Catching Fire, Chapter 23
May. 25th, 2011 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaLast time on Johanna is awesome, Johanna! <3 Also Katniss figured out the arena is based on a clock.
Each hour begins a new horror, a new Gamemaker weapon, and ends the previous. Lightning, blood rain, fog, monkeys — those are the first four hours on the clock. And at ten, the wave. I don't know what happens in the other seven, but I know Wiress is right.
At present, the blood rain's falling and we're on the beach below the monkey segment, far too close to the fog for my liking. Do the various attacks stay within the confines of the jungle? Not necessarily. The wave didn't. If that fog leaches out of the jungle, or the monkeys return …
Uh...that actually doesn't seem too bad. You just have to stay clear of a particular zone during a particular hour. You aren't even stuck going in one direction, from the looks of things it'd be easy to go backwards, so that you hang out in sections that have already done their hourly horror show while the clock progresses away from you.
And we do know that the fog sticks to its confines, because you say it hit an invisible wall, remember? That, in turn, strongly suggests other segments do as well. The wave is likely the exception to this because by nature it can't touch only one area when it's that big. Possibly the monkeys might chase them once the attack starts, but given the hanging out silently initial behavior they probably don't wait anywhere but their segment. And the fact they haven't encountered anything else at a different hour but the wave means none of those things reach them where they are, again, probably meaning it's confined by area.
So. The best idea is probably to hang out at the edge of the monkeys, on the beach, then move toward the fog once that's removed. They can even move early, since it seems the fog won't reach the beach itself and even if it did, they can just swim out into the water. Once they do that they're safe for the rest of the cycle. If they're worried about the monkeys chasing them, then hang out on the edge of the fog, since the blood rain is completely harmless, just annoying.
I guess they could try to figure out what the other areas do, but that seems a bad idea since the fog section is so manageable. If it was nearer to the wave and hanging out there meant risking drowning each time I could see it, but we already know the wave's only an inconvenience where they are.
The main issue I have is how interactive the arena is this year. If the point of the childmurder games was just to watch people die, they'd send people into death mazes or something. The fact you have to kill others made for a lot of the initial horror. Even the book, which handled all this terribly, still devoted plenty of time to Katniss worrying about having to kill other people, even if she got over it once the games actually started. But this time there's no real issue. Things are deadly enough that it's quite possible for the tributes just to die off from the traps.
Katniss explains it to everyone.
I think I've convinced everyone who's conscious except Johanna, who's naturally opposed to liking anything I suggest.
And I think you're projecting.
A memory struggles to surface in my brain. I see a clock. No, it's a watch, resting in Plutarch Heavensbee's palm. “It starts at midnight,” Plutarch said. And then my mockingjay lit up briefly and vanished. In retrospect, it's like he was giving me a clue about the arena.
I'd like to take a minute to talk about the "it's like" construction here. It's horribly worded, because "like" means "a thing that is similar but is not", so it shouldn't be used to mean "a thing I think happened". It make her sound even more clueless, as if she thinks the hint was accidental or something.
I must admit I feel bad for the guy. He took a pretty big risk trying to give her a clue, and she only works out what he meant after she's worked out the original issue. She doesn't even figure out about the starting at midnight thing based on it, Katniss just happened to guess that already.
This isn't necessarily bad writing, I admit. Things not going quite as intended can work well in a lot of cases. It's just terribly frustrating here because it isn't a counterpoint to Katniss normally getting similar clues she can use (she's often in the dark about what's going on, and based on the allies situation right now, probably still is), nor is it part of a larger story where missing clues until it's too late is commonplace - the narration regularly has her just know stuff and we seem to generally be expected to take her as good at this.
Anyway, Katniss wants to move somewhere safe. They try to get Beetee up, and it seems he's doing the same repeated word thing. His is "wire".
“Oh, I know what he wants,” says Johanna impatiently. She crosses the beach and picks up the cylinder we took from his belt when we were bathing him. It's coated in a thick layer of congealed blood. “This worthless thing. It's some kind of wire or something. That's how he got cut. Running up to the Cornucopia to get this. I don't know what kind of weapon it's supposed to be. I guess you could pull off a piece and use it as a garrote or something. But really, can you imagine Beetee garroting somebody?”
