another evening spent perplexed as to how people in the thg fandom can hate katniss everdeen
i mean that in the literal, how are you able to hate her and sit through these books way. how did you get through these books, which are 85% katniss’ internal monologue and 15% something resembling a plot, if you hate katniss everdeen?
how did you even get through book one?
chapter one?
i get if you hate the whole series overall, but if you like it in some capacity, how did you manage to sit through three books if you hate the character whose head you’re so deeply entrenched in that you might as well order some kitchen appliances because, baby, we’re moving in?
Exactly and this is what I think every time somebody says they love the Harry Potter books and Buffy The Vampire Slayer but they hate Harry or Buffy Summers (I’ve seen quite a lot of both cases in fandom) and I’m like “then how on earth could you continue reading/watching?” Even more so in the case of Katniss because it’s first person point of view. I mean I’m really curious about how that works - I have never put myself through a narrative of some length if I absolutely loathed the main/pov character. It works for me in movies, I can dig movies like that. But book series/tv shows? I don’t have that in me.
And I by no means love Katniss. There’s a lot I resent in Katniss, but most of it doesn’t have to do with Katniss herself, rather with Collins and her often horrible choices. Like, I wish Katniss would be more than she is in the way I wish the books could have been more than they are.
But I like Katniss. I always feel for her (I think a degree of sympathy for the character is required to get through these books) and I want her to do well, to come out on top of it all (which, really, she doesn’t, not completely in my opinion). More importantly, I think, I enjoy Katniss. I enjoy her voice and I enjoy going on the journey with her.
So yeah, I agree, I cannot understand how you can hate Katniss and finish these books, let alone like them. It baffles me.
Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can’t survive without.
#or alternatively katniss won’t get to choose at all because deus ex killed her sister chooses for her #and we all know she would have chosen peeta but to have her not MAKE that choice is a gross move collins #what is an agency katniss everdeen has none
(Source: yumbumfun)
robbstark ha contestado a tu publicación: all right, well, i finished that trainwreck.
you still shipping katniss/gale? I WANT A POST WITH THOUGHTS ELYSSA YOU JUST CANT COME HERE SAYING YOU FINISHED IT AND NOT SAY ANYTHING LKSDJKFJSD
gloryandus ha contestado a tu publicación: all right, well, i finished that trainwreck.
I second wanting a real post. What about FINNICK and Johanna?okay fine, here we go, we’ll just get this over with.
katniss/gale is exactly as i expected it to be. twisted and doomed and codependent and war kids and visceral and victim of too many circumstances. i love katniss/gale. at the same time, peeta/katniss is the only endgame possibility. i don’t ship peeta/katniss, but that is a fact of the text. a very poorly constructed text that imo failed to follow through on the feelings i caught in catching fire, but a fact of the text nonetheless. so for future reference, when everyone yells at me for shipping katniss/gale, let’s all recall i agree that peeta/katniss is the only endgame possibility. i just like katniss and gale’s relationship a lot more, and it has precisely the arc i wanted it to. it’s made of the war, it dies in the war, it is the war. doomed, done, over. had to be, was. that’s what i wanted, that’s what i got. gale is exactly as i imagined he would be. he can stay too.
katniss is my favorite character. it was peeta but then mockingjay happened and everything was a mess. it’s not his fault, i don’t dislike the kid, he just got bumped down to #2, but when your narrative goes off in odd directions and the pacing of a book is that atrocious it’s hard to salvage it. i see what she was doing, i agree re: the identity arc, i just think that since mockingjay is so poorly constructed she breaks him down and doesn’t have the requisite amount of time to build either him or katniss/peeta back up again sufficiently for me. i’m not here to argue about this series; i honestly don’t think it merits arguing about. but that’s how i feel on the shipping subject, and as it’s been a matter of some controversy, that’s how it is.
i very much like finnick and johanna, but they merit far too little page time for me to get particularly excited about either. finnick is more developed so i have more stuff to say about him, and johanna i was really excited about, but i’m really disappointed by how little they showed up in text.
