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Speaker 6: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Today
Speaker 6: we have special guests in yell of written in the
Speaker 6: Star Wars back with us, but not to talk Star Wars,
Speaker 6: to talk Hunger Games, along with Riki Hayashi.
Speaker 4: And let me actually start with you. Riki.
Speaker 6: We're talking today about Sunrise on the Reaping, which is
Speaker 6: the new Hunger Games book that came out just a
Speaker 6: few weeks ago and that will soon be getting also
Speaker 6: a Hunger Games movie out of it. I think in
Speaker 6: mid to late next year. Reeky is gonna we invited
Speaker 6: riky on. Riki has not read the book, but of
Speaker 6: course we want people who I haven't read the book
Speaker 6: to be able to participate in the conversation and.
Speaker 4: We find what we're discussing books.
Speaker 6: It's often helpful to have that person who hasn't read
Speaker 6: who can you know, tell us when we're being a
Speaker 6: little bit too cutting, too deep and not helping the
Speaker 6: audience stay along. Although it is a Ya novel, it's
Speaker 6: not terribly long. I finished it in about eight hours.
Speaker 6: If you if you really want to, I definitely recommend
Speaker 6: hitting pause in the podcast, finding a copy of the
Speaker 6: novel or reading, listening to it on audiobooks and consuming
Speaker 6: it that way.
Speaker 4: But if not, that's totally cool too.
Speaker 6: And Rikie, let me ask you, what do you know
Speaker 6: about the Hunger Games and what's kind of your feeling
Speaker 6: on the Hunger Games going into this discussion?
Speaker 2: Well, how do I pause recording this podcast and reading
Speaker 2: a book and coming back in eight hours?
Speaker 4: Sorry?
Speaker 2: I I read some synopsisis some reviews and stuff people
Speaker 2: were saying about this book, and I kind of want
Speaker 2: to read it now, So I'm excited for this discussion.
Speaker 2: I'm a person who generally doesn't mind being spoiled about things.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, Darth Vader's Luke's father level things.
Speaker 2: But this is a prequel. My understanding is it's a
Speaker 2: prequel to the original Hunger Game's trilogy yep, dealing with
Speaker 2: I believe, twenty five years earlier the Hunger Games that
Speaker 2: Hamage the Woody Harrelson mentor character participated in and spoiler
Speaker 2: he wins, yeah, well yeah, exactly, Like I mean, because
Speaker 2: it's a prequel, we have that problem of you kind
Speaker 2: of know where people will end up, right, and maybe
Speaker 2: there are characters who are introduced to You're like, I
Speaker 2: don't know who this is, so they're probably gonna die
Speaker 2: type of thing. But it's so I'm going to spoil
Speaker 2: what I have read, sure, and that is that a
Speaker 2: lot of the things that take place in this novel
Speaker 2: are described in the original trilogy, like Hamage's Games, and
Speaker 2: what happens in reality is not at all what was
Speaker 2: described in the Hunger Games. And it's kind of like
Speaker 2: a the Hunger Games had a revisionist history and this
Speaker 2: is like, this is actually what happened.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I think it's really true. Danielle coming into this,
Speaker 6: tell us as about your background with Hunger Games.
Speaker 7: Well, I first read the trilogy I think when Mocking
Speaker 7: Jay first came out. The book I was sick for
Speaker 7: like a week so I couldn't go to school, and
Speaker 7: I had just gotten an e reader, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 7: the Hunger Games books. I've heard people talking about this,
Speaker 7: I'm going to read them. So I downloaded all of them,
Speaker 7: literally read them all in three days and quickly became
Speaker 7: obsessed with it along with my sisters. And so since
Speaker 7: then have just been, you know, have loved this series
Speaker 7: and this kind of world that Susan Collins has built.
Speaker 7: And when the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes came out I, which,
Speaker 7: for people who don't know, is about Snow. It's from
Speaker 7: Snow's perspective, but it's written President Snow, president of pen M.
Speaker 7: But it's written in third person, and the other Hunger
Speaker 7: Games books, including Sunrise, are written in first person. When
Speaker 7: that first came out, I was kind of hesitant about
Speaker 7: it because I was of the belief then that, like,
Speaker 7: we don't need any more of Hunger Games. The trilogy
Speaker 7: is fine, it's perfect way it is. I don't want
Speaker 7: to risk going back into that and kind of ruining it,
Speaker 7: And so it took me a couple of years to
Speaker 7: read that book. I think I read it like a
Speaker 7: year and a half two years later and quickly realized
Speaker 7: I was wrong. I actually really love Ballad of Songbirds
Speaker 7: of Snakes, which I think Matthew, you and I have
Speaker 7: talked about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think we've done a number of episodes on the
Speaker 6: Hunger Games on this podcast, and I think you've been
Speaker 6: a part of every single one of them. And I
Speaker 6: do remember kind of poking you to read that book
Speaker 6: and being really glad when you finally did it because
Speaker 6: we did an episode. I think we did an episode
Speaker 6: on the movie, but also reference the book on that
Speaker 6: quite a bit.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I love that book and Sunrise on the Reaping.
Speaker 7: Whenever they announced it, they didn't tell us at first
Speaker 7: whose perspective it was going to be from or what
Speaker 7: it was going to be about. But then they told
Speaker 7: us it was going to be about the the second
Speaker 7: quarter quell Hamig's Games, but they didn't still didn't tell
Speaker 7: us who the who the voice was going to be,
Speaker 7: and and so I was kind of like, I don't
Speaker 7: know if she'll give it give us Hamage's perspective, because
Speaker 7: we've already we know the gist of what happened in
Speaker 7: his games because Catness uh watches it with Peta in
Speaker 7: Catching Fire. We don't really need to retell that story.
Speaker 7: So Zan Collins isn't isn't one who tells the story
Speaker 7: that's already been told. Well, I should have known that
Speaker 7: she pulls something out of her hat to surprise everybody,
Speaker 7: which is that obviously it's it's propaganda what Catness and
Speaker 7: Peter watch and Catching Fire and and we don't know
Speaker 7: the real story, and and the you know, propaganda becomes
Speaker 7: the big theme, which we'll talk about later. But I
Speaker 7: just that's really speaks to what I love about Suziane
Speaker 7: Collins and about the series in general, is that she's
Speaker 7: such a good writer and respects I think the craft
Speaker 7: of storytelling too, like she would really views it as
Speaker 7: as the art that it is, but also that there's
Speaker 7: a structure to it. There's a way to like break
Speaker 7: things down and to help things flow easier and help
Speaker 7: people understand it, not make it so complicated and convoluted,
Speaker 7: and still tell really engaging and important story. And so
Speaker 7: I think so many people love The Hunger Games for
Speaker 7: a reason, and I think that that is the start
Speaker 7: of it all.
Speaker 6: I think that is so true, and Rieky, I'm really
Speaker 6: glad that that was the thing you picked up on
Speaker 6: as well, even just from the synopsises you'd read, in
Speaker 6: terms of being like kind of challenging the version of
Speaker 6: it that Catnus knew and thus that we knew, because
Speaker 6: you know, people who've listened to this podcast and even
Speaker 6: more so my Star Wars podcast know that I have
Speaker 6: a really high bar when it comes to prequels, especially
Speaker 6: in terms of I don't like when the prequel sets
Speaker 6: up something that kind of doesn't match with what we
Speaker 6: already have in the established canon for what comes later.
