Headscratchers / The Hunger Games Katniss

Here are the headscratchers about Katniss Everdeen. To see the rest, click here.

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Katniss

Katniss's vow to kill Snow

• Katniss made a vow to Johanna to kill Snow. When making it on her own life wouldn't suffice, she agreed to make it on her family's life. Does she even remember this when decides not to kill Snow? Was she thinking mainly of Prim, who had already died? Or did she think he looked about to die anyway so her vow was superfluous?
  • Well, technically, Katniss did kill him. By laughter. When she shot Coin it's said that he laughed so hard that he choked on his own blood. So Katniss at least contributed to his death.
  • Also, I’m guessing she decided that Coin was a bigger threat and that she (Coin, that is) would only be so undefended during that specific moment. It was either killing Snow or Coin and she decided to go with the one who would be harder, maybe impossible to kill in any other situation. Snow was going to die anyway, by Katniss’s hand or someone else’s, so killing him herself was no longer her priority.

Katniss in the Cornicupia

• So the Games begin, and I see the Cornicupia for the first time. This is after I have agreed with Katt over her initial reaction to Peeta's declaration of love for the girl; while it may have given her slight advantage in terms of the view, the perception of her being seen as some weak young woman who could be trampled over in short range or possibly wallow in her situation was something that came to mind. Now, I think back to that asshole Haymitch and his initial 'tactical thinking.' So...don't charge into the Cornicupia to grab a bow, one of the only ways for Kat to have any real advantage in this game with some arrows, and friggin high-tail it? Yes, its a risk, but it is one of the best risks to take; she's faster than most of the other tributes by her own implication and worlds more agile. Haymitch, once again, fails to wow me as someone with little tactical understanding or expectation of risk.
  • Katniss' main skills are survival and archery, she is physically very weak. If she hides immediately and survives some time in solitude, many tributes will have died in the meanwhile. Then she can go scavenging or whatever. Or even try the Morphling/Foxface strategy and hide until the end. If she fights in the bloodbath, she will most probably die. The resources around the Cornucopia rise in value with shorter distance to it. Katniss picked the optimal resource: a survival bag that enhances her strategic strength. She could have avoided getting hurt if she had reacted faster, but she was distracted by Peeta.
  • Bear in mind that Haymitch had seen every child he had mentored previously for the last 24 years die, and probably lost more than a few in the opening minutes.
    • Katniss almost dies at the Cornucopia because she's not fast enough. The first few minutes of the Game are called the "bloodbath" for a reason. It's a real and present danger, and unless you have a powerful alliance on your side, in most cases, the smartest thing to do is get out as fast as you can and live to plan another day.
    • Yeah, and give your opponents a huge advantage for those who do decide to stay while the others are fighting to snag and grab. I'm happy she got something. Don't get me wrong, but its not tactically sound to simply allow the opponent unmitigated access to those supplies. I mean, look at the situation she got into later on because of that.
    • She only got the supplies because the other person she was fighting with over them got a convenient case of death by knife from the Psycho Knife Nut who was aiming for HER.
  • It worked for Haymitch in his Games. There are a bunch of references to how they are pretty similar, so maybe he recognized that and thought she might benefit from having a similar strategy as he did.
    • I think this has something to do with it. Haymitch essentially survived with just a knife. He also stressed the importance of being able to find water, food, and shelter/hiding place. He may have thought with those things and each other they would be fine until he got a sponsor to drop in a bow/knife. As a matter of fact, he would have been a mentor the year Finnick got someone to drop in a trident for him and would know some sponsors will donate weapons. Not to mention they could have pulled a Foxface and pilched a weapon from someone else in a situation that wasn't a total bloodbath. And there was also the probability that Katniss could fashion a decent enough weapon from the natural materials until she received a weapon through gift or theft.
    • Basically, Haymitch had reason to think that the odds of them surviving until they received a gift of a weapon or could steal one were greater than them surviving the Cornucopia. And when you think about Katniss only surviving because the person about to kill her was killed by someone else, and that she only got the knife because it stuck in her backpack, he was kinda right.

Why has there never been a Katniss before?

• I've only seen the movie, so please bear with me. The president of Panem makes this big speech about how Katniss is a problem because her victory would inspire hope, and too much hope would lead to the downfall of Panem. This makes sense, but why specifically Katniss? No one else from a poor district has ever won? What about that big black guy from 11? He had a good chance of winning, but the president didn't seem to care about him at all. I realize that Katniss is important because she's the main character, but I just can't swallow that she's the first one to inspire this worry and fear from the president.
  • Katniss caught the public eye like no other tribute ever really had before. Cinna made her gorgeous, Peeta made her tragic, Rue brought out a level of kindness in her that's unheard of in the Games, she was daring and deadly by virtue of her own talent, and most importantly, on top of all of that, she was openly willing to make fools of the Capitol. She was the perfect storm. Thresh (the big black guy) seemed like a decent guy, sure, but Katniss was unbelievable. She was the Girl on Fire, the girl who sacrificed herself to save her adorable little baby sister, the girl caught up in a whirlwind star-crossed romance doomed to end in utter tragedy, the girl who laid a rival to rest with a song and a bed of flowers, the girl who scored an 11 through sheer skill and balls-i-ness. Her story had a special way of captivating the crowd.
  • It wasn't the fact that she won, but the way she won (see the comments below on the tag-team suicide). If Katniss had won because Cato killed Peeta and she killed Cato, it wouldn't have mattered to Snow. But she won by giving the Capitol the metaphorical middle finger and forcing them to break their own rule. If a 16-year-old girl could get away with that, what else could people get away with?
  • The biggest problem is that Snow is saying this stuff before the interview, so many of the things listed here haven't happened yet. Katniss hasn't been kind to Rue yet, Peeta hasn't confessed his love yet, Katniss hasn't made fools of the Capitol on national televison yet, etc. At this point, Katniss volunteered for her sister and got an 11 in training. That's it. The general public doesn't know about how she got that 11, so to them, she's doing exactly what she's supposed to do, like a good non-rebellious citizen of Panem. Unless Snow can see the future, he has no reason to be worried about her yet.
    • The thing to note is the event that triggered this speech. She'd gotten a score of eleven by shooting an arrow through the gathered sponsors. That act of defiance got his attention in the same way that the fire in the opening ceremony caught the attention of the public. It was that defiant streak that led President Snow to tell Seneca Crane to control the hope, because he saw the beginnings of something that he wanted nipped in the bud.
  • An 11 is a pretty damn incredible score. Even the Careers really get mostly 10s. A scrawny girl from D12, the shit district that never wins, getting an 11? That's unbelievable. Maybe she hasn't proven herself to be a great person, but she's still stood out in a very unexpected way.
  • I always assumed that they gave her an 11 as punishment for the apple stunt. The book never goes into this, but a high score really isn't a good thing; it just makes you a target for the other tributes to kill. We see this happen: the only reason the Careers don't kill Peeta immediately because they want him to find Katniss for them. It also happened in Catching Fire. A tribute is better off getting a poor/average score, and then showing off their skills once inside the Arena.
  • Books Two and Three give me, at least, the impression that Panem was already dissent waiting to happen. Katniss made a focal point, but I got the impression relations were already pretty strained (to put it mildly) and something was likely to happen sooner or later (whether it would have gone the same way is a whole other question).
  • Given how quickly riots started when Rue was killed, that's probably absolutely true. Katniss was merely someone who happened to draw a lot of positive attention - she volunteers to save her young sister, she trolls the Capital with her arrow stunt, she's the object of Peeta's desires and she got an 11 in the scoring. So all of those things got people talking, something which President Snow keenly noticed.
  • The prequel book gives a lot of answers about why President Snow at least would see Katniss as a threat. Considering Katniss's defiant attitude towards the Capitol and the way she managed to catch the attention of the crowd it's very likely she reminded him of the only other winner from District 12 - Lucy Gray. Who was also from the Seam and so probably looked a lot like Katniss. The fact he was in love with or at least strongly infatuated with Lucy would make him even more likely to see simlarities. The Tenth Hunger games was also an utter fiasco that was basically struck from the record so it's not stretch to think he'd see any girl who reminded hims trongly of Lucy as a potential problem

