“Katniss?” Prim whispers. She’s awake, peering at me through the darkness. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep.” It’s automatic. Shutting Prim and my mother out of things to shield them.

Okay, but why?  We actually have very little evidence that they wouldn’t be able to handle anything.  In part because the book has zero fucks to give about these characters as anything more than set props for Katniss.  Her mother had a breakdown, yes, but she also pulled herself out of it, which speaks volumes.  And she’s got a much different support system now, so she’d likely be able to handle stress a lot better, and every time we see her she’s perfectly competent.

Now, one could argue quite reasonably that this is just Katniss’s perspective.  Her mom checked out once, so she doesn’t put any stress on her anymore, despite any evidence that she’s changed.  Prim she still sees as a little kid, even though she’s old enough to start hearing a few things now.  So yes, Katniss could still be hesitant because of how she personally sees things, not because of these things being objectively true.  But in that case, the book takes the least interesting option by never changing Katniss’s opinion.  She remains stubbornly believing this, with no consequence, when something like this in a better book would be considered a character arc.

I’m not going to list examples, because there’s too many, but in MASH every time someone thought it was a better idea to keep secrets from their friends, they were wrong.  Because they were wrong.

Okay, except that one infidelity case, and I’m still not sure how I feel about that one…

She’s really gone, then. The little girl with the back of her shirt sticking out like a duck tail, the one who needed help reaching the dishes, and who begged to see the frosted cakes in the bakery window. Time and tragedy have forced her to grow too quickly, at least for my taste, into a young woman who stitches bleeding wounds and knows our mother can hear only so much.

Um…what?  All Prim said was that she’d keep a secret from their mom, which is actually quite in line with a normal 13 year-old.  And the rest seems like a normal bit of growing up, or in the case of the dishes, growing taller.  Katniss can be upset by this (I still hate that my baby brother is taller than me) but that doesn’t mean it’s some angsty part of war.  And Prim certainly isn’t “gone,” unless you think that a person’s personality in childhood is somehow immutable.

“Tomorrow morning, I’m going to agree to be the Mockingjay,” I tell her.

“Because you want to or because you feel forced into it?” she asks.

…has this author ever been around a 13 year-old?  Because that’s a little too astute.

Prim thinks this over. “Katniss, I don’t think you understand how important you are to the cause. Important people usually get what they want. If you want to keep Peeta safe from the rebels, you can.”

The sad thing is, I think the book is taking this seriously.  Like, this is the actual moral standpoint that the book holds, the belief that is the basis for everything that follows.  Keep this in mind as we continue reading.

It’s not a matter of what’s right, what’s just, what’s fair, what’s moral, or even what’s practical.  No, everything in this book comes from a standpoint of “certain people are important, and therefore they should have things.  If they don’t have the things they want, that’s wrong.”

“I think you could demand almost anything and they’d have to agree to it.” Prim wrinkles her brow. “Only how do you know they’ll keep their word?”

Prim is sounding quite manipulative here.  And ungodly creepy, what the hell?  I think it’s the brow wrinkle that makes it sound so calculated.

This whole scene has Prim acting, not as a character with her own thoughts, needs, and concerns, but as a catalyst for Katniss.  She’s not voicing anything personal; she’s only saying the exact right thing to push Katniss to her next thought, and nothing more.  The book doesn’t care enough to give her any concerns of her own.  She’s not “important” enough to talk about her own thoughts or feelings.  She’s just a reflection of Katniss.  But because of that, she winds up sounding manipulative, because her comments are so tailored to pushing Katniss into a particular action. 

shovel my food down, wishing for seconds, but there are never seconds here.

Apparently a single year of being rich was enough to make her forget that she’s spent most of her life not getting seconds.

They have nutrition down to a science. You leave with enough calories to take you to the next meal, no more, no less.

…that’s a very bad idea, because if you have just enough to get you to the next meal and you miss a meal…well, then you’re out of calories, and you can’t work.  Also, you’ll be too hungry all the time to do anything.  Presumably, this line is hyperbole and she just means that their meals are tailored to their needs without meaning that they’re being fed the minimal amount possible. But Katniss’s lines are usually only wrong in our speculation, not in the actual story, so it’s impossible to tell if this is meant to be taken seriously or not.  If she is an unreliable narrator, it’s not done to any point or purpose, not even to showcase her personality or bias, because we never get to see her be wrong.  We’re not even sure if she is!