Speaker 6: And I found myself going through that same process of
Speaker 6: reading parts of this book and thinking, wait a minute,
Speaker 6: this is not this doesn't match up with what we
Speaker 6: know happened is even Susanne khl Oh okay, I get
Speaker 6: it now. And I thought that was just so brilliant
Speaker 6: that she, like, like you said, approaching as a craft,
Speaker 6: approaching it as the art form that it is, and
Speaker 6: really knowing, like, here's the way people think about prequels
Speaker 6: is that we are going to be, whether consciously or subconsciously,
Speaker 6: trying to match this up to the story we know.
Speaker 6: And what she's reminding you is that a part of
Speaker 6: so much of this being first person narrative is that
Speaker 6: everyone is to some extent a unreliable narrator because you know,
Speaker 6: sometimes they don't understand their own emotions, which are these
Speaker 6: are really great things they did in batness for so often,
Speaker 6: but also they're telling you what they experience, and everythink
Speaker 6: they're experiencing is through the media that they know. And
Speaker 6: it's kind of funny too, because she'd already done that
Speaker 6: to us, you know, the books had told us that
Speaker 6: Area thirteen, District thirteen doesn't EXAs because it was cat
Speaker 6: miss telling us and she didn't know that it existed,
Speaker 6: and so I kind of should have been ready for that,
Speaker 6: but for herd it is again was so great.
Speaker 2: That's a strength for the first person narrative is you
Speaker 2: can certainly have unreliable narrators in the sense that they
Speaker 2: are lying either to themselves or to the audience, like intentionally,
Speaker 2: but in a case like this, the unreliability of the
Speaker 2: narrator comes from their lack of knowledge, which is not
Speaker 2: necessarily a fault, like they are being lied to by
Speaker 2: people and then using that to subvert the audience the
Speaker 2: reader's expectations. I think is an excellent technique and use
Speaker 2: of the first person, and it kind of loses a
Speaker 2: little like in film form because even though you have
Speaker 2: a protagonist that stories are often told from the perspective
Speaker 2: of a film, really like takes you outside of them
Speaker 2: and makes is like third person by default, right unless
Speaker 2: you have a very specific st or right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I agree. I I like to call them biased
Speaker 7: like narrators, like not necessarily unreliable, because I do feel like,
Speaker 7: like you said, unreliable has kind of like a negative
Speaker 7: connotation to it, like they're intentionally lying to you. But
Speaker 7: we're all biased in what we know and in what
Speaker 7: and how we even perceive ourselves isn't necessarily true to
Speaker 7: how other people see us and or like our own actions.
Speaker 7: Sometimes we think we're doing something for a reason, a
Speaker 7: certain reason, but it is sometimes something else. And and
Speaker 7: so I kind of I always viewed Catnus a little
Speaker 7: bit as like a biased narrator, an inherently biased narrators,
Speaker 7: as we all are as humans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's really true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean she starts the story as a teenager,
Speaker 2: a young woman, and like in the in this setting,
Speaker 2: like the things that she has put through are traumatizing,
Speaker 2: and it's hard to imagine yourself, right, Like, of course,
Speaker 2: like these types of novels, people like to imagine themselves
Speaker 2: as the hero, and that's part of the allure of it.
Speaker 2: But what she goes through is incredibly traumatizing and just
Speaker 2: I don't know, I would say devastating. Like I finished
Speaker 2: the movie series and I was like, wow, this is terrible.
Speaker 2: Like I enjoyed what I watched to the most degree,
Speaker 2: but I mean, from a perspective of it wasn't a
Speaker 2: happy ending, right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean it was an ending of survival instead of victory. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And I think that's something plays out here as well.
Speaker 6: And you know, we're talking about Susanne Collins. One thing
Speaker 6: that she has said very clearly is that she doesn't
Speaker 6: write a book just because it's like, all right, well,
Speaker 6: time to write another book. She's obviously doing very well financially,
Speaker 6: and I think that's a concern as much for her.
Speaker 6: It's really question of that. As she has said, she
Speaker 6: writes when she has something to say. Danielle, what do
Speaker 6: you think she was saying in this book? What was
Speaker 6: the thing she wanted to say when she sat down
Speaker 6: to write this book, at least as it came across
Speaker 6: to you.
Speaker 7: Oh, I could feel her anger in this book more
Speaker 7: so than any of the other Hunger Games books. Like,
Speaker 7: there were moments where I was reading it where I
Speaker 7: just was like, she like, you know, there's a gift
Speaker 7: that people post a lot where like that someone's writing
Speaker 7: with a quill and it's like on fire. Like that's
Speaker 7: why I like pictured. It's just that you can feel
Speaker 7: her anger. And I don't want to speak for her,
Speaker 7: right because we don't know an author's intention. We can
Speaker 7: never like truly know. Even if they tell us themselves,
Speaker 7: they could be it could be lying or exaggerating whatever.
Speaker 7: But my own feeling from it is just that she
Speaker 7: was she was angry at a lot of things that
Speaker 7: are happening now politically in the US across the world,
Speaker 7: and propaganda is such a good theme, I think, to
Speaker 7: channel that anger through, because propaganda isn't inherently a negative thing.
Speaker 7: You can use propaganda for rebellions, as we see in
Speaker 7: the original trilogy, but you can also use it to
Speaker 7: to ensure the longevity of an empire. Yeah, and and
Speaker 7: there's some quotes at the beginning, right before the actual
Speaker 7: narration starts, where it talks about, you know, all propaganda
Speaker 7: is a lie. I think George Orwell says that I
Speaker 7: don't think it's inherently bad as long as you know
Speaker 7: what it is that you're doing with it. And I
Speaker 7: think that that's such a perfect just tool to use
Speaker 7: to talk about what's happening now in the US and
Speaker 7: just you know, all over the world, largely because of
Speaker 7: the US, to see where we lie on that what
Speaker 7: propaganda are we being exposed to? Are we aware that
Speaker 7: it's propaganda? If we are, why aren't we doing anything
Speaker 7: about it? Like, if it's bad, it's propaganda for something
Speaker 7: that is harmful to other people, why aren't we doing
Speaker 7: anything about it? If we're aware of that, what choices
Speaker 7: do we have? And it's not really placing the blame
Speaker 7: on any one person. It's genuinely what I felt, asking
Speaker 7: the reader to question these things, to question if you
Speaker 7: have the opportunity to do something, to take action, and
Speaker 7: you don't, why, YEA, like genuine curiosity, Why haven't you
Speaker 7: done that? What are the reasons? And if you understand
Speaker 7: the reasons, then you can maybe understand how to work
Speaker 7: around them or how to work through them, how to
Speaker 7: push against them. And I think that that was just
Speaker 7: so cleverly done in here by using some characters like
Speaker 7: Plutarch for example, I thought he was a perfect character
Speaker 7: to really explore that through. But Yeah, what struck me
Speaker 7: the most because I could go on and on about this,
Speaker 7: but it was just really the anger I think a
Speaker 7: lot of us can relate to, and that we ourselves
Speaker 7: have felt. It is just I think there's a reason.
