Last time our narrator Katniss Everdeen and a dude named Peeta Mellark were selected as the “tributes” from their home district for that national Hunger Games tournament. “Tribute” is intended to have all those sacrificial connotations, by the way; the government of Panem essentially demands that two kids from every town get killed once a year. Which seems unreasonable, right? I mean one kid, sure. But two? You're getting greedy, Panem.
Then again, Panem doesn't seem to be fighting any wars right now and how many kids from our nation's cities die every year in Iraq and Afghanistan? Where's the real dystopia? Whoa, did I just blow your mind?
Chapter 3
After a song and the reading of a few more oaths or whatever (you know how these ceremonies do) Katniss and Peeta are spirited from the stage and Katniss is held in a room where loved ones come to say goodbye. Peeta may be in the same situation or he may be Effie Trinket's sex slave now—who's to say? Mrs. Everdeen and Prim show up and Katniss urgently feeds them instructions as to how they'll get by without her. It reads at first like “this is how you'll get by while I'm away” but slowly it dawns on us that Katniss is planning on being dead soon. She tells us that kids from other, wealthier districts train their whole lives for the games—they're all 'roided out and have bachelor's degrees in knife play or whatever. So even though living in The Seam probably sucks, there's an admirable purity to the place (a point reinforced by some of Katniss's visitors in this chapter). Being poor keeps them from plotting how to make themselves extra-deadly and evil. Which is a pretty much an essential truth about socioeconomic brackets—inner city neighborhoods might be violent but the kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods go on to wreak more havoc. I'm just dropping truth bombs left and right today!
(In college I took a poetry workshop in which I wrote a poem called “Preamble.” It was a pretty corny but totally earnest plea for the working man, and my professor fucking hated it. She actually stood up on her desk like it was a soapbox and yelled “Rich people are bad! Poor people are good!” to make fun of me in front of my mortified classmates.)
Katniss has a cathartic moment where she screams at her mother that she can't “leave” again, can't mentally check out and leave Prim to die. Her mother's odd excuse is that she didn't have the right medicines to fix herself then, and she does now. That's totally not reassuring at all, but they leave and Mr. Mellark, Peeta's dad, comes in next. Katniss is kind of like “Did you get the wrong room?” because she only sort of knows him, but he hands her a package of cookies and tells her he will look after Prim and then they sit in comforting silence for a few moments. Katniss is happy to realize that though people “deal with” her, they really love and will protect Prim.
OK but our girl is being pretty hard on herself, right? She's acting like she's an unpopular citizen ten minutes after everybody stood silently and made a wordless gesture of thanks and appreciation at her. I mean I think people like me, and no one has ever given ME a wordless gesture of thanks and appreciation, you know? But her feeling totally syncs up with the idea we have of Katniss as a person: she's tough and rational but only because she's deliberately sublimated her human side. She wasn't born a hardass, it doesn't fit naturally, but she's making it work. And being a beloved member of the community doesn't really jive with her realpolitik views, so she doesn't see it.
Her next visitor is Madge, and OK, I can't shake the image of the warehouse worker from The Office but this Madge is the Mayor's daughter and I'm assuming she doesn't look like Madge from The Office. She begs Katniss to wear her gold pin, which is of a bird and oh, it's on the cover of the book, so I'm sure that pin won't be important or anything later. Moving on! Gale turns up next and in case you forgot that there is nothing romantic between them Katniss reminds us in literally the first sentence of his section:
Finally, Gale is here and maybe there is nothing romantic between us, but when he opens his arms I don't hesitate to go into them.
So is this happening because Katniss is in denial about her feelings for Gale too? What I'm hoping is that ISN'T the case and rather Suzanne Collins is doing this to push back against the potential Twilight-ification of her work. (“This isn't romance, it's hard sci-fi!”-Roman Collins) To further underscore that this (maybe) ain't your daddy's YA (huh?) Katniss and Gale talk strategy while mentioning the environs of Hunger Games past. I guess every time they switch it up, like levels in Mortal Kombat. Gale insists that she'll be able to make a bow because firewood has been available in the arena since a botched year in which contestants were dropped into an arctic landscape and just fucking froze to death.