Why would Katniss support the Capitol Games

• Why would Katniss support the Capitol children being put into Hunger Games? She's made it clear in the past she's opposed to the idea and wouldn't want it on anyone.Then her reasoning, "For Prim" Really? From what I gather Prim never would've wanted that. Especially after helping out other kids in the Capitol?
  • Katniss wanted to give the impression that she blamed the Capitol for Prim's death. After Coin's death, the Capitol Hunger Games seems to never happen. It simply becomes just grisly history for Katniss's children.
  • Either that or Katniss was deranged by grief. Which isn't too unlikely, considering how many Heroic BSoDs she has during the rest of the novel. Not to mention that she might have just blown straight through the Despair Event Horizon, considering the ruminations on Eternal Recurrence that precede her statement.
  • What I figured is that Katniss was planning since they talked about the Hunger Games for the Capitol children, she was planning on shooting Coin instead of Snow. She voted for the Capitol children being in the Hunger Games so they would think she was still on their side.
  • I thought it was kinda obvious she was going for a Batman Gambit when Katniss immediately ponders whether Haymitch will understand what she is doing or not. Throughout all three books, those two have had an odd almost telepathic understanding of each other, and of hidden motives behind obvious acts or words (or lack thereof). She has given a nod to Eternal Recurrence and she knows she can only stop it if she heads it off at the source.
    • There's a book called The Hunger Games Companion that seems to support the idea that Katniss supporting the games was a ruse. Indeed, it's probably that moment that makes her decide Coin is as dangerous as Snow. Alternately, Mockingjay sees her change into cold-blooded killer, so the argument that she might have decided to go for blood out of revenge is not necessarily invalid. She might well have supported elimination of all Capitol citizens (except her friends) at that point.
    • It's in the book Mockingjay:
      Katniss looks at Coin at the voting: Was it like this then, 75 years ago? ... The scent of Snow's rose curls up into my nose. ... All those people we love: dead! And we are discussing the next Hunger Games?! In an attempt to avoid wasting life? Nothing has changed! Nothing will ever change now! ... Keeping my eyes on the rose I say "I vote yes, for Prim." ... 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.
      Katniss looks at Snow at the pole: It's as if he's speaking the words again: "Oh my dear Miss Everdeen! I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other." He is right. We did.
  • The Choice was between a genocide of all Capitol citizens and a single Hunger Games. The children wouldn't be spared either way. The Hunger Games was the lesser of two evils here.
    • I think it is a false dilemma here. We have only Coin's words here, and Coin admitted that the Hunger Games was her idea when Haymitch asked.
    • And Katniss displayed why she is the hero: she took a third option and followed Beetee's words: "We have to stop viewing each other as enemies."
• Am I the only one who read between the lines for Katniss's approval for The Capitol Games? No one saw that she was trying to catch Coin off guard? And even if she wasn't planning it, she was stricken with grief over Prim's death. So, you're telling me that if a loved one of yours got murdered, you wouldn't in the slightest act more irrational?
  • Definitely true, but for me the biggest problem with that is one that exists alongside a lot of Katniss's actions: we don't know why she did it because, even though the books are from her POV, it doesn't explicitly say.
    • Also, voting for something counter to your beliefs in order to get a plan to work is stupid no matter what. Katniss got lucky that the Games she voted for didn't actually happen.

Katniss and her bow

• Katniss has a bow capable of taking down a deer. She mentions hunting from a blind, so it can't be that long. There's no way of fitting, say, a six-foot English longbow up in a blind and still being able to move it about. The damage output of a bow is dependent on two things: the draw weight (the force an archer applies to the bowstring to pull it back) and the length (longer bows offer more leverage, thus more force applied to the arrow as it is released). This said: How in the hell does a starving, underweight, presumably diminutive teenage girl overcome the draw weight on a bow capable of taking down a deer, and aim proficiently whilst doing so?
  • Practice, and the fact of not being starving anymore, just malnourished at most.
  • Animal hunting with a bow takes less strength than you'd think. The recommended draw weight for bowhunting deer is around 40 pounds if you wish to get a clean kill. Not exactly something a beginner can handle easily, but certainly not impossible for a hunter as skilled and experienced as Katniss.

How did Katniss know about the 'tearing hair out' stereotype?

• This is very minor but how did Katniss know about the stereotype that people tear their hair out and pound the ground with their fists if she hasn't watched much television other than the Hunger Games?
  • It's also a saying, "I'm tearing my hair out over this" and things along those lines. Perhaps she got it from there.

Why does Katniss look so healthy?

