scribbles on paper.

And to Ralsei’s original naïve ideas of ‘how to be a friend’. Them thinking it’s a simple matter of always ‘being nice’ - paralleling ‘Relationship Mechanics’ in games that are mostly about choosing the friendliest and most placating options, and that's really all you need to 'max out' your relationship with whoever.

Only for them to realize that it’s more complicated than this as they grow closer to Susie, someone who absolutely is not the person who chooses only the ‘nice’ options all the time, and realize that they love her for it. But also at the same time, their sweet and passive demeanor seems to have pretty much failed to endear them to Kris, despite their best efforts.

That relationship only progresses when Ralsei stops trying so hard to be Lovable….

And then also Our Choices Don’t Matter meaning that there’s no Choice a Player can make that can meaningfully change Kris’s most important relationships. These relationships also don’t depend on simply picking ‘positive’ options (because if one likes Kris, that also goes hand-in-hand with liking some amount emotionally detached teasing and pranks). AND the most important moments of relationship development happen of Kris’s own volition, and they will rebel against words that are either too cruel or too sappy to their own taste. Which in previous Chapters was mostly a positive, hopeful thing. No matter our influence, Kris’s friends will always be Kris’s friends first and foremost. We don’t have enough power to ruin their most important relationships or to make their friends love them for something that they’re not.

But in this Chapter, there’s a new melancholy wrinkle added to it. Through the whole Festival Sequence, you’re presented with a bunch of choices that under standard ‘Game Logic’ might be expected to influence the relationships between Kris, Susie and Noelle - but in true Deltarune fashion, regardless of your choices, Susie and Noelle always start their romance at the end of it. But while this could be a heartwarming story about Cute Teenaged Lesbian Love triumphing over a manipulative Amoral Time God… the whole situation also makes it very clear that even if Kris was able to make choices freely, there’s nothing they could choose that would make Susie love them either. No matter how close they and Susie get, she just doesn’t seem to be attracted to them that way.

You can also add to it the way the Flowery Final Boss plays on the ‘Power of Friendship’ bit that’s generally expected at the end of a Pacifist Run…

Where Flowery has his own Recruits that instead seem to team-up with Flowery and against you, regardless of your choices. Because the cute little ACTs you did to Recruit them were nice and all, but were they really enough to make them truly love you more than they already loved Flowery and the other Flowers? More then they loved their Dark World?

And then there’s Flowery’s whole thing. Like in many other aspects of their characters, he and Ralsei are two sides of the same coin. If Pre-Character-Development Ralsei is like someone who tries to please and befriend everyone in an RPG, Flowery is someone trying to powergame his way through a dating sim. His (and the other Flowers) constant showering of Asgore with admiration, gifts and ideal hang-outs/dates that are all just perfect for him are partly just trying to repay Asgore for the kindness he’s given them and making him happy… and also to try and make Asgore choose Flower Kingdom and his Flower Family over Hometown and his Light World Family.

As much as Flowery teases Ralsei over their jealousy of him, his behavior often reveals that he’s jealous of Kris, for being part of that family that has, from his perspective, have given Asgore nothing but grief, and yet he still seems to love more than the Flowers. Kris is a living demonstration of how his gifts and dedication to Asgore is secretly just as ‘useless’ as his fake made-up overpowered stats. Flowery is also well aware that Kris is the one that opened the Fountain in the first place, and that they seem to have some sort of hidden agenda that’s not beneficial to their dad, and Flowery still feels like Asgore will always choose them over him.

And, well, the resolution to the Flower Kingdom arc is a mixture of that (especially considering how much he was motivated into exploring the Dark Worlds out of a belief that it will magically make his family life ‘go back to normal’…. Literally pushing the Flowers away for the sake of that goal...)

But also, it’s kind of a matter that Asgore does absolutely love the Flowers, just not in the way they wanted to. The Flowers wanted Asgore to love being around them so much, he’d choose their fantasy even if it means their deaths, but Asgore loved the Flowers so much that he wanted them to live.

And in way, that’s also kind of a mirror to Kris’ situation with Susie. She definitely loves Kris, they just feel like she’d never love them the way they’d want her to.

