The stink of unwashed bodies, stale urine, and infection breaks through the cloud of antiseptic

…what kind of antiseptic are you guys using?  You’ve got to pretty much be choking on the stuff to get it to cover up urine.

And infection?  Do you know how bad something has to be before you can smell it over urine?  (Seriously, urine is a strong smell, and apparently the antiseptic is even stronger until you get right on it, so for puss and rot to be smellable above that, it’s got to be strong.)  Basically, we’re talking rotting flesh.

And that “unwashed bodies and urine” thing is no small matter, either.  Remember, they’re chained to a wall.  If they don’t all have UTIs right now, then shut the fuck up, they’ve all got UTIs right now, that is literally your only option when you sit in your own piss for days on end.  Left untreated, that shit will spread to your kidneys and cause severe pain, fever, and then death.  Although it’s a tossup if that infection, or the sepsis from the rotting flesh on their wrists will kill them first.

Guys, chaining someone up is no small thing.  It’s not a reasonable method of confinement.  It’s a form of torture.  It was developed as a form of torture.  The only reason it exists is to torture people.  If you ever write someone chained up and don’t intend for that to be torturously painful and potentially deadly, then slap yourself and stop that.  (Unless you’re doing a kinky story, in which case, look up how to be careful.  Use properly fitted manacles, have both parties be extra vigilant, and don’t let it go on for more than a few hours.  Take breaks and check extremities often to be sure that poor circulation isn’t turning into a problem.)

In short, there is exactly zero reason for D13 to be doing this.  It’s not even practical.  If you intend for people to survive this, then you have to waste medical resources fixing them up after.  If you intend for people to die from this, just kill them, this is wasting everyone’s time.

“Who took you?” I press her.

“People,” she says vaguely. “The night you broke out.”

“We thought it might be comforting for you to have your regular team,” Plutarch says behind me. “Cinna requested it.”

[…]Cinna would never have approved the abuse of these three, who he managed with gentleness and patience.

The team continues to be treated as subhuman, not only by Katniss but by everyone.  What, Cinna couldn’t ask them if they wanted to do this?  No one bothered to walk up and say “hey, wanna come help Katniss?” instead of just straight-up kidnapping them?

These people, these human beings, are being treated as objects that have been acquired for the sake of Katniss’s comfort. They were snatched out of their homes without any regard to family, friends, or responsibilities they might have (do they have family?  We’ll never know!  No one bothers to ask, because they’re not “important” people) and brought to D13 like pilfered goods.

“For stealing food. We had to restrain them after an altercation over some bread,”

GOOD FUCKING GOD, MAN, YOU HAVE DOORS, JUST PUT SOME DUCKING DOORKNOBS AND LOCKS ON THEM IF YOU WANT TO RESTRAIN PEOPLE, THERE IS LITERALLY NO POINT TO THESE CHAINS I HATE THIS BOOK.

Torture is not something to be tossed into your book lightly.  I shouldn’t have to say this, because of course people are cruel and vindictive and bad shit will happen even if it’s not necessarily efficient.  Until very recently, if pointless torture was in a book, it wouldn’t bother me.  But in the past…oh, since this book came out (natch) dystopians have gotten WAAAAAAAY too casual about torture.  I am floored by how casually books will throw out pointless, self-destructive cases of torture as if it’s just an as-you-do sort of thing.  And it’s got to stop, because it greatly devalues how devastating torture can be to all parties.  Seriously.  Most people don’t want to torture other people.  It’s not in our nature.  The same way we don’t want to kill people.  Almost anyone can be pushed to it, given the right circumstances.  Inhumane treatment can be brought about by circumstances or even accidently, that’s a thing.  But the way books these days will toss torture out there like “oh, those people are bad.  …um, you know, just have them nearly kill prisoners for no reason.  Or something” really takes away from the horror of the situation.  It turns it into cartoon mustache twirling, instead of something gritty and destructive. 

There is…I’m trying to think of something that is less weird for an example, and I can’t, which kind of scares me.  But bear with my NSFW analogy here.  When stuff like this comes up with evil characters/groups…I think of porn comics.  (I guess there’s genres of fanfiction or erotica like this, too, but I enjoy porn comics, so sue me.)  There’s a certain brand of porn, especially kinky porn, where the entire setting is a fantasy constructed specifically to make the premise work.  Women are kept as sex slaves and literally everyone is a kinky owner, and no one has a problem with this, and everyone is like “yes, I will totally have sex 24/7 with my slave in the showiest way possible.”  There’s no consideration given to the fact that most of the population wouldn’t be okay with this, or that they at least wouldn’t be kinky, or that they at least would not be marathoning sex every single day.  But it’s on purpose: it’s a ridiculous scenario specifically crafted for the sake of having kinky porn.

When I see torture used as it is in Mockingjay and similar books, that’s what I think of.  It’s a ridiculous situation that gives no thought to the fact that most people aren’t cackling-levels of evil sociopath, all specifically crafted to create a fantasy that props up the shock value and showmanship.  Except instead of getting off on that fantasy, we’re supposed to take it seriously.