Speaker 7: I think she says in the Q and A that
Speaker 7: she finished the book or not the hum and aid
Speaker 7: the acknowledgments at the end. I think she finished the
Speaker 7: book in like August of last year, and I thought
Speaker 7: and the production company for the film was surprised whenever
Speaker 7: they were contacted about it. So she started writing it
Speaker 7: I think probably the beginning of twenty twenty four, end
Speaker 7: of twenty twenty three, So this is soon, like not
Speaker 7: that long ago. It's definitely in like there's a reason
Speaker 7: for it, right. It's an ants in response to something,
Speaker 7: and I think a lot of us know what that is.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I've made the comment that I kind of want
Speaker 6: her and Alexander Freed, the author of the newest Star
Speaker 6: Wars book, The Mask of Fear, which is certainly not
Speaker 6: about anything relevant. It's just about senators githering and not
Speaker 6: knowing what to do as an empire takes over. But
Speaker 6: I kind of want hurt those two to like form
Speaker 6: a support group of people who are processing their feelings
Speaker 6: about what's happening in this country and this world through
Speaker 6: their fiction, because we certainly need much more of it.
Speaker 6: And I think the other major theme that she talks about,
Speaker 6: and I really love it what you said, Danielle, it's
Speaker 6: not about blame. The word she uses a lot is complicity,
Speaker 6: and it's heemits really thinking about how everyone in this system,
Speaker 6: including in some ways himself, is complicit in what allows
Speaker 6: things to happen, because and this is a theme that
Speaker 6: one of my favorite movies that I'll talk about again
Speaker 6: and again, Viva Vendetta really talks about, is that these systems,
Speaker 6: like the capital, like any kind of tyrannical government, exists
Speaker 6: because the people are constantly doing things. They're complicit and
Speaker 6: allowing it to exist and allowing it to use its
Speaker 6: fear and whatever. And sometimes it's like you're complying, you're
Speaker 6: complicit because your other alternative is something truly awful, like
Speaker 6: imprisonment or death. And so that might be a legitimate
Speaker 6: choice you make, but that you have to understand that
Speaker 6: the cost of that choice you're making is to allow
Speaker 6: the horrible thing to continue.
Speaker 4: And one of the things.
Speaker 6: That that they they've explored somewhat in some of the
Speaker 6: other books, and especially in Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds,
Speaker 6: And in that book, you know, the young Snow who
Speaker 6: becomes President Snow kind of he comes to understand that
Speaker 6: one of the points of the Hunger Games is to
Speaker 6: keep all the districts separate, to pit them against each other.
Speaker 6: And even pit individuals against each other to make it
Speaker 6: all about individual success instead of group success.
Speaker 4: Or group rescue and Hamish kind of cut.
Speaker 6: In this book, we get to kind of see the
Speaker 6: flip side of that of Hamage coming to understand the
Speaker 6: ways in which he is complicit in all of this,
Speaker 6: and that pretty much breaking him in a lot of
Speaker 6: ways of kind of seeing that even by winning, he
Speaker 6: is now going to be the victor and he is
Speaker 6: going to be the one who you know, shows that
Speaker 6: he is like that. They becomes a part of imperial
Speaker 6: of the capital propaganda, and how he fights about against
Speaker 6: that and tries to rebel against that in a system
Speaker 6: that utterly kind of is ready for that and doesn't
Speaker 6: allow doesn't allow him to do it in any.
Speaker 4: Way that that matters.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it's it's really interesting. I made a
Speaker 7: video about this, about the different levels of complicity that
Speaker 7: that Cusan Collins shows specifically through Sunrise and the Reaping.
Speaker 7: But it's also, like you said, a thread throughout the
Speaker 7: other books is how the truths themselves and especially the
Speaker 7: victors are are made to be complicit, but how the games,
Speaker 7: and this is a point in the ballot of Songbirds
Speaker 7: and snakes too about how the games like encourage that
Speaker 7: complicity to where it's almost like the tribute's choice at
Speaker 7: that point. And and we see this in the original
Speaker 7: trilogy with Catnus in the first Games, her first games,
Speaker 7: there are parts where I have like little notes where's
Speaker 7: she sees one of the other tributes make a stupid
Speaker 7: choice about lighting fire in the middle of the night,
Speaker 7: and she's like, I have half a mind to go
Speaker 7: over there and end it in her myself. And because
Speaker 7: she's so stupid, I probably wouldn't even feel guilty about it,
Speaker 7: and I was happy in the margins, Like this is
Speaker 7: Catnus thinking how the Capital wants the tributes to be
Speaker 7: thinking in the arena, because that is proof of Snow's
Speaker 7: philosophical ideology that once someone is put into the arena,
Speaker 7: their inherent nature, which according to him is evil, will
Speaker 7: take over. And I think it's so interesting that we
Speaker 7: see almost the opposite with Hamich. He goes into the
Speaker 7: games accepting that he's probably gonna die. He is not
Speaker 7: trying to fight his way out of there. He has
Speaker 7: a mission, which, as we learn, is you know, like
Speaker 7: the starts or the kind of the little bow spark
Speaker 7: of rebellion. He has a mission, he's going to get
Speaker 7: it done, and he expects to die on his way out.
Speaker 7: And there is no part where he is thinking, how
Speaker 7: am I going to kill this person? I'm going, like
Speaker 7: seeing a person over there, I'm going to go get
Speaker 7: rid of them. Now, there's no time where he's thinking that.
Speaker 7: The only time he does is whenever it's self defense,
Speaker 7: like genuine self defense, and he's horrified by that, like
Speaker 7: absolutely horrified by what he does. Yeah, and so I
Speaker 7: think it's not to say that like Catnus is worse
Speaker 7: or more susceptible than him, but it's interesting to see
Speaker 7: how differently this plays out with the two of them
Speaker 7: and what they both come to learn about each other.
Speaker 4: In the end, I think.
Speaker 6: So, so let's let me give kind of a brief
Speaker 6: summary of the book, and I'm just going to hit
Speaker 6: on the things that I think are a kind of
Speaker 6: fundamental for understanding where it goes.
Speaker 4: It's not going to be a full plot summary by
Speaker 4: any means.
Speaker 6: Similarly to the original books, we start kind of on
Speaker 6: the day of the reaping and him it's just trying
Speaker 6: to enjoy some last things, you know, kind of checking
Speaker 6: in with people, he's quite literally woken up by a
Speaker 6: younger sibling who is worried about him, and in a
Speaker 6: way that is just very evocative of Catness and Primrose.
Speaker 6: I literally messaged Danielle and I'm like page one. They're
Speaker 6: hitting me with this page one. And then he kind
Speaker 6: of goes through his day.
Speaker 4: Of kind of checking.
Speaker 6: Very much like Catness, he goes off to the woods,
Speaker 6: he does some hunting. The person he's hunting with is
Speaker 6: the person who will become Catnus's father, one of his
Speaker 6: best friends, who we hear kind of has a crush
Speaker 6: on the pharmacist's daughter, who of course is gonna be
Speaker 6: Catnus's mother. And we learned also that himself Hamich has
Speaker 6: a girlfriend who is a Covey girl, Covey being the
Speaker 6: group that was kind of established as I don't think
Speaker 6: they're actually romani but they are kind of like traveler
Speaker 6: kind of community in this world at the time of
Speaker 6: Sunrise of the Reaping, at the time of Ballad of
Speaker 6: Snakes and Songbirds, and are similar in this time.
Speaker 4: He's got a crush on her. They're really hoping they'll both.
