Moar goat cheese
Sep. 8th, 2011 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileEarlier this week (or last week? Is it next week already?) I read the next two books in the Hunger Games trilogy.
Catching Fire was awesome and did not suffer from middle-book syndrome at all. In this one, Katniss and Peeta go on the Victory Tour, where they have visit all the other Districts whose champions are dead and pretend not to feel bad about it while the people in the Districts pretend to love them and be honored by their presence. It is super awkward, and the whole thing is made extra tense and horrible by whisperings of rebellion in the District over what Katniss did at the end of the Games. Katniss has to pretend really really hard that everything she did was because she was madly in love with Peeta and not because she was playing the Capitol at all, otherwise President Snow is going to eat her family. Then the next year’s Hunger Games are announced. Since this is the 75th Games, it is what is known a Quarter Quell—a game with a special gimmick that they do every 25 years in case killing eleven youngsters gets old and not horrifying enough. The gimmick for this year’s Quell is that all the contestants are chosen from the pool of previous victors. Very convenient for people who want Katniss dead, as she is the only female victor from District Twelve, so she is definitely in. Less convenient for everybody else, even including a lot of the Capitol citizens who ordinarily love the Games because they are silly useless tools, since they tend to get really attached to the victors. This Games is bananas, and I will not waste time even attempting to explain it. It ends in awesomeness and chaos.
The third book, Mockingjay, begins in awesomeness and chaos, but I am afraid that about halfway through I started feeling like it had a little less awesomeness and too much chaos. In this book, a full-scale rebellion against the Capitol has started, led by the previously-thought-to-be-extinct District Thirteen (because of course thirteen). If a full-scale revolution sounds to you like it might take a bit longer to properly tell than a single television event, you are right! It would, if you wanted to tell it properly. Sadly, Mockingjay does not tell us about this revolution quite properly; the plot is supposed to be something deep and satirical about how Katniss being “the face” of a rebellion that is being wielded as much through television coverage of itself as well as actual fighting (this is necessary within the books, as well as deep and important for the reader, because so much of the Capitol’s control is wielded through communication technology) is weird and artificial and gets in the way of her doing stuff, particularly stuff like leading a rebellion, which she is not doing because other people have orchestrated the whole thing. Sadly, much of the plot ends up being “Katiss is in the hospital and sometimes does stuff for the camera while other people have a revolution and then later come in and tell her about it.” She does get in some fighting, because that is the only way she performs well for the camera, but… Idunno, there has to be a better way to tell the “Katniss is facing obstacles in actually leading the revolution” story where Katniss also fights her obstacles as well as fighting the revolution, instead of having her just be in the hospital all the time. There were some surprising-but-make-sense plot twists of the sort that are part of why these books are so awesome, but a few too many of them happen off-stage. Also, the ending was really unsatisfying—Katniss did not kill Snow in an awesome fashion, my ’ship did not work out, Katniss married and had kids with the dude the Capitol had previously attempted to force her to marry and have kids with. The Revolution succeeded well, but seriously, fuck this ending. I would have been equally happy if it had ended either not all wrapped up in a neat little bow, or if it had ended all wrapped up in a nice little bow that wasn’t wrong in almost every imaginable way.
There were a lot of things I really did like about Mockingjay, though; like the portrayal of the extreme austerity/discipline measures District Thirteen had to take in order to keep functioning, and being able to see people from different districts interact in ways that didn’t involve trying to kill each other, and seeing the effects on some of the Capitol people of being taken out of their privileged positions. Also Johanna Mason is awesome and I want to play her in the movies.
Speaking of the movies; TEASER TRAILER OMG:
I am le excited.
Catching Fire was awesome and did not suffer from middle-book syndrome at all. In this one, Katniss and Peeta go on the Victory Tour, where they have visit all the other Districts whose champions are dead and pretend not to feel bad about it while the people in the Districts pretend to love them and be honored by their presence. It is super awkward, and the whole thing is made extra tense and horrible by whisperings of rebellion in the District over what Katniss did at the end of the Games. Katniss has to pretend really really hard that everything she did was because she was madly in love with Peeta and not because she was playing the Capitol at all, otherwise President Snow is going to eat her family. Then the next year’s Hunger Games are announced. Since this is the 75th Games, it is what is known a Quarter Quell—a game with a special gimmick that they do every 25 years in case killing eleven youngsters gets old and not horrifying enough. The gimmick for this year’s Quell is that all the contestants are chosen from the pool of previous victors. Very convenient for people who want Katniss dead, as she is the only female victor from District Twelve, so she is definitely in. Less convenient for everybody else, even including a lot of the Capitol citizens who ordinarily love the Games because they are silly useless tools, since they tend to get really attached to the victors. This Games is bananas, and I will not waste time even attempting to explain it. It ends in awesomeness and chaos.
The third book, Mockingjay, begins in awesomeness and chaos, but I am afraid that about halfway through I started feeling like it had a little less awesomeness and too much chaos. In this book, a full-scale rebellion against the Capitol has started, led by the previously-thought-to-be-extinct District Thirteen (because of course thirteen). If a full-scale revolution sounds to you like it might take a bit longer to properly tell than a single television event, you are right! It would, if you wanted to tell it properly. Sadly, Mockingjay does not tell us about this revolution quite properly; the plot is supposed to be something deep and satirical about how Katniss being “the face” of a rebellion that is being wielded as much through television coverage of itself as well as actual fighting (this is necessary within the books, as well as deep and important for the reader, because so much of the Capitol’s control is wielded through communication technology) is weird and artificial and gets in the way of her doing stuff, particularly stuff like leading a rebellion, which she is not doing because other people have orchestrated the whole thing. Sadly, much of the plot ends up being “Katiss is in the hospital and sometimes does stuff for the camera while other people have a revolution and then later come in and tell her about it.” She does get in some fighting, because that is the only way she performs well for the camera, but… Idunno, there has to be a better way to tell the “Katniss is facing obstacles in actually leading the revolution” story where Katniss also fights her obstacles as well as fighting the revolution, instead of having her just be in the hospital all the time. There were some surprising-but-make-sense plot twists of the sort that are part of why these books are so awesome, but a few too many of them happen off-stage. Also, the ending was really unsatisfying—Katniss did not kill Snow in an awesome fashion, my ’ship did not work out, Katniss married and had kids with the dude the Capitol had previously attempted to force her to marry and have kids with. The Revolution succeeded well, but seriously, fuck this ending. I would have been equally happy if it had ended either not all wrapped up in a neat little bow, or if it had ended all wrapped up in a nice little bow that wasn’t wrong in almost every imaginable way.
There were a lot of things I really did like about Mockingjay, though; like the portrayal of the extreme austerity/discipline measures District Thirteen had to take in order to keep functioning, and being able to see people from different districts interact in ways that didn’t involve trying to kill each other, and seeing the effects on some of the Capitol people of being taken out of their privileged positions. Also Johanna Mason is awesome and I want to play her in the movies.
Speaking of the movies; TEASER TRAILER OMG:
I am le excited.