The people from 12 are already getting slightly larger portions than the natives of 13 in an effort to bring us up to weight. I guess bony soldiers tire too quickly. 

See?  She says this completely without irony!  She goes from saying that they’re given barely enough to survive to saying that they’re actually being fattened up without even blinking, and the only thing we learn about Katniss through this process is that she’s a clueless, self-centered moron.  Which we already knew, because we’ve read the first two books.

If that was the intent, then bravo, book.  You have succeeded in creating an unreliable narrator that can’t string together two consecutive sentences into a logical thought.

They have very strict rules about food. For instance, if you don’t finish something and want to save it for later, you can’t take it from the dining hall. Apparently, in the early days, there was some incident of food hoarding.

Yes, that is indeed a huge problem.  Not only will you get pests that way, but people will be completely unreasonable when it comes to food.  You can get people starving themselves in order to create a backup supply, which defeats the whole purpose of rationing out the food to begin with.

For a couple of people like Gale and me, who’ve been in charge of our families’ food supply for years, it doesn’t sit well.

Pull up your big girl britches and deal with it.

In some ways, District 13 is even more controlling than the Capitol.

Drink! \~/ 

Damn, Katniss, you’d complain about the sky being too blue in heaven, wouldn’t you?  She’s honestly, actually saying that it’s “more controlling” to serve people three square meals a day than it is to whip them for killing a turkey and working them into the ground.  Nothing is ever good enough for Katniss.  She’ll whine no matter what’s going on.  If the capitol is around, they’re the meanest ever.  If D 13 is around, they’re the meanest ever.  She has no sense of scale, no sense that she’s judging things relative to what’s come before or what it could be.  She’s annoyed, therefore this is the worst thing ever.

“No, that we can hunt.” That gets his attention. “We’d have to give everything to the kitchen.

First Katniss says it’s a terrible thing that they can’t control their food, then she says she’d be okay giving over all of her hard-earned meat to the kitchen staff.  She can’t even tell what her problem is.

The list. It still seems too small. I should try to think bigger

…I…just…

I can’t.

I just can’t.

Drink.  Then drink again.  It’s the only way to deal with the unabashed selfishness of this entire fiasco. \~/ \~/

I can’t believe she’s being upheld as a role model.  This.  This is being pushed on young girls as model behavior.  “If you see that you can help people – people who are dying and will continue to die – make sure you squeeze every last bit of payment out of them.  If your demands seem too small, just make shit up, because you’ve got a chance to have STUFF!”  It was present in earlier books, what with all the claims that every favor had to be repaid and people only help people if there’s some personal gain in it, but not we’ve catapulted over the line and have lit up that message like a neon sign.  How, how, how did this get a free pass?

“Gale. I’ll need him with me to do this.”

“With you how? Off camera? By your side at all times? Do you want him presented as your new lover?” Coin asks.

She hasn’t said this with any particular malice — quite the contrary, her words are very matter-of-fact. But my mouth still drops open in shock. “What?”

…what do you mean, what?  What were you expecting?  Her question is perfectly reasonable.

I mean, Katniss set herself up for that, but…very obviously set herself up for that.  The whole “I need Gale” thing was pretty vague from the start, especially given that she’s not being kept from him in any way, and then her shock here makes it obvious that the book just wanted to work in a line bit about more for-camera relationships and had Katniss set it up, so that she could then be surprised by it.

Also, two more drinks! \~/ \~/ One for D13 = capitol, one for propaganda masturbation.

“When the war is over, if we’ve won, Peeta will be pardoned.”

Pardoned from what?  He’s a prisoner, and no one has said that he’ll be punished, so where did she get this notion that he needs to be pardoned?  He hasn’t done anything.  Calling for cease-fire may be enough to make people irked at him, but it’s not criminal by a long shot.

“The same goes for the other captured tributes, Johanna and Enobaria.”

AND JOHANNA IS ONE OF THE REBELS, SHE’S FUCKING WORKING WITH THEM, WHY THE FUCK WOULD SHE NEED TO BE PARDONED?

“It’s not their fault you abandoned them in the arena. Who knows what the Capitol’s doing to them?”

“They’ll be tried with other war criminals and treated as the tribunal sees fit,” she says.

See?  Katniss comes up with bullshit craziness like this, and then she’s proven right!  I have no choice but to react to every flippant remark she makes as if she’s serious, because the book is such a hot mess that I can’t tell what’s flippant and what’s just an utter failure on the book’s part.

