rivers_bend

I've finally finished all three Hunger Games books, and never in my life have I been more aware of the extent to which we read things through the lens of our own experience. I haven't exactly been rolling around in posts about the books or the movies, as I wanted to avoid spoilers, but I've seen enough to know that what a lot of people are talking about are not themes that jumped out at me at all. I felt like all three books were essentially about one thing.



This entire series seems to me to be about how depressing, frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, and hopeless seeming it is to be female in a patriarchal society. I see talk of ship wars, the "Peeniss" (and seriously???) shippers versus those who are team Gale, like this is just another Twilight scenario with team Jacob and team Edward. But unlike Bela, who is all about the boys, Katniss is MARKEDLY uninterested. Over and over and over she talks about how she never wants to get married. How she sees Gale and Peeta as friends and nothing more. She is scared before she meets Cinna that he plans to send her out in public naked. She is uncomfortable with her prep team touching her, and repeatedly disassociates when they do, especially in the run-up to the first games, going somewhere else in her head so she doesn't have to deal with what they're doing to her. She seems very much like someone who either has suffered a prior sexual abuse (something there is no other evidence of beyond her reaction to events), who is sexually interested only in other women, or who is not sexually interested at all for whatever reason.

Katniss is an amazing girl. She hunts with great prowess, providing for her family. She knows her strengths, she knows her own mind, she's carved out a strong place for herself in her society. She has a comfortable relationship with her best friend. Obviously, this all has to be taken away from her. Suzanne Collins for sure takes to heart that one must trap her protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at her. Sometimes literally. But she doesn't just threaten her life and her family and her home. Katniss is also constantly plagued by the attentions of the boys in her life.

As she gets drawn deeper and deeper into the charade of her 'lovers' relationship with Peeta, she has to deal with constant jealousy from both him and Gale. Neither of them find it even REMOTELY comprehensible that she could fail to be in love with him unless she is in love with the other. She's told over and over by everyone around her that she must choose, and her choice is always one or the other of them. That she could just choose herself is never suggested.

She is also plagued by the requirement to be beautiful. Her skills aren't completely discounted, but again and again she is waxed, polished, made up, and changed in order to be worthy. She is repeatedly distressed by this, but it never really seems to go anywhere as a theme, beyond one point where everyone realizes that it's better in the middle of a war if she looks more natural. I hoped that there might be some resolution of this at the end, but I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that Katniss was literally stripped of her skin and declared insane and then exiled. Maybe I'm not seeing it, but I wanted something else.

I thought we were going to at least get Katniss being allowed to be her independent self at the end, with her house and her friends and her hunting again, and even with music back in her life. But LO. It was not to be. I cannot tell you how much it depressed me that after everything that happened to her, she ended up married with children--something she NEVER WANTED. I realize that she lived in a whole new world without hunger games, and that she was sixteen when she didn't want any of this at the start, but it just smacked so much of how women are constantly being told that they'll change their minds when they meet the right person. That they'll want to be wives and mothers. Of course they will! alskjfdhlsdf NOT EVERYONE.

Katniss says that she knows this would have happened anyway. That she would have ended up with Peeta because Gale was wrong for her. In the end she, too, buys into the idea that those two were her only choices. That she never had the choice to be on her own. And then when she says that it took, "five, ten, fifteen years for me to agree. But Peeta wanted them so badly." about having children, it gave me chills. Being pregnant is a horror to her. She does love her kids, and holding her first child in her arms brings her comfort from the horror of her pregnancy, but it still seems like yet another terrible thing that happens to her in a long line of terrible things throughout her life. And this is the happiest ending she can be given.

I would love to know if Suzanne Collins always planned for her to end up with Peeta at the end, or if that was something suggested by her publishers to please the reading public. If in an ironic twist, what she was trying to write a commentary on with the love strategy that started in the first games became something that she ended up having to actually do for real.

Either way, it creeped me the hell out.

Now I'm not saying that there aren't themes of racism and classism and war and all kinds of other things going on here. Or that there isn't a lot of world building and plotting. But honestly, none of that made much of an impression on me, because I was so constantly uncomfortable with how uncomfortable Katniss was trying to be herself in a world that primarily valued her for her role as a female. Someone to be used, changed, molded, to fit into the lives of the people around her as required for their goals and egos. It was fucking depressing.

That sense of menace was largely taken out of the movie. Katniss' fear was almost absent. It made for a hugely different story. One that is a lot more media friendly, and one that doesn't jar so much with the messages that girls are being given every day about how they should fit in to the society we live in. I'm sure I will want to see the others as they come out, but mostly to see where they take them.


Your mileage may vary, of course. The whole point of this is that my life experiences have so very thoroughly impacted my interpretation of this series. But these thoughts have been plaguing me since I started listening to the first book, and I wanted to get them out.