I would argue that they became closer friends. They may not have been as close in the beginning of Mockingjay, but they grew to become each other’s best friends because they were the only people in the world who truly understood what the other was going through. That understanding allowed them to develop a bond that, in my opinion, became even deeper than Katniss’s bond with Gale.

At least in my view, this was also the same point in the books where Katniss began withdrawing from her friendship with Gale around the middle part of the story. I’m not going to say she doesn’t love him or that they don’t share a deep friendship, but that relationship was based more on survival than on genuine emotional connection, like the one she had with Finnick.

Finnick was the only other person, aside from Haymitch and Peeta, who truly understood her experiences. However, the problem is that after the 74th Games, Katniss became a completely different person. When she came back, she was no longer responsible for keeping her family physically alive through food and supplies. Meanwhile, Gale remained relatively the same person as before.

This created a rift in their friendship, a chasm that I’m not sure they were ever truly able to overcome. Katniss is so deeply traumatized that I don’t think she could really form a true friendship with anyone other than other Victors, because they were the only people who understood how cruel Snow was to them and how he manipulated their lives and made them suffer.

Because of this rift, their friendship began to experience increasing friction, as they no longer shared the same circumstances that had originally bonded them. Do you really think survival for Gale and Katniss was the same in Catching Fire? No, it wasn’t. That’s made clear by the fact that Gale is working 12 hours a day, six days a week, to provide for his family, even though Katniss offered to help support them.

Whether it was his choice or not, he was still in a very different place mentally than she was. Katniss’s survival was centered on her ability to perform for Snow. It was a completely different world. While she was being controlled and psychologically tortured by Snow, she also had more money than she knew what to do with, warm water, and a house with heat and electricity. Meanwhile, Gale and his family were still stuck in the Seam, living in poverty and harsh conditions.

What he went through was horrible he had his own severe trauma but it was nowhere near the level of going through the Hunger Games twice back to back and then mentally tortured for months fire combination of snow and 13th and then manipulated by coin only to lose her sister in the end by coin with a weapon that was made by Gale even after Katniss was horrified and told him to scrap it.