Reply that got too long for a comment, mostly related to Hunger Games ships and romance narratives
The reason I don't enjoy Katniss/Peeta is that although she is clearly the one who decides where and when the relationship goes, she still feels like he's better than her. It's connected to the "owing" thing she has. Even though she also owes other people, it's important that she owes Peeta the hope and inspiration that got her to hunt, thanks to his goodness and love for her. She owes him again when she shoves him against a vase for what turns about to be a favor: he loved her and told the whole Capitol about it, making her more attractive to the sponsors when she was incapable of doing that herself, because even getting a good score and a striking debut in the chariots wasn't going to win her the love that a star-crossed story did. Even that debut relied partly on them holding hands. She gets to be the masculine one, but it's presented as her not being good enough and making him suffer unfairly while he does so much good for her.
That's just the beginning. I thought Katniss was pretty blatant about this. She feels bad for not being able to pay him back the love he gives her, even if he's written not to mind like a female love interest would be, that's just proof of how good he is and makes her feel bad and look bad to people. It gets more blatant in Catching Fire, with her plan to protect Peeta with Haymitch, because they both love him and both think he's better than her. Katniss wants to die for him not only because she loves him, but because she thinks he's better as a rebel leader or just a person who unites the districts, the thing Gale thinks she can do. Her whole arc with Peeta in Catching Fire is that she thinks he's better than her. This is also the falling in love arc. It's tricky for me to explain this all, but an arc like this, with the heroine feeling inferior to her male love interest and feeling like she has to sacrifice herself and all she could do for the districts because he is more worthy and can do it better, is like all the romance stories I've read in which the heroine feels unworthy of her love interest and that she's been so bad or caused so much damage or taken him for granted. It also relates to the heroine's journey of always needing to be the one to understand the hero, of becoming part of his world by conforming to it, even if she is teaching him to love or brightening him up. I will bring that up later. Of course, it often takes the form of "I didn't understand that you weren't really being a douchebag," but here it takes the form of "I never knew you loved me so much and I don't deserve it, and you'd be so much better at my main character role than I would be." While tough male action heroes might have a saintly girlfriend/wife, we're not generally supposed to think of him as being less effective than her at doing the things thrust upon the main character, and we're supposed to feel that her morality and compassion need to be set aside because sometimes people need to get rough. That's what it looks like on the surface with Peeta and Katniss, with her saving him in the Games, but I feel like I'm supposed to believe she's inferior.
Then there's how he's so much better with people than her. That's meant to be a feminine trait, but in the series it's meant to also be a masculine trait. Charm, moving and manipulating a crowd, saying the right thing, those are all traits I've seen associated more with men that I'm supposed to admire in some way in fiction, especially romance fiction, than with women. His people skills aren't just for domestic situations or being the heart of a group. They give him public power, and Katniss is heavily dependent on that for both the games and for when she's Mockingjay and pretends to lose her baby. Some people even become unfriendly because she calls him a mutt when she's in the Star Squad and announces that she could kill Peeta, and some point their guns at her when the issue of what to do with him is brought up after Boggs dies. She knows that he has that power, Haymitch and Peeta know it, and Coin knew it. She got thrown a bone by Collins, in that she proved that as long as she wasn't supposed to be smooth or pretend she could make a good public symbol, but it was generally done by using her as a pawn. She didn't even agree to follow their agenda; it was something Coin forced on her by saying she had agreed to it in public in exchange for protecting Peeta and the others. That's different than Peeta, who intended to use his skills and did so, both in the first two books and in the third, when he warned about the bombing of District 13. In that, he had more agency than she did.
There were too many times in Mockingjay when Katniss was thinking that Peeta would have done better. Her feeling of inferiority is made most blatant when Peeta coldly tells her how awful and unattractive she is after being hijacked. She narrates that he's finally seen how she really is, and that she took him for granted, and even tells Gale that Peeta's seeing her true self.
I feel like this is possibly due to the love triangle, but the entire story seems like it was pushed into conflating Katniss choosing not to be bloodthirsty or vengeful with Katniss choosing Peeta. Or at least tying them together too tightly. How he was talking about not being a pawn from the beginning, how she remembers that in the last book, how she's a pawn to both the Capitol and District 13 most of the time until she shoots Coin, how attacking the Capitol is like being in the Games, the failed mission to kill Snow that wasted lives (it was fueled by vengeance, which is a Gale thing, not a Peeta thing), and how adding a Katniss/Gale romance is associated with Katniss never forgiving him because his increasing ruthlessness and bloodlust indirectly killed Prim. Except for the epilogue, the story ends with Katniss being relieved Gale is gone and narrating that she doesn't need his hatred because she needs Peeta's hope or whatever it was, making it about who Katniss chooses. (I don't have the books on hand, as my sister just lent them to her friend yesterday, so I don't remember the exact thing she said.) Which is why I didn't want the triangle so much. It feels like it forced the story into a romance formula I've seen too often, in which there is a right guy who also equals the right values and life, whose lead she needs to take to improve herself and her life, and a wrong guy who doesn't. That's why it damages Gale's character and an otherwise interesting story arc in why compassion and nonviolence are necessary. It's the narrative of the heroine becoming part of her love interest's world, the virgin/ignorant one now enlightened as to what is good for her, because Peeta is both good to and for her and elevated by the narrative into the one who is right and was right all along. Basically it switches the gendered traits but not the stereotypical hierarchy itself.
Due to fandom spoiling me and my misremembering that, I actually thought that it'd end up Katniss/Gale but that I'd ship Katniss/Peeta because of the gender dynamic. The elevation of Peeta by both Katniss and the story prevented that, and then I think the way Katniss/Gale was squashed actually magnifies my feelings for it, because it was so brutal and created a double loss for Katniss that I didn't feel was strictly necessary: Prim's life and Gale's friendship and even the good memory of it. I'm now more invested in the ship than I wanted to be, because of the way in which any possibility of it was ruined also seems to have destroyed any happy remnant of their friendship and it feels so excessively forced.
