Catching Fire, Chapter 26
May. 30th, 2011 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaLast time on Catching Fire, the arena is a clock but the wire is a fuse. Also, Johanna!
Beetee starts wrapping the lightning tree in wire with a really complex pattern.
I wonder if it makes any difference how the wire's placed, or if this is merely to add to the speculation of the audience. I bet most of them know as much about electricity as I do.
The issue of education keeps coming up and it's never done well.
Katniss says that they don't bother to educate the kids beyond learning about mining, but they also go to school up to age eighteen and she seems to be shockingly well-rounded under the circumstances - at the least, we never see any gaps in her knowledge compared to a reader's. She knows various trivia, like about diamonds, graphite and coal as well as pearls, yet apparently her school doesn't even teach what monkeys are. What on earth do they teach to fill up the time? It can't possibly be anything useful in general, but it's not like their once-a-year school trip to gawk at the mines is teaching them much about their future professions. The Soviet Union emphasized math because it was pretty safe to teach, but Katniss hasn't shown the slightest inclination toward that. She obviously isn't much of a writer either, and no references have been made to any other rote things to take up time - learning good penmanship, being taught to recite facts on command, etc.
Meanwhile people at the capital seem highly skilled in in their professions, yet at the same time you have the ongoing joke about Effie and the people she's talking to being too dumb to know what a pearl is. Cinna invents synthetic fire, which is impossible, I'm sure he's bright enough to have a working grasp of electricity. All the people of the capital we've actually met are quite good at whatever their job is, and given how most education systems work, that means they all should have a broad base education before they specialized.
The only way to make this work is if we assume that there's a lot of tracking systems going on, and kids split up into different tracks for different careers very early on. But that kind of thing generally is done when you don't have the resources to educate everyone, which is obviously not true. The capital is defined by excess, and even if it wasn't, the fact Katniss' worst of the worst district can give all kids a general education means it's well in the capital's power for their own citizens. Besides, again, Cinna obviously has an education across multiple disciplines. He doesn't just pick what he thinks looks pretty, he constructs the whole thing. And it seems that's normal for a fashion designer. This kind of makes sense, because at a certain level of technology you start needing generalists again to put the various pieces together, and magic science is definitely past that point. Imagine the sort of education people would need to pull off something like the Hunger Games themselves.
You could say it's a satire of the American education system, with some sort of system where taking hard courses is optional and most people avoid it, but then there's still the problem of people being so skilled at their jobs. America gets people by immigration, but this seems to be an incredibly rigid society where everyone is born and dies in their particular area. Besides, if it was possible to get to the capital by being a great doctor or designer or electrician, that'd have come up in the story as a way out of the whole grinding poverty and starvation thing.
Anyway. Plan is that Katniss and Johanna take the spool down to the beach and chuck it into the water. That doesn't make sense either. They aren't sure this will work, it's stated there's plenty of extra wire on the spool, and we're told that it'll burn up when used, so why not cut the wire and keep what's left on the spool in case they need it again? If the insane plot point about the stuff burning up hadn't been used this wouldn't be an issue, but for no discernible reason it's there and needs to be addressed here.
Katniss and Peeta are uncomfortable about being split up, but it seems necessary.
And if I trust anyone here besides Peeta, it's Beetee.
Come to think of it, Beetee is getting similar treatment to Cinna. We're told he's brilliant and Katniss inexplicably trusts him. Beetee is just as much a murderer as everyone else here, and indeed, we know he killed the other kids with wire and electricity.
So they get moving. But suddenly the wire recoils and bunches up around them - it's been cut.
The obvious possibility is that the other group has heard their long and extensive discussion and decided to intervene, closely followed by the idea the whole thing was a red herring and Beetee is currently garrotting Peeta.
My hand frees itself from the wire and has just closed on the feathers of an arrow when the metal cylinder smashes into the side of my head. The next thing I know, I'm lying on my back in the vines, a terrible pain in my left temple. Something's wrong with my eyes. My vision blurs in and out of focus as I strain to make the two moons floating up in the sky into one. It's hard to breathe, and I realize Johanna's sitting on my chest, pinning me at the shoulders with her knees.
