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2:26am July 7, 2014

alliecat-person:

warmthrushesthroughme:

Thank you for sharing your thoughts barenakedpeeta! I enjoyed reading your post and reblogged it on here for everyone to see! :)

I agreed with all of your thoughts and have wondered what the story was with Peeta’s brothers. I have seen lots of fics featuring the middle Mellark brother but I cannot think of any right now. I feel like he is featured in a lot of Canon AU / Canon Divergent fics.

Now to one of the big points of your post, Gale’s inappropriate reaction to Madge and his harsh words. First, I too try to do each reread without bias but no matter what I do, I like Gale less each time and that is ok. I think the text is the text and even before Peeta is in the picture, I think this is why I didn’t see Gale as a romantic interest for Katniss because even early on she showed how they are different like below:

“Gale knows his anger at Madge is misdirected. On other days, deep in the woods, I’ve listened to him rant about how the tesserae are just another tool to cause misery in our district. A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper and thereby ensure we will never trust one another. “It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves,” he might say if there were no ears to hear but mine. If it wasn’t reaping day. If a girl with a gold pin and no tesserae had not made what I’m sure she thought was a harmless comment. As we walk, I glance over at Gale’s face, still smoldering underneath his stony expression. His rages seem pointless to me, although I never say so. It’s not that I don’t agree with him. I do. But what good is yelling about the Capitol in the middle of the woods? It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make things fair. It doesn’t fill our stomachs. In fact, it scares off the nearby game. I let him yell though. Better he does it in the woods than in the district.”

I love this part of the book and I didn’t notice it until this reread. Katniss mentions how Gale is fully aware that the Capitol tries to divide Seam and Merchant and yet he becomes a pawn of the very game that the Capitol is playing. If he knows it’s a way to divide the district then why let it be divisive, why not be above it. It makes me think that Gale is highly intelligent but he lets his rage and emotions overcome him. If Gale was more sensible, he wouldn’t react to Made, who is innocent in all of this. To me, even early on Katniss while angry at the Capitol, is more about justice and moving forward. She says his rages seem pointless because what would be the results. How would things really change!? I think here you see the difference between the two early on and in MJ it is super clear. This is why she kills Coin because it’s not about revenge against the Capitol for what they did, it is about how will life and society really change? Definitely not with a Hunger Games with Capitol children and that’s why I love Katniss so much. She desired change not revenge in the end.

Also, Gale is short-sighted. He has absolutely been through so much shit and I empathize with him but I think he doesn’t see how others may be suffering. Katniss sometimes does this too. I can’t remember where but she envisions Peeta having fresh bread and good meat, when I believe Peeta revealed that he ate stale bread and squirrels. Madge wore that nice dress but Katniss stated that she never wore that which to me speaks to the fact that she doesn’t live this rich extravagant life but Gale cannot see that.

Haha I’ ve been talking too much, but yes I have major issues with Gale early on in THG as well and I think the person we see in MJ is very much there in THG!

I honestly would be okay with Gale being a bit of an ass on reaping day, given the circumstances. But the more we saw of him the more it became clear that his behavior then wasn’t unusual behavior brought on by the stress of that particular day so much as his default mode of interaction.

But enough about Gale.  Doing this reread actually made me more interested in Madge. I noticed that she was very insistent about Katniss wearing the mockingjay pin in the arena. More so than I would expect to be if the pin is just a pin, frankly. From that, I think the popular fandom speculation that her family had an inkling of knowledge about resistance against the Capitol makes a lot of sense.