Alex Muninn

bookbat:

Spoilers for the whole series, obviously.

-Holy FUCK that got SO BLEAK. I mean, the premise of these books is that children have to fight to the death on live television and the first book climaxes with someone being slowly torn to pieces by wild dogs and I was still TOTALLY unprepared for how dark Mockingjay was. How are these so popular? How are they even remotely filmable (and PG-rated)? I’m maybe kind of impressed with the American teenage populace for apparently liking their heroines hardcore as FUCK? But also just kind of shell-shocked.

 -In particular, I think that in the grand question of whether it’s better to love someone who loves truth and justice or someone who just really loves you, coming down on the side of the person who just loves you is pretty deeply hopeless. I mean, these are just not books that believe in truth and justice in any arrangement that involves more than maybe three people, are they? Or maybe it’s just that I was expecting all along that Katniss would choose Gale because he is her connection to who she was at the beginning of the first book, and instead that connection got cut dead, and that was pretty brutal.

 -I still want someone to write something brilliant about decadent fashion and female beauty rituals in this book. Also, there is something really odd going on with sex here. Like, Katniss and Peeta sleep in the same bed every night for most of Catching Fire but there is no suggestion that sex might even be a possibility? Like these two seventeen-year-olds who are very very intimate and also under enormous pressure all the time just never think about sex because … why? And Katniss is always thinking how she can’t get married because she doesn’t want her children to be candidates for the Games, so apparently married and childless is an unthinkable state, and I can think of a number of possible reasons why contraception wouldn’t be terribly common in the terrifying fascist post-apocalyptic wasteland, but this is never even slightly addressed. It’s just a freaky empty space. Oh, and that weird moment where Peeta says that the other tributes think Katniss is too “pure,” as if any of them are at all sexual ever, oh except for Finnick I guess but then it turns out he’s not a womanizer, he’s just being sex trafficked? I have no unifying point for any of this, I just think it’s all notably weird.

 -I thought this book did something very cool with the attention to geography, and to the material needs of the rebels and the Capitol, and how the conditions of labor in the various districts affects how they participate in the rebellion. Curious if it would be possible to map Panem onto a current map of the US with reasonable accuracy? It seems plausible, and would be so ridiculously geeky and cool and I would buy a print if someone were selling it on the internet.

-That thing where your mother goes crazy and you know she couldn’t really stop it but you can’t forgive and then you kind of become her and how that all ties in with the deep blank terror you feel at the thought of having children? Yeah, that thing.

 -I wish Katniss and Johanna had had more scenes together. The love between cutthroat bitches is the greatest love of all.

-I just love Katniss SO MUCH it hurts a little when I breathe.

So tumblr just slapped me across the face. Ouch. (Bolding by me.)

(via novazembla)