I stop trying to sleep after my first few attempts are interrupted by unspeakable nightmares.

Finally!  Some actual consequences from all those nightmares we keep hearing about!

…which then segues into absolutely no consequences from sleep deprivation.  She summarizes the whole rest of her day, so I guess technically there’s room for her to be sluggish or irritated or spacey or so on and so forth, but we don’t get to see it, so once again, all consequences from trauma are reduced to an easily-ignored, throw-away line that actually present no hardship for the character.

How can people claim that these books portray PTSD when they consistently fail to actually show the hardships caused by PTSD.  We get absolutely no sense of how difficult any of these “symptoms” are because they’re all confined to summaries and off-hand mentions – when the book remembers them at all – and they never impede Katniss in any way.  PTSD is a problem because it disrupts people’s lives, and if you don’t show that disruption, then you’re not showing PTSD.

Do you really know what’s going on? And if you don’t … find out.” Find out. What? From who?

This would be a lot more effective if she’d ever tried to find out anything.  Really, just, anything at all.  Because as it stands she could LITERALLY ASK ANYONE AT ALL and it would be showing more interest than she’s shown for three books now.  Seriously, she could wander the halls and chit-chat with random guards and find out more than she knows now.  She could go do that kitchen duty that napped her way through earlier and chat with the other average people there and see what they’re doing on a daily basis and gather information and see if it lines up with what the higher-ups are talking about.  She could to HER OWN GOD DAMN MOTHER and ask about where the patients in the hospital are coming from and if any of them have information on how the war outside is going.

Playing off like there’s no way she could find out what’s going on, trying to lay the red herring that there’s some sort of cover-up going on, simply doesn’t work when your main character is so disinterested in the world around her that she literally doesn’t care what it would take to win the war or what would happen afterwards.  Instead, she can’t trust anyone to hand the right answer to her on a silver platter, all neatly explained with charts and bullet points and pretty bow, so she just flails around going “oh, but how could I possibly?!?!?!”

But if Plutarch thinks it’s just the Capitol line, why didn’t he tell me about it?

…what?

“He thinks its meaningless rhetoric that would do nothing except upset me while ultimately serving no greater purpose.  So why doesn’t he tell me!?!??!”

Peeta can only guess about the rebel tactics or make up things to tell his torturers. Lies, once discovered, would be severely punished.

There is seriously no reason for anyone to be torturing Peeta except for shits and giggles at this point, and the book knows this.  But it also goes on as if torture-for-information is a valid, natural, logical tactic.

If you want to claim that the capitol is torturing him just because they’re evil and mad about the war and Peeta’s a convenient scapegoat, okay.  I don’t like that excuse, because torture should never be used as a short-hand for evil, but at least it would make some modicum of sense.  This book doesn’t go this route, though.  This book acts like torture is something both logical and inevitable.  This book goes on as if it’s a thing that just happens, regardless of sense or circumstance, it’s just a thing that happens and you can’t get around it, not something that people do for actual reasons. And I find that…deeply disturbing.  

In large part because when things are presented this way, in an assumed-inevitable way, it bypasses the question of why torture happens.  It sneaks that assumption past the reader by saying “why is this happening” instead of “is this happening?”  People (usually) don’t stop to question it, so they join the book in assuming that torture is oh-so-very natural, which basically erases half the of discussion about torture, the perpetrator’s side.  You can’t stop an evil thing that’s going on unless you understand why it’s going on.  Also, if your only understanding of what leads to torture is “because evil,” then it becomes a hell of a lot easier to excuse it in yourself.  “Yes, well, but, I’m not evil.  I have reasons, unlike those other bad guys.”  You’d be surprised at how often torture is just desperate people desperately looking for an answer they think they can only get through pain, and instead of really and honestly examining the morality of such a situation, we divide it into “good guys trying to get the job done” and “bad guys who are just bad.”  This is not the way to handle serious issues!  This is why torture should never be presented as a “just happens” thing!

No one has ever offered me a communicuff. I wonder, if I asked for one, would I get it? “Well, I guess one of us has to be accessible,” I say with an edge to my voice.

Stop being such a brat, Katniss.  You consistently throw away every communication device given to you.  Earlier in this chapter, even, you threw away a walky-talky without a second thought.  It’s even been talked about that this is an issue and Haymich threatened to have something surgically implanted to be sure she couldn’t take it out.  And yet now she’s annoyed that they’re not offering her more stuff to throw away? Why, because she’s “important” and should be given things even if she doesn’t want them?

everyone was afraid that seeing Peeta’s propo would make you sick,” he says.