Speaker 6: Survive, and very much like Catness, he doesn't actually get
Speaker 6: picked what happens is that a young boy does get
Speaker 6: picked and he runs for it and he gets shot,
Speaker 6: and then there's a lot of commotion and an attempt
Speaker 6: to kind of like redo things. And in the commotion
Speaker 6: he mis's girlfriend. I'm not gonna give her name, because
Speaker 6: there's sort of a it references a piece of art
Speaker 6: that is referenced throughout this that we're going to talk
Speaker 6: about in a bit. But uh so she gets in
Speaker 6: real danger, Hamich comes to protect her, and because of that,
Speaker 6: and because he fights a peacekeeper to do it, they
Speaker 6: just decide, you know what, we're just going to pretend
Speaker 6: that he was the one who got picked instead, So
Speaker 6: like Catness, uh he's not actually the one who's supposed
Speaker 6: to be picked. And like the the main tribute in
Speaker 6: Sunrise in Ballot of Snakes and Songbirds, so we kind
Speaker 6: of had that through line. All three of them weren't
Speaker 6: supposed to be picked, but in some ways things were
Speaker 6: rigged or another choice was made. So but he does
Speaker 6: get picked, he gets shipped off, and there's a girl
Speaker 6: who's supposed to be from their district who is very sick,
Speaker 6: having real problems, doesn't really adjust to this as well,
Speaker 6: and winds up dying on the journey, and in order
Speaker 6: to kind of like, well but we still have to
Speaker 6: make everything look right, they give them a different girl
Speaker 6: who basically is like someone the Capital has tortured for
Speaker 6: whatever reason, and have her pretend to be I think
Speaker 6: the original character's name is Louisa, Is that right, And
Speaker 6: they call her Lulu to kind of separate Luela, thank you,
Speaker 6: And they call her Lulu to separate her, and we
Speaker 6: learn eventually that she is clearly from District eleven, and
Speaker 6: that's going to play into a lot of the kind
Speaker 6: of like district against district feelings. They get to the Capital,
Speaker 6: they have kind of some similar things because at this
Speaker 6: point District twelve has never won, or at least not
Speaker 6: since uh uh, what's her name? Lorna Gray in Lucy Gray,
Speaker 6: who has disappeared. They are the only people who can
Speaker 6: be who can be mentors to Hamich are former victors
Speaker 6: from other areas, who turns out is going to be
Speaker 6: uh wires and mags who we learned learned about in
Speaker 6: the in the trilogy, and they kind of try to
Speaker 6: mentor him. He is disgusted by a lot of the
Speaker 6: things he sees. We go into the arena, and Wires
Speaker 6: has kind of tried to get him. I'm sorry, no,
Speaker 6: it's not Wires, it's what it's the other one.
Speaker 7: It's Beatty, it's it's well, there's Yrus and then there's Bet.
Speaker 4: They're both all right, they're both his mentors. Thank you.
Speaker 4: And Mags is kind of.
Speaker 7: That is there for another reason, but oh that's.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, okay, yes, sorry.
Speaker 6: H Bett is also kind of hanging around because his
Speaker 6: son has been put into the arena in what again
Speaker 6: seems very like that seems very unlikely that it was
Speaker 6: just log, that it was just luck, probably to punish him,
Speaker 6: and so through them Bad actually is already kind of
Speaker 6: trying to rebel. He kind of convinces Hamig to try
Speaker 6: and do this plan to blow up part of the
Speaker 6: arena and flood part of it. Meanwhile, there's this group,
Speaker 6: there's this attempt to basically combat the careers by getting
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of the non career districts together to
Speaker 6: bound together in an alliance.
Speaker 4: During the games, Hamich.
Speaker 6: Winds up going away from this, but again and again
Speaker 6: and again people turn to him for protection, and we
Speaker 6: kind of learned that Hamig is just that kind of
Speaker 6: like you know, if you think about like you know,
Speaker 6: the Mandalorian or Steve Harrington or just like all these
Speaker 6: characters who are like they're going to be babysitters even
Speaker 6: though they don't want to be.
Speaker 4: That's very much you hamich is.
Speaker 6: And along the way, one of the other tributes from
Speaker 6: his district is Easily Donner, who is the good friend
Speaker 6: of Catnus's mother, who got mentioned earlier, the twin sister
Speaker 6: of the person who stays Catnus's good friend.
Speaker 4: And I think this is all kind of confusing.
Speaker 6: It's there's a lot of references that I will talk
Speaker 6: about that in a minute.
Speaker 4: But she is very much a district girl.
Speaker 6: She's very much from the like nice part of the district,
Speaker 6: and Hamish it first, really hates her, but comes to
Speaker 6: really have a good understanding and in a very strong
Speaker 6: friendship with her. That's another beautiful part of the book.
Speaker 6: And again it's kind of a nice thing about how
Speaker 6: the district tries to divide people in terms of like
Speaker 6: the very poor versus the only somewhat poor, as though
Speaker 6: there's the major difference between them, instead of them both
Speaker 6: you know, unifying against the capital.
Speaker 4: And and yeah, and.
Speaker 6: That's where I think the story really starts to diverge
Speaker 6: from what we get in the book if when we
Speaker 6: get in the original trilogy. So, Danielle, what explained to
Speaker 6: us the difference? What is it that happens in this
Speaker 6: book that is so different from the way Hamage's story
Speaker 6: is told in the propaganda that catnescies in the official
Speaker 6: broadcast of the Hunger Games.
Speaker 7: I think really Hamich's character, who he is as a person,
Speaker 7: is crafted by the Capitol. I think that is the
Speaker 7: main thing, apart from his mission from BT to try
Speaker 7: and you know, blow up part of the arena and everything.
Speaker 7: Obviously all of that's cut, but you kind of expect
Speaker 7: that to be cut. The Capital is not going to
Speaker 7: show that obviously all the mistakes they made that led
Speaker 7: to Hamich being able to do what he did. But
Speaker 7: for me, the real crux of it, and I think
Speaker 7: for Hamich as well, is how they change his character
Speaker 7: and when he has his interview, the big interview they
Speaker 7: do the day before everyone's dropped into the arena. He
Speaker 7: has to put on this kind of persona as everyone does,
Speaker 7: as all of the tributes do, and it's the persona
Speaker 7: that we come to know Hamige as in the original trilogy,
Speaker 7: but when we're reading Sunrise, we recognize it as just
Speaker 7: a mask he's putting on. And even I think in
Speaker 7: Catching Fire, when Catnus and Peter are watching the recap
Speaker 7: of his games, she sees the interview and she thinks, well,
Speaker 7: he didn't need any coaching, Diddy, he knows exactly what
Speaker 7: he's doing, Like, that's just Hament and it's really sad
Speaker 7: to me. I made a note in Sunrise that it
Speaker 7: was really sad to me that Hamich had to be
Speaker 7: that fake persona he put on for the Capital for
Speaker 7: the rest of his life, like for the next twenty
Speaker 7: five years, he had to be that. And I think
Speaker 7: he thinks this whenever he's watching the recap of his
Speaker 7: game for the first time. Is that none of the
Speaker 7: good things he did in that arena, you know, leading
Speaker 7: Lulu to safety, protecting her, going to look for the
Speaker 7: last remaining tribute from the non career districts because he
Speaker 7: would rather her win than him, and and all of
Speaker 7: these beautiful things that he does, dropping the chocolate down
Speaker 7: to the career tribute because she was crying and needed
Speaker 7: a little comfort. None of these things are are shown
Speaker 7: on there, but for me, What really really portrays that
Speaker 7: is that when we watch that, when we read about
Speaker 7: the recap and catching Fire, we see him team up
Speaker 7: with Maisie Lee Donner and then they're together for a
Speaker 7: little while, and then it goes to a point where
Speaker 7: Hamich is obsessed with the edge of the arena. Maizie
Speaker 7: Lee wants to go somewhere else. Hamich doesn't want to leave,
Speaker 7: and so Maizle Lee says, well, I guess it's we'd
Speaker 7: have to split ways eventually. I don't want to have
Speaker 7: to kill you, and then it goes the next scene
Speaker 7: is is Hamich hearing an attack and he runs and
Speaker 7: Maizi Lee's Maisley's dying, and so you think that they
Speaker 7: actually chose to, you know, separate, that that was their
Speaker 7: mutual choice, And in Sunrise it's such small change, but
Speaker 7: it's really really meaningful that Mazi Lee turns to go
Speaker 7: and a canon goes off, the canon that signifies the
Speaker 7: that a tribute has died, and they both spin around
Speaker 7: to each other because they think that they're so scared
Speaker 7: that the other one might have died the minute they
Speaker 7: took their eyes off of them, and Hamich says, are
Speaker 7: you sure? Are you sure, you want to go, and
Speaker 7: Mazie's like, I don't know. I'm going to go get
Speaker 7: us some food and then we'll talk about it again,
Speaker 7: and that's when she dies.