And then, the way Pink interacts with the whole Dating Sim Pastiches adds in some wrinkles of important nuance. She’s the one notable occasion (well, outside of the other even bigger exception we’d get to in a moment) where the Gamification of Relationships is actually useful, both for the Player to progress and beat the Fight and for Pink’s Body and Ghost to solve their relationship issues. In a way, it’s kinda like saying “Well, of course, just because you can’t make anyone love you, that doesn’t mean Choices don’t matter at all in relationships, obviously. Making Choices of consideration and healthy communication is important.”

And even then, part of the resolution is Pink’s Ghost accepting her Body’s needs even if it means she won’t necessarily have her all for herself. She there’s still there’s this undercurrent of accepting that you can’t make people love you the way you want them too.

But, of course, the biggest and obvious exception of the concept of ‘You can’t make someone love you’ is, well, the same as what seems to be the biggest exception to the concept of ‘Your choices don’t matter’, and that’s the Weird Route, of course.

The Weird Route is the one exception to the idea that we and our choices can’t have a meaningful affect on Kris’ relationships, and it very intentionally uses a lot of the Tropes and language of, like, going on a Romance Route with a character in a Video Game, complete with a supposed ‘climax’ when said NPC decides to invite you to the big romantic Festival, and it also uses every storytelling tool in its disposal to showcase how it’s utterly creepy and manipulative and wrong.

It’s adding to the point of ‘you can’t make people love you’ with ‘also, even if you can make people love you, you probably fucking shouldn’t”.

But I suppose, in many ways it is still a case of one not being able to control how people love them…

And to Ralsei’s original naïve ideas of ‘how to be a friend’. Them thinking it’s a simple matter of always ‘being nice’ - paralleling ‘Relationship Mechanics’ in games that are mostly about choosing the friendliest and most placating options, and that's really all you need to 'max out' your relationship with whoever.

Only for them to realize that it’s more complicated than this as they grow closer to Susie, someone who absolutely is not the person who chooses only the ‘nice’ options all the time, and realize that they love her for it. But also at the same time, their sweet and passive demeanor seems to have pretty much failed to endear them to Kris, despite their best efforts.

That relationship only progresses when Ralsei stops trying so hard to be Lovable….

And then also Our Choices Don’t Matter meaning that there’s no Choice a Player can make that can meaningfully change Kris’s most important relationships. These relationships also don’t depend on simply picking ‘positive’ options (because if one likes Kris, that also goes hand-in-hand with liking some amount emotionally detached teasing and pranks). AND the most important moments of relationship development happen of Kris’s own volition, and they will rebel against words that are either too cruel or too sappy to their own taste. Which in previous Chapters was mostly a positive, hopeful thing. No matter our influence, Kris’s friends will always be Kris’s friends first and foremost. We don’t have enough power to ruin their most important relationships or to make their friends love them for something that they’re not.

But in this Chapter, there’s a new melancholy wrinkle added to it. Through the whole Festival Sequence, you’re presented with a bunch of choices that under standard ‘Game Logic’ might be expected to influence the relationships between Kris, Susie and Noelle - but in true Deltarune fashion, regardless of your choices, Susie and Noelle always start their romance at the end of it. But while this could be a heartwarming story about Cute Teenaged Lesbian Love triumphing over a manipulative Amoral Time God… the whole situation also makes it very clear that even if Kris was able to make choices freely, there’s nothing they could choose that would make Susie love them either. No matter how close they and Susie get, she just doesn’t seem to be attracted to them that way.

You can also add to it the way the Flowery Final Boss plays on the ‘Power of Friendship’ bit that’s generally expected at the end of a Pacifist Run…

Where Flowery has his own Recruits that instead seem to team-up with Flowery and against you, regardless of your choices. Because the cute little ACTs you did to Recruit them were nice and all, but were they really enough to make them truly love you more than they already loved Flowery and the other Flowers? More then they loved their Dark World?

And then there’s Flowery’s whole thing. Like in many other aspects of their characters, he and Ralsei are two sides of the same coin. If Pre-Character-Development Ralsei is like someone who tries to please and befriend everyone in an RPG, Flowery is someone trying to powergame his way through a dating sim. His (and the other Flowers) constant showering of Asgore with admiration, gifts and ideal hang-outs/dates that are all just perfect for him are partly just trying to repay Asgore for the kindness he’s given them and making him happy… and also to try and make Asgore choose Flower Kingdom and his Flower Family over Hometown and his Light World Family.

