Catching Fire, Chapter 8
Apr. 29th, 2011 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaLast chapter, there's a new peacekeeper and he's actually enforcing the laws, which means whipping Gale.
Katniss jumps in front of the whip and gets hit instead. See, stupid people? Why were you saying she shouldn't be there, someone needs to act and she's the best candidate (the government can't hate her more than they already do, and she's more protected than a random citizen).
I get a glimpse of my assailant's face. Hard, with deep lines, a cruel mouth. Gray hair shaved almost to nonexistence, eyes so black they seem all pupils, a long, straight nose reddened by the freezing air.
Remember, good people look good and evil people look eeeeviiiil.
Before he can hit her again Haymitch arrives and starts shouting about her photo shoot.
Haymitch appears and trips over a Peacekeeper lying on the ground. It's Darius. A huge purple lump pushes through the red hair on his forehead. He's knocked out but still breathing. What happened? Did he try to come to Gale's aid before I got here?
Wow, that's weird. I mean really, how does this whole peacekeeper thing work? Why are the local peacekeepers all great caring people?
Everything about this man, his commanding voice, his odd accent, warns of an unknown and dangerous threat. Where has he come from? District 11? 3? From the Capitol itself?
Okay, first, you know the capital accent, so you'd recognize it if that was it. (And probably Rue's, you spent a while talking to her.) But aside from that, this raises an interesting question.
We know there's no travel between and virtually no shared information about the districts. So, are peacekeepers usually from the same district? Or are they assigned to different districts to encourage less fraternizing with the citizens? How are they recruited? What do the other people who knew them think about their decision to join?
From the way Katniss talks, it seems that peacekeepers are probably local normally. In that case, though, strangers should be far more frightening. It's unclear exactly how large the district is, but everyone seems to know everyone. The presence of anyone new should be a shock all by itself, much more than it would be to someone normally.
Peeta is also there as backup. You know, if the plan was to go get Haymitch and help Gale, why the fuck couldn't he just tell her that?
The new Head Peacekeeper glances over at his backup squad. With relief, I see they're familiar faces, old friends from the Hob. You can tell by their expressions that they're not enjoying the show.
Why'd they become peacekeepers? How were they picked? From the sound of it, no one signed up because they expected they'd actually be enforcing laws, so with that in mind, why isn't everyone competing for such a cushy job?
One, a woman named Purnia who eats regularly at Greasy Sae's, steps forward stiffly. “I believe, for a first offense, the required number of lashes has been dispensed, sir. Unless your sentence is death, which we would carry out by firing squad.”
Purnia? What the hell book this is not how you name. But hey, a female peacekeeper! And she's doing stuff.
Get your cousin out of here, then, girl. And if he comes to, remind him that the next time he poaches off the Capitol's land, I'll assemble that firing squad personally.
Huh.
Last book I talked about who they were poaching from and how it seemed the answer was no one, so it wasn't poaching and the rules made no sense.
To quote our friend Wikipedia: Poaching is the illegal taking of wild plants or animals contrary to local and international conservation and wildlife management laws. Or another way to put it, there are two reasons something's poaching - either the animal is protected from all hunting, or the hunting rights belong to someone who isn't you.
When you poach off the king's land, it's a crime because that's his game - both in the sense he wants to hunt it himself and the sense that he's the one who's going to eat it.
How can you poach off the capital's land when they don't use it? It isn't a protected area because capital citizens want fun hunting or capital cooks demand the game for their own use. From what Katniss said, it was originally fenced off because animals were eating people.
Now, going beyond the fence could be a crime for various reasons - it means making or at least using a hole in the fence that should be fixed, it gives you a chance to escape, and you could be in communication with rebels. If there was any sign the capital was properly controlling the economy, it could also be banned because it gives people a way to survive without them - people shouldn't be allowed to poach for supper instead of work for the capital, and knowing how to survive on their own makes them harder to control if there's a rebellion.
Instead it's evululz.
Leevy, a girl who lives a few houses down from mine in the Seam, takes my arm. My mother kept her little brother alive last year when he caught the measles.
What.
They aren't even vaccinated?
Do you know what unvaccinated populations are? A disease reservoir. Vaccination isn't perfect. If you're in contact with the disease over a long period, there's a good chance you'll get sick yourself, especially because sooner or later your immune system will have a bad day. And all the while, the disease is breeding and mutating until the vaccination no longer works at all.
Every time anyone from the capital comes down, they run the risk of getting sick with some nasty superbug. When you send your troop into a different district, they're at risk of getting hit by whatever local variant that area has.
Now, this is a mistake you can make with a hedonistic, short-sighted population of idiots. America has been sliding in this direction for a while. But it's not a mistake you make when you're the iron-fisted ruler of a police state, because half your police force getting laid up by the measles is an attack on your own power.
Anyway, it turns out Cray disappeared sometime after this morning. Gale went to his house because he liked turkey and ran into the new guy.
Romulus Thread
Book. Stop. Just stop.
“He told Thread he found it wandering around the Seam. Said it got over the fence and he'd stabbed it with a stick. Still a crime.
What the fuck?
We know that even in Rue's horrible district, they're allowed to eat animals that get past the fence. This also means "poaching on capital land" means the district itself, and while I can sort of see the reasoning that everything is theirs, how do you even enforce this? What if someone's keeping turkeys, how can you tell the difference between "their" turkey and a "capital" turkey that wandered in? How do you deal with the wild dog packs if they get in, if you kill them in self-defense are you poaching? What about the goats that are being grazed on the capital's land, and the plants Katniss gathered as a kid?