Johanna acts fast! <3
There's a stab in my left forearm. I try to jerk away but I'm still too incapacitated. Johanna's digging something, I guess the point of her knife, into my flesh, twisting it around. There's an excruciating ripping sensation and warmth runs down my wrist, filling my palm. She swipes down my arm and coats half my face with my blood.
“Stay down!” she hisses. Her weight leaves my body and I'm alone
Johanna pulled out the tracker like I kept saying Johanna you are the smartest and bestest and most wonderfulest <3 <3 <3
I also love how much happens around Johanna. She's smashed Katniss in the head, then torn open her arm, then covered Katniss in blood so she looks far more injured than she really is, and then Johanna just takes off because she's a busy woman and has so many other things to do!
Compare this to the the endless chapters of Katniss wangsting about which boy she wants to stare longingly at and not kiss. Things are happening and fast. I nominate Johanna as saint of plot.
Stay down? I think. What? What is happening? My eyes shut, blocking out the inconsistent world, as I try to make sense of my situation.
All I can think of is Johanna shoving Wiress to the beach. “Just stay down, will you?” But she didn't attack Wiress. Not like this. I'm not Wiress, anyway. I'm not Nuts.
I like this. She's concussed and not thinking clearly, and all she's really sure of is that wow she doesn't want to move, Johanna isn't currently trying to kill her, and hey, maybe lying here isn't such a bad idea.
Brutus and Enobaria see her and say they should keep going because she's good as dead already. I'm really disappointed we didn't see more of Enobaria. She bit someone's throat out! Why would you not want someone like that as a major character, that is fucking awesome.
This much I know. Johanna attacked me. Smashed that cylinder into my head. Cut my arm, probably doing irreparable damage to veins and arteries, and then Brutus and Enobaria showed up before she had time to finish me off.
Hm. On the one hand, yes, Katniss is obviously having trouble thinking. On the other hand, if she's lucid enough to tell a sequence of events she should be lucid enough to tell that Johanna had no reason to cut her arm and not her throat in the first attack. I'm not even asking her to figure it out - I would completely settle for confusion and wondering if Johanna meant to torture her for kicks but was interrupted.
The alliance is over. Finnick and Johanna must have had an agreement to turn on us tonight. I knew we should have left this morning. I don't know where Beetee stands.
Once again, he was in charge of the wire and the wire broke. That strongly suggests he's the one who turned on them - the others have no reason to disable his trap. The wire breaking appears to have been the signal, in fact.
Beetee is definitely inheriting the weird Cinna bestest and most wonderfulest thing.
Katniss then says the wire breaking can't possibly have been a signal, because I don't have any idea.
She then decides Duke Devlin can't be trusted because he's Johanna's friend. Okay, she's paranoid, that one was reasonable.
She runs off to find Peeta, who she figures is at the base of the tree. She finds Beetee there instead, unconscious.
I can see no wound except a gash below the crook of his elbow.
Just like yours? But no, she doesn't think anything of it. We're still being told she's concussed at this point, but she's no longer acting like it so I'm not sure how much can be chalked up to her head injury.
She sees that Beetee was messing with the wire. There was a second length of it he'd left attached to the tree, and he's tied this to Peeta's knife. Katniss continues to fail to think that he and Peeta might have fought, because Beetee is too best and wonderful to do something mean like that.
we're only a few paces from the force field. There's the telltale square, high up and to my right, just as it was this morning. What did Beetee do? Did he actually try to drive the knife into the force field the way Peeta did by accident? And what's the deal with the wire? Was this his backup plan? If electrifying the water failed, did he mean to send the lightning bolt's energy into the force field?
Oh jesus fuck no.
If the visual flaw was also the physical weak spot, that should have been mentioned, because those aren't interchangeable terms.
She hears Peeta calling for her like a good millstone, so she starts shouting back hoping it'll draw attackers to her instead. She seems to still be under the impression Peeta has any chance of winning without her, despite that, you know, he's shouting to both give away his location and make it clear he's on his own.