And that’s on top of most of these cases making no fucking sense whatsoever.  YOU HAVE A DOOR RIGHT THERE, JUST FUCKING LOCK IT, HOW HARD IS THAT?

Venia’s brows come together as if she’s still trying to make sense of it. “No one would tell us anything. We were so hungry. It was just one slice she took.”

So D12 gets the rules explained to them, but not these guys?

“This seems extreme,” says Plutarch.

“It’s because they took a slice of bread?” asks Gale.

No, it seems fucking ridiculous and completely inhumane.  Calling it “extreme” means you believe that it’s okay to chain people to a wall as punishment, just maybe not for this particular crime.  There is no crime where letting people die chained to a wall is acceptable.

I might – might – be able to overlook Plutarch saying that.  He is a gamemaker, after all; he’s not supposed to have well-aligned morals.  But Gale is one of the book’s moral examples; he should speak up.

And I know it’s not a result of seeing abused bodies, because they were her daily fare in District 12, but the realization that this sort of thing goes on in 13 as well.

Drink! \~/  I know the book wants to show D13 as being the same as the capitol, but it doesn’t make sense.  The capitol’s defining trait is that they’re power-hungry, selfish, and decadent.  They’re standing on the backs of the people in order to have more than they need.  That’s why they can afford to waste human life left and right; it doesn’t make an impact on them.  D13, on the other hand, almost went extinct from low population numbers several times.  They should have a different attitude about capital punishment.

My mother was welcomed into the hospital, but she’s viewed as more of a nurse than a doctor, despite her lifetime of healing.

…she is a nurse. 

No, really, she doesn’t have advanced training and her best asset is her ability to stay calm while saying there’s nothing she can do.  She treated whip lashes with snow.  She’s not even a nurse, she’s an herbalist.  She’s not even got intermediate training!

You’ve been shitting on her healing abilities for two books now; don’t turn around and act like D13 is a bunch of dicks for not letting her perform open-heart surgery.

If they had no knowledge of the mistreatment, then what do they make of this move on President Coin’s part?

Wait, what?

…just, what?

When we saw the guard, he made it very clear that this is standard treatment.  He was honest-to-god confuses at the idea of not chaining people up for stealing food.  From all appearances, this is what happens in D13 for minor infractions, as weird as that is.  In any sane universe, Coin did not do this.  She probably didn’t have any notion it happened, because she’s too busy running a war to bother with singling out random people and punishing them just to spite someone else. 

“Punishing my prep team’s a warning,” I tell her. “Not just to me. But to you, too. About who’s really in control and what happens if she’s not obeyed. If you had any delusions about having power, I’d let them go now. Apparently, a Capitol pedigree is no protection here. Maybe it’s even a liability.”

Katniss, what are you even doing?

I want to say “fuck off, not everything revolves around you,” but who are we kidding?  Yes it does.  Everything revolves around her, nothing happens unless it’s directed at her, and no one has a life unless it somehow comes back around and relates to her.  I’m sure Prim just shuts down and stares at a wall when Katniss isn’t around, and the prep team power off like robots in stand-by mode, because literally nothing in this book happens without being related to Katniss.

But let’s just be annoyed by that and move on.  What is Katniss doing here?  Why is she intentionally sowing discord among these people in the middle of a fucking revolution?  Is she trying to undermine all their efforts?

“Of course you are. The tributes were necessary to the Games, too. Until they weren’t,” I say. “And then we were very disposable — right, Plutarch?”

That…doesn’t even make sense.  You were killed when you stopped being useful; your death was the useful thing.

“They’ll be all right,” she reports. “No permanent physical injuries.”

“Good. Splendid,” says Plutarch. “How soon can they be put to work?”

“Probably tomorrow,” she answers.

Option one: they were only chained for a short while and this book doesn’t understand what “the smell of infection” implies.

Option two: they were chained for a long time and this book doesn’t understand how much damage that it actually described.

Option three: magic science can fix anything in less than a day.

I remember that training equals hunting now.

Then why don’t your schedules just say ‘hunting’?

We would be hard-pressed to get past this fence on our own — thirty feet high and always buzzing with electricity, topped with razor-sharp curls of steel.

Drink! \~/  Yes, D13 has big giant fences just like the capital, omg you guys, I wonder if they’re the same?

But why do they have a giant fence?  No one would leave, because the whole point is that they’re a cohesive people and also they’re actually giving people enough to survive, so there’d be no reason to leave.  There’s no point in keeping people out, because the only people that come around are refugees anyway.  So what’s the fence for?

And why is D13 underground?  The capital knows they’re there.  It was agreed upon and everything.  They don’t need to hide and pretend like they don’t exist.  They don’t even need to preserve the ruins, because the capital isn’t using them for pictures.  Unless D13 is pretending to have died off, there’s no reason why they couldn’t have at least a little bit of building aboveground.

We take off our shoes. Mine don’t fit right anyway, since in the spirit of waste-not-want-not that rules 13, I was issued a pair someone had outgrown.

…unlike before, when you were poor and starving but always had new shoes?

When Gale offers to clean the game, I don’t object.

I see you two have learned nothing.

