We Talk All The Time About How Alike Haymitch And Katniss Are, But I Think The Differences Showcased

I know it’s been said a million times, a million different ways, but Dumbledore was crazy right out of the gate with the whole Philosopher’s Stone ordeal. Imagine approaching your longtime acquaintance and saying, “Hey, pal, can I borrow your life support? I want to lure a genocidal maniac in so I can test an 11 year old against him in combat. I’d like to do this on school property, while in session.”

Tired of stories where the author worldbuilds a whole religion only to chicken out at the last moment by making the main character a skeptic. You mean to tell me that there’s all this richness in lore and culture, but you’ve trapped me with the one person in this society who doesn’t care about it? So bland. I could meet an agnostic easily enough by walking down the street, but your story is my one chance to hear the perspective of someone who follows whatever religion you’ve contrived. You made this whole world; convince me that your character really is from there.

One thing THG says over and over is that it’s not enough to hate being a victim of injustice and it’s counterproductive to hate the people carrying out injustice; you have to hate the injustice itself.

Snow hated being a victim, only his solution was to grab up all the power he could and then isolate himself so no one could ever take it away. It turned him into a petty maniac who spent his days strategically gifting bread and milk to creep out a kid who dared to point out Snow did something wrong. He wasn’t a victim when he’d grown up to be an old man beefing with teenagers, but a lifetime of lashing out in what he considered justified self-defense ensured that he lived a miserable life surrounded by people who feared him, hated him, and eventually succeeded in brutally killing him.

Gale goes wrong (this goes for Coin, too) when he gets sidetracked assigning blame and meting out punishment on the Capitol citizens, when the priority should have been preventing the injustice from happening again—to anyone, not just him and his inner circle.

OP is so right with the example of the prep team. Katniss hated the prep team at first, too, because they saw her as expendable and treated her like a project, like a toy to play with, rather than a person. But she saw in CF that they were having a change of heart, noticing that she was a person whose life held the same value theirs did, and although it too little and too late to save her from the arena, it was enough for her to forgive them. They’d stopped being a threat to her, so her hostility toward them evaporated. Gale didn’t take that step with her, but considered a change of heart unimportant and reconciliation impossible. And yeah, he’s confused as to why Katniss isn’t doing the same. He can’t wrap his head around a world in which districts and Capitol don’t fight, can’t erase the imaginary lines that have had them pitted against each other by the Capitol’s own design. He can ally with some other districts, but even that has limits. His callousness toward the people in the Nut is an eerie foreshadowing of the later consequences of his inability to step outside the Capitol vs District paradigm. He thinks success for the rebellion means subjugation of the Capitol by the districts, when success would really be unity of the Capitol and districts.

His insensitivity to civilians in the Capitol, people he perceives as implicitly less-than, leads him to kill Prim. Any discourse on whether or not Gale could have reasonably predicted that his bombs would put Prim in danger (with an eye toward absolving him somehow if he couldn’t) misses the point. Prim’s life was not worth more or less than any of the Capitol civilians’. Intentionally targeting them was wrong with or without Prim getting caught up in it. It’s also not insignificant that Prim was only killed because she was trying to help everyone, with no concern for where they came from.

Hating being a victim is easy and everyone does it. Wanting to turn the tables and take revenge is easy and everyone does it. What’s effective, but difficult, is to see that oppressors are actually not the root cause of oppression. The problem, the reason violence persists even as power changes hands, is our willingness to pretend that we get to decide who’s worth something and who isn’t. A person is a person is a person and if you don’t want to be a victim, you can’t let anyone be a victim.

i get why a lot of people don’t like reading mockingjay as much as the rest of the trilogy, but i think it’s actually so essential to understanding the central thesis of the entire hunger games series.

the whole point of the hunger games is this: all human life is valuable, and artificial divisions between people keep them weak. and the only way out is radical love.

and this is something that is literally echoed again and again in the books. take, for example, gale. why is gale such an interesting, complex, and yet reprehensible character? yes, it’s because at the end katniss cannot separate his bomb from prim’s death. but it’s deeper than that. why does gale build the bomb in the first place? it’s because gale doesn’t see every human life as valuable. gale is willing to kill people and to deny them their humanity simply because they are his “enemy.” so, there’s the obvious example of his willingness to blow up the nut with everyone inside and his disregard for the human casualty. and the people in the nut aren’t even from the captiol, he just wants to do it because the stereotype of that district is their allegiance to the capitol, and gale hates that.