“They were right. It did. But not quite as sick as you lying to me for Coin.”

“I didn’t want you to be upset, last time you were upset you napped in a closet for a month and had to be bribed out.”  “YOU DID IT FOR THAT COIN BITCH, DIDN’T YOU?  SHE’S SO OUT TO GET ME BY PROTECTING MY MENTAL WELL-BEING.”

You know what?  I take it back.  Katniss’s lack of sleep clearly is affecting her ability to think straight and reasonably.  Too bad no one ever bothers to set her straight and this never results in any actual consequences.

I’m sick of people lying to me for my own good. Because really it’s mostly for their own good. Lie to Katniss about the rebellion so she doesn’t do anything crazy. Send her into the arena without a clue so we can fish her out. Don’t tell her about Peeta’s propo because it might make her sick, and it’s hard enough to get a decent performance out of her as it is.

Well, there is a war going on.  It’s not really for “their” own good so much as it’s for “everyone who is currently embroiled in battle.”  You know, assuming we go along with the idea that Katniss’s costumes are so vitally important.  But if we do, then yeah, no one is actually being selfish here except Katniss, but she can’t conceive of anyone doing things for the war effort and for the people who are dying, so she assumes that it’s all for personal gain, and she’s upset that it’s not for her personal gain.

It’s a shame, because with a slightly better tone, this could be a really compelling piece.  It is good drama to have someone being manipulated in this way for the good of the war effort.  The balance between what she needs and what other people need of her is a legitimate point of tension, and people pushing Katniss farther than she can go would work as a plot point.  But when Katniss refuses to do anything helpful of her own volition, it becomes less of a balancing act and more of a circus act.

Gale didn’t tell them, then. About my pretending not to see Peeta and my anger at their cover-up. But I guess it’s too little, too late

“Gale withheld information from me, and that’s bad.  But he withheld information from other people, and that’s good, just not good enough.  Because actions are good or bad depending on how best they please me.”

“Haymitch? Not able to face something? Wanted a day off, more likely,” I say.

“I think his actual words were ‘I couldn’t face it without a bottle,’ ” says Plutarch.

I roll my eyes, long out of patience with my mentor, his weakness for drink, and what he can or can’t confront.

Yeah, why can’t he be more like Katniss and keep his PTSD neatly contained in his off-hours?

I know he’s thinking about our last meeting here. When we fought over whether or not to run away. If we had, would District 12 still be there? I think it would. But the Capitol would still be in control of Panem as well.

Right, because it’s not like anyone had reason to be rebelling without you around.

I mean, it’s astounding how self-centered she is.  At that point, after the tour, the rebellion was already going on.   When she went back into the arena?  They were already well-organized enough to plan an escape for her.  D13 was already out there fanning the flames and getting ready for open revolt.  Things were already in motion.  And everyone certainly already had motivation for rebelling, what with how they’re all starving to death and overworked.  If she had run away, why on earth does she think the rebellion wouldn’t have happened anyway?

And, as with the torture, this isn’t even a question for the book.  It’s assumed that the rebellion wouldn’t have happened, and other questions are asked based on that assumption.  It’s a common manipulation tactic, a leading question.  It forces the listener to focus on the actual question asked, but considering that question relies on accepting the base assumptions, which is how that shit sneaks past your brain and into your subconscious.  This is how the book sneak-attacks you into thinking Katniss is the center of everything without presenting that statement in a direct way, because if it was directly stated, you’d engage with that on a logical level and realize it’s not (or should not be) true.

The only possible way this could be redeemed is if (because it’s a 1^st person POV) this was all in Katniss’s head, and we’re tricked into thinking like her, only to have the actual world be at odds with such a line of thinking and jar us into realizing the danger of such logic gaps.  (BTW, go read Gated.)  Needless to say, this book doesn’t do that.

Then, to my surprise, Pollux whistles a few notes of his own.

You can’t whistle without a tongue.

My guess is it’s the first conversation he’s had in years.

You know, except for later in the book where he clearly uses sign language and writing to converse with people.  But that’s not sounds so it doesn’t count.  Ableist piece of crap.

He taps me on the arm and uses a twig to write a word in the dirt. SING?