See, Johanna is pretty much the opposite of Katniss. Katniss is probably thinking about what a bitch Johanna is to be talking like that, but it's clear she's really upset by the fact he got hurt over the stuff and venting by being mad over it.
Katniss also finds her comments suspicious. Beetee is a victor because he used wire to electrocute people, and Johanna's nicknamed him Volts. Katniss says as much.
Johanna's eyes narrow at me dangerously. “Yeah, that was really stupid of me, wasn't it?” she says. “I guess I must have been distracted by keeping your little friends alive. While you were...what, again? Getting Mags killed off?”
My fingers tighten on the knife handle at my belt.
So again, Katniss wants to kill someone over saying something mean to her. What the fuck.
I will grant that this is a valid thing to worry about. Johanna downplaying someone's abilities could easily mean she's hoping Beetee will be able to get the jump on them. But that really doesn't make much sense in context to worry about that - it'd require they had a secret alliance on top of their existing alliance, one that only came about because Katniss picked them. That's a lot to be going on in a game where all alliances are temporary because only one person will end up winning.
“Go ahead. Try it. I don't care if you are knocked up, I'll rip your throat out,” says Johanna.
I know I can't kill her right now. But it's just a matter of time with Johanna and me. Before one of us offs the other.
What is this "one of us" nonsense? You're the one who keeps trying to jump to lethal force, all she said was that if you do she'll fight back. It's "only a matter of time" if you decide it's okay to kill her over being angry at you.
No, Katniss. You are the demons.
“Maybe we all had better be careful where we step,” says Finnick, shooting me a look
See, Duke Devlin agrees with me.
They decide to head to the cornucopia again, figuring that maybe from there they can see what's going on in the jungle as the hours go.
People were saying last chapter that they can't picture the arena, and it just gets more confusing now.
See, I thought what it was was that the cornucopia was on the main island. So the tributes are out in the water, and there are strips of land leading to the cornucopia and island. But it seems like the cornucopia is a separate island connected by those strips of land to the main island. And somehow the resulting thing is, combined with the force field, a perfect circle.
This is hardly the first time vagueness has made it impossible to figure out what's going on. I'm just going to shrug and roll with it.
Katniss reflects that things are easier with more people.
it's great to have allies as long as you can ignore the thought that you'll have to kill them.
This is another part of why she comes off as both flat and a sociopath. She always thinks about it in terms of when she'll kill them, not in terms of them killing her. Katniss is not motivated by fear her allies will turn on her.
She then runs through how her allies will die. She figures Beetee and Wiress will do her the favor of dying to some trap.
Johanna, frankly, I could easily kill if it came down to protecting Peeta. Or maybe even just to shut her up.
Sociopath explanation works more and more with every line.
What I really need is for someone to take out Finnick for me, since I don't think I can do it personally. Not after all he's done for Peeta. I think about maneuvering him into some kind of encounter with the Careers. It's cold, I know. But what are my options? Now that we know about the clock, he probably won't die in the jungle, so someone's going to have to kill him in battle.
...No, really, no one else could think about things like this.
Katniss has figured out there's a rule you shouldn't kill your allies, so she's trying to get around it by a loophole, missing that, murder-wise, shoving someone into a pit yourself and covering a pit and telling them to run over there are not actually that different. One just involves more planning.
She then says Because this is so repellent to think about, my mind frantically tries to change topics. but the fact she even thinks there's a difference here says a lot about Katniss' mindset, so I don't buy it. Katniss is not thinking she hopes someone else kills him, she's thinking of how to get him killed by using people instead of arrows as weapons.
Wiress starts singing the nursery rhyme about the mouse running up the clock.
“Oh, not the song again,” says Johanna, rolling her eyes. “That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking.”
See, Johanna isn't just randomly bitchy. She's listen to a nursery rhyme for hours without murdering anyone. She is a saint. One of the fun ones.
The clock progresses.
I follow her finger to where the wall of fog has just begun to seep out onto the beach.
Okay, no. Katniss was in the area. It doesn't go that far. "Invisible wall", remember?
Anyway, Peeta tells Wiress she's very smart.
“Oh, she's more than smart,” says Beetee. “She's intuitive.”
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-
Things you should avoid: describing women as hysterical or shrill.
Things you should NEVER FUCKING DO EVER: describing women as "more than smart, intuitive".
