Thoughts on The Hunger Games
I completed The Hunger Games trilogy last week, and it’s taken me another week to get all my thoughts in order. I borrowed the three books from my sister, (her assessment: “the first one is great, the second one is a repeat of the first, and the third one sucks”) to whom I had originally given the first one as a travelling gift, and read them consecutively without any breaks in-between. As such, I feel as though I’ve read one large volume divided into three parts (which sure, is precisely what a trilogy is), though I suspect that mine was a different reading experience from those who had a lengthy waiting period between the three instalments. By the end, I felt shattered, which I suspect is precisely how Collins wanted me to feel.
And so, here are my lasting impressions of The Hunger Games...(which will contain SPOILERS for all three books)...
After reading I had a look at various other reviews and websites and noticed that there were some accusations of plagiarism flying around, what with the book’s similarities to the likes of Stephen King’s The Running Man, William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Kurt Vonnegut’s All the King’s Horses, and a Japanese franchise called Battle Royale, all of which have the same general premise as The Hunger Games.
To that I say: a) a lot of people don’t seem to know what the word plagiarism means, and b) gimme a break. The Death Game trope is not uncommon in genre fiction. Every new series of Star Trek has at least one episode that seems to revolve around the idea, and back in the day so did Sliders, Babylon 5, Blake’s Seven, Hercules the Legendary Journeys, the Saw franchise, American Gladiator, and Survivor (if Survivor involved actual survival and not being deprived of cell-phones for a few weeks). Hell, even Doctor Who did it.
Oh, and remember those wacky Romans? It was pretty clear that Collins used the gladiatorial arena as a basic template for the Hunger Games, and there were some nice nods to this throughout. I liked the heavy use of Roman names, and the fact that the total amount of tributes numbered twenty-five, which was surely an allusion to the Athenians that were sent to Crete in order to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Furthermore, the name Panem was derived from the Roman satirist Juvenal’s phrase “panem et circenses”, to describe a population that are happy to give up civic responsibilities in exchange for basic needs and entertainment (bread and circuses).
So it seems pretty clear that Collins was adapting her idea from history and her own imagination, and I see no reason not to believe her story that the idea occurred to her when she was channel-flicking late at night and found that the images of reality television and the war in Iraq were blurring together in her mind. The basic premise of game + reality television + death (with aspects such as dystopia, a not-so-distant future, and public executions optional) hardly requires a stretch of the imagination, but like most tropes, it all depends on how the writer handles it.
With that in mind, I’m going to say that Suzanne Collins’s primary gifts are twofold: 1) her impeccable pacing in a narrative where tension builds, things advance, and there is very, very little padding, and 2) her ability to make a reader clearly visualise a character and care deeply about them after an extraordinarily short space of time. Because those are the two things that really struck me. Five pages into the book and I felt as though I’d known Katniss all my life, and I don’t think many characters have come so vividly to life on the page for me as the likes of Haymitch, Effie Trinket, Peeta, Cinna, Rue and the other tributes. Their physical attributes, their mannerisms, their modes of speech - I don’t know how she did it, but Collins made all of them instantly distinct and interesting with a backstory that wasn’t info-dumped, but which you could tell was just there.
Of the main cast, only Gale, Prim and President Snow remained a little difficult for me to grasp, but I’ll say more on them later. For now, we’ll start with the obvious contender:
Katniss
Unsurprisingly, I loved Katniss. Though I realize that this particular brand of female protagonist is becoming increasingly common in YA lit - an Amazonian heroine who is highly skilled at hunting/martial arts/magic/some other cool ability, yet completely clueless when it comes to her own emotions and the effect she has on other people (because unbeknownst to her, she’s actually superhot), it’s a damn sight more preferable to the other common type of YA female protagonist - the bland high school student with no discernible attributes, hobbies, or personality, and who exists in order to be the object of desire for the author’s imaginary boyfriend. Yeah, I’ll take the first option.
But I don’t want to reduce Katniss to a series of tropes. Collins took the basics and crafted a great character out of her. She’s stoic, brave, cynical, calculating, intelligent (that is, she has common sense and good instincts rather than book-learning), mature for her age (yet still recognisably a teenager), unremittingly hard on herself, choosy about the people she lets into her heart, and (this is the best part) not particularly likeable.