You could hardly see them [at night] because they were just huddled in balls and had no wood for fires.
It's funny in a kind of bleak way, everybody being disappointed that they can't see a bunch of kids dying, talking shit about the Hunger Games on Twitter like it's an award show. “Hey do you guys remember the year that Soy Bomb guy jumped into the Hunger Games?” It's also kind of funny to imagine a bunch of government employees prepping the battlefield each year. “Hey Tom, should we put some spikes on this rock?” “Shit yeah, hey what if we dig a moat?” Anyway Gale's visiting time is up and he gets dragged from the room mid-sentence: “Katniss, remember I—” Remember I what? Remember I love you? Remember I have no romantic feelings for you? Which is it?!
Peeta and Katniss are ushered to a train, past hordes of paparazzi yelling “Katniss! Look this way honey! Can we see the back of the dress Katniss? Can we get Katnis for In-Style?” Our narrator observes that Peeta has been crying and wonders if he's doing some kind of reverse-psychology strategy for the fight, trying to look weak on purpose. I'm thinking it's more like he really WAS Effie Trinket's sex slave for a few hours back there (“It's tradition,” she'd whisper in his ear). But seriously what's with Katniss always assuming everything is a battle strategy? Pretty soon they end up on a train eating dinner and I half expected her to be like, “I notice Peeta is just pushing his peas around on the plate. Could he be making a map?”
Katniss is taken to a private car where she showers and puts on new clothes. She remembers Madge's pin and looks at it, recognizing the bird as a mockingjay. What's a mockingjay, you say? Katniss gives us a little history: During the rebellion, Panem bred birds called jabberjays, which could hear and repeat back whole conversations. When the rebels figured it out, they fed the birds false information. So the government gave up on the plan and released the birds into the wild where they fucked a bunch of mockingbirds and lo, a new type of bird that couldn't replicate speech but COULD replicate music and melody was born. Katniss's father was very fond of them and liked to sing to them, and having the pin on feels like “having a piece of” her father with her. Jeez Katniss the man was blown to bits in an explosion, try to be a little more sensitive!
At dinner Effie Trinket compliments Peeta and Katniss on their table manners, which prompts Katniss to immediately abandon her table manners; I like this girl. Then they watch video of Reapings across the country. Katniss is disturbed by the selection of a girl who reminds her of Prim. So she'll probably die, right? As our heroes laugh at Haymitch's drunken antics earlier in the day, Effie Trinket notes that he is essentially their coach in the Games, which is something we haven't heard before. Her fleeting mentions of sponsorship and the “presentation of any gifts” are intriguing—there is more to this than just dropping some kids in a place and saying “fight!” I guess—but then fucking Haymitch shows up again and vomits all over the floor and the chapter ends. If this is her idea of comic relief, Suzanne Collins needs to reconsider the need for comic relief. Whoa, as I wrote that my cat just threw up.
Stray notes & Questions
- Contrast Katniss, just forty fucking pages in, with Bella Swan after thousands of pages. I have an incomplete but vivid sense of Katniss as a person that doesn't feel constructed in a cheap, contrived way. It's kind of amazing. I used to defend Bella Swan/Cullen against accusations of being an ill-defined cipher, but that was before Breaking Dawn (though the problems start in Eclipse) when all sense of her faded away in the service of relentless, meaningless plot machinations. Of course that could happen here, too.
- TWSS Alert: Katniss and Gale are talking about whether or not she'll be able to make a bow, and Katniss says, “I don't even know if there'll be wood.” Don't worry baby, just give me ten minutes.
- Geography lesson: Katniss tells us the Capitol is in what was once known as the Rocky Mountains, District 12 is along the Appalachians. Why are the cities built along mountain chains instead of the coast? Is that where the coast is now? Also: I'm pretty sure Katniss is just confused and she's from the Ozarks. Also: Haymitch is Teardrop and Effie Trinket clearly does meth. “My Life Is Winter's Bone”-Katniss Everdeen
12 comments:
I imagined Panem's geography was another feature of social brackets. The capitol being in mountains provides an already built fortress; keeping the poor in mountains prevents them from getting far without proper vehicles.