• If District 12 is supposed to be borderline starving why does Katniss look so healthy and well fed? If she lived in dirt poverty and had to hunt to put food on the family table shouldn't she be malnourished or at best thin and wiry?
  • While I agree that her body shape in the movies probably is a little bit unrealistic, she does hunt every day and she trades for other kinds of food so she has a reasonable income. She should probably be thinner but not drastically so.
    • The physical shape of Isabelle Fuhrmann would have perfectly fit Katniss' description from the book: small, slender but muscular, long dark hair. Jennifer Lawrence' acting ability made the difference, though. In a cute anecdote she told that the director Gary Ross cried over her audition performance (where she did the farewell scene with Prim and mom and a cave scene with Peeta) and thought that to be a good omen for her receiving the role. Ross himself said he was blown away by Lawrence' audition, the best he saw in his career. Collins said the same, she watched together with Ross. In hindsight, we can be very glad that Lawrence loved the story, the character of Katniss and got the role. Nobody could have done it better because Lawrence can act without words like nobody else, which is important because the movie omitted the narration from the book.
  • I find it amusing that people are bothered by this. For me, Jennifer Lawrence's acting was more convincing than the fact that she did not look starved. It's not a documentary, those people are actors, and there are limits to how much "method" you can demand.
    • I'd like to take your argument one step further - I think it's a nice change of pace to see a healthy looking girl in a starring role, instead of all those borderline bulimic ones, and wasn't bothered at all by the "she's supposed to be starving" thing. Next to that, as other people have stated, Katniss is a hunter - she gets more food in her than other people because she hunts for it, and the hunting in itself makes sure she's got some muscle working.
    • Bulimia is a serious mental illness. Claiming someone who is extremely thin is "borderline bulimic" just ignorant and insulting to people who actually have eating disorders. Never mind that people can be skinny naturally and can be anorexic and fat. You cannot LOOK at someone and tell if they're healthy. You can only look at someone and tell if they are fat or skinny.
    • While you're very right, you shouldn't willy-nilly use words like 'anorexic' and 'bulimic' to describe people who are very skinny, look at the environment of the acting world and tell me that there isn't a pressure to be "extremely skinny"? And to achieve those results by any means necessary? While a person who appears "really skinny" could be completely healthy, when it comes to that Hollywood Arena, most people are very... let's say cynical about how actresses get those "results". This isn't ignorance as much as it's a pessimistic view of reality.
    • I find a lot of Unfortunate Implications in the fact there's frequent complaints about the fact Jennifer doesn't look like she's starving, but I've heard nary a word about the fact that six foot three and muscular Liam Hemsworth doesn't exactly look like he grew up starving either. Double Standard much?
    • Peeta's one of the best-fed people in the district, and gets plenty of exercise hauling flour sacks, pans of bread, and other heavy things at work. He's explicitly stated in the books to be tall and muscular. And as mentioned above, Katniss is well-fed, thanks to hunting, foraging, and the smart trading of much of her harvest.
    • ...Liam Hemsworth plays Gale, not Peeta. Gale is a Seam kid, so he'd be just as starving as Katniss.
  • Could be a product of the times. There's been so much attention given recently to overly thin women in the media that having a very thin lead actress in a movie that, being based on a popular young adult book, was pretty much guaranteed to be seen by a lot of young people might be risky, even if she's skinny for a reason and it's not supposed to be attractive.
    • Jennifer Lawrence said that she refused to go on a diet to play Katniss because she didn't want young girls purposefully starving themselves to look like her.
  • There's also the reality that any sort of "emaciated" look is difficult to attain without serious health risks. Christian Bale has gone on record multiple times about how dangerous the diet he underwent for The Machinist was. Jennifer Lawrence is already thin, so her reluctance to undergo such a change is understandable and unnecessary when suspension of belief will work just fine.
  • When you have food insecurity (and this includes dieting, FYI), your body will latch onto and any every bit of food it can to keep you from dying and turn that into fat cells because who knows how long it'll be until your next meal. Katniss is not actually literally starving. She has food insecurity.
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality - we get the gist of how the districts are oppressed without the need for the actors to make themselves dangerously underweight. And in the book, it's mentioned that Katniss eats as much as possible when she arrives in the Capital - to ensure that she's well-nourished.

Why does Katniss' trick with the berries work?