Speaker 4: Yea.
Speaker 7: So they didn't decide to split to go separate ways.
Speaker 7: They didn't decide to split up. They were going to
Speaker 7: stick together until the end. And like I said, it's
Speaker 7: a small difference, but it speaks so much to the
Speaker 7: sense of loyalty based on affection and not just logistics,
Speaker 7: not just strategy, that the capital wants so badly to
Speaker 7: deter anyone from thinking about even within their own district, Like,
Speaker 7: of course they're not going to want people to think
Speaker 7: that about people from different districts teaming up, but even
Speaker 7: within their own district, they don't want to show any sense,
Speaker 7: like really a sense of unity while they're still alive
Speaker 7: for affection's sake. And I think that hurts Hamage the
Speaker 7: most too, is that the way that they recrafted that.
Speaker 6: So Riki, we've just dropped a whole bunch of plot
Speaker 6: stuff to help make sure that everyone else in the
Speaker 6: audience is keeping up. Do you have questions you want
Speaker 6: to ask or comments or thoughts or what the hell
Speaker 6: did we just talk about.
Speaker 4: Anything like that.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, yeah, I mean it's too many characters
Speaker 2: for me to synthesize and process. So I mostly tried
Speaker 2: to pay attention to the Hamage parts because that's who
Speaker 2: I'm familiar with. Yeah, and obviously he's the main character.
Speaker 2: And I found it very interesting what Danielle said about
Speaker 2: him playing the character who we're already familiar with, but
Speaker 2: the book giving the background that that's not really who
Speaker 2: he is, or at least who he was going into this,
Speaker 2: And it really made me think about reality TV shows.
Speaker 2: I've been watching one on Netflix called Million Dollar Secret,
Speaker 2: which is similar to The Mole, and it's a social
Speaker 2: deduction reality TV show where you're trying to figure out
Speaker 2: which contestant is the secret millionaire in the group. So
Speaker 2: it's like very similar to The Mole. And there are
Speaker 2: some contestants who play the villain on shows like this, right,
Speaker 2: Like they act in a certain way, and part of
Speaker 2: it is the editing, like the propaganda of it all.
Speaker 2: The editor see this person act in a certain way
Speaker 2: and then edit it to accentuate that personality even more
Speaker 2: to the audience. And so I've participated in some discussions
Speaker 2: about this show and people are like, oh, I hate
Speaker 2: this per They're terrible. I'm like, it's it's a TV
Speaker 2: show like edited, Like it's not it's not personal, right,
Speaker 2: Like this is not necessarily who this person really is.
Speaker 2: So I felt that strongly in that Hamage discussion in
Speaker 2: that like he had to play a certain character, and
Speaker 2: then on top of that, the Capital through their editing,
Speaker 2: made that even more a bigger personality, especially after he won,
Speaker 2: you know, in the post. In the post his Games editing,
Speaker 2: they obviously wanted to make him even more of the
Speaker 2: main character for the future, for the future broadcasts of this.
Speaker 2: So that's yeah, I think that's like very prescient to
Speaker 2: just like propaganda in general, but especially like Reality TV,
Speaker 2: Like these these people did their human beings and they
Speaker 2: are to a certain degree playing characters.
Speaker 6: I think it's very true, and I think, you know,
Speaker 6: Susan Collins Is said that one of things inspired the
Speaker 6: original Hunger Games, her writing was kind of looking at
Speaker 6: the way Reality TV and other things like that was
Speaker 6: so much about like us enjoying like people fighting each
Speaker 6: other and people having you know, yelling matches at each other,
Speaker 6: and like kind of seeing the Hunger Games is kind
Speaker 6: of the logical extension of you know, like take that
Speaker 6: to its logical extreme, and so yeah, I think that
Speaker 6: element comes through and when I read it, it's it
Speaker 6: definitely hits the reality TV stuff and it also it
Speaker 6: hits to me on every time someone like takes one
Speaker 6: sentence a person says and blasts it on Twitter or
Speaker 6: on TikTok or something else where. You're taking like, you know,
Speaker 6: one hundred and twenty eight characters or two hundred and
Speaker 6: thirty six characters or thirty seconds, and how easy it
Speaker 6: is to like, I think when we think about propaganda
Speaker 6: and lies and stuff like that, we think about making
Speaker 6: up things out of whole cloth.
Speaker 4: But most of the time it's not.
Speaker 6: It is taking like, you know, one thing a person
Speaker 6: said a little accidentally, but cutting out where they immediately
Speaker 6: took it back and apologized and just saying, oh no,
Speaker 6: look here's what they said, or as what they said
Speaker 6: in some ways, or sometimes it being a complete fake,
Speaker 6: like the the fact that they literally fake one of
Speaker 6: the people on there and have this person who's meant
Speaker 6: to be Luella who's very much not and almost everyone
Speaker 6: can see that.
Speaker 4: But there's a centa whais.
Speaker 6: I think the capital won't really care because no one
Speaker 6: really looks at them as fully formed people. They just
Speaker 6: see them as the tributes who are going to die.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Lulu was the that was the scene where Lulu
Speaker 7: is introduced is probably one of the most harrowing scenes,
Speaker 7: not the most in the book. I mean, I can
Speaker 7: think of Lulu's death is the most harrowing to me
Speaker 7: in the book. But Lulu herself the introduction is just
Speaker 7: like when you think that the capital can't get any worse,
Speaker 7: so Suzanne Collins comes up with another way that they can.
Speaker 7: And but the more I thought about, the more like
Speaker 7: it really makes sense that Like I think, so I
Speaker 7: saw someone say that was Lulu like one of their
Speaker 7: early attempts at hijacking a human, which is what we
Speaker 7: see them do to Peta in mocking Jay, like was
Speaker 7: she like a first iteration of that, and and like
Speaker 7: to think now, like I mean, I don't know whether
Speaker 7: Suzanne Collins had Lulu planned from the beginning like before,
Speaker 7: like back when the original trilogy was written. I don't know.
Speaker 7: I think maybe not, But obviously it gives a new
Speaker 7: perspective to like Hamich's thoughts around Pete's hijacking and how
Speaker 7: much of that was was familiar to him, like painfully
Speaker 7: familiar to him. And did he think that he would
Speaker 7: ever see the real Pita again, because you know, Lulu
Speaker 7: was never the same after that and never got the
Speaker 7: chance to be the same after that. But yeah, it
Speaker 7: was devastating.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they really helped to set up so many ways
Speaker 6: of how Hamig becomes the person he does. And there
Speaker 6: was one part in particularly that hit me really hard.
