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โNo, [...] we need someone exactly like you.โ
"Just luckier?"
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just having the stark realization that the failed act of rebellion was 24 years before katniss volunteered. that begs the question of whether or not there were more attempts. did johanna suffer the same fate as haymitch? did the capitol lie and say she was hidden the entirety of her games because she was given a similar (failed) assignment from beetee? did they have to erase countless hours of footage? edit things to make it seem like she was never where she actually was, simply hidden away from the chaos? how many mockingjay figures did they cycle through before landing on katniss? how many did they cycle through before the revolution actually began?
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Suzanne Collinโs just said fuck you to everyone whoโs ever critiqued the Hunger Games as being a โteen girl saves the dayโ story. She said oh, Mockingjay didnโt make it clear enough? Hereโs a book about how people have been rebelling for decades only to have their efforts suppressed and propagandized. Rebellion takes time and it takes failure and Katniss may have been the spark that ignited the wildfire but she did so standing atop the doused flames of everyone who came before her.
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some things about sunrise on the reaping/the hunger games universe i'm thinking about today
- haymitch was close friends with katniss's father when they were teenagers... how many times did haymitch see her at the hob or around town and do a double take?
- burdock everdeen is lenore dove baird's distant cousin, meaning katniss is connected to lucy gray's bloodline... literally snow's worst nightmare come back to haunt him, down to genetics
- reaping day is on the fourth of july. idk what else to say about this one i think we're all on the same page about this
- katniss wanting wiress, beetee, and mags as allies despite over half of the victor tributes wanting to pair up with her... the three victors who helped haymitch win his games
- haymitch, the victor of a games with twice as many tributes, bringing two victors home as a mentor in the 74th games
- despite having the most tributes and therefore the most deadly, with the least odds of survival per tribute, the 50th hunger games had the most alliances out of any other games
- beetee's son being a victor in the quell- i know we're all there already and it's been talked about endlessly but i'd like us to recall in catching fire when katniss tells the reader that the children of victors are reaped at a disproportionate amount... ampert was not the first nor was he the last. how many tributes were reaped to punish previous victors? "you tried to take away control from the capitol... look what we can take from you"
- the circumstances of ampert's death: mutts that were engineered just for him, just for beetee, designed to literally strip him of anything that made him recognizable while they killed him. beetee and his family didn't even have a body to bury, just a pile of bones
- we also know that at the end of sotr, beetee's wife is pregnant, but when beetee comes to district 13 in mockingjay his is alone. was his family killed in the uprising, or was yet another one of his children sent to the games as punishment for beetee's actions before and during the 2nd quarter quell?
- effie was the last person haymitch saw before the games began. she came into his launch room before he went into the tube... she was the last face he saw, the last person he touched, before the games changed him forever. she was the last person to know the "old" haymitch
- maysilee didn't even like the mockingjay pin- it wasn't a beloved token that had a deep meaning to generations before katniss. it meant nothing until katniss made it mean something- until madge, maysilee's niece, made it mean something
- gale mocking madge for wearing a nice dress and trying to present herself well on reaping day, and her defending herself by saying "i want to look nice if they send me to the capital" - maysilee being scorned by haymitch for her nice clothes and her necklaces until he realizes it's her own way of rebelling against the capitol... "i am going to make you see me as human too if it kills me"
- haymitch mentions that hattie used to tell him "fire is catching", which later became one of the slogans of the rebellion via katniss's propos with plutarch
- haymitch's token being a flint striker, and katniss being the girl on fire. katniss inciting the rebellion by succeeding at the exact task at which haymitch failed- destroying the force field
- we've always seen the quarter quell as a way of snow getting back at katniss for her rebellion in the 74th games, but after sotr we know she is hardly the first victor to rebel against the capitol. beetee was already a rebel in his own right, wiress and mags were instrumental in haymitch's victory in the 50th games, we can infer from johanna's characterization as loud and outspoken and certainly less than palatable to the capital's propoganda that she may have had a less than ideal (to the capitol) history... how many victor tributes were reaped on purpose? how many of them won their games through an act of defiance that was covered up?
- similary, we know plutarch's plan with katniss was similar to his plan with haymitch... but surely they weren't the only two. how many other tributes, district 12 or otherwise, did plutarch and co. try to use as weapons, simply by being victims of circumstance? how many families of rebellious tributes, whether they were victors or not, were punished, because they went along with plutarch's plan thinking they had nothing left to lose seeing as they were probably going to die anyway? so much of haymitch's games was covered up and rewritten to hide his defiance of the capitol,,, how many other games were significantly or almost entirely fabricated by the capitol because of "unruly" tributes? was any of it real?
anyway i may be reaching with some of these but suzanne collins just gave us so much to think about with sotr!!! i've seen some dissent about how some of sotr disrupts the canon of thg but i think that's entirely the point... none of what katniss knew about haymitch's games was real to begin with, it's just what was fed to her by the capitol.
don't let media literacy die friends there are too many stupid people in the world already!!! mwah
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Okay but itโs fucking brilliant that one of the themes of the book was about the distortion of history.
Usually prequels are a dangerous thing to write because unless theyโre planned out well in advance, they risk contradicting lore in the main series. Even still, we knew barely anything about Haymitchโs games. They were the perfect stomping ground for new information, with a rough series of events but without a close temporal connection to the main books.
But though she had this freedom and safety net, while she could have just written a story that aligned with what we knew, Collins leaned into the idea of contradicting past lore head on and made it the damn thesis of the book; that yeah, actually, it did play out entirely differently from how the characters saw it, and yes that contradicts what you were told, thatโs the point.
We didnโt really know what happened in the 50th games until we read it from Haymitchโs perspective, because what little information we did have was spliced up and edited. The video evidence was processed through the Capital, and twisted to serve their purposes.
Tackling that idea of history being written by those in power with a notoriously inconsistent medium? Goddamn, writer that you are, Suzanne Collins.
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iโm so appreciative to suzanne for reframing the rebellion from the original trilogy as a โthey saw their moment and took itโ type situation and showing us that theyโve been trying, over and over, with so many failed attempts, to break the arena and incite a rebellion for decades. in this current political climate never giving up hope is so essential. haymitch wasnโt the first nor the last, and they kept going even when it seemed completely futile, and thatโs what counts, and what ultimately saves them all.
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Thinking about how Wyatt Callow is proof that Dr. Gaulโs and Snowโs assertion that humanityโs essential nature is violent (which is part of their argument for the Capitolโs control being necessary) is false. That โWhat happened in the arena? Thatโs humanity undressedโฆ A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. Thatโs mankind in its natural state.โ is false.
Iโm sure he had it all calculated. He knew exactly what choices would give him the best odds of survival. He knew that the faster he got out of the initial bloodshed the better his chances would be. He knew that letting other kids die would benefit his odds of survival. He knew exactly what he shouldโve done to preserve himself.
And yet, he threw all those statistics and odds, all that reason and logic out the window in the name of protecting Lou Lou, a girl that wasnโt even from his district. He threw it all out the window in the name of helping another human being that was in an unfair situation and had worse odds than him. He knew who the real enemy was; he knew it wasnโt the other kids being taken advantage of by the Capitol just like him.
That is humanity.
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"We haven't been introduced"
Liraz and Ziri from Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Commissioned byย TeddiBarez
i love them a normal amount