To be "intuitive" is to just know stuff without needing any other positive qualities, like intelligence or observation skills, to accomplish it. Intuitive is something animals are. It's the word you use for "somehow knows stuff without needing to get/process real information". It's a word for something that can't be learned and is no credit to you for having.
There is stuff it's understandable to be intuitive about. But when you use that word for something that normally involves reasoning and deduction, it's not a compliment. You're saying the other person isn't capable of that, they just lucked into the answer by some natural instinct.
If you don't believe me that this means they're treating her like an animal, Beetee keeps talking.
“She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines.”
And she's still not capable of talking. So let's look at our cast so far.
We have more women! But most of them are treated as clever animals. Mags, the morphine addict, and now Wiress are all incapable of speech. Wiress is definitely mentally ill, the narration insists the morphine addict was, and Katniss said Mags had probably had a stroke. Our only functioning female character besides Katniss is Johanna, and Katniss is at her throat.
At the cornucopia, Johanna picks up some axes. She seems happy about this in what is probably supposed to mean she's a jerk, but honestly, it must be pretty stressful running about unarmed, and she wasn't able to get any weapons before now because she was trying to keep other people out of danger.
Of course. Johanna Mason. District 7. Lumber. I bet she's been tossing around axes since she could toddle. It's like Finnick with his trident. Or Beetee with his wire. Rue with her knowledge of plants. I realize it's just another disadvantage the District 12 tributes have faced over the years. We don't go down in the mines until we're eighteen. It looks like most of the other tributes learn something about their trades early on. There are things you do in a mine that could come in handy in the Games. Wielding a pick. Blowing things up. Give you an edge. The way my hunting did. But we learn them too late.
This stinks of clumsy retcon. It's never been explained why they wait until eighteen to work in the mines originally, and so it's not explained why other districts would do it differently. Rue made sense because dealing with plants involves variability - they need more workers at certain points in the season. But why on earth would a toddler be useful in cutting down trees? The author wants to use the districts as a hat, but knows it doesn't work with the worldbuilding she did to the main district we know of, so she's justifying it now.
Meanwhile, Peeta's drawing.
he's creating a map of the arena. In the center is the Cornucopia on its circle of sand with the twelve strips branching out from it. It looks like a pie sliced into twelve equal wedges. There's another circle representing the waterline and a slightly larger one indicating the edge of the jungle.
Anyway, they mark down the known areas and say what they know.
We all nod in agreement, and that's when I notice it. The silence. Our canary has stopped singing.
Because that's all Wiress is, apparently. An animal. There have been four other women so far. Only one is still alive. Only one is capable of speech.
They're under attack by the career group, for no particularly clear reason. I mean, it isn't a good place to ambush and they've just restocked on weapons. The two from District 1 die, and the two in District 2 make it away alive, having only managed to kill a single person.
Suddenly the ground jerks beneath my feet and I'm flung on my side in the sand. The circle of land that holds the Cornucopia starts spinning fast, really fast
This is ridiculous.
The spin has knocked the bodies into the water, so Katniss has to swim out to retrieve the wire Wiress was cleaning when she was killed.
They decide to head back to the jungle-side beach, but it turns out that once spun they don't know which segment of the beach is which. This isn't really a big deal - they could just wait on the cornucopia for something visible to happen, then work backwards from there. Katniss will have none of this sanity.
“I should have never mentioned the clock,” I say bitterly. “Now they've taken that advantage away as well.”
Okay, no, they really didn't. You still know each area has a particular danger, that each area's danger is only active for an hour, and that you need to exit a dangerous area counterclockwise or you'll just be going into the next area that's about to activate. All they took away was your ability to tell which danger was in which area, which you'll get back as soon as areas start activating again.
They figure it's the monkey period, so they're safe as long as they don't see any. Johanna tells Peeta to stay back anyway and draw another map.
There is no question about it. For reasons completely unfathomable to me, some of the other victors are trying to keep him alive, even if it means sacrificing themselves.
Katniss is baffled as to why, though. She has a point. I'm pretty sure the idea is they're keeping him alive as part of keeping her alive, but that's bad reasoning since he really is a millstone. She might have a breakdown if he dies, but I doubt it. As she's established in her behavior toward everyone else, Katniss only goes by the letter of the law. She won't kill you, so she'll trick you into getting killed by someone else. So, she isn't trying to save Peeta because life is meaningless without him, but because she thinks she has to. If he dies she's no longer obligated.
