“I just murdered a member of our squad!” shouts Peeta.

“You pushed him off you. You couldn’t have known he would trigger the net at that exact spot,” says Finnick, trying to calm him.

“Who cares? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Not to sound too calloused here, but…I’m with Peeta on this one.  A person who goes into a violent rage and attacks his own teammates is not someone you want to take along on a dangerous mission.  It doesn’t matter that didn’t mean it, because dead is still dead.  You don’t avoid wild bears because they’re meany-meany fart-faces, you do it because something dangerous is still dangerous regardless of intent.

I’m really sick of books that pull this sort of thing, though.  Where they make a situation like this in which killing someone may actually be the best course of action, because while it sucks, it’ll ultimately save lives?  I see it all the time.  It’s a staple of action movies and fantasy books alike.  And always, always, always the answer is “of course we don’t kill the cute person whose name we know.”  They present it as if that’s the tough decision, to keep that person alive regardless of risks and costs.  But it’s not.  That’s an extremely emotional decision, and it’s the one our human instincts automatically want to follow.  The saying goes “one person is a tragedy, one hundred people are a statistic.”  So actually, saving the person you know at the cost of a dozen people you don’t know is the easy choice, and a pretty selfish and shitty one at that.  I’m sick of it being played off as a tough call.

And it especially bothers me in this series, which kicked off by promising us “tough choices” which “weigh love against life” and such.  No tough choices here, just the standard lovey fantasy tropes!

“I didn’t know. I’ve never seen myself like that before. Katniss is right. I’m the monster. I’m the mutt. I’m the one Snow has turned into a weapon!”

Shit, really, it was that easy?  They could have shown him a tape of him attacking Katniss that first time and avoided all of this.

Did he just black out for that attack and assume she flew off the handle instead?

Frankly, Peeta didn’t act outside the norms in this case.  He fought against people who were trying to restrain him and he didn’t go above and beyond for that goal.  So it comes off as if he didn’t realize that he’d ever displayed aggression, and now that he knows that he…is capable of punching people, suddenly that fixes everything?

I don’t know if it’s the pods, or the fear, or watching Boggs die, but I feel the arena all around me.

It’s the author trying to rehash that one successful idea.

How satisfying, how entertaining it would be for Snow to have me kill him. To have Peeta’s death on my conscience for whatever is left of my life.

Right, because there’s nothing in the world going on right now that might be occupying Snow’s mind more than you.

I mean, it’s not like he’s got an army breathing down his neck at the moment or anything.

Besides the medical kit and cameras, we have nothing but our uniforms and our weapons.

…

…

“We have nothing!  And by nothing I mean ‘all these things here.’”

we find over thirty canned goods and several boxes of cookies.

The hoarding disgusts the soldiers raised in 13. “Isn’t this illegal?” says Leeg 1.

“On the contrary, in the Capitol you’d be considered stupid not to do it,” says Messalla. “Even before the Quarter Quell, people were starting to stock up on scarce supplies.”

“While others went without,” says Leeg 1.

“Right,” says Messalla. “That’s how it works here.”

Just for you lovely readers, I went downstairs and counted all the cans in my cupboard.  If we count ‘boxes’ and ‘bags’ as cans, there were 49.  And that didn’t even touch the fresh stuff in the fridge, drinks, bags of chips, or various baking ingredients in different cupboards.  And that’s after a bad week of snow, so we haven’t been shopping in a while.  30 cans is not an impressive stockpile by any stretch of the imagination. 

Mind you, most of those cans and boxes are things to use in a meal.  Canned veggies, bags of rice, a jar of olives, etc.  So just throwing out “canned goods” isn’t very descriptive, because that could mean 30 cans of lima beans for all we know.  But, if this is a hidden emergency supply, then let’s assume it’s, like, cans of stew or Chef Boyardee, something you can just open and eat.  We do later see one can is chowder and another is “lamb stew.”

So, okay, 30 meals in a can.  Three meals a day.  For one person, that’ll last 10 days.  Most people go grocery shopping for a week or two at a time, so this…really isn’t impressive.  Wow, and average amount of groceries, how shocking.

It would be one thing if it was just the D13 folks appalled at this.  They have issues about distributing supplies in any sort of manner.  But is Messalla going on about how this is some sort of absurd amount of stockpiling?  “While others do without?”  If all the cans in all the houses were collected up and evenly distributed and they come out to less than a week’s worth of food per person, then hoarding isn’t your problem; starving is your problem.

I think [Snow] might have recently had more work done, because his lips are puffier than usual. And his prep team really needs to use a lighter hand with his blush.

If he’s the president of the whole of decedance-dom, then he should have the very finest of plastic surgeons and make-up artists to work on him.