Seriously, it’s a miracle that Collins pulled it off, because the truth is that Katniss is not a girl that you can easily imagine yourself being friends with. Her worth is based on the things that she achieves, not the person she is. (Compare to say, Guinevere from Merlin who doesn’t really achieve much, but is characterized by her warmth and kindness). Katniss can be spiky and cold and unforgiving, and yet her defining moment in all three books is volunteering herself as a tribute in order to save her little sister’s life.
I loved that contrast between the steel exterior and the vulnerable interior (though you could easily argue that it’s the other way around) and Collins fills her with plenty of idiosyncrasies: her queasiness around blood and wounds, her estrangement from her mother after her father’s death (born out of resentment at her mother’s crippling grief), the way she defines her relationships by how much she “owes” a person, and her awareness of her own myriad of weaknesses. Seriously, when was the last time that an author recognised her protagonists’ flaws let alone the character? And it’s not the whiny, self-pitying, woe-is-me type of anguish either. It’s genuine recognition on Katniss’s behalf that she sometimes makes the wrong decisions, treats people badly, or compromises herself.
Of course, it takes a dark turn as the series goes on, and by the third book we’re dealing with a self-loathing teenage girl who is steadily spiralling into a textbook case of PTSD. Somewhere near the beginning of “Mockingjay” I realized I was watching the mental breakdown of a seventeen year old girl. It was pretty harrowing stuff.
However, the love triangle felt rudimentary to me (it wouldn’t surprise me if Collins had been instructed by her publishers to insert one) and I was quite amazed at how pervasive the discussions surrounding it seemed to be, complete with “Team Peeta” and “Team Gale” debates (insert eye-roll about how a fandom can be given a book about warfare, social issues, and a deadly game in which only one contestant is left standing; yet still find a way to boil it all down to what boy she’s going to hook up with). Yet within the books, it was barely a subplot and I was never in any doubt as to which boy she’d end up with. What’s more, I felt that Katniss never seemed particularly interested in either of them. Katniss was entirely on Team Prim, and ultimately it felt to me as though Katniss was being asked not to choose between two guys, but between the two lifestyles that they offered her.
In a sense, I think the central themes of the entire trilogy and Katniss’s inner conflict were broken down into her two love-interests. Gale represented the Survival and Revolution But At What Cost? idea, whilst Peeta embodied all the ambiguity over What Is Real question. That said, I thought it was actually kinda wonderful that both Peeta and Gale existed predominantly as assists to Katniss’ own story, and that there was an intriguing gender-flip that existed between Katniss/Peeta.
Peeta
Peeta gets many characteristics that would usually be tagged as feminine: he’s a baker, he’s sociable, he’s much more invested in/defined by his relationship with Katniss than she is, and his strategies involve hiding and forming alliances rather than combat (for the most part). Likewise, his shtick in the Hunger Games, which is all about “protecting Katniss at all cost” gets flipped around at every turn. Most of the time she’s the one protecting him, doing all the physical labour whilst Peeta lies in a cave, mortally wounded. And oh look, there's even a trope for this: Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy.
I think the conceit of Katniss and Peeta faking a relationship in order to garner support and sympathy from the watching Capitol was one of the most fascinating parts of the book; a tactic on Collins’s part that grew organically out of the rules that she had created for the Games, and which was played out expertly throughout the entire trilogy. That motif of “real/not real” between the two of them was pretty poignant, and it fit in nicely with the artificiality that surrounded Katniss’s entire story; not just the empty glamour of the Capitol and the televised Hunger Games “franchise” but also her role as the Mockingjay and how it forces her to go from a pawn of the Capitol to a tool of District 13.
By the end of the story, Katniss’s decision to embark upon a relationship with Peeta felt more like a defeat to me. Not necessarily a bad defeat, but rather that it was written as though she had given in to the inevitable (that they’d been through too much to simply part ways) instead of having any sort of Love Epiphany. That she didn’t so much love him as need him; she specifically states that she needs someone to offset her fire and anger, and that … I hate to say it … that she owed him.
Though I’m optimistic that they found some degree of happiness and contentment together, there’s no way I could ever call Katniss/Peeta a wonderful love story. And that’s what I liked about it. Collins never shied away from making their relationship as open to discussion as possible (in terms of its authenticity), and to constantly keep the question above their heads: “real or not real?” I’m glad she sustained that right until the very end, and left them on just the right note of ambiguousness.