Dang. I have to keep reminding myself not to add spoilers to the comments. Okay; I'll add this: Katniss is tolerated also because of who her father was and frequently accompanying him on his illicit business trips. She's just business, one more source of meat (and strawberries). She's not without personality, as people claim Bella is, however, she does come off as that cold bitch in school who scowls at everyone and talks to only one person (maybe two) but everyone knows she's been through some shit, so they leave it alone.
I thought the capital was by the coast? Like, past the mountains. Given the coal and regional descriptions, I assumed she was from Appalachia, like West Virginia or something. We don't have a lot of coal mining in the Ozarks. We do have a lot meth, though. Maybe that's what the district in that area produces and that's why everyone in the capital is so weird.
I think Katniss focuses so much on strategy because that's been her entire life for the past few years. She's been so focused on survival that that's all she sees and now that's even more intensified since she'll literally be fighting to stay alive. Everything is strategy, even when it's not.
It bothers me when people go on and on about the romance aspect of the books now that they're making a movie. Yeah, there is romance in it, but it's not a romantic story. And the romance is kind of messed up and all entwined with the craziness of the games. When they focus on just the romance, they kind of miss the point. Like, I kind of wonder who exactly would be reading this for a love story, you know?
I love it when people compare Bella and Katniss. I feel like I know Katniss better than I ever knew Bella. The only impression I ever got of Bella was that she overreacted to almost everything. She was so uninteresting.
I think it says in there somewhere that the oceans rose and North America is a lot smaller now. It's implied that Panem is created after a number of environmental catastrophes. I do think it's totally crazy to say one specific thing comes from one specific place. The 'this person is from this place so they're like this' of these books kind of grosses me out. Sorry, SC. You still my homegirl.
I applaud your (and Effie's) attempts at sexualizing Peeta. As Team Peeta as I may be, I don't think you have much to work with there.
Well Suzette, not everybody can have as much potential as Alice.
That's funny that your professor hated your poetry for the working man. My professors are hate the rich man and encourage arguments for the working class. Of course most of our student body comes from the middle and lower class.
I think Katniss is hard on herself because she is so hard on everyone else. Everyone around her is proof that society has let them down. I doubt many people in the projects have a very high opinion of themselves.
The only people she ever looked up to and thought positively of were her father and Gale. Two people who taught her and helped her learn to survive. And Prim who is a beacon of hope and innocence that she lost a long time ago.
There's quite a lot of fan made maps of Panem floating around, based on all the clues in the books- none of them are exactly the same but you get the general idea.
Here's two of the better ones:
http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/18100000/My-Well-Thought-Out-Map-of-Panem-the-hunger-games-trilogy-18114988-1166-891.jpg
http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/18100000/My-Well-Thought-Out-Map-of-Panem-the-hunger-games-trilogy-18114988-1166-891.jpg
Those links were both the same. I've seen a bunch of those maps, too, but it always seems like they make the districts too big. Like, the way Katniss talks about District 12, it seems more city size than multiple state size.
Ooops, sorry anout that.
And yeah, I know what you mean, I always imagine it as like a town, but maybe huge areas are unocupied? I don't know.
It can't be THAT much bigger than a town, if the whole population of it can fit in the one town square. The whole geography of Panem is kinda confusing, I think every district just has the one town, and then there is the Capitol, which is the only city. I think.
My favourite game while rereading these books was What Would Bella Do? Basically you put Bella Swan in place of Katniss in any given situation. Hours of fun. You have to find a lot of defferent ways to describe grey eyes though, because Bella is fucking boring and probably wouldn't explain anything about the Hunger Games because she'd be way too busy losing her shit.
I don't think all the districts are the same size. It depends on what was made there. Some things take a big population to produce and some things take a lot of land.
I must admit, I did not really know anything about this trilogy until I found out a movie is in the works. I read the synopsis and thought the books would make an interesting read. I am very glad I downloaded the set. I recently finished the first book and all I can say is WOW!!! I found myself missing out on sleep to read just "one more chapter!" I am moving on to "Catching Fire" now and am so excited to see the story continue. Although I may not have read them all as they came out . . . at least I do not have to wait months or a year to start the next! I definitely recommend this series!!
Post a Comment