(And turkeys CAN FLY so they'll "get over the fence" all the time. And you can do a lot to a population, but tell starving people to let food walk away again? No. It's unenforceable and a waste of time. And worse, unenforceable means you're just teaching people the limits of your power and that they don't have to be afraid of you all the time.)
Anyway they bring him to Katniss' mom.
“Don't worry,” says Haymitch. “Used to be a lot of whipping before Cray. She's the one we took them to.”
I can't remember a time before Cray, a time when there was a Head Peacekeeper who used the whip freely.
Why so ignorant, Katniss?
What, your dad absolutely never compared the current state of things and how it used to be? Never said how it was a lot safer being a poacher these days? Your mom never said anything? The people at the Hob never said anything? Do you live in a tiny little bubble or something?
I multiply my own pain once, twice, forty times and can only hope that Gale remains unconscious. Of course, that's too much to ask for. As the final bandages are being placed, a moan escapes his lips.
They have cheap knockout sugar syrup, book, remember? It was kind of a plot point last time.
Hazelle strokes his hair and whispers something while my mother and Prim go through their meager store of painkillers, the kind usually accessible only to doctors. They are hard to come by, expensive, and always in demand. My mother has to save the strongest for the worst pain, but what is the worst pain? To me, it's always the pain that is present. If I were in charge, those painkillers would be gone in a day because I have so little ability to watch suffering.
Expensive, you say? Oh, if only you have access to some sort of huge store of money you didn't need.
My mother tries to save them for those who are actually in the process of dying, to ease them out of the world.
You know, if you're serious about triage, you should just smother that group and save the medicine for the people who'll need it to make it through the night. I'm generally supportive of morphining people to death if it's inevitable, but if you've got limited supplies, it goes to the living.
Katniss starts getting upset that they're not giving him stronger painkillers, and her mom references the sleep syrup but for some reason it isn't good enough because I don't know, drama, and she has to be dragged out in hysterics and held down on a bed in another room until she calms down because I don't know.
Eventually her mom comes in and it's time for everyone to talk.
“So it's starting again?” she says. “Like before?”
“By the looks of it,” he answers. “Who'd have thought we'd ever be sorry to see old Cray go?”
Uh, anyone sane? From the looks of it, things royally sucked before him and they royally suck everywhere else.
Cray would have been disliked, anyway, because of the uniform he wore
Why? Katniss is on good terms with him and the other peacekeepers, and it seems they weren't doing anything bad. More, it seems Cray was likely taking a huge risk by not enforcing those laws. And the other peacekeepers seem like quite good people, since the guy tried to physically restrain the head peacekeeper and the woman lied through her teeth about actual punishments to get him to stop, and that's definitely a risk for both of them. You people are a bunch of ungrateful bastards, you know that?
but it was his habit of luring starving young women into his bed for money that made him an object of loathing in the district. In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them.
So he's evil because he pays for sex and isn't a pedophile. Got it.
Let's talk about "lure". When you lure someone, it's generally implying some degree of trickery. For example, he could lure young women into his bed with the promise of marriage to someone getting a decent salary. That would be bad. Instead, he's paying them, and apparently for a known amount instead of promising a large amount and then giving them little afterward.
It doesn't even say he was misleading them about what they'd have to do or abusing them, and he seems to be having sex with adult women. And it doesn't seem like he's carrying some nasty STD he didn't disclose, or stacking the deck to get them to make a bad decision for short term reward. In fact, given he let the black market run and otherwise gave people who couldn't be employed other options, he seems to have been doing the complete opposite of trying to force people to this point. I mean, he could have been enforcing the rules and whipping people unless they fucked him instead. That's what abusing power looks like.
So - he'd be a better person if he didn't sleep with the starving women and just let them starve? It's impossible that the women made their own choice in the matter, and decided they'd rather sleep with him and get extra money? And of course it's only the most desperate who take him up on it, because no one in the district could possibly look at their employment options and decide that comparatively, prostitution has a lot going for it.
I mean, this is the district that abuses orphans and nearly let Katniss die of starvation. I really don't think paying for sex is going to win you Asshole of the Year. Honestly, until someone says Cray was also a chauvinist asshole to the women involved, Peeta and Gale have both out-assholed paying for sex in the space of a chapter.
I have the sinking feeling the book's primary objection here, the reason he's so terrible, has nothing to do with the idea he's taking advantage, but simply that sex before marriage is morally wrong, and that's why people dislike him.
Anyway.
They hear someone at the door and all assume it's peacekeepers. Why? No one else has done anything wrong, they've been busy with Gale. After all that, it turns out to be Marge, whose mother sent her own painkillers.
“It's from the Capitol. It's called morphling,” my mother answers.
The word is morphine. And this is particularly idiotic because morphling sounds like it means a thing that morphs. Look, I put up with stupid shit like "muttations" because fine, maybe it's a reference to the things being mutated and combinations of existing animals, so mutate and mutt. But this is just fucking random. And why would words in common use, like turkey, and obscure words, like katniss, be completely unchanged, but something requiring scientific knowledge to manufacture changes this severely?
“I didn't even know Madge knew Gale,” says Peeta.
“We used to sell her strawberries,” I say almost angrily. What am I angry about, though? Not that she has brought the medicine, surely.
“She must have quite a taste for them,” says Haymitch.
