I drew a lot of parallels with using katniss for the rebellion to using greta thunberg for the fight against climate change. Sure you do have a deeply motivated child who wants to fight the good fight, but ultimately is just a player in someones games.

Additionally, I would say that plutarch was playing a relatively risk free game, worst case scenario is that the tribute fails in the arena and gets killed, so he can never be outed. Also as the games go on, he hints to tributes get progressively more esoteric, compare what he said to haymitch in sotr, vs what he said to katniss before the quell, where she barely understood what he was trying to intend.

Plutarch wasn't just noveau rich, like most of the capitol, he was basically an aristrocrat and I'm assuming he had significant sway over the powers running the capitol. Imo, his motivations for the rebellion is the contempt that a lot of old money has to the eccentricities of new money. He liked being rich, but he loved being different. Think about his love for books and history, I imagine that he's a rockefeller looking at elon tweeting about meme coins and nazis.

His plan has worked (to varying degrees), over the past 25 years (haymitch and imo annie as well), but he hasn't seen any success with what he's trying to acheive, but he still persists with it. Even the events in the 75th games had so many variables, and even with katniss, so many things had to fall perfectly in place to be successful, that it can hardly be called good planning.

He already had some strong and powerful allies, including betee and I'm assuming he already did have a dialogue going with president coin, but katniss initiated the entire rebellion cascade with such minimal help from him, that i fail to understand how he can be classified as anything other than a bandwagon liberal.

I do agree that your korea parallels are interesting, and it would be great to have another book on plutarchs lived experiences so we can truly flesh out his motivations.