• How does Katniss and Peeta's attempt at dual suicide really make the Capitol look stupid and lead to rebellion? Also, why do the Gamemakers decide that having two winners is better than zero? Why not just let them kill themselves off? Katniss kept saying, "They need a winner," but never why. Is it because the after-tour is so important in crushing people's spirits? Is it because they said there would be one (in this case, they are still liars, since now there are two)? It just does not make much sense to me. I have a hard time believing that a totalitarian regime who enjoys watching kids die would act this way. And I don't understand why it leads to a rebellion. Yes, symbolic acts can be important, but you and your buddy tricking your way out of a game is hardly some great symbol of resistance, especially when it's completely motivated by self-interest. Katniss didn't want to die and she didn't want her buddy/lover to die. That's not inspirational, it's selfish.
  • Katniss and Peeta openly defied the Capitol on live national TV and got rewarded for it. That's what makes the Capitol look like idiots. The Capitol's supposed to be all-powerful and controlling, but these two total goobers from the smelliest armpit of the country totally played them for saps. The Capitol said, "Hey, guys, only one winner," but Katniss and Peeta just went, "Screw you, bozos," and the Capitol totally rolled over. And gave them a lifetime of food and fame for it.
    • Why did the Capitol have to roll over and reward them, exactly? The Capitol could easily say that technically, neither of them won, so no one gets food or fame this year. Think of how hated Katniss and Peeta will be once they get home if this happens. I mean, they were the last tributes alive, so District 12 was guaranteed a win as long as one of them died. Instead, District 12 is still on the brink of starvation, all because Katniss valued her boyfriend's life more than the lives and well-being of all of District 12. If I was the Capitol, I would make sure that this is brought up and stressed in the post-Games interview, and then send a camera crew back with Katniss. When the inevitable angry mob kills her for letting them starve, air it for the other districts to see as a warning to future tributes.
    • The District the Victor came from doesn't benefit in any way. The Victor themselves gets a prize. District 12 as a whole was no better off after Katniss and Peeta won.
    • That's incorrect. The second book clearly states that the winner's district will receive food bonuses over the following year. There's a bit about what Gale's family did with the extra food.
    • Also Katniss spent a considerable amount of her won money in the hob to distribute her wealth.
    • Exactly, the problem is that the Capitol just rolled over, which makes no sense. Two winners seems as exactly against the rules as no winners, so what makes one better than the other? I'll tell you what, having no winners shows the people the cost of trying to be clever and standing up to the Capitol. The book acts like there is some metaphysical law that prevents the Hunger Games from having no winner, but there isn't. There's only a narrative reason why, and it's not a very good one.
    • The movie explains why the Capitol needs one winner. He keeps the hope in the districts alive that their child might win, thereby preventing them from laying down work or other disobedience. No winner result is therefore out of question. Two winner result means the Capitols rules can be broken and is therefore out of question. Snow wanted Seneca to kill Katniss.
    • The implication is that the reason the Capitol rolled over was essentially because Seneca Crane wanted to. Snow describes Seneca as "a sentimental fool," and says that he should have "blown [Katniss] away" the second she pulled out the berries. So it's possible that with a different head gamemaker, they would have allowed Katniss and Peeta to kill themselves, and either said, "Sorry, no winner," or declared whichever of them survived a fraction of a second longer to be the posthumous victor.
    • So Seneca brought down Panem? Someone get that corpse a medal. Seriously though, has there never been a situation where it's likely that both final tributes will die? I feel there should be something in the "Head Gamesmaster Manual" that covers this.
    • Except that it did, in Haymitch's Games. He was holding his guts in, and he still managed to kill the girl from 1. What was new in this one, I think, was that they were going to kill themselves. Letting people watch two sixteen-year-olds commit suicide for love, when it could have been stopped, may have been too much of a wake-up call for Seneca to let them. Also, one doubts the Government was ignorant of the value of martyrs.
    • In Haymitch's Games, both tributes weren't likely to die at the same time. The girl wasn't as injured as Haymitch and could have won by outlasting him (until she got a face full of axe.) The only injury she had was that her eye was missing and the eye socket was bleeding, while Haymitch's guts were threatening to fall out. Anyway, the narrative could have easily said that suicide wasn't allowed during the Games. Of course, it still would happen sometimes, but it would be earlier in the Games, and also explain why the Gamesmakers were so unprepared. Since most of the final 2 tributes would be from different districts, they would try to kill each other instead of suggesting a double suicide.
    • A rule stating that it's not allowed to commit suicide sounds ineffective. How do you punish someone for having died at their own hand?
    • By killing their families and loved ones. Air it for everyone to see, so that they know the price for suicide before they get to the Games. Katniss is worried that they will hurt her family after her stunt at the training session, and they killed Haymitch's family after he won his Games, so there is a history of the Capitol doing this kind of thing already. As an aside, why are Prim and Mrs. Everdeen still alive? Haymitch mentions that his family and girlfriend's family were dead two weeks after he won, and his little rebellion pales in comparison to what Katniss did.
    • Good question. My guess is that Katniss was thought a romantic heroine, and so she was loved by her fans; and Prim was adored for being cute and the sister Katniss would sacrifice herself for. It would be like killing Bambi.
  • As for the matter of needing a winner, just imagine. If you have two winners, then okay, that makes you look stupid. But if you had no winners? That means the entire Games was for nothing. It would be the Capital saying to the Districts, "Congratulations, guys. Those 24 kids of yours just died for absolutely no reason!" When you have a winner, you parade them around, you talk about glory and fame, and you say this was the entire point. Yes, people died, but they only died so that this champion could rise. If you don't have a champion, you outright admit there was no point, and the entire thing was just one long, cruel, public execution of two dozens innocents. That incites riots.
    • Well, the Games are for nothing. The way Katniss speaks, everyone in the districts is well aware that the Hunger Games are just a tool of oppression. And we can see that this is not just her opinion from the description of the behavior of all of District 12 at the Reaping - all of them seem aware that this is a sham. Now, it could be that this is just the way District 12 sees it, but that seems unlikely. And why can't they just name whichever one of the two died last the winner? If Peeta's heart stops before Katniss, he wins, if not she does. And even if both die, you can have a winner, just one who died shortly after winning. They could still parade around in his honor - glory and fame are not things that disappear with death. Hell, death can be a great source of glory and fame (take, for example, real Cato. That guy got tons of glory and fame from his suicide, why can't Peeta or Katniss?). And you say that "That incites riots." You know what else incites riots? Taking away people's children to be slaughtered for a game. You know what doesn't cause riots in the books? Taking away people's children to be slaughtered for a game. I'd believe that the Game's lack of a winner (if they chose not to name one posthumously) is not so much more heinous than the Games themselves, especially since the people (outside the Capitol at least) don't buy into the myth.
    • The reason for the Games is for the Capitol to say, "Hey Districts, we are powerful enough that we can take your children away and make them fight to the death for our entertainment, and you can't do anything about it!" The victors and the competition for food are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. As long as the districts still fear the Capitol's power, the Games have been successful. So yeah, only 22 tributes died this year. So? Just don't make that stupid rule change ever again.
    • Also, I'm pretty sure it's stated that a lot of Capitol residents gamble on the outcome of the Games. If the Games end in a tie with no real winner, the people who bet on either Katniss or Peeta to survive would feel cheated and the people who bet on the other Tributes would probably demand their money back. Considering how rich the Capitol residents are, that's a lot amount of money at stake. Possibly enough to inspire riots in the Capitol itself.
    • It's not about the money, it's about sending a message. The Capitol's citizens trust that the gamemakers are honourable at the very least. Also, many have taken a shine to Katniss and Peeta's romance. Killing both of them off would have the same effect Family Guy creators had to face when they offed Brian.
    • Just let them eat the berries then. Unless they die at exactly the same time, one of them will be a winner. No one said the victor had to be alive...
  • I personally believe the first book's Hunger Games would have played out more or less the same for Katniss and Peeta even if the Capitol didn't make that decree about two district winners. So much so, that I don't even know why it was included in the first place, except to make the Capitol look uncharacteristically like saps. I think there was supposed to be a little ambiguity at first regarding Peeta's loyalty towards Katniss vs. the careers, but as soon as us readers found out that was a ploy it became obvious that neither Peeta nor Katniss would ever kill each other. That rule change also made no sense to me - it seemed like the Capitol was purposely baiting them, because they also should have been aware that the two people who are supposedly lovers would not blindly follow some lame last-minute change. So yeah, if the new rule had never been made they could have just waited it out. Peeta most likely would have died first without some form of aid, but if they did try to pull the stunt with the nightlock the Capitol should have just let them. Either option works out well for the Capitol, and would quell any stirring rebellion.
    • The rule change was made to manufacture some more drama for the game (specifically, forcing lovers to fight each other). The change definitively did make a difference; Katniss only started looking for Peeta after she heard the new rule. Without the change, Peeta would have likely died by the riverbank without aid. Also, since Katniss is doing relatively well and isn't worried about Peeta's medicine, she's in no rush to get to the feast (or maybe just ignores the feast altogether), meaning that Clove isn't distracted with Katniss/bragging about Rue when Thresh shows up. Katniss, unlike Peeta, knows about Nighlock berries and wouldn't pick them, so Foxface wouldn't have poisoned herself. Who knows who would have won? (My money's on Clove.) I will agree that the rule change did make the Capitol look stupid though. A more natural way to get the same result would have been for Haymitch to send a note saying to act more in love, and then Katniss deciding to look for Peeta as a result.
    • I don't think Clove would have won. Without the option of both of them getting out alive I suspect Cato would have killed her. Anyway, it's possible that Katniss would have gone looking for Peeta even without the rule change. She's smart enough to realize that she most likely would not have survived without an ally, and after Rue died Peeta became the only possible choice. Besides, since they were playing the lovers card it would have seemed incredibly callous of her to leave Peeta to die, which would certainly affect her post-victory tour (if she still won). The other players most likely would have been affected, but that's why I specified that the games would play out the same for Katniss and Peeta.
    • I don't think the Victory Tour even occurred to Katniss, though. Frankly, even after she goes and finds Peeta, she doesn't even think about the romance angle until Haymitch pokes and prods at her with the parachute incentives. At this point in the series, her only concern is surviving the Games, and until the rule change, she thought of Peeta as a very dangerous potential enemy. That's what the rule change ultimately did in the narrative: It made Katniss stop thinking of him as "just another guy who has to kill me if he wants to live" and start thinking of him as "the one single guy I can safely team up with."
  • The rule change was a response to the riots after Rue's death. It would give the districts something to focus on and hope for—an unprecedented change to the system. With that in mind, the switch back to the single-survivor rule makes sense. The gamemakers figured Katniss was a survivor

Won't Katniss get negative attention from the 11 score

• Isn't Katniss getting an 11 kind of bad? It got the attention of the Careers after all.
  • That was the point. That way, they ensured that the other favourite (Cato) would have an interest in killing her himself. Otherwise, they wouldn't have cared about her.
  • The book doesn't acknowledge it, though. Katniss celebrates getting the 11, instead of panicking. She misbehaves by shooting the apple, and thinks it's completely normal that she got "rewarded" for it, even though she was worried about punishment just hours prior. Shouldn't she be suspicious? Or at least think it's weird?
    • I guess at this point, she had no reason yet to assume that she might have incurred somebody's anger. As for the book not acknowledging it, I'm on the fence about that. It's mentioned once or twice that Cato is angry that Katniss got a higher score, which is why the careers team up with Peeta in the first place.
    • I'm talking about the reaction to receiving the 11, though. Katniss has been watching Games her entire life, she should know how this works by now. Effie or Haymitch definitely should know that a high score will only make yourself a target. But they all still celebrate the announcement like it's a good thing, instead of something that will draw the wrath of the careers.
    • Because it was a big deal. It didn't just draw the attention of the careers - it drew the attention of sponsors. Think back to the times Katniss got a package from Haymitch right when she needed one. That would never have happened if she was considered a scrub.