Gale does have Ideas and Drive, but Katniss rarely feels inferior to him. On the contrary, she frequently dismisses or doubts his fervor, and their growing apart before Prim's death is due to his ruthlessness. There are some times when she thinks she was wrong and he was right. When he tells her off after she asks him to run away, and when he gets hurt right after. I think we were meant to agree with him them, before he got more ruthless, because of how much worse things are getting. Then there are two moments in Mockingjay, the scene when she thinks she should have agreed to it and been like Gale, which I don't remember much about except that it's near the beginning, and the scene during the propo in District 12, when she thinks her actions are what is driving him away. It wasn't true, and I'm not sure if we were meant to think so, given how blatant the book's end is that it's him who drove the wedge between them. We're supposed to think Gale's Ideas and Drive led to him being awful, more like Snow per his own words about Snow's rulebook even if he didn't mean it that way, and growing apart from Katniss. That's before Prim was blown up. I would be happier if they had kept growing apart without such a severe and final separation, which I don't want to go on about because it'll distract me from the point. But what I liked about it is that Katniss was not frequently comparing herself to Gale and feeling inferior, and knowing that other people saw her as less good than him too- she knew he was more integrated into 13 than her and had more goodwill with Coin, and he did keep Peeta's condition from her when he thought he could get away with it, but generally this meant she could get mad at him and treat him like someone who'd done wrong and be right, instead of feeling like he was some precious saint she'd taken for granted who deserved better. His being more into the rebellion and having more of Coin's favor didn't make her think he was superior, at least most of the time, and in turn he doesn't usually doesn't let their disagreements make him treat her like he's better than her, even going to rescue Peeta for her (though it could also be for the rebellion, but still).
And another thing I like was that the entirety of their relationship before the books was them being equals. They helped each other, hunted together, were partners and best friends who had each others' backs. She loved Prim more than anyone in the world, and she trusted Gale with that more than anyone else. Her happiest memory at the time of the first book was spending time with Gale in the forest, which she deliberately kept to herself, because it was hers and because it would do her and Peeta no favors in the Game. She told Peeta and the audience an altered story about something else instead. He had his Ideas and Drive, but couldn't do anything with them, so if there had been no Everdeen picked for the Games and no rebellion, they wouldn't have grown apart, at least not due to that. Not that I would want for there to have been no rebellion. The point is, pre-trilogy they were equals, she was happiest when with him, and he knew her best. During the trilogy they grow apart and disagree often but are still equals in Katniss's eyes, Gale her partner according to her narration right up until Prim's death.
I think both pairings were forced to an extent in execution (though the friendship Katniss and Gale had wasn't or their separation wouldn't have had any power), but having them both present and forced tied the themes about bloodshed, vengeance, and compassion too tightly to a romance formula I don't like, and made the ending of one relationship more severe than it might have been otherwise. Gale was one of the most important people in Katniss' life, with whom she had some of her happiest memories, and that is practically erased in the end. (This is where the emotional effect on me makes me dislike rather than respect the sadness. Sadness is too gentle a word.) He's not even mentioned as being in her book, of happy memories and people she loved. Everything about their friendship gets boiled down to him telling her he knew he wasn't going to get her, possibly doing one small supportive thing if he for her to shoot coin, and then Katniss being relieved at him moving far away, imagining him moving on already after feeling that he'll materialize next to her, and narrating how she needs Peeta and not Gale in a way that associates Gale with the hatred and fire she's rejecting or has enough of by herself. It serves the romance narrative I already dislike far too well in a way that cuts Gale off as a friend and even, I feel, as a happy memory to be treasured from an irrecoverable past.
That's an excellent point about Prim; I hadn't even thought it, but yes. Katniss practically raised Prim and watched her die even after she did everything she could to take every risk for her. Her sacrifice in the first book triggered what ended with her death. Now I'm even more irritated with the epilogue. I was already irritated with her having children explicitly because Peeta wanted them, since it's yet another time when she feels like she owes it to him for being so good and loving. That's how it reads to me anyway: the story telling me one final time that Katniss should reward him for his goodness.
Wow I wish I didn't have so many feelings. I may be overinvested; it's still largely due to how horrific the triangle squashing was.
Emily/Jack wasn't completely out of nowhere, in the sense that it was being brought up since early in the season. But it has no instory basis that makes sense unless I'm supposed to view it as bad, which I think I'm not thanks to the epic music when they made out over Sammy's corpse and her turning from revenge to try being with him.
Actually I don't think Buffy treated Faith as horridly as is said in fandom. Buffy didn't understand Faith, partly due to her privilege yes, but also due to how they just were two guarded and isolated people who were also too different. Granted, Buffy was not as isolated as Faith, but the effects of season two have left her feeling alienated and keeping secrets, not to mention more aware of the consequences of failing in duty. Buffy gave Faith opportunities repeatedly, and never tried to kill her until she poisoned Angel with something needing only her or Buffy's blood to cure. She would have done it for any loved one Faith poisoned, and for random people she didn't know. She was willing to give her a chance according to her conversation with Willow in This Year's Girl, right before Faith goes to her, but Faith is understandably in no state to be friendly. I think it's understandable that Buffy wouldn't forgive Faith after Faith took her body, it's just that in the context of her forgiving Angel and Spike it feels like a wrong note.
This is my reply to this discussion here: http://prozacpark.livejournal.com/126192.html?thread=1623536&#t1623536
It ran far too long.