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“Hold them out. I want everyone to see,” he says.
I start to sit up but am arrested by the sight of my hands. The skin’s perfection, smooth and glowing. Not only are the scars from the arena gone, but those accumulated over years of hunting have vanished without a trace.
It’s funny, because even though they’re rattling on about the Games, it’s all about where they were or what they were doing or how they felt when a specific event occurred. “I was still in bed!” “I had just had my eyebrows dyed!” “I swear I nearly fainted!”
“I know,” says Cinna before I can object. “But the Gamemakers wanted to alter you surgically. Haymitch had a huge fight with them over it. This was the compromise.”
This will last exactly three hours and is required viewing for all of Panem.
Of course, the previous victors didn’t have the Capitol looking for a way to destroy them.
Someone returned it to my room after the Games.
Avox!
“One more time? For the audience?” he says.
The way they speak, particularly the way in which they refuse to speak like citizens of the Capitol, is important to them. No one in District 12 wants to sound like Effie Trinket unless they’re mocking her. So they hold on to their regionalisms as a quiet form of rebellion. The closest thing they have to freedom of speech is their manner of speaking.
As you note above, both are important far beyond any romantic subplot, but I do think there’s something fascinating about the way they both reinscribe roles that would traditionally be that of the “girlfriend.” Gale in particular gets to be “the girl back home” from so many Westerns and adventure movies — but of course is so much more than that. And Peeta, while a very strong character in his own right, often has to take a backseat to Katniss and her strategy, both in and out of the arena.