That's what nettles me. It's the implication that there's something going on between Gale and Madge. And I don't like it.
♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠
For the first time, I reverse our positions in my head. I imagine watching Gale volunteering to save Rory in the reaping, having him torn from my life, becoming some strange girl's lover to stay alive, and then coming home with her. Living next to her. Promising to marry her.
The hatred I feel for him, for the phantom girl, for everything, is so real and immediate that it chokes me. Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable. Why did it take him being whipped within an inch of his life to see it?
True love is defined by possession and hate.
What's depressing is this is still better than fucking Twilight.
Because I'm selfish. I'm a coward. I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die. This is the girl Gale met in the woods today.
You mean, when you suggested getting absolutely everyone involved out because the government was specifically gunning for them, despite the fact you'd have to take care of all of them? And Gale was totally fine with leaving but threw a tantrum at the idea of letting anyone else come?
Yes clearly Katniss was the one at fault there.
No wonder I won the Games. No decent person ever does.
So close and yet so terribly far.
Katniss, indeed, was not a decent person then. She hated the other kids. She not only killed them, she wanted to kill them and made no efforts to do so humanely. And she's done a lot since then. But nothing the book lists here is that. Katniss trying to save her family and friends is not wrong. It's not selfish. Even if Katniss couldn't convince anyone to come and had to leave alone, it still wouldn't be wrong. You are not obligated to die with people. If there's nothing at all you can do to save them, if they refuse what help you can give, you're not selfish to save yourself.
She thinks that at least she saved Peeta too.
But now I question even that. I knew good and well that my life back in District 12 would be unlivable if I let that boy die.
Then the people of District 12 are terrible.
Katniss was indeed obligated by basic human decency to find Peeta. When she discovered he was injured, she was safe enough and it was right to try to help him. Even getting the medicine probably still is covered by this, because she needed to kill the other kids who'd also be showing up either way and she could hide herself well enough that just going to see if she had a chance was pretty safe.
But past a certain point - no, the berries were a choice. They were told there was no way out. She figured out there was another option and chose to do that at great risk to herself. If people would have shunned her for not dying in his place, people are horrible.
I realize the answer to who I am lies in that handful of poisonous fruit. If I held them out to save Peeta because I knew I would be shunned if I came back without him, then I am despicable. If I held them out because I loved him, I am still self-centered, although forgivable. But if I held them out to defy the Capitol, I am someone of worth. The trouble is, I don't know exactly what was going on inside me at that moment.
So hey.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica. (Go watch it, kids!) Some people object to this because they see it as encouraging women to be self-sacrificing. Where were they when this book was getting popular, because jesus fucking christ how can someone write this.
And this is written by a woman. It's written by a woman and she's apparently upped female self-sacrifice to the point it doesn't even count if you do it to save someone you love, you have to do it for everyone or you're a self-centered little bitch who has to hope people forgive you for it. Doing it for everyone is the only way you can have any worth at all.
Just helping one person isn't good enough! Help all of them! Or you're WORTHLESS! And you'd better not get anything for doing it or it doesn't count!
Kyubey approves.
Katniss keeps rambling.
Could it be the people in the districts are right? That it was an act of rebellion, even if it was an unconscious one?
Oh, women. When will they learn their little women heads are so full of stupid they don't even know why they do things?
The author is a woman so I'm going to decide she wrote this as a meta condemnation of how people are willing to blindly accept the narrative's voice even when it's pushing messages most people would reject when stated outright. She may say other things but that was her unconscious motive regardless of what she thinks. I'm not her, so clearly I'm better at figuring out why she did stuff.
Because, deep down, I must know it isn't enough to keep myself, or my family, or my friends alive by running away. Even if I could. It wouldn't fix anything. It wouldn't stop people from being hurt the way Gale was today.
Okay, for one thing, there's a difference between general oppression and targeted oppression. Snow being generally a scary bastard and Snow telling you to your face that he will order Gale's death is not the same thing.
Running when the government says they will personally kill you apart is not cowardly. It is not abandoning the people who are really in trouble. Even assuming you're obligated to ignore all misery as long as someone's worse off, Katniss, you have officially won this round of oppression olympics! The government is coming to torture you to death because Snow just hates you a whole lot. Here's your medal, get running.
Next, the thing with the new peacekeeper is, you know, NEW. As in, it wasn't a factor back when you were making the decision, so it's not relevant.
Also, running away and taking away their workers is an act of rebellion. Run out of their reach set up something survivable out there and come back for those people you're so worried about. Because rebellion - that's going to make people get hurt, people who wouldn't have been otherwise. You do know that, right?
No, of course you don't.
Katniss instead kisses Gale.
My choices are simple. I can die like quarry in the woods or I can die here beside Gale. “I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay right here and cause all kinds of trouble.”
No, they're really not.
I want to run through this carefully.
Katniss and Gale are the only two people in the group - indeed, by all appearances, the entire district - who know basic hunting. If we've lucky, Madge has learned the very basics of shooting a bow as well. But basically, two people.
These two people are everyone else's only hope of surviving outside the reach of the capital and the food the capital provides. They're also the only ones who have successfully hidden from a hovercraft and know it can be done. Katniss has a pretty good chance of getting out of their range and surviving and even saving other people like that. Even assuming starting trouble in the district is a valid goal, they're among the last people who should be doing so.
