I don’t post about the hunger games a lot because it is my Original Hyperfixation, and I fear once I start I will not be able to stop, but I just re-read SOTR and have to get this thought out:
One of the most valuable things that TBOSAS and SOTR added to the series, in my opinion, is highlighting just how much of a limited/unreliable narrator Katniss is, and gently challenging her perception in the early books that no resistance to the Capitol exists and/or is futile. Reading the original trilogy, you get the perception early on that there is little to no resistance against the Capitol, that it is futile and pointless to fight back, that the Capitol has well and truly subjugated its population until Katniss and Peeta spark the blaze that sets the country aflame.
But that’s not true. People have been fighting back and resisting the Games HARD, right from the very beginning. Casca Highbottom, the Games’ own creator, throwing institutional roadblocks and trying to stop Snow before he gets out of control. Arachne and the girl from District 10. Marcus and his refusal to play the game. Reaper and everything he did in the arena. Lucy Gray, who defied Snow and his Games so profoundly she was written out of history entirely. Sejanus and his story. EVERYTHING ABOUT Haymitch’s Games - everything he did, Mags and Wiress and Beetee and Plutarch, Maysilee, the Newcomers. Lenore Dove and everything she did in service of revolution. Resistance against the Games, we can infer, has been active and persistent since the Games themselves were founded.
Katniss isn’t wrong or dumb for having the perspective she does early on in the trilogy; she’s working off the information she has, and there’s so much she hasn’t seen and doesn’t know about. But the resistance she feels is born at the end of THG/into CF has always been there, has always been fighting, has given the Capitol a run for their money right from the beginning. There are so many ways in which Katniss will never know just how much came before her, and how much the revolution was the endpoint of a struggle that’s as old as the Games themselves.
Idk, the whole thing makes me think about doomerism, and the “we’re so cooked” crowd, and manufactured consent, and a hundred other things. The people in power will do everything in their power to make sure that you feel isolated in your resistance, that you find the effort pointless and futile, that you feel as though you are a one-person army against a tidal wave. But how many acts of resistance, both historical and ongoing, are you simply not privy to? How many Lucy Grays and Sejanuses and Haymitchs are out there that you just don’t know about? How many are being hidden from you? How many times is the narrative rewritten to attempt to snuff it out? Sometimes you have to resist blind, and trust without knowing that you are not alone in the fight. And I think that’s an extremely important message in the current moment