First, I still can’t tell how Katniss thought there was any need for a pardon, but apparently the book thinks it’s just so obvious that this would happen.  So…why are the victors being considered “war criminals”?  What crime have they committed?  What have they done?  They’re literally being held against their will and shoved in a cell somewhere WHAT PART OF THAT SCENARIO NEEDS A PARDON?

You will hold yourself and your government responsible for their safety, or you’ll find yourself another Mockingjay!”

My words hang in the air for a long moment.

“That’s her!” I hear Fulvia hiss to Plutarch. “Right there. With the costume, gunfire in the background, just a hint of smoke.”

Yup, that’s exactly what this war effort needs, a teenager throwing a hissy fit because her demands aren’t being met!  Truly, we are experts at this!

One drink for each of Katniss’s demands: \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/

“We didn’t think it would be quite so rigid here,” Fulvia explains to us as she massages Plutarch’s shoulders. “Not in the higher ranks.”

Katniss’s ‘the important people get stuff because important’ attitude is basically the same as that of the bad guys.

Think about that, book.  Your main character shares her moral compass with your main bad guy, and she never gets corrected.

I turn the pages slowly, seeing each detail of the uniform. The carefully tailored layers of body armor, the hidden weapons in the boots and belt, the special reinforcements over my heart.

Hm, let’s include this in the propaganda circle jerk. \~/

“Our plan is to launch an Airtime Assault,” says Plutarch. “To make a series of what we call propos — which is short for ‘propaganda spots’ — featuring you, and broadcast them to the entire population of Panem.”

Just…just…fuck it, just finish your whole glass. |~|

It’s acceptable for them to be focused on propaganda, of course.  They’re the Propaganda People; this is their job.  They’re not in charge of the whole war, just this part of it, so of course they’re going to be talking about it like it’s their only focus.  It is their only focus.  But they’re just so…bad at it.  I mean, this isn’t even propaganda.  This is just everyone sitting around getting giddy over a pretty thing they made: the Mockingjay.  There’s no mention of trying to convince anyone of anything, or of trying to time things to match what’s going on in battle plans, or of working in a message, or of trying to coordinate with other propaganda campaigns going on.  Nothing.  They are literally planning to just film Katniss looking awesome and then… ???  Sit around and enjoy the pretty and pretend like it’s helpful?

Wartime propaganda takes more effort than this, people!

M*A*S*H had a character called “Seoul City Sue,” which was based on a radio personality of the same moniker that operated during the Korean War.  In the show, Sue would host a radio show of American music for the GIs to listen to, only her DJ stuff would be propaganda bites telling the soldiers that their war was pointless, their wives back home were cheating on them, and they should all give up and leave.  Now, not the most subtle stuff, but it was pervasive in a way that would grind down on people.  It was needling them, coming at them when they were relaxed from listening to music, and it was relentless in sniping at them.  And it that was just a minor point among many.

On the American side, people would come in to try and film propaganda stuff at the 4077 numerous times, which annoyed the doctors there to no end.  One such instance had someone coming in to film a documentary and tried to make everything overly-patriotic, since it was a pro-war piece, and eventually that guy got run out while Hawkeye and the crew filmed a Three-Stooges-Style farce of the planned documentary, ending on a serious note about how war is hell.  (Season 1, Episode 6 “Yankee Doodle Doctor”)

I’m just baffled by how little this book seems to know what it’s doing.  PSYOPS is not exactly a hard thing to research.   And there’s so much that these people could be doing besides worrying about Katniss’s outfits.  Go and film medics taking care of wounded district children and pass that footage around.  That would be propaganda AND have the added benefit of actually helping people. 

The door — in fact, all the doors — seem incomplete. No knobs. They must swing free on hinges like the one the guard appeared through.

And as we find out, this is the prisoner floor.  …damn, D13 really doesn’t know how to handle prisoners, do they?

and shackled to the wall.

Apparently they don’t need doors because everyone is being chained up, but damn that is some stupid shit.  Not only do chains like that cut into a person’s skin, but keeping people immobile, especially with arms raised, does some serious damage to nerves, muscles, and joints.  There’s a risk of cutting off circulation, which can be fatal.

Basically, there’s no point to doing this unless you don’t care what condition the person is in afterwards, and what with D13 being so uber-frugal, why waste food and guards on prisoners you’re not even taking care of?

Episode of MASH you should watch instead: To Market, To Market