Speaker 6: And I'm kind of curious if you had any of
Speaker 6: the same reactions, And I know for me, part of
Speaker 6: my reaction is I'm the child of alcoholics, and so
Speaker 6: that's very much on my mind. In one of the
Speaker 6: first scenes in the book, he mentions that he doesn't drink,
Speaker 6: and so I'm like, okay, interesting, so maybe in this
Speaker 6: book we're going to see him like start drinking. And
Speaker 6: early in the book he makes some trades and someone
Speaker 6: gives we find out that he does work for a bootlegger,
Speaker 6: and someone gives him a bottle of alcohol, and I
Speaker 6: felt myself holding my breath in a way that I
Speaker 6: never really fully let go of until he got rid
Speaker 6: of that bottle, because I was so thinking, like, is
Speaker 6: he going to take his first drink because he just
Speaker 6: got reaped or something like that, And in some way
Speaker 6: it built up in my head that I was thinking, oh,
Speaker 6: so maybe the last line of the book is going
Speaker 6: to be him thinking fuck it and cracking open the
Speaker 6: bottle because of like greeking, you mentioned all the just
Speaker 6: the devastation that Catnus goes through. He goes through just
Speaker 6: as much, but instead they kind of sneak it in
Speaker 6: in such an interesting way where they talk about how,
Speaker 6: you know, they don't really have morphine in this world.
Speaker 6: They have like medications that you take, uh, like basically
Speaker 6: you drink as you know, ways to dull the pain.
Speaker 6: And they're basically like you know, some kind of sedative
Speaker 6: uh that has probably some alcohol in it. And they
Speaker 6: talk about him like there isn't a moment where he's like,
Speaker 6: well I don't need it for the pain anymore, but
Speaker 6: I need it for the mental pain. He just keeps
Speaker 6: taking it and again in the like I don't blame
Speaker 6: her in any way, but literally Catnus's mother just keeps
Speaker 6: bringing it to him without thinking that, like, without like wondering.
Speaker 4: Like does he still need it anymore?
Speaker 6: I'm just gonna hear Danielle was that kind of something
Speaker 6: that was very foremost in your mind when he first
Speaker 6: got that bottle of alcohol, and kind of just thinking
Speaker 6: throughout the book of when is when is the drinking
Speaker 6: gonna start?
Speaker 7: I think I'm probably I think I assumed that it
Speaker 7: would start after the games, after his mother and brother
Speaker 7: and uh girlfriend were killed, because we knew that was coming.
Speaker 7: It's told to us and catching Fire and mocking Jay.
Speaker 7: But it did hit me really hard to find out that,
Speaker 7: you know, he worked for, you know, a bootlegger, but
Speaker 7: he didn't drink. And like he's very insistent on that,
Speaker 7: he doesn't drink. He doesn't like the taste of the stuff,
Speaker 7: he doesn't want it. It's nothing, nothing that ever appealed
Speaker 7: to him. And so what hit me when I read
Speaker 7: that was this is another thing that the capital has
Speaker 7: taken from him. Yeah, they've taken his ability to enjoy
Speaker 7: life without being numb to it. And I think that
Speaker 7: that is a is a tragedy in itself. And I
Speaker 7: don't know that I felt negatively towards Astrod Catnus' mom
Speaker 7: simply because it's one of those things that like cat Simpede,
Speaker 7: don't try to stop payment from drinking. They encourage it
Speaker 7: actually because of how awful it is for him without it.
Speaker 7: And granted that was because yeah, yeah, And and I
Speaker 7: think that maybe with Cannis's mom it was kind of
Speaker 7: made probably similar like who am I to deny him
Speaker 7: this thing after everything he's been through?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like.
Speaker 7: If he wants to self medicate in this way, like,
Speaker 7: who am I to to take that from him? After
Speaker 7: everything in his life has been taken from him? And
Speaker 7: I think that maybe once they realized that he wasn't
Speaker 7: going to try to take his own life, that maybe
Speaker 7: they were like, well, you know, what else is he
Speaker 7: going to do? And and so I kind of I
Speaker 7: kind of can understand that of being like wanting to
Speaker 7: give him as much comfort in whatever way he can get,
Speaker 7: it might be something that they viewed as as, you know,
Speaker 7: we can't stop that from him. And then and then
Speaker 7: like also to her credit, they stopped seeing Hamage after
Speaker 7: several months because of what he did to them, and
Speaker 7: so there wasn't much chance, I think for her to
Speaker 7: really try and help because being around him became a
Speaker 7: danger to themselves as well. And I just think that
Speaker 7: that is just like the tragedy is just he used
Speaker 7: to have so much enjoyment of life and he didn't
Speaker 7: need this to help him through it, and the Capital
Speaker 7: took that from him.
Speaker 2: No, I fully agree, and I'm shook, you know, I
Speaker 2: shook just listening to you talk about it because obviously,
Speaker 2: like we know in the original trilogy how much he drinks,
Speaker 2: and it's it's kind of an essential part of his
Speaker 2: character and to understand, like the journey he went through
Speaker 2: to reach that point and to start from a sober perspective,
Speaker 2: like that's really tough. Yeah, so I I have a
Speaker 2: question maybe that perhaps will lead to a larger discussion, and.
Speaker 6: Let me quickly respond to that, uh what Danielle said,
Speaker 6: because I do totally agree, and I yeah, it's not
Speaker 6: that I blame blame her at all. It's just to me,
Speaker 6: it's one more part of the complicity, you know, it's
Speaker 6: one more part of like they live in a world
Speaker 6: where this is the like the only kind of self
Speaker 6: medication that's available, where there aren't better alternatives of you know,
Speaker 6: pain medications or sleep aids or stuff like that, you know.
Speaker 6: Because yeah, so it's just it's just it's all part
Speaker 6: of this, this this piece and exactly so, Yeah, wreaking
Speaker 6: out ahead and ask your question.
Speaker 2: So earlier, Danielle, you commented on like how good of
Speaker 2: a writer Susanne Collins is, And I'm certainly getting that
Speaker 2: from you two. I get that from like all of
Speaker 2: the reviews I read. And this is a young adult series, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's how it's that's how it's organized on the shell.
Speaker 2: But there are other young adults serieses that have been
Speaker 2: turned into movies that are not so well regarded, like
Speaker 2: as as books, like as the actual written text, like, oh,
Speaker 2: like the writing's not good, but this we like the
Speaker 2: story type of thing. This seems like an outlier, Like
Speaker 2: these are these sound like they are really well written books?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like would would you agree with that assessment?