Because really, how else was their story supposed to end? I’d have to side-eye anyone who was genuinely holding out for a happy ending.
(Out of interest, what was the Portmanteau Name for Katniss/Peeta? Because all I can come up with either Peeniss or Katpee, and I honestly can’t decide which one is worse.)
Gale
On the other hand, Gale never really came alive for me as a character, and as such was never a particularly strong suitor for Katniss. He had the advantage of being the childhood friend, but other than that, he came across more as a symbol than a character. Unlike Katniss, whose main concern was predominantly the safety of her loved ones, Gale was driven by his destructiveness and resentment toward the Capitol, and most of his characterization in Mockingjay was spent exploring the fact that their ideologies were incompatible.
His entire characterization actually breaks down into fairly basic terms. The Katniss/Gale relationship hinges on Gale’s protection of her family. The last words Katniss says to him before she leaves for the Capitol is: “don’t let them starve.” Thus Gale is caught between his desire to defeat the Capitol at any cost and Katniss’s charge to protect her family. The possibility of them becoming a potential couple is at its strongest when Gale is successful in this endeavour: leading District 12 to the lake before the bombing, fetching Prim and Buttercup before the bombing of District 13 - but then he slips up when he doesn’t tell Katniss about Peeta’s appearances on Capitol television, and it’s all over when Prim dies (especially with the implication that Gale may have known about the bombing of the children).
That makes them incompatible, as Prim was what it was all about for Katniss, and I don’t doubt that Katniss would have chosen Prim’s life over either guy.
Though speaking of Prim, I thought that she was very much like Gale - more of a symbol than a character. There were a couple of moments when her personality shone though (talking with Katniss in the bunker) but for the most part, there was very little exploration of the sister/sister relationship. Katniss was fighting for someone that the reader barely knew, and in a way Prim embodied her own lost innocence. With that in mind, it almost seems inevitable that Prim had to die (and in hindsight, Rue’s death - who reminded Katniss so much of Prim - feels like foreshadowing). There’s something very tragically poetic about the fact that everything that happens to Katniss in these novels was born out of her willingness to sacrifice herself for Prim; only for Prim to die in a situation that was completely beyond her control. To me at least, that’s the most devastating component of the trilogy.
Haymitch
But out of all the relationships Katniss had in this series, the one that most fascinated me was that between Katniss/Haymitch. I think what intrigued me was the fact that it was a typical mentor/student relationship, and yet one that was so dysfunctional. Haymitch was not a good mentor. Katniss was not a good student. And yet there was an understanding there that manifested in ways that both found rather uncomfortable. I loved how in the first games Haymitch would silently communicate with Katniss in ways that Peeta couldn’t grasp (ie, he doesn’t send her water, and she realizes that it’s because she’s close to it). Likewise, when Katniss makes her final gambit against Coin (voting in favour of a final Hunger Games in a bid to get herself in a position to assassinate Coin), Haymitch decides the vote:
“A furious Peeta hammers Haymitch with the atrocity he could become party to, but I can feel Haymitch watching me. This is the moment, then. When we find out exactly just how alike we are, and how much he truly understands me.”
It’s my favourite moment of the entire trilogy, especially since the narrative at this point has given little indication of what Katniss truly plans to do, and so misleads us into thinking that Haymitch is backing up her desire for retribution. Only after Coin’s death do we realize what was really happening between them in this moment.
Another nice touch was the fact that Haymitch clearly liked Peeta much more than Katniss; heck, I think he explicitly says so at one point, and also tells her that “you don’t deserve him.” Now, I utterly hate the idea that any sentient human being with free will and a mind of their own could ever “deserve” another human being, but in this case, that sentiment, coming out of that character’s mouth, even though I don’t agree with it at all, is perfect characterization. The idea of finding a kindred spirit that you don’t particularly like, and don’t really want to resemble in any way is a fascinating concept.
Heroism
Along with deconstructing the romantic angle (because there was nothing even remotely romantic about it), I think Collins also tries to raise the question of what a hero is. Or maybe it just raised the question in my mind, and I’m presenting it to you.
Back when I first saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Part II, I commented on the fact that I didn’t find Harry a particularly satisfying hero, not because he wasn’t a decent bloke, but because he wasn’t nearly proactive enough for my liking. All his problems were solved by other people, all his tools were given to him by other people, all his plans were devised by other people. This wasn’t always the case, but it was definitely the norm.
