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Feministe Book Club: The Hunger Games, Chapters 19-27

Caperton

The end! It’s the end! The book is over. Sigh. A few themes: The rest of the book. Katniss’s 100-percent reversal of her attitude toward Peeta in light of the new rule, even though (she thought) he’d been trying to kill her before and he had been aligned with the Careers–would you be able to forgive that fast, and would the circumstances of the Games influence that?; the number of tributes Katniss personally killed, and why, and what that means; the influence her defiance might have on the Districts, and whether Snow’s proposed solution could really undo that; and the fact that after all this she still can’t relax and how much that sucks for her OH MY GOD COME ON SNOW JUST LET HER HAVE HER MOMENT. And of course the degree to which she was pretending vs. the degree to which she actually has romantic feelings toward Peeta vs. the degree to which she had feelings of trust and friendship toward Peeta–and whether there’s a whole lot of difference. Ready, go.

(I think we’re pretty done for Hunger Games spoilers, but if you have spoilers for Catching Fire or Mockingjay, leave them in comments to the original post and link to them here using just the names of the characters involved. If we end up discussing those books, they will be best unspoiled.)

Next up: If anyone’s up for Catching Fire, I am. I’m going to take a week off and set the first discussion for the week after next, Saturday, June 9, with Part I, chapters 1-9. If you’d rather have a longer break than that, let me know, and we can push it back. Thanks for playing, y’all. This has been fun.

38 thoughts on Feministe Book Club: <em>The Hunger Games</em>, Chapters 19-27

  1. I can’t really comment right now on Katniss’s own feelings (she’s obviously still in stress/survival mode and too busy and worried to be thinking about “feelings”, and that’s okay), but it did strike me how completely Peeta fell for the idea that she was in love with him. He saw what he wanted to see, and when he’s starting to clue in that she might have faked some or all of it, on that ride back on the train, his reaction is anger – not extreme, and it’s rather understandable, but he does distance himself from her considerably after that and react with some degree of entitlement/hurt, like honesty and integrity in their relationship was what SHOULD have been her top priority during the games. It did strike me as something of a dissonance that showcased how much differently he’d been interpreting the events of the Games till that point.

    It might also not be very fair to him that Katniss and their mentor did not inform him about how they were all still in danger after the games, essentially relying on him to method act. It might have been the more reasonable course of action (they needed to be convincing, after all), but I couldn’t help pitying Peeta a little for how much he was kept out of the loop.

  2. First time commenting but I definitely am interested in continuing with the last two books (I read all of them already and am skimming them again for these discussions).

    I think it wasn’t too irrational for Katniss to forgive Peeta as quickly as she did, because she was already wondering if he was, in fact, just pretending to be allied with the Careers. She was unsure whether it was a hallucination, but she has that memory of him telling her to run after the tracker jackers stung her, and given his overall demeanor and what she knows of him, I think that behavior feels more like the real Peeta than his alliance with the Careers.

  3. Well, I think it fits in with Peeta’s character profile. He said going in that, however he exited the Games, he wanted to remain whole, he wanted to show that he was “more than a piece of their games”. I got the impression that Peeta wanted to operate with honesty, and he made the assumption Katniss was doing the same (this also speaks to the place of privelege that he came from, where he always knew where his next meal was coming from and never had to operate under the law to survive, as Katniss did).

    I think it’s also fair to say that since he had a huge crush on Katniss, he saw what he wanted to to see and believed she loved him because he wanted to believe it.

  4. I really like the point about Peeta wanting to be honest the whole time and expecting the same.
    Is Katniss really taking all the blame for the berry stunt, or does she just think so? Because to me, Peeta is the real rebel. He finds out that the rule change is no longer in effect, and throws away his knife, while she aims an arrow at him. She plays the game–as you have. noted–and Peeta ain’t Why doesn’t he get any heat on him? Is this literally the oldest story in the book, where the woman with the fruit gets blamed

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  6. Katniss mentions in the book that if she didnt team up with Peeta and try to win the Games together, she wouldn’t be able to show her face in district 12 again. I found that Peeta might have been a little naive, considering they were in the Games, but he doesn’t seem very analytical at all in the book, so looking for an ulterior motive in Katniss’ actions doesn’t really fit his personality. Also, he has been pining for her for the majority of her life and when she finds him, he is feverish, so that distorts things a bit.