i’m still in catching fire. should i even bother with the rest?i mean if you want to know what everyone’s on about, yes. that’s why i did. but somewhere around the middle of catching fire i had no interest in continuing, i just did. i actually like mockingjay at times, and i think the gale and gale/katniss stuff is flawless, but if you’re not interested in that narrative or if expect a war narrative that doesn’t totally suck, i’d stop now.
but that’s my personal opinion on the subject.
basically these books are bad and the movies are going to be great because they know what they’re doing, but i’m pretty disappointed. like, i don’t even want to try and fix things or salvage anything because things are either irreparable or done the way i wanted them to be. i do want katniss/peeta fic recs, though, so you can send those my way. i have a feeling i’ll like that ship a lot more in fandom than i did in text. which is a shame, because i really wanted to.
and that’s that.
FINALLY SOMEONE WITH THE RIGHT OPINIONS. ie These books are a mess. I’m sick of hearing it’s the best YA books series ever because if that is true (it’s not, i’ve read enough awesome YA books to know it’s not tre) then i feel pity for YA books. i mean these books are a lot of fun and have good ideas and interesting characters and i think it’s fine to feel fannish about them but THEY ARE NOT THAT GOOD. Catching Fire and Mockingjay are all over the place structurally. Collins needed to make better decisions about what’s important in a book and what’s not. and i have ALREADY TALKED ABOUT HOW BADLY SHE NEEDED A GOOD EDITOR. i can forgive the fact that she failed at convincing me of the love story of Katniss and Peeta or at convincing me that the reasons why she chose Peeta were other than circusmtancial (disclaimer: i don’t ship Gale/Katniss, in case you were wondering about bias), and i can forgive her for being politically disappointing (it was too cynical for me, stomaching that the rebels are just as bad as the Capitol, or how the book condemned Gale for being a good
bolshevikrevolutionary soldier, or how Katniss never developed a political sense and never saw the bigger picture) and i can forgive that she shortchanged so many characters for the sake of shock value (Finnick, Prim… and fucking Madge who should have been an important character in a world where these were better books… or how Johanna needed more screentime). But dude, I cannot forget the mediocre prose. I can never forget the mediocre prose. and the ugh structure - it was such a struggle for me, finishing this books.basically I’m disappointed at how bad the movie was but when I see people complaining of the adaptation because IT’S RUINING A GREAT WORK OF LITERATURE it totally blows my mind. it’s like WAIT WHAT.
it was too cynical for me, stomaching that the rebels are just as bad as the Capitol, or how the book condemned Gale for being a good
bolshevikrevolutionary soldier, or how Katniss never developed a political sense and never saw the bigger picture
YES, THIS. THANK YOU OMG. i have been trying to articulate my feelings on Mockingjay for a while now and this is it. all of it.Not all my thoughts exactly, but I agree with a lot of what is said here. A good structure could have shaped Mockingjay to be a much better novel. I still ship Katniss/Gale, though I can see how Peeta/Katniss is the logical endpoint, but as I said to Rhiannon last night, the end of Mockingjay still feels like Katniss is doing this for Peeta because she feels like she owes him. (Which is not to mention there is no resolution with the whole hijacked to kill her thing, and what if he is just biding his time?) Gale really is punished for fighting for the cause, because the message overall just seems to be you can’t trust the establishment, no matter who is running it.
But back to Peeta and Katniss, because my thoughts just jumped a few tracks there, while the last two pages before the epilogue are sweet, and seem to do a reasonable job building a post-war relationship out of two very broken individuals*, the epilogue really undoes all of that work for me.
Compare:
On the night I feel that thing again, the hunger that overtook me on the beach, I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.
So after, when he whispers, “You love me. Real or not real?”
I tell him, “Real.”(Page 453, Scholastic Australian Edition)
to
I’ll tell them how I survive it. I’ll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I’m afraid it could be taken away. That’s when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I’ve seen someone do. It’s like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.
But there are much worse games to play. (Page 455, Scholastic Australian Edition.)
