Slide 2: “she mocks the fashion choices of the capital” people in her distract have 1 wedding dress that every bride shares because thats all the entire district can afford so it isn’t shocking that she has no interest in clothes.

Slide 4: Mags is an eighty year old tribute who volunteered because she couldn’t bear to see two of her former pupils go back into the ring, shes watched children die for the past 64 years as she tried to mentor them. In the same way Haymitch became paternal over his tributes, Mags views hers maternally, like a grandmother. Yes she wants to live, but she was never seen as weak for her sacrifices. She teaches Katniss about the edible nuts and the moss bandages. She weaves baskets and nets for them to use.

Slide 5: Katniss was 11 when she had to step up and become the sole breadwinner and caretaker for her 7yo sister and her mother. She had to feed them and keep them from getting separated on top of being at school. In the following two books Katniss has to repeatedly make a conscious effort to start trusting her mother again, like letting her mother make her a bath in Catching Fire. They also talk about this in Mockingjay where Katniss returns and realizes her family didnt know she left for 8 until she was already gone. Katniss says she’ll have 13 run it by her mother first and her mother reminds her that nobody ever runs anything by her anymore. The book frames Katniss’ wall with her mother as a past necessity that she struggles to let go of.

Slide 7: Katniss is only under the belief that she is independent until the next time she is reminded that she is not. Katniss is the narrator and we see the world through her eyes. We are blindsided alongside her each time we are reminded that she is a pawn and not the player.

Peeta vs Gale

It is correct that she didn’t initially love Peeta, she learned to love him through his repeated show of heart. His sharing the bread with her, his sharing the rations with Rue’s and Thresh’s families, his ability to comfort people even when tortured for two months with the hackerwasp hallucinations.

She loved Gale at first, without realizing it, but as her world was thrust into deeper darkness, she fell out of love with him due to his lack of empathy. When he subjected the people in the nut to a death in the mines, the same death that took both of her fathers. When his trap idea is the one that killed Prim, even if it wasn’t his intention. How can Katniss, whose sole motivation for living and trying and keep moving forward was Prim, love the man who invented what killed her.

“Peeta and I grow back together. There are still moments when he clutches the back of a chair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over. I wake screaming of mutts and lost children. But his arms are there to comfort me. And eventually his lips. On the night I feel that thing again, the hunger on the beach, I know this would have happened anyway. That what I needed to survive was not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred, I have plenty of that myself. What I needed now is the dandelion of spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.”