As much as Flowery teases Ralsei over their jealousy of him, his behavior often reveals that he’s jealous of Kris, for being part of that family that has, from his perspective, have given Asgore nothing but grief, and yet he still seems to love more than the Flowers. Kris is a living demonstration of how his gifts and dedication to Asgore is secretly just as ‘useless’ as his fake made-up overpowered stats. Flowery is also well aware that Kris is the one that opened the Fountain in the first place, and that they seem to have some sort of hidden agenda that’s not beneficial to their dad, and Flowery still feels like Asgore will always choose them over him.

And, well, the resolution to the Flower Kingdom arc is a mixture of that (especially considering how much he was motivated into exploring the Dark Worlds out of a belief that it will magically make his family life ‘go back to normal’…. Literally pushing the Flowers away for the sake of that goal...)

But also, it’s kind of a matter that Asgore does absolutely love the Flowers, just not in the way they wanted to. The Flowers wanted Asgore to love being around them so much, he’d choose their fantasy even if it means their deaths, but Asgore loved the Flowers so much that he wanted them to live.

And in way, that’s also kind of a mirror to Kris’ situation with Susie. She definitely loves Kris, they just feel like she’d never love them the way they’d want her to.

And then, the way Pink interacts with the whole Dating Sim Pastiches adds in some wrinkles of important nuance. She’s the one notable occasion (well, outside of the other even bigger exception we’d get to in a moment) where the Gamification of Relationships is actually useful, both for the Player to progress and beat the Fight and for Pink’s Body and Ghost to solve their relationship issues. In a way, it’s kinda like saying “Well, of course, just because you can’t make anyone love you, that doesn’t mean Choices don’t matter at all in relationships, obviously. Making Choices of consideration and healthy communication is important.”

And even then, part of the resolution is Pink’s Ghost accepting her Body’s needs even if it means she won’t necessarily have her all for herself. She there’s still there’s this undercurrent of accepting that you can’t make people love you the way you want them too.

But, of course, the biggest and obvious exception of the concept of ‘You can’t make someone love you’ is, well, the same as what seems to be the biggest exception to the concept of ‘Your choices don’t matter’, and that’s the Weird Route, of course.

The Weird Route is the one exception to the idea that we and our choices can’t have a meaningful affect on Kris’ relationships, and it very intentionally uses a lot of the Tropes and language of, like, going on a Romance Route with a character in a Video Game, complete with a supposed ‘climax’ when said NPC decides to invite you to the big romantic Festival, and it also uses every storytelling tool in its disposal to showcase how it’s utterly creepy and manipulative and wrong.

It’s adding to the point of ‘you can’t make people love you’ with ‘also, even if you can make people love you, you probably fucking shouldn’t”.

But I suppose, in many ways it is still a case of one not being able to control how people love them…

8. jockington

7. rudy

6. gerson boom

5. catti

4. statue from gerson boom's study

3. roaring knight

2. kris

one thing about me is that i loooove to overanalyze a piece of media. i just finished reading sunrise on the reaping after highly anticipating this book for a couple of months and now need to put down my thoughts about it somewhere so here we are.

for the majority of this discussion, im going to be comparing sunrise on the reaping, the ballad of songbirds and snakes, and the hunger games trilogy as three stories. im regarding the entire hunger games trilogy as one story because i see that as the story of katniss. the ballad of songbirds and snakes is the story of snow. sunrise on the reaping is the story of haymitch.

i think sunrise on the reaping is the worst hunger games book. that doesn't mean it's a bad book; it's just that the original trilogy and tbosas (which i personally loved) set a very high bar. i'm starting this off with a disclaimer that, although most of this post is criticism, i definitely did enjoy reading the book and i think it's generally pretty good. it's just not incredibly good.