Naturally, there are a dozen different ways of defining a hero, but I was intrigued by the question of whether or not Katniss is one. In a book this dark, in which the romance plays out in a way that bears no resemblance whatsoever to a typical romantic arc, and given the way in which Katniss is clearly suffering from PTSD throughout the course of Mockingjay, I think the question bears consideration. Personally, I don’t think Katniss is as much of a hero as she is a survivor. On trawling the Amazon.com reviews, a lot of people seemed disappointed that Katniss didn’t “step up” and become the heroic figure that they wanted her to be, seemingly missing the context of the story she was in, which leaves very little room for people to be heroes, no matter how you define one (as a person who achieves their set goals, or who goes through a gruelling experience and comes out stronger, or who is proactive and intelligent and somehow “triumphant”).
In fact, the typical “hero’s journey” in which an Ordinary Joe is called upon to save a damsel/lead a rebellion/become a king/whatever, seemed to play itself backwardly here. How many stories can you think of in which a wife/child/little sister is killed at the beginning of the story, thus creating an incentive for the protagonist to start fighting against the book’s enemies? In this case, that happened in reverse: Katniss sacrifices her own life to save Prim, knowing that she has little chance of survival, and stating several times that her only real motivation to fight/survive is because Prim asked her to:
“She asked me to try really hard to win.” The audience is frozen, hanging on my every word. “And what did you say?” prompts Caesar gently. But instead of warmth, I feel an icy rigidity take over my body. My muscles tense as they do before a kill. When I speak, my voice seems to have dropped an octave. “I swore I would.”
Her only motivation to fight and win was spurred on by her little sister’s wish for her to live. And yet we find in the third book that saving Prim in The Hunger Games only delayed the inevitable in Mockingjay. Prim dies regardless of everything Katniss does throughout the trilogy. Her defining action, the one that gets story rolling, is ultimately futile. Now, I know you can argue that it wasn’t all for nothing: the Capitol falls, Snow and Coin are dispatched, and there are no more Hunger Games, but then - Katniss was never really fighting for that in the first place. Not really. That was something else I liked about her. Unlike Gale, who was a total revolutionary, Katniss was apolitical. She unapologetically didn’t give a shit about anything but her loved ones’ safety. It’s a shame that we never see someone in the Capitol say: “your family, or the revolutionaries”, because I don’t doubt that she would have chosen a life of oppression with her family over a life of freedom without Prim and her closest loved ones.
If heroism requires you to be actively trying to bring down an evil system, then Katniss doesn't qualify - at least, not in the sense that toppling the Capitol was ever her intended goal. If we define heroes by what they do, then Katniss failed in her first and most important objective: saving Prim. If we define heroes by the choices they make, then Katniss has very little. In The Hunger Games she’s forced into the Capitol’s game and plays along with it in order to survive. In Catching Fire she is largely unaware of the forces moving for and against her and ends up rescued by District 13. She spends a large portion of Mockingjay being followed around by cameras that capture her every move for propaganda, in which all her quiet and personal moments are distributed to the world (even her impulsive talk-down of the District 2 man in the train is taken over by Haymitch’s prompting in her ear). Though she rises to the occasion no matter what’s thrown at her, she has no long-term strategy in mind, and she’s constantly sedated, reduced to tying knots in a rope, repeating basic facts in her head just to keep herself calm…you never lose the feeling that she’s in WAY over her head.
For most of the trilogy, she’s a wild card. She can influence policies in unpredictable ways (everything from her stunt with the nightlock berries to her presence at the bombed hospital) but she has no real political agenda or skills beyond her symbolic importance. The times in which she consciously takes matters into her own hands, she often (usually?) fails. In Mockingjay she makes the choice to become the face of the uprising, at which point she’s immediately pinned into another corner by Coin. It’s notable that what spurs her into becoming District 13’s figurehead in the first place is her realization that it will give her enough clout to secure the safety of prisoners such as Peeta, Johanna and the other captured tributes. Her other requests include getting the freedom to hunt, and permission for Prim to keep her cat. It’s all personal. To the organised and frugal District 13, almost absurdly so.
