Ingrid made...

Is it arguably the bleakest and least hopeful of all the hunger games books? Absolutely. It's also hands down the funniest book Suzanne Collins has ever written.

Unlike Mockingjay or sotr there isn't even the pretence of a happy ending, and you know something's gone horribly wrong when the supposedly privileged Capitol students witness horrors on par with anything the gamemakers will later devise, while the tributes are treated worse than animals.

But, amongst all the suffering you've also got...

'She was terrifying, really. And here he was in his uniform, clutching a rose like a lovesick schoolboy, hoping she would - what? Like him? Trust him? Not kill him on sight?'

-Meet-cute of the century right here.

'Who were all these people hanging around on a weekday at the zoo? Didn't they have jobs? Shouldn't the children be in school? No wonder the country was such a mess.'

-Future president Coriolanus Snow ignoring the fact he's in a cage at risk of being beaten to death by an angry mob

'"I'm supposed to fill out this questionnaire about your background. Do you mind?" He pulled out a single sheet of paper.

"Not a bit. I love talking about myself," she said'

-Lucy Gray 'any publicity is good publicity' Baird recognising the games for the PR opportunity they were.

'In rhetoric class, she'd once attributed his inability to decipher the deeper meaning of a poem to the fact he was too self-absorbed.'

-Coriolanus seething over Livia Cardew, the girl it's heavily implied he goes on to marry, in the immediate aftermath of a brutal murder, and essentially proving her point.

'They simultaneously leaned in for another kiss when the peacekeepers laid hands on her and led her away.

Festus nudged him on the way out of the hall. "That was some goodbye."

Coriolanus just shrugged. "What can I say? I'm irresistible."'

-Coriolanus 'I've kissed precisely two girls in eighteen years' Snow thinking he's a player. This right here is how you do unreliable narrators.

'Surely, if there had ever been an exception to the rule, it was Lucy Gray Baird. A person who defied easy definition. A rare bird, just like him. Why else had the pressure of her lips on his turned his knees to water?'

-Tell me you didn't have sex in high school without telling me you didn't have sex in high school.

'"I started out as a medical doctor, you know" she said.

"Obstetrics."

How awful, Coriolanus thought. To have you be the first person in the world a baby sees.'

-Dr Gaul getting not even a fraction of the roasting she deserves.

'Did you tell your best friend his crush was a cannibal? Never a rule book when you needed one.'

-Coriolanus 'I've internalised the horrors of war' Snow pretending he isn't still haunted by that severed leg

'Lucky did the weather report district by district, with the added fillip of Jubilee's company, but the bird refused to talk again, so Lucky began speaking for it in a high-pitched voice. "How's the weather look in district 12, Jubilee?" "They've got snow, Lucky." "Snow in July, Jubilee?" "Coriolanus Snow!"

Coriolanus gave the camera a thumbs up when they cut for his reaction. He could not believe this was his life.'

-Just A+ daytime TV content, the moment everyone realises 'oh damn, these kids are hiding rather than murdering each other, we're going to need to kill some time' and Lucky brings out the parrot still sends me.

'He gave Coriolanus a hard stare. "Are you like your mother?"

The conversation wasn't going the way Coriolanus had imagined. Where was the talk of reward money? He couldn't be persuaded to take it if it was never offered.'

-Coriolanus faced with the reality that Strabo Plinth is likely one of those rich people who got rich by not splashing the cash.

'She could only mean the one lake house that still had a roof. Probably his last roof, until he built one himself. How did you build a roof anyway? It had not been a question on the officer candidate test?'

-Coriolanus fresh of the back of thinking he's too 'exceptional' to adapt to a life in the woods, like sure my dude, you're probably too exceptional to do the washing up or take the bins out too.

Then you've got my personal favourite:

'And he did love her! He did! It was just that, only a few hours into his new life in the wilderness, he knew he hated it.'

If anyone knows of a genuine excuse for what look like lazy and unnecessary examples of canon divergence, let me know (and feel free to add your own)

5. Buttercup

So we're told straight off this cat is ginger right? He's ginger in Catching Fire and both parts of Mockingjay, but in the first film we get...

Like... could they not find a single ginger cat to appear in a 5-second scene? I genuinely don't understand why this happened

4. Burdock Everdeen's death

The first film is the least faithful to the books, to its detriment, and while the lack of narration makes it difficult to accurately convey Katniss' memories, they didn't even really try here. We get a photo on the mantlepiece and a shot of some miners, that's it. There's no associative exposition, showing you that he taught her to hunt, that the jacket she wears was once his (as was the original bow).

When you consider the importance of objects imbued with memory to the series it seemed pretty lazy. And if they gloss over the fact that Burdock and Haymitch were best friends in sotr I might just have to throw hands with the screenwriters

3. The timeline of the double-homicide in tbosas

Having Lucy Gray write 'Pure as Driven Snow' prior to watching Coriolanus shoot Mayfair was a weak move. The timing is important. In the film, it makes her look like a naive teenage girl who doesn't know what he's capable of, in the book it makes her look like a ride-or-die who's fully aware and prepared to try and match his freak with her own.

Idk, the film already made it seem way more like she got fridged to serve the plot (when the ending to the book was much more ambiguous), don't take away her agency like that

2. The architecture of the Capitol

Yeah, I'm as much a fan of the early brutalist style as anyone, but making the Capitol look like Stalinist Russia is a convenient way to ignore the fact The Hunger Games is supposed to be a story of a uniquely American dictatorship.

The books very clearly describe candy-coloured skyscrapers, with important municipal buildings and the president's mansion made from white marble, do you see any candy-coloured skyscrapers here? Didn't think so. We're leaning heavily into Moscow-in-the-40s which is cool but a pretty major divergence from the source material.

And finally, because it was the single daftest decision in adapting tbosas and they're probably going to have to retcon this in sotr or change part of the ending...

The tribute interviews/the ballad of Lucy Gray Baird

Words cannot describe of infuriated I was when I watched this scene, because in sotr, when a young Haymitch stumbles upon clips from the early games, he sees Lucy Gray's performance at the tribute interviews, and we get this:

'The girl bows and extends her hand to a figure who's standing just out of the spotlight. A silhouette of a man. Upright, trim. A crown of curls. He waits a moment, as if deciding whether or not to join her. Then takes a step forward as the screen goes black.'

Haymitch identifies district 12's forgotten victor, he does the maths, and he figures out that Lenore Dove's in grave danger, because there was a reason president Snow seemed to know so much about the covey when they met in the library. But this revelation is only possible because he's seen the one piece of surviving media in the Capitol that links the two of them together.