    I really felt that Katniss had genuine feelings for Peeta but might not have known to name them love/attraction/a crush. Also, she knew acutely what her role was to the audience and what she needed to do to survive, mixing all that up with any feelings towards Peeta is bound to get a little messy. We also see her try to compare Peeta and their relationship to Gale and that relationship. She is beginning to realize that Gale is more than just a friend to her, and that if she wanted more she could make that move. Thats a lot for any 16 year old.

  7. None of the discussion I’ve seen seems to take into account just how much stress — trauma, actually — Katniss is suffering. To be blunt, it makes me think of how the people in Capitol talk about the tributes.

    By the end of the book, she has spent something like six weeks pretty much under sentence of _almost_ certain death, with the proviso that if she puts on a good enough show, they might do something to slightly improve her odds. There’s also the suggestion that her life is not the only life at stake — if she does something that pisses off the people in power, they might take revenge on others. She spends the entire time on high alert, in a situation in which anything or anybody could be about to kill her. This is the usual way people (e.g., soldiers) get PTSD.

    And at the moment when she think’s she’s safe, she is informed that she has merely jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. (And we’ve got two more books for her to be tormented in.)

    Katniss even says this, pretty much. All she’s been able to think of is managing her terror so she can protect those she loves and maybe herself (in that order.) Asking her to _have_ any other feelings shows IMHO an incredible lack of empathy.

    To relate this to feminism: women in abusive relationships, and women living in cultures or subcultures where women are always in danger to some extent, are in a similar position. Asking for them to deal with things on any terms but how they can improve the odds is an example of privilege in action.

  8. Who’s asking Katniss to have feelings for anyone else? (On this thread, I mean).

    Though I agree; I think you’ve given name to what many of us have described in the HG threads: Katniss’ only thought, every day, is how to ensure the survival of her loved ones and survival of herself. She has no time to waste on figuring out if she likes this guy or that one.

    BUT- I also think it’s fair to say that Katniss does have romantic feelings for both Gale and Peeta. That she doesn’t recognize this, or is unwilling to pursue it, supports everything you’ve said about women in danger situations. Prior to becoming a tribute, falling in love could have been detrimental to Katniss’ survival. It’s only in the arena that being in love (or pretending to be) increases her chances of survival, since the Capitol is enthralled by “the star-crossed lovers of District Twelve”. Thus she entertains the idea for the first time-because for the first time, being in love might help her survive.

  9. I’ve only lurked here in the past. Hope I’m not derailing this thread too much by asking this. What do you think the PG 13 rating of the movie says about our culture?

    I took my eleven-year-old daughter to see it yesterday. (Both of us have read the book and knew what was coming. The movie stays relatively true to the book.) I know that everyone has their own opinions on what is appropriate for children to be exposed to and at what age. Katniss grows up without the support of a parent, she experiences poverty, she’s thrust into a survival situation, she witnesses the violent death of a friend, and she is forced into a relationship for reasons that are not her own. It seems to me that this is far more “mature” content than a lot of films that carry “R” ratings.

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  11. @7 (Skye)

    BUT- I also think it’s fair to say that Katniss does have romantic feelings for both Gale and Peeta.

    With the caveat that we don’t know what Katniss is really feeling (especially since she’s a character in a book), I’d say it is misleading to label the feelings she has for Gale and Peeta “romantic.”

    I’m reminded of my readings about life in the Middle Ages, when, for most people, life was largely about doing what was necessary for survival, and the point of relationships was about who could be counted on to help you survive. The bonds of family, class, guild, and community were what mattered, because they could be counted on. Affection existed, but didn’t play much of a role in how people lived their lives, because it couldn’t be relied upon. Romantic love was largely unknown, and mainly confined to those classes that were well-off enough to be able to afford some foolishness.

    Katniss’s life prior to being reaped reminds me of this. Once she is reaped, of course, there’s even less room for anything but survival.

    I think what Katniss feels for Gale is a sense of loyalty — by working together, they’ve help one another and one another’s families to survive. What she feels for Peeta is that she owes him something for having saved her family (and her) when she was young, as well as the fear that she would be a pariah in District 12 if she were to be the one who killed him. By the end, I think she also feels some loyalty towards him. I see no evidence of any romantic feelings, except possibly, briefly, while they were hiding in the cave together, although keep in mind, she was putting all her efforts into putting on a show of being in love with him. Has no one here talked themselves into believing they were in love with someone?