Enobaria and Finnick reach the lightning tree.
She's still alive! Yay. But this is confusing. Are they working together? If so, why would Johanna need to fake Katniss' death? Johanna is clearly working with Duke Devlin, who also now seems to be working with Enobaria. This would sort of work out if it'd been Enobaria saying Katniss was good as dead, because maybe she was in on it and charged with misleading Brutus, but it was Brutus who told her that.
Anyway, Katniss aims for the neck because that's how she rolls. Sure, she can shoot a squirrel in the eye, but with her human opponents she prefers the neck and torso.
The books are really pretty weird.
Two cannons have sounded. Brutus, Johanna, Chaff. Two of them are already dead.
What the hell is with Chaff, anyway? He certainly seems to be living up to his name. We're told he's Haymitch's friend so he'd have been the natural choice to join up, yet he's just hung out doing nothing. And it just underscores the way who gets named is prophetic here - since god knows his presence hasn't mattered storywise, why must it be a named character rather than an unnamed one that survives until the end?
Katniss remembers Haymitch's words about remembering the enemy, and finally gets it.
Yes, I know who the enemy is. And it's not Enobaria.
YES.
KATNISS ALL IS FORGIVEN.
She shoots to the "chink in the armor" and the force of the arrow is enough to get through. You know, considering this zaps hard enough to blacken meat, shouldn't the wire have burned up? I'm still waiting for the reason for that bizarre feature. Anyway, the wire is now connected to the force field in time for the lightning to hit and everything goes boom.
A flash of white runs up the wire, and for just a moment, the dome bursts into a dazzling blue light.
My eyes strain to capture one last image of beauty to take with me.
Right before the explosions begin, I find a star.
No you don't, you were just staring at lighting, then seeing everything go blue-white, so there's no way your eyes can pick out stars right now. Moderation, book, moderation. Sometimes less is more.
One more chapter to go!
Beetee starts wrapping the lightning tree in wire with a really complex pattern.
I wonder if it makes any difference how the wire's placed, or if this is merely to add to the speculation of the audience. I bet most of them know as much about electricity as I do.
The issue of education keeps coming up and it's never done well.
Katniss says that they don't bother to educate the kids beyond learning about mining, but they also go to school up to age eighteen and she seems to be shockingly well-rounded under the circumstances - at the least, we never see any gaps in her knowledge compared to a reader's. She knows various trivia, like about diamonds, graphite and coal as well as pearls, yet apparently her school doesn't even teach what monkeys are. What on earth do they teach to fill up the time? It can't possibly be anything useful in general, but it's not like their once-a-year school trip to gawk at the mines is teaching them much about their future professions. The Soviet Union emphasized math because it was pretty safe to teach, but Katniss hasn't shown the slightest inclination toward that. She obviously isn't much of a writer either, and no references have been made to any other rote things to take up time - learning good penmanship, being taught to recite facts on command, etc.
Meanwhile people at the capital seem highly skilled in in their professions, yet at the same time you have the ongoing joke about Effie and the people she's talking to being too dumb to know what a pearl is. Cinna invents synthetic fire, which is impossible, I'm sure he's bright enough to have a working grasp of electricity. All the people of the capital we've actually met are quite good at whatever their job is, and given how most education systems work, that means they all should have a broad base education before they specialized.
The only way to make this work is if we assume that there's a lot of tracking systems going on, and kids split up into different tracks for different careers very early on. But that kind of thing generally is done when you don't have the resources to educate everyone, which is obviously not true. The capital is defined by excess, and even if it wasn't, the fact Katniss' worst of the worst district can give all kids a general education means it's well in the capital's power for their own citizens. Besides, again, Cinna obviously has an education across multiple disciplines. He doesn't just pick what he thinks looks pretty, he constructs the whole thing. And it seems that's normal for a fashion designer. This kind of makes sense, because at a certain level of technology you start needing generalists again to put the various pieces together, and magic science is definitely past that point. Imagine the sort of education people would need to pull off something like the Hunger Games themselves.