Certainly he is brave, but we have all been brave enough to survive a Games.
Murdering people =/= brave.
But then Katniss guesses it's because Peeta is just so damn awesome, and god this had better not be the real reasoning because it's even dumber than what I just suggested.
There is that quality of goodness that's hard to overlook, but still ... and then I think of it, what Peeta can do so much better than the rest of us. He can use words. He obliterated the rest of the field at both interviews. And maybe it's because of that underlying goodness that he can move a crowd—no, a country—to his side with the turn of a simple sentence.
Why is this book so terrible?
Katniss wonders how Haymitch could have convinced the others of this.
It still seems like a really long leap for some of the tributes. I mean, we're talking about Johanna Mason here.
Yeah, she does seem too bright to fall for this bullshit.
More seriously, this is one of the things I hate about how people write women. It's always antagonistically. I've been reading recs for woman-centric stories on and off, and inevitably, even there, the character that comes off the worst, to the point of it feeling like outright bashing, is the other female character. Because women are in competition with each other. You can have your female protagonist have weak female friends, but anyone else who's strong must be in opposition.
Anyway, speaking of female characters, suddenly Katniss hears Prim screaming in pain and runs to find the sound.
You know, how many times has she heard Prim screaming like that before? I find screams really aren't that identifiable. It's a good day when you can tell the difference between a human and an animal one, figuring out an exact person seems like a stretch.
Also, really, Prim? It's just reminding me how much the book has failed to actually show any of their relationship. We keep being told Katniss cares so much about her and would do anything for her, but back in District 12 she barely noticed the kid. Certainly her love for her sister wasn't enough to make her want to come back this time.
Each hour begins a new horror, a new Gamemaker weapon, and ends the previous. Lightning, blood rain, fog, monkeys — those are the first four hours on the clock. And at ten, the wave. I don't know what happens in the other seven, but I know Wiress is right.
At present, the blood rain's falling and we're on the beach below the monkey segment, far too close to the fog for my liking. Do the various attacks stay within the confines of the jungle? Not necessarily. The wave didn't. If that fog leaches out of the jungle, or the monkeys return …
Uh...that actually doesn't seem too bad. You just have to stay clear of a particular zone during a particular hour. You aren't even stuck going in one direction, from the looks of things it'd be easy to go backwards, so that you hang out in sections that have already done their hourly horror show while the clock progresses away from you.
And we do know that the fog sticks to its confines, because you say it hit an invisible wall, remember? That, in turn, strongly suggests other segments do as well. The wave is likely the exception to this because by nature it can't touch only one area when it's that big. Possibly the monkeys might chase them once the attack starts, but given the hanging out silently initial behavior they probably don't wait anywhere but their segment. And the fact they haven't encountered anything else at a different hour but the wave means none of those things reach them where they are, again, probably meaning it's confined by area.
So. The best idea is probably to hang out at the edge of the monkeys, on the beach, then move toward the fog once that's removed. They can even move early, since it seems the fog won't reach the beach itself and even if it did, they can just swim out into the water. Once they do that they're safe for the rest of the cycle. If they're worried about the monkeys chasing them, then hang out on the edge of the fog, since the blood rain is completely harmless, just annoying.
I guess they could try to figure out what the other areas do, but that seems a bad idea since the fog section is so manageable. If it was nearer to the wave and hanging out there meant risking drowning each time I could see it, but we already know the wave's only an inconvenience where they are.
The main issue I have is how interactive the arena is this year. If the point of the childmurder games was just to watch people die, they'd send people into death mazes or something. The fact you have to kill others made for a lot of the initial horror. Even the book, which handled all this terribly, still devoted plenty of time to Katniss worrying about having to kill other people, even if she got over it once the games actually started. But this time there's no real issue. Things are deadly enough that it's quite possible for the tributes just to die off from the traps.
Katniss explains it to everyone.
I think I've convinced everyone who's conscious except Johanna, who's naturally opposed to liking anything I suggest.
And I think you're projecting.