Why is Katniss so friendly with Capitol people?

• Why is Katniss so chummy with the people who are sending her to her death? With the exception of Effie and Haymitch (the latter being the most sympathetic character of all those involved), she seems to think Cinna is delightful and her prep team harmless, despite their part in dressing kids up for death. She's not bothered that they strip her naked. She thinks the interviewer (Caesar?) is a genuinely nice guy due to his banter with the kids who are about to die. She also shoots her arrow at the gamemakers in her test not because she's angry at them for, you know, making the murder games but because they're ignoring her. Katniss generally seems to spend most of her time before the games going "ooh, pretty dresses" or "mmm, tasty food" and not so much going "ohgodohgodohgod I don't want to die". Obviously she can't be written doing that all the time, but some realism in her behaviour would be nice. It makes me wonder if she's mentally unstable before the games, not after. For all the mentions of Annie being a bit unbalanced, I think her reaction to the murder games is just that little bit more realistic, whereas Katniss doesn't seem all that bothered the first time around.
  • Because Cinna, the prep team and the interviewer all help Katniss by increasing her chances to survive. Cinna by making her unforgettable and admirable to sponsors, the prep team by making her gorgeous which is also helping in winning sponsors and the interviewer by presenting her personality in the optimal way which also gains her sponsors. As Haymitch explains, the gifts from sponsors can decide whether she lives or dies.
  • In regards to Cinna, it's made perfectly clear that he's not dressing her up for death, but he's dressing her up to keep her alive. Without his designed clothes, she is far less likely to gain any sponsors, as she would have just been another tribute, and not "the girl on fire".
  • To me, Katniss always seemed like a "deal with it" person. Not just in the sense that you have to deal with her, but also that she deals with what's presented to her. And why wouldn't she admire the food and the dresses? She's never seen such things irl, and it's a nice distraction. Not to mention that she seems to do a lot of repressing. About them stripping her naked, I was under the impression that nudity is not a big deal in panem, unless it happens to be specific persons. The reason she started liking Cinna is probably because he seemed like a shred of sanity in all this madness. Her prep team, she doesn't even take seriously. She repeatedly says that they're like dumb pets.
  • Keep in mind that the Games have been running for 74 years. This is a fairly long time to have everyone simply getting used to it. Sure, if it is you who has been chosen, it is a tragedy, but one of the mundane kind, not an absolute evil, as we think of sending children to fight each other for death from our early 21st century perspective. If she always has been told that this is how the country runs, and, moreover, never knew anything else, she is not likely to hate the system or the people which represent it. Actually, the fact that she did question the system in the end can be viewed as an outstanding (for the world) trait and a character development.
  • She's in a world where the Hunger Games are basically just a reality show. She, like the rest of Panem, has had years to become desensitized to the idea of death and violence so she understands that her stylists don't think about it the same way she does. In regards to Cinna, he seems to actually want to help Katniss survive. Right from the getgo he makes sure she has multiple advantages thanks to his dresses and whatever. Not to mention the encouragement he gives her.
    • Hate to break it to you but human's aren't that weak. Humans do not break that easily. The Soviet Union fell because there was a REVOLUTION many years after the system was put into place, the USSR wouldn't have fallen if they were willing to crack down on the revolt in their puppet states but that isn't the point
    • Actually I think that is part of the point. With Gorbachev as a leader, chances were way better - the same revolution (in fringe regions only by the way) wouldn't have succeeded under Breshnev. Another part is that people of the USSR knew there was another way - they may not really have known everything about it, not been sure whether it would be better, but there was a competing system. There is none for Panem before you hear about District 13 still existing. There is no hope of outside help, there is no one to model an alternate society after. This is the way and the only way they really know about.
    • Gorbachev was also the leader to preach glasnost - "openness." Look at it this way, he adapted to the changing (read: failing) system of the USSR, as the Gamemakers and President adapt situations to their benefit, or at least attempt to. Inflexibility and refusal to change at all is a key factor in why the German Democratic Republic ended so spectacularly and suddenly, whilst the USSR petered out a little more.
    • What you're also forgetting is that most revolutions don't lead to democracy. Human rights may very well be motives for revolution, but when it comes down to it, people can get pretty damn immoral to achieve their ends, and there are plenty of real life examples of people more or less accepting their own deaths and atrocities towards the weaker groups in society because living under oppression and violence they've learned to live with it. Haymich even states outirght that he is sceptical to the idea of democracy, showing that Panem's people truly didn't know of a better way of ruling the country, and the revolution wouln't have happened at all if 13 wasn't there to support an organized revolt.
  • When someone's particularly helpless and knows it, they strongly tend to latch on to any moments of kindness or just not-cruelty and exaggerate it, ignoring the context. Stockholm Syndrome.
  • There's also the fact that she's constantly saying how wasteful the Capitol is and how stupid and unnecessary their fashion is, but it seems like as soon as she's given the opportunity to be wasteful and wear stupid, unnecessary fashion she just goes "Ooh, gimme gimme gimme." Maybe she's supposed to be a satire on people who do nothing but complain about topic X but then when given the chance to live up to their moral code, just immediately give in to temptation.
    • It's not like she has a choice. She could rage and attack and claw and bite her prep team, but they'd stick tranquilizers into her and sew her into her dress if that's what it took. And Katniss learns that if she puts her best face forward, she can win sponsors — so learning to twirl and walk in heels becomes a viable strategy. Point is, she's got to follow the formula of the Opening Ceremonies; hey, might as well have fun with it.
    • I think the problem most people have isn't that she goes along with it, but that she actively enjoys it. She rages about how awful it is that they're dressed up before being sent to be slaughtered, but then, once she sees out pretty her outfit is, she decides this is the coolest thing ever. And she twirls and plays nice with Caesar, but she also seems to legitimately think he's a very nice man and twirls because she feels so pretty and giggly, not because she is going along with the game to survive.
    • Imagine you were a teenage girl who spent her whole life living in drab poverty and with not many people who were nice to you or paid you much attention. Woman's only human, it'd be unrealistic for her to not get sucked into the glamor.
    • I imagine I'd be more concerned with the whole death games thing.
  • In regards to Caesar, this troper was always under the impression that she conceded that he was A Lighter Shade of Black. She was thinking something among the lines of "At least he's trying to give each tribute a fair chance.", not "Ohmigosh what a nice fellow!"

Katniss' hallucination of Flickerman

• How could Kat have hallucinated Flickerman warning about the danger of tracker jacks? There's no way she could have previously heard that line from him...
  • He's been host for awhile now, presumably she watched him explain them during some other Game.

How did Katniss survive on her diet?