SEE, NOT ONE PARAGRAPH LATER, AND HE’S HAVING A CONVERSATION WITH YOU.

In fact, since he works as part of a team, communication would be quite important, and he’s likely been doing stuff like this all along so he can work with his brother and Cressida.  That’s how teams work.  You have to be able to communicate or else you’re going to bash into each other and get nothing done.  So, in any logical world, he’s been writing and signing all along, and Katniss just never bothered to notice, because she still thinks of him and his brother as “insects.”  She never pays attention to them except to note that they are present and still look like insects. 

That’s weird obviously, the talking-corpse bit, but it’s not until the third verse that “The Hanging Tree” begins to get unnerving.

If you have to spend an entire page giving us the literary-analysis version of the song you wrote, then you’re doing it wrong.  Mostly because THIS IS A BOOK, NOT AN ANALYSIS OF THE BOOK.  You should never have to explain your own symbolism while still writing the story.  Not only is that incredibly self-serving – because you might as well jump up and down while squealing “look what I made!” – but also it’s something that fans should be doing on their own.  And it breaks up the flow of the story and it serves to talk down to your readers.  “No, I’mma let you keep reading in a minute, but first I wanted to explain this to you, in case you didn’t pick up on my genius a moment ago.”

But then you wonder if he meant for her to run to him.

No I didn’t.  Stop trying to tell me what I’m thinking.

I’m on the verge of losing Gale as well. The glue of mutual need that bonded us so tightly together for all those years is melting away.

Which is exactly why relationships forged in the fire of adversity probably aren’t the most lasting ones.  Not a knock against this book (honestly, I think Gale growing away from her is one of the few things done well), but I felt like pointing it out since a lot of stories rely on the “danger made them closer” trope.  It may be true that people grow closer when they’re scared, but after the danger is over, so is the closeness.

MASH did this well when Hawkeye and Margret had to go on a trip together and they got stuck out behind enemy lines.  Margret had just received an emotional blow from her husband and was exceptionally vulnerable, as well as both of them being terrified while hiding from the bad guys, and they end up in a romantic tryst while out.  It’s the culmination of some low-burning sexual tension between them that’s usually played for laughs in the show.  BUT, after they get rescued, that doesn’t last.  They go back to sniping at each other, because the thing pushing them together is gone and all that’s left is their incompatible personalities.  HOWEVER, at the end, Margret writes a very heartfelt letter about how the incident was what she needed at the time, and for that she’s very thankful that it happened.  It didn’t have to be lasting in order to be real and comforting.

Surprisingly, most of this chapter doesn’t bother me, because it’s detailing their trip through the place and the somber moments of recollection that Katniss and Gale both have.  And, on its own, I really kind of like it. It certainly has the right tone.  Although I do wish this had been at the start of the book, instead of Katniss’s mope-fest there, because it’s a severe lull in the flow of the story right now.  (Of course, that would require that Katniss be on board with the whole propaganda thing from the start but…yeah, I’m good with that, too.)

weapons mankind no longer has at its disposal. High-flying planes, military satellites, cell disintegrators, drones, biological weapons with expiration dates. Brought down by the destruction of the atmosphere or lack of resources or moral squeamishness.

….how on earth do you have invisible planes, but not ones that can fly at above 300 feet?  How do you have wolf/man hybrids that can be made on command, but not biological weapons?  How do you have invisible forcefields – three different kinds! – but not any of these other things. 

Drones.  You don’t have drones.  How can you not have drones?  Remote controls should not be outside the abilities of someone who has enclosed arenas with cameras everywhere that were built once every year.

YOU HAD NERVE GAS THAT ONLY LASTED AN HOUR IN THE LAST GAME, HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE “BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS”?  What lack of resources makes you give up drones but not once-a-year arenas that are several square miles large?

who must make do with hovercraft and land-to-land missiles and plain old guns.

Why…just…what?  Did someone point out to the author that her sci-fi war lacked sci-fi weapons, and instead doing research or fixing it, a random line just got inserted?  I mean, high-altitude planes and satellites are things we already have so…did she just want an excuse not to use them?

The rest of the chapter doesn’t particularly bother me.  I kind of like the on-air “battle” and the way Peeta and Snow get all disoriented when their speech is broken up by bits of rebel propaganda.  It’s the first time we’ve seen on-the-offensive propaganda used properly, instead of as masturbatory material.