It’s also very clear that Snow gets a psychological hold on Katniss that she’s never fully able to shake off. The confrontation between them doesn’t involve Katniss triumphantly executing the man and leading the revolutionaries to victory, but is a final piece of manipulation that causes further chaos in the aftermath of Katniss’s assassination of Coin - which given Snow’s reaction, results in a definite Pyrrhic Victory for everyone involved. Snow’s death is ridiculously (and purposefully) anticlimactic:
“Opinions differ on whether he choked to death while laughing or was crushed by the crowd. No one really cares.”
There’s irony in the fact that one of her conditions in becoming the Mockingjay was to kill Snow, only for her to kill Coin instead, but it’s also a Bookend to the beginning of the book. If Prim symbolised Katniss’s innocence, then it’s gone entirely when Katniss makes her first calculated and cold-blooded kill. If the book opens with Katniss giving up her life to save Prim, it closes with her again offering up her life (and whatever moral fibre she still clings to) in order to kill Coin. It’s the exact inverse of her intentions and heroism in trying to save Prim’s life; for here she’s again offering up her life, but in order to avenge Prim, and take the woman who (possibly) made the call to sacrifice Prim with her.
Katniss’s story is a succession of symbolic “deaths”, and it accumulates in the incredibly broken woman of the final pages. Even her relationship with Peeta is born out of this brokenness, as she specifically states that she needs him simply to cope with day-to-day existence.
“What I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.”
So, was she a hero or a victim? Personally, I think the first action she ever took in The Hunger Games was the most heroic thing she ever did: sacrifice herself for Prim. It was all downhill from there. By that I mean that taking her little sister’s place in the Hunger Games was the “purest” choice she got to make, the one made with entirely unselfish motives, for the right reasons, an act of highest self-sacrifice.
From then on, she became more and more compromised; her kills became more and more morally indefensible, until finally Prim (her own innocence) inevitably had to die. To me, she’s not so much a hero as she is a survivor, and yet when you’re as broken as Katniss is by the end of the trilogy, that’s a form of heroism in itself. This trilogy has always centred around survival, not just in the Games, but against starvation, in the midst of war, and in the face of heartbreak and despair. For her to have simply survived these books against all the odds is a feat in itself, and I’m glad Collins was uncompromising in her decision not to take any sort of easy way out in dealing with the consequences of Katniss’s ordeal. This is not a typical female protagonist, as she wasn't the hero that several readers seemingly wanted her to be.
The Hunger Games
At the risk of sounding like a big party-pooper, I actually had trouble buying this as a concept. However, in saying that, I do fully understand that it’s the entire crux of the novel and there comes a point where you just have to shrug and go with it or else forgo the entire book.
LadyKate and I were having a conversation about the basics of the Robin Hood legend, discussing how every single version has an inherent plot hole that you just have to ignore or else go mad, which is that all the Sheriff has to do to capture Robin is round up villagers and systematically begin executing them until a) Robin turns himself in, or b) the villagers betray Robin in order to protect their own.
It’s a fool-proof trap, but various adaptations hardly utilize it simply because nothing else would ever happen if they did. Usually the Sheriff tries something like it once, resulting in Robin mounting a rescue, saving the villagers, earning their undying gratitude, and riding off into the sunset. The Sheriff will never attempt repeating the plan, even though it’s got a fairly good chance of success if he just keeps at it.
It also reminds me a bit of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Remember the episodes that centred on the City of Ba Sing Se, where there was a government conspiracy to keep not only the king, but the entire population ignorant as to the fact that there was a war going on? That their entire spiel revolved around brainwashing people into believing that the city was perfectly safe and that anyone who said otherwise was clearly out to disrupt the peace?
Well, on the one hand, that scenario provided the backdrop for some of the show’s best episodes. On the other, it didn’t hold up under close scrutiny, as logically-speaking, any totalitarian regime is better served making people believe that all is NOT well outside their borders; that peace and security is only sustainable if everyone sticks to the status quo out of fear that anything disrupting it would bring the oft-discussed “foreign danger” into their lives. Fear makes people more complacent far better than assurances that everything is just fine. The fact that Ba Sing Se officials are brainwashing citizens into thinking that there is no war whilst going to great lengths to cover up refugees and war machines (instead of convincing them that their best hope for security is to pass all power into the hands of those who know how to handle the war) doesn’t quite mesh.