• How did Katniss survive on a diet of mainly rabbit? Rabbit uses more nutrients to digest than it contains, so if anything she was bringing her death closer.
  • She probably also ate a lot of vegetables and roots and other small animals like squirrel. But the author probably just didn't do the research.
    • It does actually credit at the end (not sure if this ended up in all editions of the book, though) the people who helped her with the research and it seems she did quite a lot of it. And people have survived with rabbit as their primary meat source before.
  • Or perhaps the gnawing hunger in her gut was more important to get rid of than worrying about specific caloric intake.
  • Rabbit does not use more nutrients to digest than it contains. (It's true you'd have to eat a lot of rabbits per day to keep yourself going long-term, but eating the rabbit certainly would not make you starve faster.) "Rabbit starvation" is not an incredibly well-understood phenomenon, but it's probably caused by nutrient deficiencies from the lack of essential fatty acids in such lean meat. You can't survive on just rabbit, but a diet mostly based on rabbit is quite possible as long as it's occasionally supplemented with fattier meat, or the right plants.
  • And she lives on a lot more than rabbit. In District Twelve, she mentions, among other things, birds, bread, wild dog, Greasy Sae's stew, and deer (though she and Gale trade the deer for cash and buy food that is presumably not rabbit, since they could hunt that.) She mentions her father's joke about not starving if she can find herself (ie, katniss, aka arrowhead, duck potato, etc), and things get better after she buys a goat for Prim (milk and cheese.) In the games, besides rabbit, there are eggs, groosling (a wild turkey sort of bird, explicitly described as being quite fatty), and berries that are not nightlock (the ones she uses to give Peeta the sleep syrup, a well as less delicious but edible inner bark from pines. That's not counting food from sponsors.
    • Katniss says herself she lost a lot of weight when she came out of the Games and that was on a diet of rabbit, some occasional berries and other foraged food and also food from Haymitch.
    • The idea that rabbit is a negative calorie food is a crock of horse hockey. It contains protein, which contains calories. Mal de caribou doesn't play in unless a diet consists solely of lean meat, which Katniss's never did.
    • Basically, we can eat all the rabbits we like, as long as we eat some peas and carrots with them.
  • Any sort of lean protein-exclusive diet will eventually starve the human body, as the liver has limitations on how much protein it can metabolize in a day, resulting in dangerously high blood-urea levels, as well as the fact that proteins can only be broken down into glucose under specific conditions (i.e. starvation). Katniss' hunting skills are played up because those are what help her survive the war, but she's shown to have extensive knowledge of plants and herbs gleaned from her parents, which is more likely the bulk of her family's diet. Most hunger-gatherer societies source most of their diet from the gathering aspect of their lifestyle, which is why it's often referred to in academic circles as gatherer-hunter to reflect this reality.

Why didn't Katniss end up with Gale?

• The fact that Katniss ends up with Peeta. This isn't just a disappointed fangirl talking, because I support Katniss/Peeta: it would've made a hell of a lot more sense to end up with Gale. Gale is her best frind who she's known throughout the series. She only met Peeta at the start of the Hunger Games. She is forced to act her love for Peeta, and I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty pissed and bitter toward the guy. Plus, in Mockingjay she chooses Peeta, who tried to kill her twice, over Gale, who has stated numerous times he loves her and is willing to die to protect her, and actually carries his weight instead of being The Load like Peeta. If you're just going to throw away her best friend, why throw the Gale-loves-Katniss thing in the first place? Keep them as friends, because they lose each other in the end. I hate Mockingjay, seriously.
  • In Catching Fire, Katniss witnessed the sacrificial love of Peeta and fell in love because of that. In Mockingjay, she witnessed Gale crossing the moral event horizon when he promoted for killing all civilians in the "Nut" in district 2, and he invented the booby trap designed to kill medics.
  • Because Team Peeta makes up the majority of the fanbase.
    • There's also the fact that Katniss's decision wasn't totally arbitrary either. Although it would've made sense for her to be with Gale because they're both very passionate people, it makes sense that she wouldn't be with him for the same reason: she would never forgive him for his role in killing her sister, and he would never feel remorse for it because Prim's life was traded for a greater "good". The Gale/Katniss relationship was page filler, and in itself was pandering to the base: in this post-Twilight world, teenagers seem to expect a love triangle.
  • I never get fans who portray Peter's actions in Mockingjay as somehow being his fault, when it was made clear over and over that he had been tortured and brainwashed for months on end into being a physical and psychological weapon against Katniss. The whole series is about Peeta and Katniss being pitted against each other in real and metaphorical death matches, and overcoming and beating the game by clinging to their humanity and choosing to be selfless for each other. The romance is more of an afterthought, literally an epilogue. As for ending up with Gale, that might have made sense in the beginning and indeed might have been the ending if the Hunger Games hadn't intervened, as Katniss herself speculates in Mockingjay. But it's very clear that all the characters have changed beyond recognition by the end, and the chance of Gale/Katniss had long flown by the time the war was over. Too much had happened, and they wanted different things out of life.
    • The fact the attacks of crazy paranoid rage weren't his fault doesn't mean that Katniss marrying a guy who wants to murder her is a Good Thing.
    • Probably not. But it wouldn't have been a Good Thing for her to marry a guy who might have had a hand in killing her sister, either. Again, that's not Gale's fault, but it would have hung over their heads and poisoned the relationship. Katniss herself makes it clear that she needed Peeta's warmth and comfort to live her life. Marrying a traumatized and broken man was not something she did for fun, obviously, but because she was willing to take the risk for a chance at happiness—which is the theme of the whole series, really.
    • So what, she HAS to go with Peeta and not someone else? Or simply not marry? Nice Message
    • If she married someone other than Peeta or Gale, it would have been weird. The ending was choppy enough; if she had also developed feelings for another guy who hadn't been there throughout the series, it would have been worse. As for getting married at all, I thought it WAS a nice message. Early in the series, she didn't want to have children not because she just didn't want to be a parent, but because she was afraid of them having to go to the Games. Having her get over it, get married, and have children gave the ending more hope.
  • It's possible that Katniss felt that Peeta could understand her in a way that Gale, and most others, couldn't. The Hunger Games were pretty traumatic, to say the least, and more than that, they were bizarre. At multiple points after she came back from the first games, Katniss said something about how she couldn't relate to Prim or Gale as well as she could before. The only victors that we see in relationships are Finnick and Annie, who are together; Johanna and Haymitch, at least, are explicitly stated not to have any significant others. It must be hard for a victor to relate to a non-victor well enough to be in love.
    • Cecelia certainly did it. I doubt District 8 would have enough victors that she could have married, due to age gaps.
  • Katniss may not have known Peeta as long as she knew Gale, but that doesn't mean that she should like Gale better. How many times in real life do people marry their childhood best friends? Besides, by the end of the series, she and Peeta have known each other for about a year and a half, maybe two years, lots of that in shall we say stressful situations, so it's not like they're strangers.
  • Actually, Katniss' reasoning did made emotional sense. She chooses him over Gale because Gale's passion leads them to negative emotions, and she has plenty of those of her own. And Peeta's kindness and warmth is what her wounded heart needs. And that without even entering in Gale being partially responsible for Prim's death. At least in my opinion, the problem of the Love Triangle resolution is not who she chooses. It's the fact that Collins makes that resolution in one freaking paragraph at the very last page of the trilogy!
    • I saw that resolution coming when Haymitch called Katniss in the Capitol and reminded her of their deal to save Peeta at all costs. Previous to that, Gale had already lost any chances by becoming evil in the attack on district 2. I had expected Katniss dying to safe Prim's life or Peeta's life.
  • YMMV, but at least to me it was blatantly obvious from about halfway through "Catching Fire" that Katniss was in love with Peeta and that a large part of their arc in "Mockingjay" was about her dealing with losing his love just as she realized she loved him back. There are countless hints to this in the text, like how she sees the reunion between Finnick and Annie and then pictures a similar reunion between herself and Peeta, or how the loss of him makes her react similarly to how her mother reacted to losing her father. At no point in the third book does she seem to even consider being with Gale romantically, even when she believes she can't be with Peeta, and she only kisses Gale because she's lonely and in pain and wants to feel better for a moment. I knew by the end of "Catching Fire" that she would end up alone or with Peeta but definitely not with Gale.
  • Him being in love with her doesn't mean that she has to be in love with him. More importantly, their history doesn't matter as much as the fact that they are too different by the end of the series. From the get go Gale was a reolutionary and Katniss a survivor, and by the end of the end of the series that's only deepened as Gale has grown into his role as a revolutionary behind the lines and surrounded by the elite of 13 and the resistance, while Katniss' startin point is the horrors she knows that violent death entails. They have opposing world views, and on top of that Gale's failure ot understand Katniss leads to even more cruel and unnnecessary deaths. There's no saving them after that. (Not that I understand how her relationship to Peeta managed to survive. In my opinion she should have dropped both.)
  • She may be close with Gale, but part of something like the Hunger Games changed Katniss. The Hunger Games and following revolution was by far the most formative part of her life, and Peeta understood that part of it more than Gale. It's also made clear throughout Mockingjay that Gale and Katniss have fundamental disagreements on many things, and Gale wasn't driven insane by the Capitol.
• Because she was never meant to. Gale was originally supposed to be her cousin (hence the few scattered comments in the first book about people mistaking them for cousins), and Peeta her only love interest. The whole "love triangle" was forced by Executive Meddling.