Next, it's the dead of winter. The dead of winter is the worst possible time to be rebelling. If the capital cuts supplies they won't even be able to keep warm, just having a coal mine doesn't mean you can easily get the stuff out. They're completely reliant on stored food and what the capital sells them, because hunting and gathering will provide almost nothing now. Fleeing will be horrible - the snow does is make travel harder and their path easier to follow. People will die to starvation and exposure.
The only reason to rebel now is District 8, and unless they're very well set up for a rebellion right now that's not good enough. There's no way of knowing how well 8 planned this, but given they're armed with bricks getting shot down in the streets, I'm guessing it's a riot, not a rebellion, and it's not going to last long. If your best hope is that there's more of you than bullets, you're fucked. 12 doing the same thing isn't going to accomplish much. Maybe if you got all the districts going at once you'd have the numbers, but there's no evidence of that and if this was being coordinated (it'd be pretty easy to coordinate if the mayors were in on it - just wait until you see the news report) I think 8 would have waited to be more ready.
Then there's the issue of conditions. Things have just gotten a lot worse. A lot of people who were okay will suddenly be having second thoughts. Now is not the time to rush in with the handful of people who always believed, it's to find out who else wants to join. It's also a good trial run in logistics and goodwill - start organizing to help people. Work out systems to pass messages and keep a black market running, to protect people, to warn them in advance so they can avoid being caught doing anything illegal. If you can't even do that much, you can't manage a rebellion and worse, you'll never be able to hold together things after a victory.
Finally...cause all kinds of trouble? This is a government that's murdered almost two thousand kids over one rebellion. You cause them trouble, they hurt everyone. You can't just do anything that might annoy them and hope it adds up. You have to weigh every act of defiance against what they'll do in retaliation.
...It occurs to me that after the failtastic way the childmurder games were dealt with, I'm suddenly curious just how the book will twist the expected rebellion story up in a similar pretzel of amorality and self-centeredness.
Katniss jumps in front of the whip and gets hit instead. See, stupid people? Why were you saying she shouldn't be there, someone needs to act and she's the best candidate (the government can't hate her more than they already do, and she's more protected than a random citizen).
I get a glimpse of my assailant's face. Hard, with deep lines, a cruel mouth. Gray hair shaved almost to nonexistence, eyes so black they seem all pupils, a long, straight nose reddened by the freezing air.
Remember, good people look good and evil people look eeeeviiiil.
Before he can hit her again Haymitch arrives and starts shouting about her photo shoot.
Haymitch appears and trips over a Peacekeeper lying on the ground. It's Darius. A huge purple lump pushes through the red hair on his forehead. He's knocked out but still breathing. What happened? Did he try to come to Gale's aid before I got here?
Wow, that's weird. I mean really, how does this whole peacekeeper thing work? Why are the local peacekeepers all great caring people?
Everything about this man, his commanding voice, his odd accent, warns of an unknown and dangerous threat. Where has he come from? District 11? 3? From the Capitol itself?
Okay, first, you know the capital accent, so you'd recognize it if that was it. (And probably Rue's, you spent a while talking to her.) But aside from that, this raises an interesting question.
We know there's no travel between and virtually no shared information about the districts. So, are peacekeepers usually from the same district? Or are they assigned to different districts to encourage less fraternizing with the citizens? How are they recruited? What do the other people who knew them think about their decision to join?
From the way Katniss talks, it seems that peacekeepers are probably local normally. In that case, though, strangers should be far more frightening. It's unclear exactly how large the district is, but everyone seems to know everyone. The presence of anyone new should be a shock all by itself, much more than it would be to someone normally.
Peeta is also there as backup. You know, if the plan was to go get Haymitch and help Gale, why the fuck couldn't he just tell her that?
The new Head Peacekeeper glances over at his backup squad. With relief, I see they're familiar faces, old friends from the Hob. You can tell by their expressions that they're not enjoying the show.
Why'd they become peacekeepers? How were they picked? From the sound of it, no one signed up because they expected they'd actually be enforcing laws, so with that in mind, why isn't everyone competing for such a cushy job?
One, a woman named Purnia who eats regularly at Greasy Sae's, steps forward stiffly. “I believe, for a first offense, the required number of lashes has been dispensed, sir. Unless your sentence is death, which we would carry out by firing squad.”
Purnia? What the hell book this is not how you name. But hey, a female peacekeeper! And she's doing stuff.
Get your cousin out of here, then, girl. And if he comes to, remind him that the next time he poaches off the Capitol's land, I'll assemble that firing squad personally.
Huh.
Last book I talked about who they were poaching from and how it seemed the answer was no one, so it wasn't poaching and the rules made no sense.
To quote our friend Wikipedia: Poaching is the illegal taking of wild plants or animals contrary to local and international conservation and wildlife management laws. Or another way to put it, there are two reasons something's poaching - either the animal is protected from all hunting, or the hunting rights belong to someone who isn't you.
When you poach off the king's land, it's a crime because that's his game - both in the sense he wants to hunt it himself and the sense that he's the one who's going to eat it.
How can you poach off the capital's land when they don't use it? It isn't a protected area because capital citizens want fun hunting or capital cooks demand the game for their own use. From what Katniss said, it was originally fenced off because animals were eating people.
Now, going beyond the fence could be a crime for various reasons - it means making or at least using a hole in the fence that should be fixed, it gives you a chance to escape, and you could be in communication with rebels. If there was any sign the capital was properly controlling the economy, it could also be banned because it gives people a way to survive without them - people shouldn't be allowed to poach for supper instead of work for the capital, and knowing how to survive on their own makes them harder to control if there's a rebellion.