This, basically, is my entire problem with the book’s “message” in a nutshell.  Lots of people go on about how it’s a criticism of “fake” media bullshit, but if that’s what it’s going for, it falls far short.  Because it’s not actually criticizing the intent and the morals behind it.  This book digs deep and all it can come up with is… “You did it wrong, and now it looks weird.”  That’s it.  That’s the sum total of everything “bad” this book says about media.  It’s not that he’s using visual tricks to appear healthy and, therefore, fooled everyone into thinking…I don’t know, that he wasn’t dying of self-inflicted poison, or whatever.  There’s no instance where all this visual trickery works…and is still bad.  It’s like this book wants to criticize these things, but it can’t conceive of the concept being wrong and so this is the only “bad” outcome it can imagine.

And what was I, really? A poor, unstable girl with a small talent with a bow and arrow. Not a great thinker, not the mastermind of the rebellion, merely a face plucked from the rabble because I had caught the nation’s attention with my antics in the Games.

Yup, everything Snow just said is absolutely correct.  Kind of sad when I’m siding with not one but two of the book’s villains.

“Tomorrow morning, when we pull Katniss Everdeen’s body from the ashes

Is there any particular reason you couldn’t search the building now?

Seriously, this is on the Evil Overlord List.  Don’t announce the death of your rival until you have the corpse.  Why does no one read the Evil Overlord List?  (It’s #13!)

Suddenly, I’m so tired. All I want is to lie down on a nearby green plush sofa and go to sleep. […] Instead, I pull out the Holo and insist that Jackson talk me through the most basic commands

I’ll never get sick of pointing this sort of thing out, because I’m that sick of seeing it.

If she’s “suddenly” tired and yet can progress perfectly normally with no ill effects and no change in actions or demeanor, then it has no impact.  All that amounts to is a couple extra sentences that I had to read.  Nothing changed.  There’s no struggle.  There’s nothing to deal with.  It comes out of nowhere and amount to nothing and if it amounts to nothing then it should be cut.

I decide it’s best not to adopt some sort of superior attitude when I’m with these people.

Because you have to actually decide away from acting superior; otherwise it’s her standard operating procedure.

I see that when we go underground the clean, dependable lines of the street plan are interlaced with a twisting, turning mess of tunnels. The pods look less numerous, though.

God, is there any way in which this doesn’t fail?  Why would you put most of your traps on the street, where you citizens are, but leave them out of the clear, straight, uncluttered roadways that are perfect for an invading army? \~/

“We’ll knock you out and drag you with us,” says Homes. “Which will both slow us down and endanger us.”

JUST KILL HIM ALREADY.

Wait.  No.  If this was an actually vital mission, I’d say just kill him, but really what you should be doing is all pack up and go home.  But in a vital mission, yes, leaving him be with a suicide pill is the best option you have.  It’s hard and it sucks, but that why war is so awful.  Because sometimes the difficult, sucky things are necessary.  If the “let people live” choices were always the right choices, then war wouldn’t be hell.

Is it because I care too much about Peeta or too much about letting Snow win? Have I turned him into a piece in my private Games? That’s despicable, but I’m not sure it’s beneath me. If it’s true, it would be kindest to kill Peeta here and now. But for better or worse, I am not motivated by kindness. “We’re wasting time. Are you coming voluntarily or do we knock you out?”

So ultimately Katniss agrees that dragging him along is emotional and selfish, but she does it anyway, because reasons.

That’s the last word we get on this.  She just does it, no further justification, no new thoughts.  That’s it.

In this apartment, one of the bedrooms has a door marked UTILITY instead of a bathroom. […]“It’s why no one ever wants the center unit. Workmen coming and going whenever and no second bath.

No one does this.   You put your utility closet in a hallway or (since there don’t appear to be interior hallways in this building) you make it have an outside door.  This is just plain old poor building design.

Has anyone ever heard of an apartment building that had a utility entrance inside one of the units?

“My brother worked down here after he became an Avox,” says Castor. Of course. Who else would they get to maintain these dank, evil-smelling passages mined with pods?

Professionally trained engineers?

The pods thing isn’t a factor, since there’s even more of them up on the street level.

Most important, he has knowledge of the cameras. There aren’t many down in this gloomy, misty place,

“Hey, I’ve got a great idea!  Let’s take these people who are all traitors already, and who now hate us doubly because we cut out their tongues, and then let’s put them in an area of the city where they’ll have unfettered access to absolutely every building through a complex of tunnels, and then let’s not provide any oversight at all.  I bet this won’t backfire in any way, shape, or form.  Gosh, I’m so smart!” \~/

The memories they altered with the tracker jacker venom have this strange quality about them. Like they’re too intense or the images aren’t stable. You remember what it was like when we were stung?”

“Trees shattered. There were giant colored butterflies. I fell in a pit of orange bubbles.” I think about it. “Shiny orange bubbles.”

“Too intense” is not nearly the same thing as “psychedelic hallucinations.”  Why do you keep confusing that?  Like…this straight-up doesn’t make sense to me.  At all. Where did this even come from?

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” I ask. “If you can separate the two, then you can figure out what’s true.”

“Yes. And if I could grow wings, I could fly. Only people can’t grow wings,” he says.

…way to completely ignore the statement, Peeta.

What does this even mean?  That she’s right and he’s just disoriented enough to answer in sequiturs?  Is there some actual counter to that idea that we don’t know about and Peeta just skipped over it?