You could say it's a satire of the American education system, with some sort of system where taking hard courses is optional and most people avoid it, but then there's still the problem of people being so skilled at their jobs. America gets people by immigration, but this seems to be an incredibly rigid society where everyone is born and dies in their particular area. Besides, if it was possible to get to the capital by being a great doctor or designer or electrician, that'd have come up in the story as a way out of the whole grinding poverty and starvation thing.
Anyway. Plan is that Katniss and Johanna take the spool down to the beach and chuck it into the water. That doesn't make sense either. They aren't sure this will work, it's stated there's plenty of extra wire on the spool, and we're told that it'll burn up when used, so why not cut the wire and keep what's left on the spool in case they need it again? If the insane plot point about the stuff burning up hadn't been used this wouldn't be an issue, but for no discernible reason it's there and needs to be addressed here.
Katniss and Peeta are uncomfortable about being split up, but it seems necessary.
And if I trust anyone here besides Peeta, it's Beetee.
Come to think of it, Beetee is getting similar treatment to Cinna. We're told he's brilliant and Katniss inexplicably trusts him. Beetee is just as much a murderer as everyone else here, and indeed, we know he killed the other kids with wire and electricity.
So they get moving. But suddenly the wire recoils and bunches up around them - it's been cut.
The obvious possibility is that the other group has heard their long and extensive discussion and decided to intervene, closely followed by the idea the whole thing was a red herring and Beetee is currently garrotting Peeta.
My hand frees itself from the wire and has just closed on the feathers of an arrow when the metal cylinder smashes into the side of my head. The next thing I know, I'm lying on my back in the vines, a terrible pain in my left temple. Something's wrong with my eyes. My vision blurs in and out of focus as I strain to make the two moons floating up in the sky into one. It's hard to breathe, and I realize Johanna's sitting on my chest, pinning me at the shoulders with her knees.
Johanna acts fast! <3
There's a stab in my left forearm. I try to jerk away but I'm still too incapacitated. Johanna's digging something, I guess the point of her knife, into my flesh, twisting it around. There's an excruciating ripping sensation and warmth runs down my wrist, filling my palm. She swipes down my arm and coats half my face with my blood.
“Stay down!” she hisses. Her weight leaves my body and I'm alone
Johanna pulled out the tracker like I kept saying Johanna you are the smartest and bestest and most wonderfulest <3 <3 <3
I also love how much happens around Johanna. She's smashed Katniss in the head, then torn open her arm, then covered Katniss in blood so she looks far more injured than she really is, and then Johanna just takes off because she's a busy woman and has so many other things to do!
Compare this to the the endless chapters of Katniss wangsting about which boy she wants to stare longingly at and not kiss. Things are happening and fast. I nominate Johanna as saint of plot.
Stay down? I think. What? What is happening? My eyes shut, blocking out the inconsistent world, as I try to make sense of my situation.
All I can think of is Johanna shoving Wiress to the beach. “Just stay down, will you?” But she didn't attack Wiress. Not like this. I'm not Wiress, anyway. I'm not Nuts.
I like this. She's concussed and not thinking clearly, and all she's really sure of is that wow she doesn't want to move, Johanna isn't currently trying to kill her, and hey, maybe lying here isn't such a bad idea.
Brutus and Enobaria see her and say they should keep going because she's good as dead already. I'm really disappointed we didn't see more of Enobaria. She bit someone's throat out! Why would you not want someone like that as a major character, that is fucking awesome.
This much I know. Johanna attacked me. Smashed that cylinder into my head. Cut my arm, probably doing irreparable damage to veins and arteries, and then Brutus and Enobaria showed up before she had time to finish me off.
Hm. On the one hand, yes, Katniss is obviously having trouble thinking. On the other hand, if she's lucid enough to tell a sequence of events she should be lucid enough to tell that Johanna had no reason to cut her arm and not her throat in the first attack. I'm not even asking her to figure it out - I would completely settle for confusion and wondering if Johanna meant to torture her for kicks but was interrupted.