Instead it's evululz.
Leevy, a girl who lives a few houses down from mine in the Seam, takes my arm. My mother kept her little brother alive last year when he caught the measles.
What.
They aren't even vaccinated?
Do you know what unvaccinated populations are? A disease reservoir. Vaccination isn't perfect. If you're in contact with the disease over a long period, there's a good chance you'll get sick yourself, especially because sooner or later your immune system will have a bad day. And all the while, the disease is breeding and mutating until the vaccination no longer works at all.
Every time anyone from the capital comes down, they run the risk of getting sick with some nasty superbug. When you send your troop into a different district, they're at risk of getting hit by whatever local variant that area has.
Now, this is a mistake you can make with a hedonistic, short-sighted population of idiots. America has been sliding in this direction for a while. But it's not a mistake you make when you're the iron-fisted ruler of a police state, because half your police force getting laid up by the measles is an attack on your own power.
Anyway, it turns out Cray disappeared sometime after this morning. Gale went to his house because he liked turkey and ran into the new guy.
Romulus Thread
Book. Stop. Just stop.
“He told Thread he found it wandering around the Seam. Said it got over the fence and he'd stabbed it with a stick. Still a crime.
What the fuck?
We know that even in Rue's horrible district, they're allowed to eat animals that get past the fence. This also means "poaching on capital land" means the district itself, and while I can sort of see the reasoning that everything is theirs, how do you even enforce this? What if someone's keeping turkeys, how can you tell the difference between "their" turkey and a "capital" turkey that wandered in? How do you deal with the wild dog packs if they get in, if you kill them in self-defense are you poaching? What about the goats that are being grazed on the capital's land, and the plants Katniss gathered as a kid?
(And turkeys CAN FLY so they'll "get over the fence" all the time. And you can do a lot to a population, but tell starving people to let food walk away again? No. It's unenforceable and a waste of time. And worse, unenforceable means you're just teaching people the limits of your power and that they don't have to be afraid of you all the time.)
Anyway they bring him to Katniss' mom.
“Don't worry,” says Haymitch. “Used to be a lot of whipping before Cray. She's the one we took them to.”
I can't remember a time before Cray, a time when there was a Head Peacekeeper who used the whip freely.
Why so ignorant, Katniss?
What, your dad absolutely never compared the current state of things and how it used to be? Never said how it was a lot safer being a poacher these days? Your mom never said anything? The people at the Hob never said anything? Do you live in a tiny little bubble or something?
I multiply my own pain once, twice, forty times and can only hope that Gale remains unconscious. Of course, that's too much to ask for. As the final bandages are being placed, a moan escapes his lips.
They have cheap knockout sugar syrup, book, remember? It was kind of a plot point last time.
Hazelle strokes his hair and whispers something while my mother and Prim go through their meager store of painkillers, the kind usually accessible only to doctors. They are hard to come by, expensive, and always in demand. My mother has to save the strongest for the worst pain, but what is the worst pain? To me, it's always the pain that is present. If I were in charge, those painkillers would be gone in a day because I have so little ability to watch suffering.
Expensive, you say? Oh, if only you have access to some sort of huge store of money you didn't need.
My mother tries to save them for those who are actually in the process of dying, to ease them out of the world.
You know, if you're serious about triage, you should just smother that group and save the medicine for the people who'll need it to make it through the night. I'm generally supportive of morphining people to death if it's inevitable, but if you've got limited supplies, it goes to the living.
Katniss starts getting upset that they're not giving him stronger painkillers, and her mom references the sleep syrup but for some reason it isn't good enough because I don't know, drama, and she has to be dragged out in hysterics and held down on a bed in another room until she calms down because I don't know.
Eventually her mom comes in and it's time for everyone to talk.
“So it's starting again?” she says. “Like before?”
“By the looks of it,” he answers. “Who'd have thought we'd ever be sorry to see old Cray go?”
Uh, anyone sane? From the looks of it, things royally sucked before him and they royally suck everywhere else.
Cray would have been disliked, anyway, because of the uniform he wore
Why? Katniss is on good terms with him and the other peacekeepers, and it seems they weren't doing anything bad. More, it seems Cray was likely taking a huge risk by not enforcing those laws. And the other peacekeepers seem like quite good people, since the guy tried to physically restrain the head peacekeeper and the woman lied through her teeth about actual punishments to get him to stop, and that's definitely a risk for both of them. You people are a bunch of ungrateful bastards, you know that?
but it was his habit of luring starving young women into his bed for money that made him an object of loathing in the district. In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them.
So he's evil because he pays for sex and isn't a pedophile. Got it.
Let's talk about "lure". When you lure someone, it's generally implying some degree of trickery. For example, he could lure young women into his bed with the promise of marriage to someone getting a decent salary. That would be bad. Instead, he's paying them, and apparently for a known amount instead of promising a large amount and then giving them little afterward.
It doesn't even say he was misleading them about what they'd have to do or abusing them, and he seems to be having sex with adult women. And it doesn't seem like he's carrying some nasty STD he didn't disclose, or stacking the deck to get them to make a bad decision for short term reward. In fact, given he let the black market run and otherwise gave people who couldn't be employed other options, he seems to have been doing the complete opposite of trying to force people to this point. I mean, he could have been enforcing the rules and whipping people unless they fucked him instead. That's what abusing power looks like.