Speaker 7: Yes? I actually think that Where do I start? Okay, First,
Speaker 7: I think that Suzanne Collins writes in first person better
Speaker 7: than almost anyone else in our modern time. I think
Speaker 7: she understands the strengths of first person POV and also
Speaker 7: the weaknesses of it, and I think she uses the
Speaker 7: weaknesses to make it stronger. Actually, there's there's a part
Speaker 7: in mocking Jay where I I think a lot of
Speaker 7: people's criticisms of a first person mine included with some
Speaker 7: you know, underdeveloped writers is that it can tend to
Speaker 7: read like a log of what has happened, like what
Speaker 7: that person's day is like. And Suzanne Collins uses that
Speaker 7: to describe Catnus when she is at her absolute worst mentally,
Speaker 7: where she cannot notice the specific like she usually. Catiness
Speaker 7: is very descriptive in her how she notices things, how
Speaker 7: she notices a room, how she notices a person or
Speaker 7: or something that's going on. But when after prim dies
Speaker 7: and she is just you know, she's heavily medicated and
Speaker 7: she's just wondering around the President Stowe's old mansion, she
Speaker 7: doesn't notice any of these things. We just get that
Speaker 7: she walked into a room and there was this thing
Speaker 7: over there, and then all of a sudden she's in
Speaker 7: another room, and then she's walking down the hall. It's
Speaker 7: very very like, you know, it's like a log of
Speaker 7: what she's doing. But then slowly, over time we get
Speaker 7: those descriptions back. And to me, that is such a
Speaker 7: masterful way of using what most people criticize first person
Speaker 7: for to actually strengthen who Catinus is as a character,
Speaker 7: our understanding of Catinus and our ability to be in
Speaker 7: her head. And so for that, like I think that
Speaker 7: she has a firm grip on what first person is
Speaker 7: and should be and can be at its best. But
Speaker 7: I also think that she is so familiar with how
Speaker 7: to tell stories to kids that doesn't like sugarcoat things,
Speaker 7: but also is really easy for them to understand. And
Speaker 7: I've seen other people talk about how the Hunger Games
Speaker 7: and even still Sunrise and Ballad being shelved as Ya
Speaker 7: and being so accessible to students, most importantly being published
Speaker 7: by Scholastic, which has incredible access to schools and young kids,
Speaker 7: is intentional. Is very intentional. Uh So that these stories
Speaker 7: that are so important to have from as young as
Speaker 7: possible are getting to these students, and and that that
Speaker 7: it's not clunky, it's not it's not difficult to understand.
Speaker 7: The flow of this is so good. And I could
Speaker 7: talk about this forever. But the way she breaks down
Speaker 7: the narrative itself, the chunks of text, she does it
Speaker 7: almost like scientifically, like mathematically, there's uh, what is it?
Speaker 7: There's three parts in each book, and at least in
Speaker 7: the first person POV books, those three parts are broken
Speaker 7: down into nine chapters, and across those nine chapters you
Speaker 7: get a full arc of a story. Now it's not
Speaker 7: a complete like the complete book. You wouldn't want to
Speaker 7: end a book on that arc, but you get a
Speaker 7: pretty full arc. You have, you have a rye, you have,
Speaker 7: you have you start off, if you have a rise,
Speaker 7: you have a somewhat of a conclusion, but then you
Speaker 7: have a lead in to another one, and in each
Speaker 7: chapter those have their own little mini like three act
Speaker 7: arcs kind of, and that's what keeps the flow of reading.
Speaker 7: To me, like, so so well done for adults, but
Speaker 7: also especially for kids. You want to keep kids interests
Speaker 7: in that, you want to keep teenagers interests and have
Speaker 7: them guessing about what's coming next, And the best way
Speaker 7: to do that is to have you know the rise
Speaker 7: and fall, the natural rise and fall storytelling as often
Speaker 7: as you can in the story without it becoming like overwhelming.
Speaker 7: And I was interested to see if she would do
Speaker 7: that for Sunrise too, And she does three parts, nine
Speaker 7: chapters per part, a three act part, with a three
Speaker 7: act story within each chapter, almost definitely within each act.
Speaker 7: And I just like to me, like, I don't know,
Speaker 7: I didn't appreciate that as much as a kid like
Speaker 7: the structure behind it, but I knew that I just
Speaker 7: kept reading. I keep kept reading, kept reading, kept reading.
Speaker 7: Like I said, I finished them all, like each book
Speaker 7: in a day. And but as an adult and as
Speaker 7: i've I've you know, I've taken writing classes, I've done
Speaker 7: my own writing and everything with that, I know how
Speaker 7: hard that is, and I know how intentional it is.
Speaker 7: And for her to put so much intention that way,
Speaker 7: like so much work and so much thought behind it
Speaker 7: for a YA book, like not to say that YA
Speaker 7: isn't as deserving is that as you know, as other
Speaker 7: books are, I think they're even more deserving of it.
Speaker 7: I think it's even more necessary. But I just I
Speaker 7: think that it's I can tell that it's intentional, and
Speaker 7: I just really respect respect her for that. She doesn't
Speaker 7: phone it in.
Speaker 4: Ever, Yeah, I.
Speaker 6: Would agree with so much of that. And I'm not
Speaker 6: a writing student by any means. So there's a lot
Speaker 6: of stuff that you picked up on that that I missed.
Speaker 6: But but I love hearing about that and that structure
Speaker 6: of threes, and I think that's true, like the structure
Speaker 6: of threes fits for like each individual chapter, each part
Speaker 6: of the books. But then also when you look at
Speaker 6: like the trilogy, you know, and I think there's a
Speaker 6: lot of questions about like is there gonna be a
Speaker 6: third third book in this sort of prequel trilogy, And
Speaker 6: I think there probably will be when she has something
Speaker 6: to talk about that, and we're gonna talk about that
Speaker 6: a bit in the bonus section for members. But for me,
Speaker 6: I think the best thing I would say is that,
Speaker 6: like I, I often am aware of YA writing as
Speaker 6: being significantly different than adult writing, and it doesn't mean
Speaker 6: it's bad. I think there's some wonderful, wonderful YA writing
Speaker 6: out there. But like when I would read a high
Speaker 6: republic book that was written for adults and a high
Speaker 6: republic these are with Star Wars books written for YA,
Speaker 6: I could tell the difference. When I'm reading a work
Speaker 6: by Susan Collins. Most of the time I completely forget
Speaker 6: that it's a YA book until we get to a
Speaker 6: romantic scene where the book will emphasize. And then they
Speaker 6: were kissing and kissing, and by the way, we mentioned
Speaker 6: like they never say making out, they never talk about hands,
Speaker 6: like it is very clear that all they ever do
Speaker 6: is kiss.
Speaker 4: Which is it?
Speaker 6: I think, as I understand it, like that's fairly chased,
Speaker 6: even compared to most YA standards today. But I do
Speaker 6: think it's fairly intentional to make that not be the focus.
Speaker 6: And that's my only reminder. And you know, I read
Speaker 6: this book and then almost immediately read the Star Wars book,
Speaker 6: which is an adult book, but I didn't feel like
Speaker 6: there was any real difference in the Really, the only
Speaker 6: difference is length. And I love that Star Wars book
Speaker 6: Mask of Fear, but my god, is it long. And
Speaker 6: while I would like a little more of the Hunger
Speaker 6: Games books, I could have used with a lot less.
Speaker 4: Of that Star Wars book.
Speaker 6: So so yeah, for me, I think it's a great question,
Speaker 6: and I think all the stuff that Danielle said about
Speaker 6: the writing, but I also think it just it is
Speaker 6: obviously written for the teenage attention span, but it never
Speaker 6: feels dumbed down in any way. There's so much complexity,
Speaker 6: there's so much nuance. The only characters who like me
Speaker 6: say this again, as to the POV thing, I think
Speaker 6: a lot of times what YA means is that you
Speaker 6: get less nuanced characters and characters who are more two dimensional,
Speaker 6: two dimensional and more like this is the love interest,
Speaker 6: this is the villain in Suzanne Collins books, especially in
Speaker 6: this one. I think you get that. But the reason
Speaker 6: they appear two dimensional is because our point of view
Speaker 6: character is only looking at them two dimensionally, and that
Speaker 6: so often when our character gets the chance to know
Speaker 6: them better, like with Maislely Donner, they actually develop into
Speaker 6: a much more rounded character. And so it's kind of
Speaker 6: a way to get away a little bit with some
Speaker 6: of that, like, oh, this is just a kind of
Speaker 6: you know, this is just a bad person or whatever,
Speaker 6: because our characters doesn't see them more than that, instead
Speaker 6: of the narrator telling you that a third person objective
Speaker 6: narrator and let me astually you use that to talk
Speaker 6: about the character of Maislely Donner some or Danielle not
Speaker 6: to talk with you to put it on to Danielle,
Speaker 6: tell us a little about Maislely because I know she's
Speaker 6: one of your favorites.