Why did Katniss not train in hand-to-hand combat?

• Why didn't Katniss at least attempt to gain some profficeny in hand to hand combat during her training? I get that the bow is her speciality and key weapon but she was running a tremendous risk. What if there wasn't a bow or it became broken early on or the person who did get her hands on it didn't sleep convieniently beneath a wasp nest? It's understandable that she wouldn't become a martial arts master overnight but she's a tall, strongly built girl who could have learnt how to deliver a punch or kick if only as a last resort move.
  • She said she can handle a knife well, even throw it sufficiently well. And she trained spear throwing and other combat types. The book contains more details than the movie, as always. There you learn she is smaller than half of the female tributes.
  • But... she's not. She's a starved girl, tiny in comparison to the careers. Maybe she could have kicked Rue into oblivion, but Thresh or Cato? No Chance. Did it explicitly say that she didn't do any hand to hand combat? I don't have the book on me now, but my impression was that she visited pretty every station with a few favourites except for shooting.
  • Perhaps she's starved in the book but in the film she's tall, robust and looks in excellent shape. She's certainly towers over Clove for instance and as far as I can recall she's bigger than Glimmer too. In fact now that I think of it she might be tallest female tribute. In any case I'm not arguing that Katniss should have devoted herself to a hand to hand strategy but (again in the film) she seems to spend little or no time studying even the basics. The scrawny Clove makes mincemeat out of her in seconds even though she's also primarily a missile girl.
    • Okay, I guessed that you might have only seen the movie... but I assume the casting choice was made due to Jennifer Lawrence's acting skills and the fact that it might send a bad message to impressionable teens to have a severely underweight girl play the main character. Also, the movie is long enough as it is, I don't think a close-combat training montage would have added anything to that.
    • When your life is on the line, use what you know. Right before the Hunger Games is NOT the time to be learning a new combat skill that several others have already mastered.
  • And you can't pick up enough hand-to-hand fighting prowess in a matter of weeks compared to people who have been training for years. Katniss does eat as much as she can while she's in the Capital to get stronger, but she knows her strengths and sticks to them. Also she's not particularly bloodthirsty and seems as if she'd rather let the rest of them fight it out amongst themselves and do as little killing as possible herself.
  • And being good at ranged combat actually gives you an advantage, because it allows you to keep your distance while you take out your enemies. Katniss just needs to get to a high vantage point with a bow and she can take out her enemies as they come at her - the second film also showing she's quite good at firing arrows at people running at her too. The Careers are trained in hand to hand combat so if it comes to that, they're going to win regardless of how much Katniss picks up in a couple of weeks.

Katniss/Peeta and 'survival'

• I supported Katniss/Peeta throughout the series, but was anyone else bothered by the fact that Katniss falls for Peeta out of "survival"? She was furious when Gale told Peeta she'd choose whoever she needed to "survive," but at the end of Mockingjay, she says that's exactly the reason she falls for Peeta; she needs him to survive. I can't decide how I'm supposed to feel about that...
  • You will notice that, throughout the series, Katniss's definition of things changes depending on what major thing impacts her life. At the time of Gale's conversation with Peeta—when the war was going on—survival only meant existing during and after the war. In the end, when Katniss had lost nearly everything, survival had come to mean pulling through and living despite whatever crushed her in the past. Existence versus life. See the difference?
  • It's a play on words - as in, "I love you so much, I can't survive without you." Like when the protagonist of Boy Meets World realized which girl he loved by saying the other was great, "but I can live without her."
    • It's meant literally, as in Katniss would die from losing the will to live if Peeta didn't help her find something to live for. She made several suicide attempts ...

How did Katniss know about Peeta's sleeping habits?

• How did Katniss know that Peeta likes to sleep with the window open? At that point she had only slept next to him in three different settings - the arena, the train and the training center. The arena is outdoors so no windows. Trains don't usually have windows you can open and Capitol trains carrying tributes/victors they want to keep an eye on would be even less likely to. The training center doesn't seem likely to let the tributes be able to open their bedroom windows either but even if they did Katniss and Peeta only slept together for two nights there. Not really enough to determine a set preference. Could be that he simply told her at some point but the context in which she says it implies that she's talking about things she knows from her own experience, not things he's told her about.
  • He's her neighbour in the victor's village, maybe she sees his window open at night a lot.
    • Although he lives three houses away from her so it seems unlikely that she'd be able to see his bedroom window from her house.
    • Maybe she goes outside sometimes
  • And Peeta lived many weeks with her while she had injured leg and tailbone. He even shared her bed to comfort her into sleep. They had plenty of time to talk about everything. She might even have noticed an open window in her bedroom that he is assumed to have opened.
  • The training center has a forcefield surrounding it that forcefully rebounds anyone who attempts escape or suicide via drop and is implied in the novel to be a skyscraper-sized building. It's quite possible the rooms have windows that can be opened, especially if they're framed in such a way that they only open inward and upward. Barring that, he could have easily mentioned it in conversation at one point.

Why didn't Katniss and Peeta break up?