So - he'd be a better person if he didn't sleep with the starving women and just let them starve? It's impossible that the women made their own choice in the matter, and decided they'd rather sleep with him and get extra money? And of course it's only the most desperate who take him up on it, because no one in the district could possibly look at their employment options and decide that comparatively, prostitution has a lot going for it.
I mean, this is the district that abuses orphans and nearly let Katniss die of starvation. I really don't think paying for sex is going to win you Asshole of the Year. Honestly, until someone says Cray was also a chauvinist asshole to the women involved, Peeta and Gale have both out-assholed paying for sex in the space of a chapter.
I have the sinking feeling the book's primary objection here, the reason he's so terrible, has nothing to do with the idea he's taking advantage, but simply that sex before marriage is morally wrong, and that's why people dislike him.
Anyway.
They hear someone at the door and all assume it's peacekeepers. Why? No one else has done anything wrong, they've been busy with Gale. After all that, it turns out to be Marge, whose mother sent her own painkillers.
“It's from the Capitol. It's called morphling,” my mother answers.
The word is morphine. And this is particularly idiotic because morphling sounds like it means a thing that morphs. Look, I put up with stupid shit like "muttations" because fine, maybe it's a reference to the things being mutated and combinations of existing animals, so mutate and mutt. But this is just fucking random. And why would words in common use, like turkey, and obscure words, like katniss, be completely unchanged, but something requiring scientific knowledge to manufacture changes this severely?
“I didn't even know Madge knew Gale,” says Peeta.
“We used to sell her strawberries,” I say almost angrily. What am I angry about, though? Not that she has brought the medicine, surely.
“She must have quite a taste for them,” says Haymitch.
That's what nettles me. It's the implication that there's something going on between Gale and Madge. And I don't like it.
♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠
For the first time, I reverse our positions in my head. I imagine watching Gale volunteering to save Rory in the reaping, having him torn from my life, becoming some strange girl's lover to stay alive, and then coming home with her. Living next to her. Promising to marry her.
The hatred I feel for him, for the phantom girl, for everything, is so real and immediate that it chokes me. Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable. Why did it take him being whipped within an inch of his life to see it?
True love is defined by possession and hate.
What's depressing is this is still better than fucking Twilight.
Because I'm selfish. I'm a coward. I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die. This is the girl Gale met in the woods today.
You mean, when you suggested getting absolutely everyone involved out because the government was specifically gunning for them, despite the fact you'd have to take care of all of them? And Gale was totally fine with leaving but threw a tantrum at the idea of letting anyone else come?
Yes clearly Katniss was the one at fault there.
No wonder I won the Games. No decent person ever does.
So close and yet so terribly far.
Katniss, indeed, was not a decent person then. She hated the other kids. She not only killed them, she wanted to kill them and made no efforts to do so humanely. And she's done a lot since then. But nothing the book lists here is that. Katniss trying to save her family and friends is not wrong. It's not selfish. Even if Katniss couldn't convince anyone to come and had to leave alone, it still wouldn't be wrong. You are not obligated to die with people. If there's nothing at all you can do to save them, if they refuse what help you can give, you're not selfish to save yourself.
She thinks that at least she saved Peeta too.
But now I question even that. I knew good and well that my life back in District 12 would be unlivable if I let that boy die.
Then the people of District 12 are terrible.
Katniss was indeed obligated by basic human decency to find Peeta. When she discovered he was injured, she was safe enough and it was right to try to help him. Even getting the medicine probably still is covered by this, because she needed to kill the other kids who'd also be showing up either way and she could hide herself well enough that just going to see if she had a chance was pretty safe.
But past a certain point - no, the berries were a choice. They were told there was no way out. She figured out there was another option and chose to do that at great risk to herself. If people would have shunned her for not dying in his place, people are horrible.
I realize the answer to who I am lies in that handful of poisonous fruit. If I held them out to save Peeta because I knew I would be shunned if I came back without him, then I am despicable. If I held them out because I loved him, I am still self-centered, although forgivable. But if I held them out to defy the Capitol, I am someone of worth. The trouble is, I don't know exactly what was going on inside me at that moment.
So hey.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica. (Go watch it, kids!) Some people object to this because they see it as encouraging women to be self-sacrificing. Where were they when this book was getting popular, because jesus fucking christ how can someone write this.
And this is written by a woman. It's written by a woman and she's apparently upped female self-sacrifice to the point it doesn't even count if you do it to save someone you love, you have to do it for everyone or you're a self-centered little bitch who has to hope people forgive you for it. Doing it for everyone is the only way you can have any worth at all.
Just helping one person isn't good enough! Help all of them! Or you're WORTHLESS! And you'd better not get anything for doing it or it doesn't count!
Kyubey approves.
Katniss keeps rambling.
Could it be the people in the districts are right? That it was an act of rebellion, even if it was an unconscious one?
Oh, women. When will they learn their little women heads are so full of stupid they don't even know why they do things?
The author is a woman so I'm going to decide she wrote this as a meta condemnation of how people are willing to blindly accept the narrative's voice even when it's pushing messages most people would reject when stated outright. She may say other things but that was her unconscious motive regardless of what she thinks. I'm not her, so clearly I'm better at figuring out why she did stuff.
Because, deep down, I must know it isn't enough to keep myself, or my family, or my friends alive by running away. Even if I could. It wouldn't fix anything. It wouldn't stop people from being hurt the way Gale was today.