but there’s another scene, also in mockingjay, that i think goes under-discussed which is his view of katniss’ prep team. when katniss finds her prep team literally imprisoned in 13, she’s horrified and upset by the conditions they are in. but gale isn’t. and he’s confused about why katniss would care for them! her response is to say that it’s because they cried when she went to the quarter quell. and gale is like, “sure, but they’re still from the captiol.” and this argument is so important. because katniss argues that the prep team deserves to be treated as human beings, and when he presses her on why, she basically says because they treated her as a human being. but gale can’t see that–all he can see is that they’re from the capitol, and he’s confused about why katniss should care.

and this is, so crucially, what katniss learns in the hunger games. she realizes that she doesn’t want to kill the other tributes just because they are from the other districts. she hates the fact that they have turned her against people who are, in their core, just like her. frightened children who have been manipulated to kill other children against their will, all selected based on their district, a social divide that has literally been invented and imposed on them.

and another just absolutely essential thing to understand here is that peeta knows this all along. we talk at length about how peeta’s defining trait is his kindness. but what’s so important about peeta’s kindness is how it transcends any boundaries of social class or social division.

when peeta gives katniss the bread, it’s important to note that just before he does that, we hear his mother talking about “seam brats pawing through her trash.” peeta’s mother buys into the social divides in district twelve–she views herself as better than someone from the seam simply because of her standing as a merchant, and reinforces these class divides by refusing to extend the simplest humanity to a child from the seam. she literally refuses to feed a starving child on the grounds of a social divide, within a world that already has divided them into districts. but peeta doesn’t see it like this. peeta refuses to deny katniss food just because she’s from the seam. peeta gives her kindness. peeta gives her humanity.

and he does the same thing in the games! his entire first interview, the dramatic king focuses, not on the games, but on his genuine love and adoration for another tribute. how radical! to refuse to subscribe to a system which asks him to hate her? to want to kill her? and to instead confess his love for her? sure, katniss ends up being the mockingjay. katniss might have held out the berries. but peeta in that moment is the one who sets the rebellion in motion. peeta is the one who refuses to engage in the senseless hatred of someone who “should” be his enemy. instead, he reaches out in love.

and it all culminates at the end of mockingjay, when katniss votes for the capitol hunger games to gain coin’s trust. and peeta is utterly horrified by this. because he can’t understand how she could have been through everything he has been through and not understand that continuing to senselessly kill human beings (children!!) for some kind of revenge just reinforces these binary modes of thinking. but the thing is–katniss DOES see that. and when coin proposes it, that’s when she knows she has to stop her. because coin, like gale, like peeta’s mother, and like so others many around her, is still buying into these divides. is still viewing the captiol as the enemy. is still viewing a human life as expendable. 

and there’s a quote in mockingjay that i think lays this out pretty explicitly. katniss says, after she kills coin and is recovering, point blank: “they can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them.” she’s realized the crux of the entire hunger games–that manipulating us to hate and kill our fellow humans, that drawing up divisions between people because of where they live and what they produce, that believing that hating someone on the basis of any of these is justification for their death, is all a farce. it’s all a distraction. it’s all pretend. she says, in the same chapter: “no one benefits in a world where these things happen.” not the districts. not the capitol. not the victors. no one.

the entire arc of the hunger games is really just about katniss catching up to what peeta has known from the start. katniss overcoming all the manipulation from those around her, all the glitz and glamour, all the artificial social and class divides to see what peeta has seen clearly from the start: love.

As soon as I get a grave, the first thing I’m gonna do is start rolling in it.

Radium Girl

You, a fanfiction author: “I don’t know if this fic is any good. Maybe I just won’t post it. Probably nobody would like it.”

Your top commenter, eyes enormous: “You hide the fic? You hide the fic in WIPs? Oh! Oh! Jail for author! Jail for author for one thousand years!”

There’s a time and a place for overthinking fiction, and if the time and place is here and now:

Do you find it endearing if the love interest is stupid or are you just afraid of other people’s free will?

“The Devil works hard, but AO3 authors work harder,” I mutter to myself like a mantra as encouragement while I trudge my way through my 10 year old WIP, which is not published on AO3.