    One of the conflicts in the book is that both Gale and Peeta try to turn the relationship they have with Katniss into a romantic one, whereas she doesn’t feel that way about them, but doesn’t feel she can safely refuse them point-blank, either.

    I can’t help thinking that the idea that she must have romantic feelings toward Gale and/or Peeta is a case of readers imposing on Katniss the social script that says that a woman, especially a young woman, has to be in love with someone. After all, that’s what women are for. The idea that a woman’s mind (and life) might be so full of other stuff (like survival, and loyalties, or even just getting a PhD) that there isn’t room for romance just doesn’t compute.

  12. I agree that she doesn’t have the emotional safety to be able to classify her feelings for either Gale or Peeta outside of their working relationships. She likes them both, she respects them both (to a degree), but she is aware of faking romance with Peeta to garner sympathy with viewers, she is aware of NEEDING to team up with him when the rules change or her survival in the games will mean nothing, since District 12 will not let her family survive if she doesn’t.

    And then, when they win, and she realizes that they will have to keep it up forever, there’s no room to discover what her own feelings really are because no matter what, they will not be “real” enough to convince Snow.

  13. Katniss says (or thinks to herself) repeatedly that she isn’t interested in romance because romance leads to children and she doesn’t want to have children that she could then lose to the Hunger Games. She does not want to breed in captivity, and for some reason, the idea of romantic partnership without children doesn’t really occur to her, whether because that’s how her society is set up, or because she assumes that’s what anyone she falls in love with would want is not really clear.

    She does not say (or think) this overtly, but I would think that her own history, in which her parents failed to protect her (even before she was chosen as a tribute, since her father’s death nearly led her family to starvation), has to feed into that as well.

    Then there’s the fact that to Katniss, love means responsibility. The people she loves most (at all) are her mother and sister, and what that’s meant since she was a kid is taking care of them. She cared for Rue, and in doing so took responsibility for her (though Rue was able to do more in return)–but Rue was killed anyway. She then took on Peeta, and they both nearly failed to survive that). So romance aside, love is pretty fraught if you’re Katniss.

    Then there is that whole 16 years old and a good bit on her mind bit that others have mentioned. But it’s not that she ignores the idea of romance entirely. She’s wondering if she wants Peeta or Gale (or both). Because, well, 16. Even under terrible & extreme conditions, people have hormones. I suspect they even did in the middle ages.

  14. Then there is that whole 16 years old and a good bit on her mind bit that others have mentioned. But it’s not that she ignores the idea of romance entirely. She’s wondering if she wants Peeta or Gale (or both). Because, well, 16. Even under terrible & extreme conditions, people have hormones. I suspect they even did in the middle ages

    Exactly.

  15. But it’s not that she ignores the idea of romance entirely. She’s wondering if she wants Peeta or Gale (or both). Because, well, 16. Even under terrible & extreme conditions, people have hormones. I suspect they even did in the middle ages.

    And yet there are 16-year-olds who have no interest in sex or romantic relationships. Who dread the constant expectation that they should be interested, and the idea that there’s something wrong with them if they aren’t.

    I see no evidence in the book that she “wants” either Peeta or Gale in what I’d call a romantic way. What she wants is to go back to her old life, and to find a way to finesse the relationship with Peeta that has been forced upon her without being a jerk — or getting herself and everyone she cares about killed. She pretty clearly and repeatedly says that she is not interested in any sort of intimate relationship with either of them.

    My point about the Middle Ages wasn’t that nobody felt sexual desire or sexual attraction, but that the culture didn’t frame it as a basis for relationships. If she’d felt “romantic” about Peeta in a Middle Ages sort of way, it would have presented no problem to killing him at the end.

  16. On another note:

    The original thread referenced a posting by “The Last Psychiatrist,” which I thought did have one valid point: how the two District 11 tributes — that is, the two black tributes — were depicted.

    I felt that Rue was a bit of a “magic negro.” Her whole character seems to be about reminding Katniss of Prim, and then dying in a very sad and romantic way. I never got a sense of her as an individual.

    Thresh was even more sketchily drawn. He’s basically the Big Black Man who is big and mean enought to pull Clove off Katniss. We, like Katniss, expect him to kill her, too, because that’s all we know about him. Suddenly, when Katniss mentions Rue, he decides to let her go. There’s no preparation for why he acts the way he does, and he basically disappears after that.

