because I can’t imagine there’s too much good that a small child can do with logging. 

We all nod in agreement, and that’s when I notice it. The silence. Our canary has stopped singing.

So after telling us that Wiress has all the intelligence and humanity and will of a fucking bird, the book decides to go ahead and use her death as a warning device, too.

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

Sacrificed Women: 4

She’s floating on her back, borne up by her belt and death,

Fun fact: dead bodies float thanks to the gasses produced by decomposition.  Until that sets in, they aren’t any more buoyant than live bodies.

“I should have never mentioned the clock,” I say bitterly. “Now they’ve taken that advantage away as well.”

She says this because they spun the center island, and now they don’t know what’s the “top” of the clock. 

However, the advantage isn’t lost.  There’s still a clock, and stuff still happens in one pie wedge a time.  All they have to do is sit and wait for a visible trap to start, and then they’ll know where everything is.  If they don’t want to wait on that center island and get spun around again, fine, but they can still sit on the edge between two wedges, so they can run across the boundary if need be.  These traps tend to announce themselves ahead of time, given how that fog sure moved slow and those monkeys waited almost the whole hour to attack.

But it doesn’t make sense. I’ll have the advantage on Finnick if he’s dealing with the tree and Peeta’s much bigger than Johanna.

Yes, but Johanna has a fucking axe.

But Peeta is heftier, and that’s all that matters.  There’s no way that Johanna, a mere female, can overcome the oh-so-impressive advantage of Peeat’s weight.

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

So I follow Finnick about fifteen yards into the jungle, where he finds a good tree and starts stabbing to make a hole with his knife.

What counts as a good tree?  Can they tell the difference between a tree with interior plumbing and one without?

and then I think of it, what Peeta can do so much better than the rest of us. He can use words. He obliterated the rest of the field at both interviews.

So, Katniss thinks that everyone’s trying to save Peeta because he can talk pretty, and in the same thought recognizes that he’s utterly selfish and cares not for what the rest of the group is trying to do.

After all, the rest of them did a damn fine job of whipping the crowd into a frenzy, and they did it by working together, and they did it while calling for change and justice.  Peeta just stomped on their efforts and said “fuck you guys, pay attention to what I want.”

And maybe it’s because of that underlying goodness that he can move a crowd — no, a country — to his side with the turn of a simple sentence.

Well…that’s creepy.

Considering how much of our own current government and voting process is dependent on speechifying, the fact that she’s trying to convince a generation of young readers that “public speaking talent” = “goodness” is…unsettling, to say the least.

For anyone who was confused, no, those two things are not connected.  Otherwise con men wouldn’t be a thing.

I remember thinking that was the gift the leader of our revolution should have. Has Haymitch convinced the others of this? That Peeta’s tongue would have far greater power against the Capitol than any physical strength the rest of us could claim?

She also said that she’d be better off as a martyr than a living symbol, because then she wouldn’t have to fuck it up by…you know, being her.  So if you go along with the idea that Peeta can give speeches because he’s so good, then this is all quite convincing.

Remember this for the third book when everyone starts insisting that the rebellion would up and die if Katniss does.

I don’t know. It still seems like a really long leap for some of the tributes. I mean, we’re talking about Johanna Mason here.

And what exactly do you know about Johanna Mason that leads you to believe that she wouldn’t go along with a “save Peeta for the sake of saving literally everyone else” plan?

Oh, right, nothing.  Because literally the only thing you know about her is that she doesn’t like you, personally.  The fact that she doesn’t like you is not proof that she’s a horrible, selfish person.

It just means she’s got some proper perspective.