The first is sweet and hopeful, and even though it seems like Katniss might not quite, or only just be there in terms of loving Peeta, the audience needs no more resolution than that. It ties up the storylines, and ends on what I like to consider is a strong, satisfactory line. Leaving aside the fact that the epilogue reads like a piece of tacked on fan fiction**, that final paragraph of the epilogue is narratively speaking, much weaker and unsatisfying. The last page of the final chapter deals with the traumas of war that will haunt Katniss, and probably Peeta as well, but caps off by drawing that out of war comes love and that Katniss and Peeta will make it through because they have each other. The final paragraph of the epilogue presents the situation as much unsteadier than that. It seems like backtracking (in more ways than one, surprise kids, anyone?) for the story to give an emotionally satisfying conclusion at the end of the final chapter, to then undermine it with, I have bad days, it feels impossible to enjoy the good things, etc. As an English teacher and someone who has been writing and beta-ing fan fiction for 13 years, if anyone gave me a story like that, I’d either advise them to cut the epilogue entirely, or take bits of it, like Katniss’s bad days, and work them in before that effective final punch, ‘I tell him, “Real.”’
And then there’s my problem with the kids. When I was talking to Rhiannon about my feelings after finishing the novel last night, I said that I didn’t like that suddenly she had kids with Peeta, because that is what he wanted. Yes, there is always that through line that Katniss hates being indebted to people, and Peeta makes her life whole again, so she’d do this for him, but I feel like it is more out of character than in, in this situation. Rhi’s justification was that now the Hunger Games were over, there was a new government and no reason for Katniss not to want to have children, but there are more issues than that at play here.
- I don’t like that Suzanne Collins presented a kickass girl, who is strong, brave and fierce and didn’t want to have babies, and then had her go back on that. There are lots of girls growing up who know they don’t want to have children, and I haven’t seen a representation of a woman in the media who doesn’t want to have kids and then sticks to that. (And no, Robin from How I Met Your Mother doesn’t count either, because the episode in which she discovers she is biologically incapable of having children gives us the emotional turmoil that basically reveals that maybe someday she probably would have had them.) I hope to have babies someday, but I know others who don’t, and while we are old enough to not look for role models in the media anymore, my high school best friend was saying at 15 she didn’t really want babies, and could have done with a decent role model back then.
- This “the Hunger Games is over, there’s a good government in power, Katniss has nothing to worry about” rhetoric is flawed when you consider that Katniss is pretty anti- any establishment by the end of the novel. She distrusts the rebels as much as she distrusted the Capitol, and besides, looking at that portion of the epilogue I quoted, “…it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I’m afraid it could be taken away.” She still distrusts the government. That doesn’t seem like her reason to not have kids has been taken away.
- If Peeta is so ~in love with Katniss, why is he pressuring her to have babies? And it really seems like pressure, “It took me five, ten, fifteen years to agree. But Peeta wanted them so badly.” (Page 454 Scholastic Australian Edition) Again, we come back to that point that Katniss probably feels indebted to him for everything, but that is not a reason to have kids. You know what’s not cool? “When I first felt her stirring inside of me, I was consumed with a terror that felt as old as life itself.” Okay, sure, maybe this refers to a fear that all mothers will experience that they will not be able to protect their child, but hey. You know what exacerbates that, and turns it into the levels of anxiety and nightmares that Katniss experiences? Everything that Katniss has lived through and the unresolved fear that everything could be taken away in an instant. Even at the end of the novel, Peeta is essentially putting Katniss back together, and giving her what she needs, which yes, Emma, is probably bread, but if he is at that level of knowing what Katniss needs, and that is what the readers are supposed to assume at this stage, he should probably understand that babies aren’t on the agenda.
- You know what would have been more in keeping with the characterisation of Katniss Everdeen? Raising a bunch of war orphans. Yeah, I know this was my interpretation of the character, but I feel like if children were necessary to the character’s redemption at the end of the novel, Katniss would have been way better at collecting war orphans and raising them in her little District 12 commune. I really don’t feel this is a stretch on her character at all. Even as late in the game as page 397 in the Australian Scholastic edition, Katniss notices a little girl right before she gets shot, and then again after, when girl is dead, and Katniss keeps recalling the blood red on the girl’s yellow jacket. And even if you want to make the point that after Prim’s death she wouldn’t be mentally capable of caring for war orphans, the same point goes that she wouldn’t be mentally capable of caring for her own children. Sure, the epilogue isn’t specific about how long it takes to have kids, (there’s a huge difference between five and fifteen years after the war, dear author) but the government you thought you trusted, the side you thought you were fighting for, orchestrating it so your fourteen year old sister is burned alive is not exactly pain that fades with time. Even if the pain of losing Rue, then Prim, and the memory of that little girl dying in front of her (and Katniss thinks), because of her is going to be too much to raise a commune of war orphans, the fear of losing her own flesh and blood children would work the same way. And in either situation, Peeta would be there, so his support of her works for either argument.