A memory struggles to surface in my brain. I see a clock. No, it's a watch, resting in Plutarch Heavensbee's palm. “It starts at midnight,” Plutarch said. And then my mockingjay lit up briefly and vanished. In retrospect, it's like he was giving me a clue about the arena.
I'd like to take a minute to talk about the "it's like" construction here. It's horribly worded, because "like" means "a thing that is similar but is not", so it shouldn't be used to mean "a thing I think happened". It make her sound even more clueless, as if she thinks the hint was accidental or something.
I must admit I feel bad for the guy. He took a pretty big risk trying to give her a clue, and she only works out what he meant after she's worked out the original issue. She doesn't even figure out about the starting at midnight thing based on it, Katniss just happened to guess that already.
This isn't necessarily bad writing, I admit. Things not going quite as intended can work well in a lot of cases. It's just terribly frustrating here because it isn't a counterpoint to Katniss normally getting similar clues she can use (she's often in the dark about what's going on, and based on the allies situation right now, probably still is), nor is it part of a larger story where missing clues until it's too late is commonplace - the narration regularly has her just know stuff and we seem to generally be expected to take her as good at this.
Anyway, Katniss wants to move somewhere safe. They try to get Beetee up, and it seems he's doing the same repeated word thing. His is "wire".
“Oh, I know what he wants,” says Johanna impatiently. She crosses the beach and picks up the cylinder we took from his belt when we were bathing him. It's coated in a thick layer of congealed blood. “This worthless thing. It's some kind of wire or something. That's how he got cut. Running up to the Cornucopia to get this. I don't know what kind of weapon it's supposed to be. I guess you could pull off a piece and use it as a garrote or something. But really, can you imagine Beetee garroting somebody?”
See, Johanna is pretty much the opposite of Katniss. Katniss is probably thinking about what a bitch Johanna is to be talking like that, but it's clear she's really upset by the fact he got hurt over the stuff and venting by being mad over it.
Katniss also finds her comments suspicious. Beetee is a victor because he used wire to electrocute people, and Johanna's nicknamed him Volts. Katniss says as much.
Johanna's eyes narrow at me dangerously. “Yeah, that was really stupid of me, wasn't it?” she says. “I guess I must have been distracted by keeping your little friends alive. While you were...what, again? Getting Mags killed off?”
My fingers tighten on the knife handle at my belt.
So again, Katniss wants to kill someone over saying something mean to her. What the fuck.
I will grant that this is a valid thing to worry about. Johanna downplaying someone's abilities could easily mean she's hoping Beetee will be able to get the jump on them. But that really doesn't make much sense in context to worry about that - it'd require they had a secret alliance on top of their existing alliance, one that only came about because Katniss picked them. That's a lot to be going on in a game where all alliances are temporary because only one person will end up winning.
“Go ahead. Try it. I don't care if you are knocked up, I'll rip your throat out,” says Johanna.
I know I can't kill her right now. But it's just a matter of time with Johanna and me. Before one of us offs the other.
What is this "one of us" nonsense? You're the one who keeps trying to jump to lethal force, all she said was that if you do she'll fight back. It's "only a matter of time" if you decide it's okay to kill her over being angry at you.
No, Katniss. You are the demons.
“Maybe we all had better be careful where we step,” says Finnick, shooting me a look
See, Duke Devlin agrees with me.
They decide to head to the cornucopia again, figuring that maybe from there they can see what's going on in the jungle as the hours go.
People were saying last chapter that they can't picture the arena, and it just gets more confusing now.
See, I thought what it was was that the cornucopia was on the main island. So the tributes are out in the water, and there are strips of land leading to the cornucopia and island. But it seems like the cornucopia is a separate island connected by those strips of land to the main island. And somehow the resulting thing is, combined with the force field, a perfect circle.
This is hardly the first time vagueness has made it impossible to figure out what's going on. I'm just going to shrug and roll with it.
Katniss reflects that things are easier with more people.
it's great to have allies as long as you can ignore the thought that you'll have to kill them.
This is another part of why she comes off as both flat and a sociopath. She always thinks about it in terms of when she'll kill them, not in terms of them killing her. Katniss is not motivated by fear her allies will turn on her.
She then runs through how her allies will die. She figures Beetee and Wiress will do her the favor of dying to some trap.
Johanna, frankly, I could easily kill if it came down to protecting Peeta. Or maybe even just to shut her up.
