Katniss Everdeen

A new look on THG trilogy by Suzanne Collins:

So I was thinking last night about TGH and, especially, Mockingjay. Especially what it was about it that I loved so much, considering it could be construed as demoralizing, tragic, and slightly in-your-face about its morals. Well, OK, I won't like - I'm a huge fan of the Uglies trilogy and the His Dark Materials trilogy. And it's not like HDM isn't heavy-handed about its sentiments or anything... Anyways digressorz. I has them.

I've thought a lot about the structure of the trilogy, about the characterizations and messages and twists that make it so fantastic. I have trouble fleshing out written thoughts on these things, but I'm gonna make a start here with an idea I had last night. Surprisingly, the feminist perspective is NOT one that I'd applied to THG on anymore than a basic, 'OH YEAH baddass female hero who is never defeminized! YAYZ!' reaction. Other than that, I've been mostly paying attention to the ideas about power, manipulation, and control, and how Collins has actually managed to outline what I see as a fairly accurate depiction of that elusive concept, evil. She doesn't have the concept of 'good' so well fleshed out, but I think that's the point...

Anyway. The train of thought went something like this:

A lot of people hated Mockingjay because it was depressing. It's not like other books in its category - Harry Potter may have suffered like Katniss but he bounced back emotionally and got his happy ending. Gemma Doyle joined the suffragist movement in America - cue happy ending. Tally ran away into the forest and had a role to play - she may have been emotionally traumatized but it's not like Scott Westerfeld ever felt the need to delve into his character's inner workings. He merely hinted at them, focusing more on plot and moral. Lyra and Will may have parted, but they found depth and meaning and courage in their separation and were always joined in spirit. But Katniss... Katniss's initial character has been turned around in such a life-like depiction that many people have claimed her 'destroyed' and 'beaten' by the series. Yet... Mockingjay is my current favorite book. I've reread it half a dozen times and continue to analyze it, think about it in my spare time and attempt rudimentary drawings of the main characters in my lame attempt to learn how to draw. WHY am I so drawn to a book that's so brutal?

(Well, I mean, I'm attracted to The Sparrow and that book's just BLAM DOOM shit fuck yeargh, but at least it's not a YA novel...)

And the thing is... Katniss truly is one of the few female characters I have NO complaints about (at least in the sense that she's a female character... but at the same time, no matter what perspective I look at her I love who she is and how she's written). Gemma's a brat, and while that's cool, she annoys me. Tally's a pretty good female character. But Katniss is... I love how Collins has written her. She does a lot of masculine things - Collins even makes it a point to write that she doesn't shave her legs, she doesn't care about her appearance, she has little to no interest in romance even though she has very deep feelings for both potential interests... Yet NEVER in any way is Katniss de-feminized or portrayed as 'less' than a real woman. Again, this is purely a feminist-perspective style analysis... so I'm glossing over a lot about what it is her character I love.

And you'd think that, having written a character who is so much the model of what I love about strong female heroes, Collins would have caused be great distress by putting her through so much SHIT. But it's the way Collins frames the thing - Katniss is taken away from her world, where she's living her way, on her own terms, and placed in the Capitol... which reflects our current culture in some exaggerated but still disturbingly accurate ways. The obsession with fashion, romantic gestures, brutal violence and just... the glorification of everything to the point where it loses all true meaning. Katniss is constantly presented by the Capitol as a clueless, love-struck teenage girl. She is forced to fake a marriage and a pregnancy, to show this kind of 'female' life that has NOTHING to do with what it actually means to be HER.

And ultimately, all of those attitudes and all of that shallowness and what's BEHIND the shallowness is what destroys her. Yet it doesn't completely destroy her - it scars her for the rest of her life, yes. But there is a parallel between that and the lives of women I see around me, who struggle so hard to not be de-feminized, who, even if they are strong and capable and independent, perhaps ESPECIALLY if they are strong and capable and independent, are being torn apart and watching their lives fall apart because of the way our media and our social culture tries to impose its will of what femaleness should be on women who in their heart-of-hearts disagree. The amount of abuse women suffer - more emotional and mental but the physical abuse cannot be underestimated - leaves them with scars that echo Katniss's by the end of Mockingjay.

It's just... it's heartening, especially after the whole Twilight fiasco, to see a young adult series come into its own that blatantly calls out the harmful nature in human beings which leads to such abuse - abuse of women, abuse of the impoverished, abuse of race (though that's not necessarily addressed in THG), abuse of the disabled (that is SO there... god, Annie) and abuse of EVERYONE, basically. It's not the abused who fall into specific categories, because they're everywhere. It's the abusers - the specific kind of abuser who is as much in Snow as in Coin, Plutarch... even parts of Gale (but Gale is a good guy - and that's another point, you can have the nature of an abuser and still control it, still be loving and gentle and compassionate like Gale) - that is one specific breed. People who meddle, people who feel the urge to manipulate and overpower and force their will. Collins didn't need to represent all of the different oppressed groups and tell her readers how hard it is to be a part of one of those groups and tell the readers they should be nice/empathetic to this-or-that demographic of people, which is what a lot of well-meaning fiction does when it's trying to write about social justice.

Collins gets to the heart of it. NO ONE deserves abuse, so let's stop telling people to be empathetic to the abused - let's call out the abusers. Let's point out who they are and how they work, and once you know that, natural human empathy leads you to understand that NO ONE deserves to be used like that. The most unnatural thing for a human being is to be put in a situation where it can't at least have a semblance of feeling like it has free will. People who believe they have free will and the power to make their own choices are more responsible, loving, caring, and strong than people who subject themselves to fate or who are taught to live in a world where they must obey some higher power or trust in something outside of themselves to make their choices. Katniss's final act in Mockingjay is her loudest act of self - basically, Leave me the FUCK alone. You've meddled enough in my life and I'm ending that NOW. It's the only violence Katniss engages in willingly - for survival, to keep herself from having to submit to the will of those who do not care about her.

This may not be everything I love about Katniss or even everything I love about the way Collins writes her - but it's the MAIN reason I feel I can identify her and see her in the majority of my female friends who have suffered underneath similar attitudes from our own culture that Katniss must face from the Capitol.

So.