“It’s more complicated than that. I know them. They’re not evil or cruel. They’re not even smart. Hurting them, it’s like hurting children. They don’t see

This could have been some interesting commentary, because people really do have a problem with stuff like this.  We’re always more likely to forgive the people we know personally, to think that “oh, but they’re a good person underneath” is an excuse, and we have trouble reconciling the people we know with bad actions, even though, objectively, most of us know that it’s possible to be a racist and also like puppies.  We resist accepting bad things about our friends, and we resist learning humanizing details about our enemies, and it actually causes a lot of problems.

But this book doesn’t take that sort of tract.  Instead…it’s honestly trying to forgive the capital people because they “don’t know any better.”  Katniss struggles for a moment over the fact that she likes them, but the struggle is just to accept that fact, because the final result is just “but I do like them!”

I should hate them and want to see them strung up. But they’re so clueless, and they belonged to Cinna, and he was on my side, right?

And in the end, the biggest reason we have for forgiving them is that they’re stupid and subhuman.  Yet we still don’t have any indication that they actually are stupid.

The message here is so…simultaneously bland and confusing.  We shouldn’t blame people who are willfully ignorant, because it’s not like they could possibly know that killing kids is bad?  And also Katniss likes the?

“But I don’t think Coin was sending you some big message by punishing them for breaking the rules here.

Thank you, Gale.

She probably thought you’d see it as a favor.

Fuck this book.

“During the Quarter Quell, Octavia and Flavius had to quit because they couldn’t stop crying over me going back in. And Venia could barely say good-bye.”

In a better book, the point here would be that crying is all they did.

We hand the meat over to Greasy Sae in the kitchen. She likes District 13 well enough, even though she thinks the cooks are somewhat lacking in imagination. But a woman who came up with a palatable wild dog and rhubarb stew is bound to feel as if her hands are tied here.

…why?  You think D13 isn’t sick of bland food, too?  She can make tastiness out of leftovers; that seems like a prime skill in this place.

“Oh. Good. Because I worry about that with Annie. That she’ll say something that could be construed as traitorous without knowing it

The really creepy thing here?  That everyone just goes along with it.  The book itself goes along with this.  You know what’s glaringly, distressingly missing from this entire toxic subplot?  Anyone – anyone – saying “hey, maybe we should be the kind of culture that doesn’t murder people for saying something slightly off.”  That thought is nowhere to be found anywhere in this book.  None of the “moral” characters have any problem with this sort of punishment being meted out, they just don’t want it to happen to their friends.  They don’t think it’s wrong for this to happen, they just think they should have special exceptions.

That’s fucking creepy on multiple levels.

“Oh, the mad girl. That’s not really necessary,” she says. “We don’t make a habit of punishing anyone that frail.”

If you only punish people who are able to shake it off, then what’s the point of doing it at all?

AND WHY WILL NO ONE VOICE ANY OBJECTION TO THIS CONCEPT IN GENERAL?

The more I think about it, the worse it gets.  No one in this book, nor the book itself, has any concept of what justice is actually for.  Notice: it’s always termed as “punishment.”  Everything is personal.  You pissed off the leaders, so they’re going to hurt you, presumably purely out of spite.  There’s no sense that anything is happening to preserve social order, to uphold a sense of justice or right, to enforce a moral code, it’s not even to prevent future rule-breaking.  No, this is an entirely personal system, and the book doesn’t condemn that, because the book runs on the same logic.

I hear the dissent. I suppose no one doubted I would want to be the Mockingjay. So naming a price — one that spares possible enemies — angers them.

“For some reason, people are actually mad that they’re bleeding and dying for this cause, but I’ll only join in if I get paid.  God, you’d think they were fighting for survival or something, what a bunch of weirdos.”

“But in return for this unprecedented request, Soldier Everdeen has promised to devote herself to our cause. It follows that any deviance from her mission, in either motive or deed, will be viewed as a break in this agreement. The immunity would be terminated and the fate of the four victors determined by the law of District Thirteen. As would her own. Thank you.”

Frankly, I’m on Coin’s side, here.  If we go with the idea that pardons are a bad thing, then yeah, you’ve got to do damage control.  Personally, I prefer the idea that Coin is just fucking with Katniss.  Notice, she doesn’t say that they’ll all be thrown into torture chambers, just that they’ll be judged.  Maybe she’s saying that, on account of there not being any war crimes involved, they’ll be judged innocent.  Fuck it, if some shitty little brat came up to me and demanded payment for the oh-so-difficult task of putting on a costume, I’d want to troll her, too.

In other words, I step out of line and we’re all dead.

The hands-down weirdest part of all of this is Katniss’s assumption that everyone’s guilty.  Coin is saying they’ll be judged, which could mean anything.  Katniss is saying “oh, shit, we’re going to be in trouble for that…thing…something…that we apparently all did.”

Not any MASH comparisons today, because MASH was too smart to get anywhere even near this here clusterfuck.

Episode of MASH you should be watching: Rally Round the Flagg Boys.  Because, let’s face it, Katniss’s attempts to turn the rebellion on itself is something Col. Flagg would do.