    What makes this significant is that we live in a society in which white people have historically not seen black people as fully human and still have a hard time seeing them as both black and human at the same time. I saw these depictions as an example of how hard a time a writer who is white has writing realistic black characters.

  17. And yet there are 16-year-olds who have no interest in sex or romantic relationships. Who dread the constant expectation that they should be interested, and the idea that there’s something wrong with them if they aren

    Fair enough. And I thought of that right after I hit post, and I apologize for not being clear that there are such teens, and plenty of them. But I don’t think that’s Katniss. She feels things sometimes (but not always) when with Peeta. She wonders how she feels about Gale. She’s not presented as asexual. Conflicted, but not asexual.

    If she’d felt “romantic” about Peeta in a Middle Ages sort of way, it would have presented no problem to killing him at the end.

    It didn’t–when they first announce “psyche–rules changed back, ha ha,” she assumes he’s going to try to kill her, and she’s all ready to try to kill him first– until she realizes that he’d let her. And then she hatches her berry plot. And tells him to trust her. Which he does. Even though she’d been about to kill him a moment ago.

    Thresh was even more sketchily drawn. He’s basically the Big Black Man who is big and mean enought to pull Clove off Katniss. We, like Katniss, expect him to kill her, too, because that’s all we know about him.

    I strongly agree that there are huge problems with how Thresh is presented (I don’t really agree with you on Rue–I think she’s as real as anyone else in this story). He really is shown as little other than a big brute. Not dumb: Katniss admires his thinking in going to the fields and earlier she admired him for being strong enough not to have to play to the audience. However, he speaks little, and simply, and his main purpose in this story is to let Katniss go because she was nice to the little girl from his district. I don’t think this is inherent to white people writing about black people, though. Lots of folks manage to write about characters who don’t represent their demographics just fine simply by realizing that they’re writing about people. I thought Collins did that with Rue (I think she was mostly destined to die because she was a little kid, not because she was black, and that’s pretty much pounded in from when she’s first introduced ’til she’s a body covered in flowers), but not with Thresh. The characterization of Thresh is probably my biggest problem with this book.

  18. I didn’t feel so much Magic Negro from Rue, just because her character seemed more thoroughly developed and sympathetic than most others, and because her brief relationship with Katniss seemed more even-handed–they were two fairly capable characters who were relying on each other for survival. Her intelligence and self-reliance, coupled with her physical resemblance to Prim, made for an interesting dynamic there. And while her death did contribute to Katniss’s growing rebellious leanings, Rue was pretty much guaranteed to die anyway, along with 22 other tributes (Peeta getting off on a technicality). But I completely accept that there are aspects of the story that I’m not seeing in that respect.

    Thresh bugged the everliving hell out of me, though. Of all the tributes who actually got names and speaking parts, he was the only one who was pretty much nonverbal. He disappears for the entire Games, reappears long enough to spare Katniss and bludgeon another tribute to death with a rock, and then re-disappears, never to be seen again. Thanks for the big, black, taciturn deliverer of blunt-force trauma, Collins.

  19. Thrash was an equivalent to Cato. Rue was an equivalent to Prim, if anything this humanized black characters in a way I had not seen in big movies in a long time. They were actively compared to white peers as being just as sweet and innocent (Rue and Prim) or big and scary (Thrash and Cato). Although Thrash was nicer than Cato was during the games.

    The way i read the book and saw the moive; Katniss was not sure how she felt about either one of them. If anything rattles the sense and heart it’s a life an ddeath situation. They played a game of survival of the fittest and both of them came out on top. They did it while feigning a romance, it wouldn’t be that difficult to understand how that experience could foster romantic feelings towards each other if they werent’t there before.

  20. Lucky @ 9 – MPAA ratings generally report more on content than on themes: violence, sex, nudity, drinking and drug use, spicy language, that kind of thing. The Dark Knight, Inception, and Casino Royale all got PG-13 ratings because any violence wasn’t as graphic and any sex scenes weren’t as naked–even though the themes were darker and required more sophisticated processing (and, in the case of Inception, a flow chart). It’s a lot easier for an organization to count blood spatters and f-bombs than to determine what concepts are appropriate for viewers of different ages, maturity levels, and life circumstances. That’s where parents come in.