A similar type of situation occurs here. There are all sorts of plot holes and leaps in logic that surround the Hunger Games, some of which Collins tries to address, and some of which are simply ignored. For instance, the forcible removal of one’s children for an annual bloody death match is surely a way of enticing the districts to act, not subduing them - especially if they’re televised as a form of entertainment. And the whole “celebrity cult” that grows up around the Tributes, which is fostered by the Capitol itself by grooming, training, interviewing and sponsoring the children is surely a way of making even citizens of the Capitol question the validity of watching contestants they’ve become emotionally invested in slaughtering each other (heck, the rules are changed due to the impact that Katniss and Peeta made on the viewers, allowing them both to survive).
In this case, there’s something intrinsically unstable about the concept of the Hunger Games. Maybe I’m just a glass-half full person, but I like to think that humanity would have to fall very, very far before anything like this becomes anything even remotely close to a possibility.
Our only (obvious) precedence to this sort of thing are the Romans and their use of gladiators as entertainment. But even they don’t come anywhere near the Hunger Games in terms of sheer bloodthirstiness. For one thing, they didn’t involve children (at least as far as I know). For another, the gladiators had an 80% chance of survival over the course of a “career” in the arena considering it wasn’t in their trainers’ best interests to have them killed. They cost money to feed and train! Finally, even Romans at the time were disgruntled by the bloodthirsty nature of the games (see Juvenal’s “bread and circuses” quote).
But as I said, Collins does try to cover for some of this. For instance, Katniss states that the reasoning behind the Hunger Games is to remind the Districts of just how easily it is to take their children and how there’s nothing they can do about it (though I still find this a little hard to swallow - if you don’t fight for the safety of your children, what do you fight for? Why wouldn’t they just hide their children, or try to prevent having them in the first place?) Furthermore, I loved the detail about how tributes can increase their chances of getting their names picked out of the lottery in exchange for food and fuel, and the fact that many Districts have embraced the Hunger Games to the point of training and volunteering their children, in the hopes of attaining the wealth and glory that is accorded to the winner.
It makes them participants in their own oppression; a sort of self-blaming, self-victimizing technique that probably results in many of them thinking: “well, I hedged a bet and lost. It’s the choice I made.”
And of course, the sequels reveal that many of those working against President Snow’s regime are citizens of the Capitol, who do in fact think that the Hunger Games are barbaric.
But my point in bringing up all this is not to criticize it, but to point something out about writing in general. Much like my Avatar: the Last Airbender and Robin Hood examples, the concept of the Hunger Games is good enough to carry the internal inconsistencies. It’s like an exchange program in the reader’s mind: “okay, you’re going to try and sell me this great but implausible idea? Sure - but you’re going to have to overcompensate in every other aspect if you expect me to buy it.” And the good news is; all three examples do. It was also quite reminiscent of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which hangs together nicely, but takes hundreds of short-cuts in getting various characters to where the author wants them to be with no explanation whatsoever (I’ll give some examples if you ask for them).
So the lesson I took from The Hunger Games (from a writing perspective at least) is that you can actually get away with a central premise that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny as long as you use it in an interesting and innovative way. Or to turn it into a lame analogy: if you can ice-skate impressively enough on the surface of a frozen pond, nobody will mind if they can’t see how deep the water is.
Miscellaneous
Out of all the deaths, Cinna and Finnick’s upset me the most; the former because I genuinely liked that guy (and there was so much more of his story left to tell - why did he request District 12?) and the latter because even though it was fairly inevitable that he was a goner, he went out in such a low-key way. And there were plenty of unanswered questions surrounding him as well; particularly to do with his time as a “victor” in the Capitol…
Whatever happened to Bonnie and Twill? Katniss mentions that they never turned up at District 13 and that they “probably died in the woods”, but that unsolved mystery will probably end up haunting me…
It’s a shame we never found out what was happening in the rest of the world.
How the race!wank surrounding Rue and Thresh in the film adaptation began I’ll never know. They’re clearly identified as black within the text.
Did we ever learn Foxface’s real name?
What happened to Johanna?
I kept thinking that the red-headed Avox would turn out to be some sort of Chevkov’s Gun, but she just sort of fell out of the story. Ditto Peeta's pearl.
Collins was great with her naming; almost every single one had a deeper significance, particularly the Roman ones.
So...what's the movie like?