So. tl;dr, I apparently have a lot of feelings about Mockingjay and The Hunger Games series as a whole. And I had fun discussing them! There are way more I want to discuss, but at this point I’ve spent my whole morning on this, so I might come back and add more later. Because there is definitely more I want to say.
*If anyone has read Paullina Simons’ Bronze Horseman Trilogy, the main characters fall in love and fight in WWII in the first book, the main female character rescues the main male character from a prisoner of war camp in book two, and then the last book is them putting their lives together after the war and rebuilding each other for nearly 900 pages. Katniss and Peeta get 3 pages. It starts to touch the edges of being a satisfying reunion, but Collins could have taken that two pages of epilogue and given us better character development there. As far as I’m concerned, the story didn’t even need an epilogue.
**Not all fan fiction is horrible, really! In fact, there is a a good amount I want to live inside forever, because the writers are just so talented, but you know the kind of fan fiction I am talking about here.
THIS. THIS so much. The kids issue always bothered me a lot, the way it was presented - like Katniss had given in to Peeta’s desire to have children rather than her believing their children would be safe in the new Panem and wouldn’t be taken away to the Games. Because Katniss at the end of the books still distrusts the government and, important little fact, she knows the government distrusts her and that’s what having Haymitch living next door is for. The epilogue doesn’t convince me things are so much better now on that subject.
In fact the first thing I did when I finished Mockingjay was say “well, that epilogue ruined a lot”. Because I had liked the last chapter. The last chapter was the best argument for Katniss/Peeta this last book managed. It didn’t make up for the lack of time and conviction about the pairing before, or how Katniss never actually chooses Peeta over Gale (more like Gale is no longer a possibility, since the bomb he made might or might not have killed Prim, but that has nothing to do with Katniss’ romantic feelings for him either way) and in a way I felt that Gale’s prophecy about Katniss choosing whoever she thinks she needs to survive was pretty spot-on. It was obvious that Katniss would end up with Peeta since the first book but still Mockingjay failed at rebuilding a Katniss/Peeta relationship post-hijack that didn’t feel rushed and forced somehow. But the last chapter was nice, quiet, sad and hopeful. I could buy Katniss and Peeta as war-trauma kids that are learning to heal together. I would have liked that open ending. But the epilogue was a big NO NO NO for me. We didn’t really need it, it was only superficially optimistic and if Collins wanted ambiguity the last chapter had in spades.
So yeah, epilogue feelings. Not good ones.
COLLINS: It is a time period where hundreds of years have passed from…
COLLINS: It is a time period where hundreds of years have passed from now. There’s been a lot of ethnic mixing. But I think I describe them as having dark hair, grey eyes, and sort of olive skin. You know, we have hair and makeup.
SourceCan we just talk about the “Panem is supposed to be ethnically mixed but we’re going to use hair and makeup to fake it
because we’re so resistant to casting POC” remark? How messed up is that?Despite the claims that there was ethnic mixing, District 12 in the film was clearly very, very white. They threw in, like, one black person for every 30 white people you saw in the background, and there was nearly always a couple of black people in every Capitol crowd shot so that the filmmakers could be, like, “See?? We’re not racist! We may not trust a POC to be the main character, but we trust them enough to put them in the crowd and cheer.”
And apparently, no brown people exist in Panem, since it was portrayed as very white with some black. But this seems to be Gary Ross’ idea of a multi-racial culture, which is possibly the scariest thing of all.
