Jesse’s Reviews > Mockingjay > Status Update

…what? Well, Katniss not being able to make good on her assassination attempt is… realistic, but the cascading deaths of both major and minor characters is brutal, particularly the girl who prompted Katniss to volunteer in the first place. It’s gonna be a weird final 40 pages.

not Boggs noooooooooo

I’m bummed that Johanna couldn’t make it, but the irony of both sides trying to capitalize off of Katniss’s assumed death is darkly amusing. I am like 90% sure that there’s gonna be a betrayal here, and it won’t be Peeta who does it, lol. The economy of YA demands it.

Katniss and Johanna bonding over pushing each other to get through training for the Capitol is a great character moment. Peeta is behaving like a dick in the aftermath of an ugly breakup, which is painful when it’s only halfway how he feels, like all the doubt from whether or not Katniss cared about him festering into bitterness, especially because Katniss has a Big Problem in hedging her bets between boys.

In a plot development that surprises no one, Peeta is rescued—but he has been conditioned to hate and murder Katniss!!! It sucks but it’s both sensical in story and also a mechanism to keep the love triangle going. I’ve grown to cherish Finnick’s character, especially as the history of his governmental sexual slavery has been revealed, giving a different air to his hyper sexualized persona.

The extrapolation of this war as a manifestation of the Hunger Games also begs the inverse deduction of the symbolism behind the first book: The Hunger Games symbolized war. And we are now deep in war crimes, where THG theoretically had no designated non-combatants. The more we see of Katniss, the better I can delineate between the Mockingjay and the “little lightning girl”.

50 pages in and we are already going hard on “who can we really trust?” when District 13 is committing their own abuses of power and using their own media team to literally televise the revolution (including how to portray her relationship to Gale, LOL). Peeta being used in the Capitol’s propaganda, but having his own leverage in what he has to say, is an interesting wrinkle.