this story explores two main themes: the first being propaganda, and the second being the question of why an oppressed population does not fight against authority. i think it tackles the theme of propaganda pretty well. we see multiple instances of media being altered to represent a certain narrative. haymitch operates within the games as a character he makes up, the "rascal" and tries to put out his own propaganda, but the capitol beats him at his own game and uses the rascal against him. there's also the posters in district 12 and the capitol, haymitch's reaping, louella's death and lou lou, and certainly many, many more examples im forgetting to mention. this is done well. however, i don't think the book does an amazing job at tackling its second topic. the thing is, susanne collins' books have a pattern of posing a question which, by the conclusion of the book (or series, if you look at the hunger games trilogy), the main character answers for themselves. the hunger games is about just war theory, which asks what is an acceptable cause for war and what are acceptable actions during a war. the series explores different takes on the answers to these questions through different characters, most prominently peeta and gale. simply put, gale stands for violence and peeta stands for diplomacy. by choosing peeta at the end of the series, katniss makes a decision about her own stance on the topic. the ballad of songbirds and snakes is about the social contract theory. snow has to decide what the purpose of the hunger games is, and he concludes by the end of the book that the hunger games exist as a representation of the natural state of man as described by thomas hobbes. sunrise on the reaping asks why haymitch, all the tributes, district 12, or the entirety of the population of the districts do not rebel against their oppressors: snow, the peacekeepers, ultimately the entire capitol, who they outnumber easily. and haymitch's answer to this question is... nothing. he just thinks about it a bunch of times but doesn't get anywhere beyond that. and yes, the reason he doesn't manage to answer that question is probably because he is busy attempting to carry out a rebel plot and failing, which is reasonable, but the story as a whole suffers from that question remaining unanswered. the propaganda point, while well done, is not a question. the book is just showing many examples of something. interesting, but not necessarily engaging. the other hunger games books invite the reader to think about the moral question of the book themselves and give deep insight on the main character through the way they go about answering it. sunrise on the reaping largely fails to do that with the kind of depth that the other books did.

this brings me to my second point. sunrise on the reaping (before the epilogue) ends with haymitch on a complete low, having failed to carry out his rebel plot and lost his family and girlfriend. the hunger games ends with katniss still traumatized and recovering, but free of the oppressive regime. the ballad of songbirds and snakes ends with snow ready to rise to power, having destroyed all evidence of his wrongdoing, and the one person who knows it all vanished. basically, the other two stories do not end on entirely sad notes for the main character. there's nothing wrong with a sad ending in a book, but it definitely took away from my enjoyment of the book because there was no reward at any point. the entire story felt futile, and, to make it worse, i knew throughout the story that it was going to be futile. the happy epilogue is also not particularly rewarding because it has basically nothing at all to do with the events of the book. i would say that the book's sad ending didn't even really impact me because it wasn't a surprise. the saddest moment to me was probably louella's death, but it had been so long since that happened by the end of the story that it didn't really compound at the conclusion. even then, louella's death was not particularly devastating, because i barely had any attachment to the character.

i think sunrise on the reaping suffers most severely from being an unplanned prequel. what i mean by this is that it was obviously not planned out while the hunger games trilogy was being written. this is absolutely normal and expected; the ballad of songbirds and snakes was also obviously unplanned. the difference, however, is that tbosas takes place 64 years before the start of the original trilogy. the only character from tbosas who is present in the main books is snow himself, and he's the villain who is not having regular intimate conversations with the hunger games' main character and multiple other characters. snow is in a position where his backstory could really be anything and it wouldn't throw off the hunger games; it would only recontextualize it. do i think susanne collins' had thought up lucy gray baird when she said that district 12 had only had two victors before katniss and peeta? no, not at all. she may have had a vague idea that she wanted district 12's first victor to have a history with snow, but i highly doubt she was a fully realized character. in fact, i would guess that the reason why she said two victors but only introduced haymitch was to give herself a nonspecific character she could come back to later. if you asked her while writing catching fire, "who was haymitch's mentor in his games?" her answer may have been "the first district 12 victor", or "that's a secret", or "i haven't decided", but you know what i think was definitely, definitely not the answer? "katniss's unlikely allies, wiress and mags."