Okay, for one thing, there's a difference between general oppression and targeted oppression. Snow being generally a scary bastard and Snow telling you to your face that he will order Gale's death is not the same thing.
Running when the government says they will personally kill you apart is not cowardly. It is not abandoning the people who are really in trouble. Even assuming you're obligated to ignore all misery as long as someone's worse off, Katniss, you have officially won this round of oppression olympics! The government is coming to torture you to death because Snow just hates you a whole lot. Here's your medal, get running.
Next, the thing with the new peacekeeper is, you know, NEW. As in, it wasn't a factor back when you were making the decision, so it's not relevant.
Also, running away and taking away their workers is an act of rebellion. Run out of their reach set up something survivable out there and come back for those people you're so worried about. Because rebellion - that's going to make people get hurt, people who wouldn't have been otherwise. You do know that, right?
No, of course you don't.
Katniss instead kisses Gale.
My choices are simple. I can die like quarry in the woods or I can die here beside Gale. “I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay right here and cause all kinds of trouble.”
No, they're really not.
I want to run through this carefully.
Katniss and Gale are the only two people in the group - indeed, by all appearances, the entire district - who know basic hunting. If we've lucky, Madge has learned the very basics of shooting a bow as well. But basically, two people.
These two people are everyone else's only hope of surviving outside the reach of the capital and the food the capital provides. They're also the only ones who have successfully hidden from a hovercraft and know it can be done. Katniss has a pretty good chance of getting out of their range and surviving and even saving other people like that. Even assuming starting trouble in the district is a valid goal, they're among the last people who should be doing so.
Next, it's the dead of winter. The dead of winter is the worst possible time to be rebelling. If the capital cuts supplies they won't even be able to keep warm, just having a coal mine doesn't mean you can easily get the stuff out. They're completely reliant on stored food and what the capital sells them, because hunting and gathering will provide almost nothing now. Fleeing will be horrible - the snow does is make travel harder and their path easier to follow. People will die to starvation and exposure.
The only reason to rebel now is District 8, and unless they're very well set up for a rebellion right now that's not good enough. There's no way of knowing how well 8 planned this, but given they're armed with bricks getting shot down in the streets, I'm guessing it's a riot, not a rebellion, and it's not going to last long. If your best hope is that there's more of you than bullets, you're fucked. 12 doing the same thing isn't going to accomplish much. Maybe if you got all the districts going at once you'd have the numbers, but there's no evidence of that and if this was being coordinated (it'd be pretty easy to coordinate if the mayors were in on it - just wait until you see the news report) I think 8 would have waited to be more ready.
Then there's the issue of conditions. Things have just gotten a lot worse. A lot of people who were okay will suddenly be having second thoughts. Now is not the time to rush in with the handful of people who always believed, it's to find out who else wants to join. It's also a good trial run in logistics and goodwill - start organizing to help people. Work out systems to pass messages and keep a black market running, to protect people, to warn them in advance so they can avoid being caught doing anything illegal. If you can't even do that much, you can't manage a rebellion and worse, you'll never be able to hold together things after a victory.
Finally...cause all kinds of trouble? This is a government that's murdered almost two thousand kids over one rebellion. You cause them trouble, they hurt everyone. You can't just do anything that might annoy them and hope it adds up. You have to weigh every act of defiance against what they'll do in retaliation.
...It occurs to me that after the failtastic way the childmurder games were dealt with, I'm suddenly curious just how the book will twist the expected rebellion story up in a similar pretzel of amorality and self-centeredness.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-04-30 02:30 am (UTC)Well, if the town is that sort of prudish, women who sell themselves for text will get hurt. So it's definitely sleazy of him but, like you said, these are adult women capable of weighing their options and making decisions for themselves, and when all of the available options suck it's not really a bad thing to have an additional sucky option. And also like you said, the love interests are chauvinists too, so my reaction isn't, "Wow, this Cray guy is a real asshole!" it's "And the men of District 12 continue to be assholes. Big surprise!"
I'm suddenly curious just how the book will twist the expected rebellion story up in a similar pretzel of amorality and self-centeredness.
I've read the spoilers and you are in for a treat. >:)
no subject
Date: 2011-04-30 02:42 am (UTC)It depends on if Katniss' description is her own or telling us what the town generally thinks. If prevailing thought is that they and Cray are both immoral, they're getting hurt, but if this is considered either excusable or a matter of Cray taking advantage of them, that's a lot better.
Really, the only thing that's really sketchy is the bit about young women, and it's not really clear how young and how much that's because young women are the ones who usually get in the most desperate situations and need to prostitute themselves.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2012-02-02 02:33 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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Date: 2011-04-30 03:13 am (UTC)I'm going to assume it's not a good thing that he approves here .__.
Qbey
Date: 2011-04-30 03:17 am (UTC)Re: Qbey
From:Re: Qbey
From:Re: Qbey
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From:no subject
Date: 2011-04-30 11:11 pm (UTC)Mm, before marriage specifically? Because I'd assume the author's train of thought simply stops at "prostitution is icky" - sure, they're making their own choice, but anybody who would give you money for sex must be evil because, well, having sex for money is bad! She almost definitely hasn't thought as far as what consequences this actually has for the women involved, but I don't think you need to be even remotely opposed to the idea of sex before marriage to think of prostitution as an inherently Bad Thing.
Unless I've forgotten some part where the author actually is preaching against sex before marriage.
