Jag gillar Hunger Games (i alla fall första boken) men ugh, this person is spot on when it comes to my thoughts about this series.
Spoiler:
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so i recently read both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire and have decided that Mockingjay is shit and not worth my time even though a lot of the basics of it have kindly been explained to me (aka, the minute anyone brings up Mockingjay i am out of the conversation and have to defer to people who a) have read it and b) remember it, which is fine by me). and armed with this knowledge i have decided that the two things i care about most in these books—which are, admittedly, not the most important things in these books. these books are about Katniss and these books are marxist, which they fail themselves there in the end, in both aspects, so i hear, but nonetheless—the two things i care about most, in order of their places in my heart:
Peeta Mellark
The Triangle
and i think these two things are decidedly related to each other. because Peeta is obviously important to the triangle, but Gale and Katniss are equally important. these books are not about shipping, but i am a shipper, and if Katniss is the crux of this triangle we have to listen to her and i think a lot of people do not. is Katniss a reliable narrator? not completely. but you have to take what she gives you and you have to take it to heart. you cannot ignore how she feels and throw it out the window. if you ignore what she says about her own life you are misreading against the text. period. you need to care about Katniss and what she wants for her life.or at least acknowledge it if you do not care about her.
and Katniss, my dear friends, is an emotional idiot. and really i do not understand how this could be ignored. she spends a lot of times reigning herself in. she learns to shut herself in because she’s so angry about her life and the capital but she can’t say anything. so she learns not to say anything. she is full of restraint. and Gale feels the same anger she does but it manifests itself differently. they are two sides of the same coin, sorry to drop some truth bombs on you, except not at all. and both ships, Katniss/Gale and Katniss/Peeta, show her emotional idiocy. she is in love with Gale from the start of the first book. her narration leads you there even if she is in denial about it because emotional idiot. when she falls in love with Peeta during Quarter Quell, she is like, i don’t know what these feelings are maybe it’s because i know i am going to die! that must be it! which is not the case. she just doesn’t know how to deal with any sort of romantic love. because she knows she doesn’t want marriage and she doesn’t want kids so she has no place for it in her life even if she feels it. so she ignores it when she feels it because friendship! that’s all there is between me and Gale! and me and Peeta! oh kay, Katniss, you can say that, but you also say a lot of things about how you spent a lot of time watching Gale’s mouth when he talks which is not a friendly thing to do. and you end up feeling feelings when you kiss Peeta, especially in Quarter Quell. and that is the thing, you have to take her words, you have to take her actions, and you have to sort through them. everyone who reads is going to place more emphasis on one thing or the other, one line or moment more than another, but you can’t flat out ignore parts that complicate your interpretation.
anyway.
Peeta. to quote how Katniss feels about Gale (and Katniss says this about Gale, not the other way around, just to clarify), he is mine and i am his, anything else is unthinkable. Peeta is my favorite. Peeta is my everything. Peeta is not a cute lovesick puppy. Peeta is calculating and creepy and charming and cunning and i love him for it. i think to ignore any of these aspects of his character is to do him a disservice and to make him less interesting. i don’t care about a lovesick puppy, i care about Peeta. Peeta is good at manipulating people and performing. He manipulates Katniss with his honesty, in the end. Which is fascinating to me. When he tells her his nightmares are about losing her and when he realizes she’s fine he is okay her reaction is ugh. UGH. he says this knowing it’s going to make her feel bad. he knows it will and he says it anyway. because he loves her but she hurt him—not her fault. heartbreaking and sad, but not her fault, lbr—and he wants her to feel about about it. he wants her to feel bad about it and she does. because he’s good with people.
which, their entire relationship is fucked up and i don’t think people talk about it? maybe i’m wrong. but their entire relationship is fucked up. and i am in love with it. whether you take movie canon or book canon about how/when Peeta falls in love with her, it is creepy. let’s take book canon because it’s less so thanwatching her walk home from school every day, this creepy ass love of my life. but he says he falls in love with her when he’s five. FIVE. nope, not buying it you loser. because you’re five and because you don’t know her. he doesn’t know her. he cannot love her as she is because she doesn’t know who she is, not really. he shapes her in his head and he shapes himself to that. it starts as a performance for him and then it is real for him. but he is not in love with Katniss, he is in love with the idea of Katniss. hopelessly so. so when he does meet her he takes the Katniss in his head and reshapes her to who she really is and he loves that Katniss. this performance is his identity. this performance is real to him and it is who he is. he loves Katniss. he makes himself love her because he wants to love her and he shapes himself around it. in the first book it is real for him.
i think, at the end of the first book, she loves him, too. she loves him but she is not in love with him. there is a difference here that matters. she loves him because he saved her life, because she feels like she owes him some debt she can never repay—which is so problematic. not Peeta’s fault that she feels this way, but she does, and that shifts the power dynamic in an interesting way. because she feels like she owes and he would die for her. and then it’s like if he does that she owes him even more and i am not going to veer off about how i do wish in the end he had died saving her life because it would have been perfect for him and for their arc. tragedy and angst, y’all, tragedy and angst—she loves him because they are bonded by this weird, fucked up, shared experience of the games. nobody else could possibly understand what they go through in the arena the way they do—not even Gale—and she loves Peeta because of that. it comes out of an extreme situation. the fact that she needs to be sedated at the end speaks to this. she literally cannot control her body because she is worried about his life. but she is not in love with him the way he is in love with her. and that is important.
Katniss is not good at performance like Peeta is good at it. she knows this. she is acutely aware of it. For Peeta the lines between performance and reality are distinct and clear and sometimes they are the same, they are not blurred but they are one line. He knows how to tell the difference, Katniss does not. Katniss gets confused. the lines blur for her eventually, in Quarter Quell, and she doesn’t know what to do with that. so she falls in love with him like he’s in love with her. but their relationship is not good and pure and innocent. their relationship is based on extreme circumstances and manipulation and contrasting power dynamics andi love it so much. i am super into it. she needs him. she ends up needing him and you cannot ignore that.
but you cannot ignore the fact that she needs Gale either. and i think most of the Katniss/Gale relationship probably comes from Mockingjay, but it is clear that she needs him before that. they are built around knowing each other better than anyone else knows them, on honesty and pure reality. Gale is important to Katniss and ignoring that, calling him irrelevant to a text narrated by her is just wrong. if you ignore Gale you are deliberately misreading the text. you may hate him, he may be an asshole, but he matters. he matters just as much as Peeta matters.
and, in the end, all i see is either tragedy on both ends of this triangle—perfectly calibrated and set up and everything i have ever wanted out of a triangle until what happens in the book i am not reading—or ot3. Katniss cannot have one without the other. she needs them both.
and these books are about Katniss.
and these books fail themselves. whether all you ship is Peeta/Katniss or not, you cannot deny that these books fail her (and fail them). she ends up a wife and mother. a mother. the thing she explicitly states she does not want to be over and over again.
these books are about Katniss and they fail her.
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