  21. I agree with the Thresh / Cato compare and contrast. From Katniss’s POV (which is, remember, the only one we have), the only thing she cares about in relation to those two (large, strong, relatively well-fed) characters is: Will they kill her before she can kill them? And after her encounter with Thresh, she doesn’t want to be the one to kill him anymore and, when he dies, she is relieved that she wasn’t the one who had to do it. Whereas she really DOES want to kill Cato.

    This week, I started reading Battle Royale and the level of detail given of every bloody character on the bus with the main character stopped me in my tracks. I don’t NEED to know every thing there is to know about 22 people. I really don’t.

    Thresh (and the girl who eats the berries, and the kid who planted the mines, and the girl who died from the wasps) are presented in brief impressions, Katniss observes what she can, puts meaning to it if she can, but aside from admiring them for their strengths and trying to assess their weaknesses, we only know what she does about them through her brief glimpses of them.

  22. I think what we need to remember about Thresh is that he’s playing the audience, just as Katniss is–and Katniss realizes this. She doesn’t say that he’s hulking and nonverbal; she says basically that his schtick is to come across as hulking and nonverbal. When she watches his interview, she’s not thinking “wow, hope I don’t meet him in a dark alley.” Instead, she’s thinking “wow, bet no one made him learn how to twirl. Jealous!” He didn’t survive by braining everyone who came within a three-foot radius of him; he survived by hiding in a field and relying on his knowledge of edible grains. But, he creates a scary character by playing off of the Capitol’s preconceptions–and maybe ours too.

  23. @oxygengrl @13:

    There’s another possibility that could explain Katniss’s love=babies misconception: she might not have heard of contraception or it might not be available to someone of her social class. Way back in the first part, when Katniss is talking about starvation she mentions that it often happens in families that have more children than they can afford to feed. They’re probably not having extra children for the economic benefit of additional labor–although this might be a factor in districts that use child labor, like 11. It’s possible that options just aren’t available, or are only available to the small bourgois class, so people just don’t talk about it.

  24. But I don’t think that’s Katniss. She feels things sometimes (but not always) when with Peeta. She wonders how she feels about Gale. She’s not presented as asexual. Conflicted, but not asexual.

    There’s a difference between being “presented as asexual” and having certain feelings not framed as sexual/romantic/whatever.

    My concern with the readiness of people to see Katniss’s feelings as “romantic” is that I think in the real world, people tend to want to impose a narrative on other people and on situations. Our cultural narratives say that girls want to be wanted by boys, so if a girl has two boys trying to lay exclusive claim to her, she’s supposed to be flattered and attracted to them. They legitimize the boys’ claims and pressure the girl to interpret her feelings as attraction, even if they aren’t really. And if she doesn’t really understand what she is feeling (the predicament of most teenagers most of the time), she may come to believe that what people tell her she is feeling is what she is really feeling.

    I actually see both Gale’s and Peeta’s way of dealing with Katniss as pretty problematic. Both of them seem to feel that she owes it to them to give herself to them the way they want it, simply because they want her. And nobody thinks that there’s anything out of line in those demands. Actually, it’s not just Gale and Peeta: everyone is demanding from her that she turn into whatever would fit in with what they want. The idea that she might want to live on her own terms is just too weird for anyone to consider. (Do I need to spell out how this relates to feminism?)

    At the risk of committing a Spoiler, I think this is a major theme in the whole trilogy.

  25. Caperton @ 20 – You’re absolutely right, don’t for a moment mean to imply that it is anyone’s responsibility but my own to decide what is and is not appropriate for my kids to read and watch. I knew this was likely to be a very violent movie dealing with some pretty heavy topics. What left me scratching my head is why a topless woman or a few F bombs warrant a more severe warning than a spearing a 12 year old. Is marketing this book and movie to a young audience indicative of our priorities or am I reading way too much into this?

  26. There’s another possibility that could explain Katniss’s love=babies misconception: she might not have heard of contraception or it might not be available to someone of her social class. Way back in the first part, when Katniss is talking about starvation she mentions that it often happens in families that have more children than they can afford to feed. They’re probably not having extra children for the economic benefit of additional labor–although this might be a factor in districts that use child labor, like 11. It’s possible that options just aren’t available, or are only available to the small bourgois class, so people just don’t talk about it.

    Exactly that! People were willing to allow their children to put their names in the lottery an *extra* time just to eat, surely getting birth control was a very low priority when placed up against buying enough food to avoid the real probability of starving.