Sociopath explanation works more and more with every line.
What I really need is for someone to take out Finnick for me, since I don't think I can do it personally. Not after all he's done for Peeta. I think about maneuvering him into some kind of encounter with the Careers. It's cold, I know. But what are my options? Now that we know about the clock, he probably won't die in the jungle, so someone's going to have to kill him in battle.
...No, really, no one else could think about things like this.
Katniss has figured out there's a rule you shouldn't kill your allies, so she's trying to get around it by a loophole, missing that, murder-wise, shoving someone into a pit yourself and covering a pit and telling them to run over there are not actually that different. One just involves more planning.
She then says Because this is so repellent to think about, my mind frantically tries to change topics. but the fact she even thinks there's a difference here says a lot about Katniss' mindset, so I don't buy it. Katniss is not thinking she hopes someone else kills him, she's thinking of how to get him killed by using people instead of arrows as weapons.
Wiress starts singing the nursery rhyme about the mouse running up the clock.
“Oh, not the song again,” says Johanna, rolling her eyes. “That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking.”
See, Johanna isn't just randomly bitchy. She's listen to a nursery rhyme for hours without murdering anyone. She is a saint. One of the fun ones.
The clock progresses.
I follow her finger to where the wall of fog has just begun to seep out onto the beach.
Okay, no. Katniss was in the area. It doesn't go that far. "Invisible wall", remember?
Anyway, Peeta tells Wiress she's very smart.
“Oh, she's more than smart,” says Beetee. “She's intuitive.”
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-
Things you should avoid: describing women as hysterical or shrill.
Things you should NEVER FUCKING DO EVER: describing women as "more than smart, intuitive".
To be "intuitive" is to just know stuff without needing any other positive qualities, like intelligence or observation skills, to accomplish it. Intuitive is something animals are. It's the word you use for "somehow knows stuff without needing to get/process real information". It's a word for something that can't be learned and is no credit to you for having.
There is stuff it's understandable to be intuitive about. But when you use that word for something that normally involves reasoning and deduction, it's not a compliment. You're saying the other person isn't capable of that, they just lucked into the answer by some natural instinct.
If you don't believe me that this means they're treating her like an animal, Beetee keeps talking.
“She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines.”
And she's still not capable of talking. So let's look at our cast so far.
We have more women! But most of them are treated as clever animals. Mags, the morphine addict, and now Wiress are all incapable of speech. Wiress is definitely mentally ill, the narration insists the morphine addict was, and Katniss said Mags had probably had a stroke. Our only functioning female character besides Katniss is Johanna, and Katniss is at her throat.
At the cornucopia, Johanna picks up some axes. She seems happy about this in what is probably supposed to mean she's a jerk, but honestly, it must be pretty stressful running about unarmed, and she wasn't able to get any weapons before now because she was trying to keep other people out of danger.
Of course. Johanna Mason. District 7. Lumber. I bet she's been tossing around axes since she could toddle. It's like Finnick with his trident. Or Beetee with his wire. Rue with her knowledge of plants. I realize it's just another disadvantage the District 12 tributes have faced over the years. We don't go down in the mines until we're eighteen. It looks like most of the other tributes learn something about their trades early on. There are things you do in a mine that could come in handy in the Games. Wielding a pick. Blowing things up. Give you an edge. The way my hunting did. But we learn them too late.
This stinks of clumsy retcon. It's never been explained why they wait until eighteen to work in the mines originally, and so it's not explained why other districts would do it differently. Rue made sense because dealing with plants involves variability - they need more workers at certain points in the season. But why on earth would a toddler be useful in cutting down trees? The author wants to use the districts as a hat, but knows it doesn't work with the worldbuilding she did to the main district we know of, so she's justifying it now.
Meanwhile, Peeta's drawing.
he's creating a map of the arena. In the center is the Cornucopia on its circle of sand with the twelve strips branching out from it. It looks like a pie sliced into twelve equal wedges. There's another circle representing the waterline and a slightly larger one indicating the edge of the jungle.
Anyway, they mark down the known areas and say what they know.
We all nod in agreement, and that's when I notice it. The silence. Our canary has stopped singing.
Because that's all Wiress is, apparently. An animal. There have been four other women so far. Only one is still alive. Only one is capable of speech.