(I am also watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Aaaaa everything is creepy. And I'm only on episode two. @_@)
no subject
Date: 2011-05-01 12:14 am (UTC)(There's nothing to creepy going on at all! Mami knows what she's doing, it's fine.)
no subject
Date: 2011-05-01 12:59 am (UTC)It's not just that they're most likely to win and then their district gets goodies. If you have multiple trained kids who you can count on to volunteer each year, that means every other kid in that district is safe. It doesn't matter who's name is drawn by lottery because volunteering is allowed. So while everything's still powered by a forsaken child, no one else has to be afraid or afraid for their child.
Every kid between twelve and eighteen can take tesserae for every member of their family every year. My first thought was that that would put more food on the market, but the Capital could create artificial shortages in everything else (While your interpretation of "The Capital has decadence because they are stealing all the products of the districts' labor" is a much superior social allegory, when I was reading through it I always thought of the starvation as an artificial shortage created by the Ministry of Plenty for the evilulz.) It depends on how much food there really is to go around, and how reluctant or willing the Capital is to change their promise that a tesserae is by definition a year's grain and oil on near-starvation rations. Still, they could do it anyway.
Trained kids wouldn't just mean your chosen kids were less likely to die or that the district was more likely to be rewarded. Depending on actual availability of food out there, it could really mean that no one in the whole rest of the district has to die of starvation. It would just mean being complicit in living in Omelas, not having the starve/be punished because they're being the good little boys and girls the Capital wants the formerly rebellious distrcts to be, justifications for training kids for the childmurder games when one or two would die anyway, which would be that temptation you were talking about earlier and therefore a much more interesting book.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-01 02:10 am (UTC)Compare that to the crop of kids from the other district, which include a twelve year old and a kid with a bad leg. Even Katniss, who doesn't do guilt, is still showing signs of strain indirectly with her constant fear her district would reject her if she did something wrong, while the trained kids know they have the support of their districts.
I think that the starvation is a mix of both - the capital eats up enough resources that there's major inequality, such that rebelling would improve the lives of everyone in the districts. Therefore, to discourage rebellions they're kept extra deprived in the hopes hungry sick people are too apathetic to try anything, and if they do, they don't have the resources to resist long. I don't think they'd go so far as to readjust the market severely to cope with the influx of tesserae resources, just because people would probably notice that every time they tried to sign up for more food they ended up with exactly as much, but I wouldn't be surprised if those districts had slightly higher food prices for all other goods, so while everyone assumes they're better off, they're not really that different than other districts. (At least, if there was any evidence the capital was controlling the economy in the first place the way they should be.)
the correct plot
Date: 2011-06-09 05:01 pm (UTC)*****Mm, before marriage specifically? Because I'd assume the author's train of thought simply stops at "prostitution is icky" - sure, they're making their own choice, but anybody who would give you money for sex must be evil because, well, having sex for money is bad! Unless I've forgotten some part where the author actually is preaching against sex before marriage.*****
No sex before marriage is not bad..it just has rules in this world ---- Now of course if you are young and pretty --- it must be forced, manipulated, paid for and YOU must be unable to even have any desire for it if you are female ---- there are no touching points that girls own ---they don't have to pee on camera ---'cause you know there are no sicko old capital dudes who would pay Snow for a Special tributes Potty games feed!'...nooooo! Girls must not have any reproductive funtion other than waiting for big strong man to force a toasting and have his way.
Do NOT ever allow the girls mind to wander into an area of wonder. Pure, pure, deadly girls have no physical sensation below the heart --- It isn't just not allowed -- it isn't thought about except in desire to maintain celibacy!!!!
And... umm... thank you Peejeezus for showering with Haymitch (pure celibate old dude thinking clearly and with his game on)that first night on the train ----and he didn't want anyone to help him---eyes wide and innocent.
Because Katniss would be more embarassed to see Haymitch or Peeta's weewee, than be forced to stand naked herself in front of a whole bunch of total strangers. Then be left alone with one, waiting for him to tell her what to do.
No there are no icky undertones in The BOOK! The book is about the girl on fire ---who has none. the boy with the bread (symbol of life)--- who keeps trying to stop being alive. Man with the wine --- who doesn't have any drinking buddies and nobody loves even though he's a freaking catch. And the man with the bow (rustic hunter dude) who sets his bow in the clouds and provides. (I can't wait to play with Finn symbols ---hehehe) The only girl worthy of love is miss pure, clueless self absorbed sacrificial lamb who waffles among the boys worried about how to play hard to get.
I have a new them song for this ----
Rollin' rollin' rollin'
keep them doggies rollin
rawhide
don't try to understand em
just breed, rope and brand em....
I don't know I am just amazed at all the people who worship this story never acknowledging the reallllly dark undertones -- making them some sacred pure UN-motive rather than saying hey you know if you are willing to show a boy be eaten alive for 18 or 20 hours and the next morning you have to figure OUT where his MOUTH USED to be??? And you can talk about accepting forced sex.....
Why is a little actual love, respect and OMG (girl pleasure of any kind --other than in killing things) soooo uncomfortable -----????????
anyone? anyone????
LOL ---I write paranormal and don't have as much fantasy magic fix the virgin, save the virgin, love the virgin ---then threaten her, lie to her, ignore her and drug her in every tiny situation -- and a magic off camera hokeus-dont-pocus will end in a magic carpet ride. LOOK out unicorns ahead!
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