  27. AMM

    And yet there are 16-year-olds who have no interest in sex or romantic relationships. Who dread the constant expectation that they should be interested, and the idea that there’s something wrong with them if they aren’t.

    This is just so full of win. And speaking as one who thought this way through out her teenage years:

    During HG, I never really thought of Gale as a romantic interest for Katniss. He is her friend. She says earlier in the book that she know other girls are interested in him, and she’s upset at the idea mostly because she would lose a hunting partner. So I see no reason why this should change.

    As far as Peeta, its been said before, she’s focusing on surviving which means playing along with the whole star crossed lovers thing.

    So what is up with this idea that she must have romantic feelings for one or both of them?

  28. Lucky @ 25 – And I hope I didn’t come across as mommy-shaming. I think it can be hard to warn parents about potentially difficult themes because it’s hard to tell which themes would be difficult for which viewers. After all, we start kids on Disney films with some pretty dark themes: Bambi’s mother gets shot in the first ten minutes, Todd and Copper aren’t allowed to be friends because they’re different species and because Todd may one day be called upon to kill Copper, and Simba watches his dad get trampled to death by wildebeests and then lives the rest of his childhood in isolation because he believes it’s his fault. It’s some intense stuff. But it also reflects the harshness of reality, in a way, and introduces is in a way that’s palatable and (generally) non-scarring for children–anthropomorphic animals, musical numbers, and a happy ending.

    As kids kids get older–and do understand that I’m neither a psychologist nor a parent, just someone who knows everything about everything and is always unquestionably right–we trust them to be able to handle more realism in that area. For all the darkness in The Hunger Games, it also has elements of reality for some kids in the 6th-to-8th-grade reading zone: kids who have lived in poverty, have lost a parent, have seen friends killed, or have had to be a major source of support for their families. For a kid who hasn’t encountered any of those things before, getting to know characters in a book who are going through it might help in developing a sense of empathy and of a world outside of their own experience. Or maybe it would just give the kid nightmares–it’s hard for Scholastic or the MPAA to know whether they’re going to be dealing with worldly 11-year-olds or sheltered 14-year-olds.

    As for The Hunger Games specifically, I’m afraid the kid-spearing is just what it says on the tin. Twenty-four kids go in and one comes out; if Rue didn’t get speared, she was going to die of starvation or get stung to death by tracker jackers or something, and that’s still messed up. So sometimes it takes a little research to know what a reader might encounter, and sometimes it just takes reading the book jacket.

    tl;dr: I think that marketing books like this to kids is less indicative of a lack of caring about or attention to young audiences, and more indicative of our faith in them to be able to handle it.

  29. So what is up with this idea that she must have romantic feelings for one or both of them?

    Because she’s a girl, and everyone knows that Real Girls exist only for love. (A.k.a.: if it’s got a Girl in it, it must be a love story.)

    Because hormones trump everything.

    Because if they want her, it’s her fault, and she must want them, too. A.k.a. “she wanted it, even if she won’t admit it.”

    Because Patriarchy.

    (For a blog with the word “feminist” embedded in the name, there’s d**n little feminist analysis in these threads.)

  30. @AMM

    With alll due respect, this is the last website where anyone would insist a female character *must* be in love, because that’s *all* a woman is for.

    It is entirely possible for a feminist-centric discussion on the strong and admirable qualities of young woman in a story, which also includes her possible romantic feelings.

    No one here is saying that the most important part of Katniss’ character is that she’s in LUV OMGGG! , but we are saying that, on top of everything else she’s dealing with, it appears she does, possibly, maybe, kinda have feelings for someone.

    It’s rather unfair to say that considering that has no place in a feminist blog.

  31. I agree with AMM when it comes to Katniss’ romantic feelings. The author didn’t pull the idea of the Capitol being totally impressed with the romantic couple on the Games out of thin air. There is, of course, the fight to death between a couple that probably excites them, but they are also a mirror of our own obsession with romantic couples in entertainment. You virtually can’t find a detective or fantasy or any other kind of novel that doesn’t include a romantic pairing. And partly, it’s ok because such relationships are part of most people’s lives. But things that get pushed right along are notions that any female character anywhere needs to end up with a man. Or lose a men and end up a mere shell of a person (often the villain). Of course, there are other stereotypes (the stuck-up woman who “doesn’t need a man” but it’s totally obvious that she’s a mess without one, the spinster, the bitter ex, etc.). The point of all them is that womens’ lives are centering around romantic relationships. You can have friends, family, pets, whatever – but you gotta get yourself a man or you’re doomed. I realized as I was writing that this is terribly heteronormative, but then I realized that the same principle actually is often applied by the society to lesbians. The narrative is too often that they just need a man to set them on the right path. But I’m getting way off topic. Anyway. We’re a bit like the citizens of the Capitol. If there is only a tiny little whiff of possible romance in the air, we pounce. My friend, after watching the movie said that she can’t be bothered to read the novel(s), so she just asked another friend who had read the whole series who Katniss ends up with. Because, from the whole thing, that was what was most important to her. So I get where AMM’s frustration is coming from.