They're under attack by the career group, for no particularly clear reason. I mean, it isn't a good place to ambush and they've just restocked on weapons. The two from District 1 die, and the two in District 2 make it away alive, having only managed to kill a single person.
Suddenly the ground jerks beneath my feet and I'm flung on my side in the sand. The circle of land that holds the Cornucopia starts spinning fast, really fast
This is ridiculous.
The spin has knocked the bodies into the water, so Katniss has to swim out to retrieve the wire Wiress was cleaning when she was killed.
They decide to head back to the jungle-side beach, but it turns out that once spun they don't know which segment of the beach is which. This isn't really a big deal - they could just wait on the cornucopia for something visible to happen, then work backwards from there. Katniss will have none of this sanity.
“I should have never mentioned the clock,” I say bitterly. “Now they've taken that advantage away as well.”
Okay, no, they really didn't. You still know each area has a particular danger, that each area's danger is only active for an hour, and that you need to exit a dangerous area counterclockwise or you'll just be going into the next area that's about to activate. All they took away was your ability to tell which danger was in which area, which you'll get back as soon as areas start activating again.
They figure it's the monkey period, so they're safe as long as they don't see any. Johanna tells Peeta to stay back anyway and draw another map.
There is no question about it. For reasons completely unfathomable to me, some of the other victors are trying to keep him alive, even if it means sacrificing themselves.
Katniss is baffled as to why, though. She has a point. I'm pretty sure the idea is they're keeping him alive as part of keeping her alive, but that's bad reasoning since he really is a millstone. She might have a breakdown if he dies, but I doubt it. As she's established in her behavior toward everyone else, Katniss only goes by the letter of the law. She won't kill you, so she'll trick you into getting killed by someone else. So, she isn't trying to save Peeta because life is meaningless without him, but because she thinks she has to. If he dies she's no longer obligated.
Certainly he is brave, but we have all been brave enough to survive a Games.
Murdering people =/= brave.
But then Katniss guesses it's because Peeta is just so damn awesome, and god this had better not be the real reasoning because it's even dumber than what I just suggested.
There is that quality of goodness that's hard to overlook, but still ... and then I think of it, what Peeta can do so much better than the rest of us. He can use words. He obliterated the rest of the field at both interviews. And maybe it's because of that underlying goodness that he can move a crowd—no, a country—to his side with the turn of a simple sentence.
Why is this book so terrible?
Katniss wonders how Haymitch could have convinced the others of this.
It still seems like a really long leap for some of the tributes. I mean, we're talking about Johanna Mason here.
Yeah, she does seem too bright to fall for this bullshit.
More seriously, this is one of the things I hate about how people write women. It's always antagonistically. I've been reading recs for woman-centric stories on and off, and inevitably, even there, the character that comes off the worst, to the point of it feeling like outright bashing, is the other female character. Because women are in competition with each other. You can have your female protagonist have weak female friends, but anyone else who's strong must be in opposition.
Anyway, speaking of female characters, suddenly Katniss hears Prim screaming in pain and runs to find the sound.
You know, how many times has she heard Prim screaming like that before? I find screams really aren't that identifiable. It's a good day when you can tell the difference between a human and an animal one, figuring out an exact person seems like a stretch.
Also, really, Prim? It's just reminding me how much the book has failed to actually show any of their relationship. We keep being told Katniss cares so much about her and would do anything for her, but back in District 12 she barely noticed the kid. Certainly her love for her sister wasn't enough to make her want to come back this time.
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Re: chap 23
Date: 2011-05-27 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-10 08:59 am (UTC)Or the ones who didn't end up with PTSD, due to receiving help or simply the fact that not everybody who suffers through something seriously traumatic ends up with it scaring them forever afterwards?
Not everybody who is able to make it through a traumatic event, such as one in which they need to fight to defend their lives, and manages to come through it is a sociopath.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-11 12:40 am (UTC)Are what I just said, not sociopaths. Being messed up by this - not necessarily traumatized but to some degree - is the healthy reaction. Katniss is deeply affected by traumatic events, like almost getting killed herself, but murdering other people doesn't bother her. And murdering other people bothers everyone but sociopaths and extremely hardened long-term killers who've done their best to turn into sociopaths as a last resort defense mechanism.