sunrise on the reaping reveals that haymitch was close to many significant characters from the hunger games trilogy, then says that the reason why we get no indication of this in those books is because he decided to distance himself from everyone after snow ruined his life. the fact that he knew all these people so closely, though, does recontextualize a lot of the hunger games, but instead of adding fun gotchas, it just makes a lot of the story baffling. for example, we are told that haymitch is so traumatized from his games that he doesn't associate at all with any of the people he knew from that time in his life—yet, when beetee, who hatched the rebel plot that got beetee's own son killed and ruined haymitch's life, hatches a new plot centered around haymitch's childhood best friend's daughter, her boyfriend, and several other people he knows, haymitch simply goes along with it with little to no protest. if haymitch is apathetic to everyone and everything, why isn't he apathetic to the concept of revolution entirely? isn't his motivation not hurting himself and his loved ones no matter what? another example is the dynamics of the youth of haymitch's time in district 12. if maysilee, merilee, and astrid were the best of friends before the games, how is it that by the hunger games trilogy merilee and astrid had basically nothing to do with each other?

moving on. lenore dove suffers from a serious case of tell-dont-show, admittedly because she was off screen for most of the book. i will say that i found it very difficult to care about her and their relationship given how little time she spent actually doing anything in the story. her most important moment, i would say, was the conversation she and haymitch have the morning of the reaping, where she says that the reaping is not an inevitability, although i did think that haymitch didn't actually engage fully with that idea and there could have been more done with that line of thought. i also found her death to be, for lack of a better word, silly. lenore dove's death hinging on her happening to find a bag of poisoned gumdrops in a wholeass meadow and haymitch happening to feed them to her is just too chance-y to me and not the kind of calculated move snow would pull.

going further, snow fully ranting to haymitch about the covey for no reason and basically voluntarily revealing to him that the first district 12 victor was his sweetheart also seems very out of character for snow. it is definitely in character for him to be obsessed with lucy gray even after such a long time; but i found the verbal reveal of it all to haymitch rather contrived.

i don't want to end on a negative note, so im going to talk about some things i did like about the book. like i said before, i think the point about propaganda was displayed well. i think the book's greatest strength, however, is that it shows how long the revolution in the hunger games was in the making. admittedly, the failed rebel plot isn't wildly interesting to read, but i appreciate how it shows that the rebels successfully managed to break the arena in the 75th games but had been at it for years. i would also like to add that most of the criticisms i have stem from understandable causes, like lenore dove being tell-dont-show because she simply cannot be present during the games. the main thing i think didn't really need to be done was the abundance of cameos. i think a couple small cameos would have been a nice nod, but the way almost every character we got to know in this book was present in the humger games was a bit much to me.

in conclusion, sunrise on the reaping adds an interesting new perspective to the world of the hunger games of the role of propaganda in an authoritarian regime and the slow, failure and sacrifice-ridden rise of rebellion. its shortcomings betray the traps of writing an unplanned prequel to a very tightly woven and intricate story, but is still overall a decent book. in fact, i would say that without the hunger games and tbosas for context, sunrise on the reaping is a wonderful book, but given those masterpieces exist, the most i can truly call it is "decent".

However, I think the two main issues SotR are not nearly as seperate as they seem. And by addressing the inner workings and extreme power of propaganda, Collins gives as answers about people's complacency with power structures.

I think Haymitch's answer to that question could have been formulated more explicitly, but it is there. Throughout the story.

Why do people believe the reaping will (must) come every year? Why do they think they must obey rather than fight back? Why do they know (believe) the sun will rise in the East the next morning?

Because they have never seen it happen any other way. They can't imagine a world without the reaping. They can't imagine anyone fighting back and rebelling because they have never seen it.

Seeing is believing! They can't imagine a world they've never experienced or seen for themselves. A few dreamers can, but most people, Haymitch, they just can't imagine a thing that has (supposedly) never happened without seeing it first.

And that's exactly why propaganda is so powerful. That's why Plutarch asks Haymitch the question, why they aren't fighting back.

He isn't judging or even really questioning. Plutarch is in the position where he knows exactly that fighting back is possible. It has just happened at the reaping, and he was a key part in creating a reality where it didn't happen.

I think Plutarch is trying to help Haymitch see that, but he can't say it more clearly.

He wants Haymitch to realise that we act according to the reality we see around us. But who makes that reality?