(Source: imodair)
you still shipping katniss/gale? I WANT A POST WITH THOUGHTS ELYSSA YOU JUST CANT COME HERE SAYING YOU FINISHED IT AND NOT SAY ANYTHING LKSDJKFJSD
I second wanting a real post. What about FINNICK and Johanna?okay fine, here we go, we’ll just get this over with.
katniss/gale is exactly as i expected it to be. twisted and doomed and codependent and war kids and visceral and victim of too many circumstances. i love katniss/gale. at the same time, peeta/katniss is the only endgame possibility. i don’t ship peeta/katniss, but that is a fact of the text. a very poorly constructed text that imo failed to follow through on the feelings i caught in catching fire, but a fact of the text nonetheless. so for future reference, when everyone yells at me for shipping katniss/gale, let’s all recall i agree that peeta/katniss is the only endgame possibility. i just like katniss and gale’s relationship a lot more, and it has precisely the arc i wanted it to. it’s made of the war, it dies in the war, it is the war. doomed, done, over. had to be, was. that’s what i wanted, that’s what i got. gale is exactly as i imagined he would be. he can stay too.
katniss is my favorite character. it was peeta but then mockingjay happened and everything was a mess. it’s not his fault, i don’t dislike the kid, he just got bumped down to #2, but when your narrative goes off in odd directions and the pacing of a book is that atrocious it’s hard to salvage it. i see what she was doing, i agree re: the identity arc, i just think that since mockingjay is so poorly constructed she breaks him down and doesn’t have the requisite amount of time to build either him or katniss/peeta back up again sufficiently for me. i’m not here to argue about this series; i honestly don’t think it merits arguing about. but that’s how i feel on the shipping subject, and as it’s been a matter of some controversy, that’s how it is.
i very much like finnick and johanna, but they merit far too little page time for me to get particularly excited about either. finnick is more developed so i have more stuff to say about him, and johanna i was really excited about, but i’m really disappointed by how little they showed up in text.
i’m still in catching fire. should i even bother with the rest?i mean if you want to know what everyone’s on about, yes. that’s why i did. but somewhere around the middle of catching fire i had no interest in continuing, i just did. i actually like mockingjay at times, and i think the gale and gale/katniss stuff is flawless, but if you’re not interested in that narrative or if expect a war narrative that doesn’t totally suck, i’d stop now.
but that’s my personal opinion on the subject.
basically these books are bad and the movies are going to be great because they know what they’re doing, but i’m pretty disappointed. like, i don’t even want to try and fix things or salvage anything because things are either irreparable or done the way i wanted them to be. i do want katniss/peeta fic recs, though, so you can send those my way. i have a feeling i’ll like that ship a lot more in fandom than i did in text. which is a shame, because i really wanted to.
and that’s that.
FINALLY SOMEONE WITH THE RIGHT OPINIONS. ie These books are a mess. I’m sick of hearing it’s the best YA books series ever because if that is true (it’s not, i’ve read enough awesome YA books to know it’s not tre) then i feel pity for YA books. i mean these books are a lot of fun and have good ideas and interesting characters and i think it’s fine to feel fannish about them but THEY ARE NOT THAT GOOD. Catching Fire and Mockingjay are all over the place structurally. Collins needed to make better decisions about what’s important in a book and what’s not. and i have ALREADY TALKED ABOUT HOW BADLY SHE NEEDED A GOOD EDITOR. i can forgive the fact that she failed at convincing me of the love story of Katniss and Peeta or at convincing me that the reasons why she chose Peeta were other than circusmtancial (disclaimer: i don’t ship Gale/Katniss, in case you were wondering about bias), and i can forgive her for being politically disappointing (it was too cynical for me, stomaching that the rebels are just as bad as the Capitol, or how the book condemned Gale for being a good bolshevik revolutionary soldier, or how Katniss never developed a political sense and never saw the bigger picture) and i can forgive that she shortchanged so many characters for the sake of shock value (Finnick, Prim… and fucking Madge who should have been an important character in a world where these were better books… or how Johanna needed more screentime). But dude, I cannot forget the mediocre prose. I can never forget the mediocre prose. and the ugh structure - it was such a struggle for me, finishing this books.
basically I’m disappointed at how bad the movie was but when I see people complaining of the adaptation because IT’S RUINING A GREAT WORK OF LITERATURE it totally blows my mind. it’s like WAIT WHAT.