  32. I agree with AMM and Beatrice on the subject,but I also think that the stage in life of the targeted age group comes into play as well. How many lonely kids/ teenagers are there? Kids who are ignored at school, ignored at home, bullied, abused. Reading was my drug growing up, I got my comfort and love from the characters. And while I was a feminist from an early age I always read adventure/ fantasy books with a romance, because I was lonely and starved for love.

  33. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s particularly clear that Gale is interested in Katniss romantically at this point in the story. We know Peeta is, and we know that Katniss is wondering whether or not she’s interested in either of them other than as friends, but Gale’s never indicated romantic interest in her. And if Gale does come to be interested, wouldn’t one wonder if it was in part because of the romantic storyline played out in the Games (whether because it makes him realize he likes her, or because it makes him feel possessive, or whatever)?

  34. Also, to get off romance or no romance (which really is a pretty tiny subplot to this whole story), how about Katniss’ move with the berries? She goes from being ready to kill Peeta after all to risking both their deaths as a way of gaming the system to possibly keep them both alive. It’s great game theory, for one thing. But I think it’s an interesting question to ask how much this is a political act for Katniss and how much a personal one. And how much it is that in order for her to act in a way that is in keeping with maintaining some level of humanity (flashback to Peeta’s hopes for staying true to himself through the games), she has to take a very political action.

  35. I didn’t feel like she regarded it as a political act at all. She was doing what she had been doing her whole life – surviving and keeping her loved ones alive. Whatever her feelings for Peeta, they have been through a lot together and there is that memory of the time he saved (and changed) her life that seems to always be close in her thoughts when she’s dealing with Peeta.

    I think she saw it as a giant fuck you to the Capitol, but at that point in the game, I don’t think she was very aware of the true significance. She showed awareness of Capitol’s political manipulations during the games, but in the end, it seemed to me that she was just pushing for the end. That anything other than getting the hell out was unimportant.

  36. Beatrice and oxygengrrl, I think the berries were more political for Peeta and more about survival/ helping others survive for Katniss– just because that’s where those characters have been coming from all along. Just seconds before, Peeta threw his knife away but Katniss was ready to kill him. That moment was the most interesting to me.

  37. @AnneT:

    I tend to think that both Peeta throwing the knife away and taking the berries were personal decisions for him, given that he was very much in love with Katniss. I see the berries as Katniss’s first moment of looking at the Capitol and saying “you know what? Screw those guys.” Then again, maybe I’m committing the same mistake as the Capitol in thinking that a decision influenced by romance can’t be political too.

  38. I found Katniss’s immediate reaction to the second rule change interesting because she didn’t draw her bow until she saw Peeta go for his knife. Of course, she hadn’t had a lot of time to process everything, but it’s like killing him hadn’t crossed her mind yet–until it looked like he might kill her, and then she was immediately, instinctually prepared to defend herself. I don’t know that we can infer anything from that about her feelings for Peeta, but it does seem that that instinct for self-preservation is still strong–maybe stronger than her feelings for him? Maybe not? But in the end, she was able to game the Gamemakers such that the two feelings never really came into conflict.

    I was kind of disappointed (as I touched on in my love-triangle post) that romantic themes just had to be inserted into what’s otherwise a really good hero’s journey. But it seems almost subverted at the end when Katniss doesn’t get the guy, isn’t gotten by the guy, and doesn’t end up bitter and broken for not having a guy–she’s not even sure if she wants a guy, much less either of the available guys presented to her, and she has far more important things to think about than guys anyway. I’m not a ‘shipper (obviously), and I haven’t really discussed the book with anyone who is, but I wonder how many serious ‘shippers were disappointed with the end of the first book because it didn’t give a solid resolution to the romance.

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