• Why couldn't Katniss and Peeta just "break up" a few months after the games ended? If done right, it'd be easy to put the whole berry disaster down to young love that didn't last long after the madness of the games. Most of the hype about Katniss was based on their relationship so if you kill that off, who's going to care after a while?
  • Because the Capitol citizens were essentially shipping Katniss/Peeta. Think about fandoms in real-life... people get upset when young characters break up in the sequel, even when people of that age realistically drift apart. Imagine the outrage if Ron and Hermione had broken up by the epilogue? Katniss/Peeta breaking up would have severely disappointed all of the shippers in the Capitol, and caused people to question the rule-suspension.
  • And if they split up, what's to stop the Capitol from having one or both of them killed now that they don't have the public's love? A spy in World War II Josephine Baker was a celebrity who defied the Nazis and passed information, but they couldn't get rid of her because she was too popular and too famous. Katniss and Peeta's fake romance is what's ensuring their survival.

Why does Katniss blame Gale for Prim's death?

• Why is Katniss so angry at Gale about Prim dying? He didn't have anything to do with it.
  • He had a whole lot to do with it. Prim was killed in a trap that he designed (early on in the last film Gale describes the ploy to Beetee). Katniss and Gale had several discussions during the course of the series about the value of human life and about the cost of winning a war. Gale feels that the end justifies the means and that sacrificing innocent lives to win the war is a necessary cost. Katniss argues that this reasoning is the same as the Capitol's and that diplomacy is better than violence. Essentially what Katniss is saying is that every person who dies in the war matters to someone and it's easy to claim their deaths were a necessary evil when they're just faceless people in a crowd but their loved ones see it differently. Gale designed the trap that killed Prim (or at least thought up the very same trap) but it's not just about Prim. Every single person who died from that bombing likely mattered to someone as much as Prim mattered to Katniss. If Gale had listened to Katniss, Prim's death might have been avoidable. According to Snow he was about to surrender when the bombs fell so the bombs did nothing to speed up the end of the revolution. Katniss knows she'll never be able to disassociate Gale from her sister's death and his attitude on war and the value of human lives is off-putting to her. In the film he seems to realize her point and feel sad about it in the end but in the books he doesn't even do that.

Why didn't Katniss just shoot Cato

• So, I'm almost at the end of the book, big climax battle is pretty much over, and something's been nagging me while I read it: why didn't Katniss just shoot Cato while he was on the Cornucopia right there? At least two times we're told he's just lying there with cramps and unable to do anything on his defense, yet Katniss spends more time taking care of the other threat that she could easily take care of with one less problem on the line. Cato's lying there, one arrow square in the eye or the neck, then take care of the mutts. Why not?
  • Because she had only one arrow left and that one was inside the tourniquet that prevented Peeta from bleeding to death. When Katniss and Peeta realized the game makers would not kill Cato and that she was expected to do it, she eventually unhooked the tourniquet and used that arrow to kill Cato. It almost made Peeta die from blood loss.
  • Because Katniss is someone who can only bring herself to kill in self-defense.
    • Not really. Killing Marvel wasn't in self defense, it was out of vengeance. Also, she talks a lot about how she wants to kill people in her internal monologue, it's just that she never really has the opportunity to or has reasons why it's helpful to keep them alive longer (this is more the case in the second book). There's also the scene in the second book where she's about to shoot some innocent people after they've laid down their weapons, but only stops when she notices they have a mockingjay token on them. Basically, she seems really willing to kill for no reason at all.
    • I would argue as follows: Marvel was a direct threat to her life. He had just chucked a spear at her, and whether it missed her or dodged her I doubt he would have left it at that. It's better to say that she killed Glimmer without her being a "direct threat" to her life (she couldn't even shoot an arrow that high). As for Cato, it is more likely she has a "code of honor" that matches her brand of empathy, namely that she doesn't kill someone who is down, if anything she tries to heal them instead.
    • Techincally, the killing of Glimmer wasn't an intentional "killing of Glimmer". That is to say, she wasn't the specific target, all of the Careers and Peeta were. In fact, Katniss eagerly thought more about Peeta's potential death from the wasps than about Glimmer's when she was cutting the nest down (at that point, she thought Peeta was a traitor.)
    • The problem is, though, that the book is narrated by her and when she kills Marvel, she isn't thinking about saving herself, but how he needs to die for what he did to Rue. If the narration was third person and did not talk about her motivation, then that might be a valid argument, but it's not what she was thinking. And there's also all the other times she says she wants to kill people - like how she thinks about killing Johanna just for talking back to her.
    • To be fair, Johanna seemed to go out of her way to push buttons for simply Jerkass reasons. And in a game where the point is to kill/outlive everyone else, combined with her being both a Jerkass and a proved extremely dangerous killer...
    • All right, so she is violent. She still couldn't make herself kill Cato while he was down. That she failed to perform a mercy killing before twenty hours of mauling had passed was just cruelty on her part.
    • No, it wasn't. He was dragged inside the Cornucopia where she couldn't see him, otherwise she would have killed him. She even mentions she wishes she could. It was only after he crawled out of the Cornucopia that she was actually able to.
    • So, what I was meaning to argue is: at that time, killing Cato would be an act in self defense. At that time Cato was the only thing between her and the end of the games. Yes, there was the final twist, but no one was seeing that coming.

Katniss kills a civilian

• Katniss shoots an innocent Capitol woman at point-blank range after trying to break into her house. This is never brought up again.
  • This troper thought the woman would turn out to be Effie in a different wig/with a different skin color, and that Katniss made a huge mistake in the heat of battle.
  • Since the story is told from Katniss's point of view, it's likely that she just never thought about how she murdered that person again. Especially since she does not seem to have any inhibition against killing and is willing to do it at the drop of a hat.
  • It actually is brought up again a couple chapters later, where Katniss notes the Capitol's using video of the incident as anti-rebel propaganda. She just doesn't dwell on it because, frankly, there are bigger things happening. That was just one horrific part of a supremely horrific day.
    • I seem to remember her mocking the dead woman for being dressed up like a whore during the propaganda video. Maybe my memory is descending into hyperbole, though.
    • She didn't really offer up an opinion on it one way or the other, but I read it as her cynically pointing out what the Capitol does to their own dead for the sake of propaganda.
    • Katniss actually does dwell on it. She thinks about how many people have died and adds in the woman she shot as an after thought.
  • The "oversight" always struck me as an intentional narrative choice. It's not that Collins wanted us to believe the woman's death didn't matter; she wants us to understand that killing is now normal, even instinctive, for Katniss, to the extent that it's not even worth seriously reflection.
    • This is why that kill by Katniss was what shocked me the most in the entire franchise. It let me to assume that even Katniss was slowly becoming somewhat evil by not taking enough care before shooting. Shortly before that kill, after the sewer bloodbath, Katniss thought "I am running on hate. When that energy runs out, I will be worthless." For me this episode drove home stronger than any other the danger that war poses to the soul: It corrupts people, it destroys humanity. It also shows how a good person can do horrible mistakes in war that cannot be undone. In retrospect, I admire Collins for all the depth of darkness she had the story go towards. A very courageous book series, especially for teens 12+.

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