The alliance is over. Finnick and Johanna must have had an agreement to turn on us tonight. I knew we should have left this morning. I don't know where Beetee stands.
Once again, he was in charge of the wire and the wire broke. That strongly suggests he's the one who turned on them - the others have no reason to disable his trap. The wire breaking appears to have been the signal, in fact.
Beetee is definitely inheriting the weird Cinna bestest and most wonderfulest thing.
Katniss then says the wire breaking can't possibly have been a signal, because I don't have any idea.
She then decides Duke Devlin can't be trusted because he's Johanna's friend. Okay, she's paranoid, that one was reasonable.
She runs off to find Peeta, who she figures is at the base of the tree. She finds Beetee there instead, unconscious.
I can see no wound except a gash below the crook of his elbow.
Just like yours? But no, she doesn't think anything of it. We're still being told she's concussed at this point, but she's no longer acting like it so I'm not sure how much can be chalked up to her head injury.
She sees that Beetee was messing with the wire. There was a second length of it he'd left attached to the tree, and he's tied this to Peeta's knife. Katniss continues to fail to think that he and Peeta might have fought, because Beetee is too best and wonderful to do something mean like that.
we're only a few paces from the force field. There's the telltale square, high up and to my right, just as it was this morning. What did Beetee do? Did he actually try to drive the knife into the force field the way Peeta did by accident? And what's the deal with the wire? Was this his backup plan? If electrifying the water failed, did he mean to send the lightning bolt's energy into the force field?
Oh jesus fuck no.
If the visual flaw was also the physical weak spot, that should have been mentioned, because those aren't interchangeable terms.
She hears Peeta calling for her like a good millstone, so she starts shouting back hoping it'll draw attackers to her instead. She seems to still be under the impression Peeta has any chance of winning without her, despite that, you know, he's shouting to both give away his location and make it clear he's on his own.
Enobaria and Finnick reach the lightning tree.
She's still alive! Yay. But this is confusing. Are they working together? If so, why would Johanna need to fake Katniss' death? Johanna is clearly working with Duke Devlin, who also now seems to be working with Enobaria. This would sort of work out if it'd been Enobaria saying Katniss was good as dead, because maybe she was in on it and charged with misleading Brutus, but it was Brutus who told her that.
Anyway, Katniss aims for the neck because that's how she rolls. Sure, she can shoot a squirrel in the eye, but with her human opponents she prefers the neck and torso.
The books are really pretty weird.
Two cannons have sounded. Brutus, Johanna, Chaff. Two of them are already dead.
What the hell is with Chaff, anyway? He certainly seems to be living up to his name. We're told he's Haymitch's friend so he'd have been the natural choice to join up, yet he's just hung out doing nothing. And it just underscores the way who gets named is prophetic here - since god knows his presence hasn't mattered storywise, why must it be a named character rather than an unnamed one that survives until the end?
Katniss remembers Haymitch's words about remembering the enemy, and finally gets it.
Yes, I know who the enemy is. And it's not Enobaria.
YES.
KATNISS ALL IS FORGIVEN.
She shoots to the "chink in the armor" and the force of the arrow is enough to get through. You know, considering this zaps hard enough to blacken meat, shouldn't the wire have burned up? I'm still waiting for the reason for that bizarre feature. Anyway, the wire is now connected to the force field in time for the lightning to hit and everything goes boom.
A flash of white runs up the wire, and for just a moment, the dome bursts into a dazzling blue light.
My eyes strain to capture one last image of beauty to take with me.
Right before the explosions begin, I find a star.
No you don't, you were just staring at lighting, then seeing everything go blue-white, so there's no way your eyes can pick out stars right now. Moderation, book, moderation. Sometimes less is more.
One more chapter to go!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-02 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-04 05:31 pm (UTC)If there'd be the slightest in-text acknowledgment that his use of chink in the armor was different than just a standard term for flaw and an odd usage choice on his part, it'd have been good foreshadowing of them eventually taking it out through the weak point.