Speaker 7: Yes, I love Masley Donner, which is funny, and because
Speaker 7: I was gonna comment when you brought her up that
Speaker 7: you know, Suzanne Colins doesn't do just like she doesn't
Speaker 7: do two dimensional characters. There's not a single character in
Speaker 7: any of her books that is two dimensional, which I
Speaker 7: think is just another you know, sign of her talent.
Speaker 7: But Mazie Lee starts off as I think it was
Speaker 7: probably a bit of a surprise to people that Hamidge
Speaker 7: does not like Mazie Lee at the beginning, like and
Speaker 7: most of were come to understand that most of District
Speaker 7: twelve doesn't like her, that she's a real uh like
Speaker 7: brat and snooty and thinks that she's better than everybody
Speaker 7: else and gives really mean nicknames to people. Is she
Speaker 7: calls hamich itchi itchy hey, Mitchie. When he had of
Speaker 7: what was there was like a it was like flea
Speaker 7: season or something. I can't remember what exactly what it was.
Speaker 7: But so she's she's been really mean to the other
Speaker 7: tributes from District twelve before, so they don't really have
Speaker 7: any kind of feelings towards her. And for those who
Speaker 7: don't know, I think you I think you explained this earlier, Matthew,
Speaker 7: But just to reiterate, Mazie Lee is the aunt of Madge,
Speaker 7: who in the books is the girl that gives Catness
Speaker 7: the mocking jpin. Right, So if you've seen only the
Speaker 7: movies and not read the books, you don't know who
Speaker 7: Madge is because she's not in the movies, but she
Speaker 7: gives Catness the mocking jpen before she leaves for the
Speaker 7: Games and tells her that it was her aunt's pen
Speaker 7: first and she was also in the Games. And that's
Speaker 7: the last we hear of Maisley Donner until this book.
Speaker 7: And so you go in kind of expecting, like, oh,
Speaker 7: this is someone that I'm just gonna have like real
Speaker 7: kind of feelings about, I'm gonna love, and of course
Speaker 7: I do love her, but she starts all like she
Speaker 7: is just a real a real brat, and I think, yeah,
Speaker 7: But what's interesting is that as soon as they're on
Speaker 7: the train to the Capitol, all of her meanness is
Speaker 7: directed to the Capital people. It is not she actually
Speaker 7: sticks up for and defend and all of her District
Speaker 7: twelve fellow tributes. Anytime someone from the Capital says something
Speaker 7: mean to them, she's like steps in and is like
Speaker 7: actually and gives them the most the like most insane
Speaker 7: reads ever, Like she is the queen of just takedowns
Speaker 7: of people, and she just really sticks up for everyone,
Speaker 7: herself included, and that continues throughout the rest of it.
Speaker 7: And she is actually the one who, when they're in
Speaker 7: the arena, encourages Hamich to not let the Capital use them.
Speaker 7: It's very much kind of like how Pete is like,
Speaker 7: I don't want to be just another piece in their games.
Speaker 7: Maisie Lee is is that dialed up to like ten
Speaker 7: to one hundred even, And as you mentioned earlier, Hamich
Speaker 7: really comes to love her. They call each other brother
Speaker 7: and sister in the end their family, and it's a
Speaker 7: really beautiful evolution. I think she probably has the best
Speaker 7: arc in this book, Maizi Lee does, just because it's
Speaker 7: not what you would expect from when you first meet her.
Speaker 7: And in the Q and A, Susanne Collins talks about
Speaker 7: her and says that Macy Lee is the angriest character
Speaker 7: she's ever written, and when she's in District twelve before
Speaker 7: the Reaping, that anger manifests as meanness. But once she's
Speaker 7: around the Capitol, she knows that the Capital is who
Speaker 7: has made her life terrible, has made her life less
Speaker 7: than it can be, less than what she wants it
Speaker 7: to be, and so she knows exactly who the real
Speaker 7: enemy is and she directs all her anger to them
Speaker 7: the second that she is around them, And I think
Speaker 7: that that's just speaks to her character a lot like you.
Speaker 7: I think it reminded me a bit of like, you know,
Speaker 7: when you're in school, there's someone who who is maybe
Speaker 7: mean to you a few times or or you know,
Speaker 7: wasn't the best, but then you kind of learn something
Speaker 7: about them or meet them on different grounds later on,
Speaker 7: and you realize like who their real character is and
Speaker 7: who they really are, and that that meanness was just
Speaker 7: a mask for something else. And that doesn't happen all
Speaker 7: the time. Sometimes people are just mean, but sometimes there's
Speaker 7: more to them than that. There's a lot more. And
Speaker 7: I think Masie Lee was a perfect example of that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think you put it so well and hit
Speaker 6: so many of the points and I think are so
Speaker 6: important about her, and it really, to me feels like
Speaker 6: a commentary Suzanne is making about it. Yeah, it really
Speaker 6: feels to me like a commentary that Susan Collins is
Speaker 6: making about how easily we are divided by propaganda. You know,
Speaker 6: because yes, in the world of the district, Masally's economic
Speaker 6: circumstances are significantly better than they are in you know,
Speaker 6: for someone like Hamig, who is very much the same,
Speaker 6: which is the neighborhood that Catnus also grows up in.
Speaker 6: It's like the poorest area of this district. But it's again,
Speaker 6: it's like sort of like, you know, if Hamig is
Speaker 6: one percent of the capital, she's maybe three percent of
Speaker 6: the capital, you know, compared to their wealth. And that,
Speaker 6: to me, one of the moose striking scenes is that
Speaker 6: one of the first time that she turns that anger
Speaker 6: towards the capital is when they're on the train and
Speaker 6: they're being treated pretty badly, you know, being taken to
Speaker 6: the capitol. But they're all given sandwiches and they're just
Speaker 6: you know, kind of like, you know, if I went
Speaker 6: to a conference someone handed me a sandwich just wrapped
Speaker 6: up in paper, I'd be like, Okay, that's what we're doing.
Speaker 6: But she's like, no, we all should get plates, and
Speaker 6: we all should get nice silverware. And Hamach just baffled
Speaker 6: at first, and at first is like, why is she
Speaker 6: worrying about this frou through nonsense when we're all about
Speaker 6: to go die, until he listens to her explain that no,
Speaker 6: the point is that like, we need to still be respected,
Speaker 6: they need to treat us like people, and that for
Speaker 6: her these things matter because that's how you show that
Speaker 6: you're still a person worthy of.
Speaker 4: Respect and of decorum.
Speaker 6: And she's this guy's beautiful reframing of all and That's
Speaker 6: why I made the Regina George comment, because obviously, like
Speaker 6: the mean Girl's, part of what's about is like reframing
Speaker 6: how we look at those divisions, and that everyone probably
Speaker 6: has more of a story than we think about them
Speaker 6: as and so I just it just is a classic
Speaker 6: story that I love how they they change it in
Speaker 6: that way. I'll also say I appreciated that you mentioned
Speaker 6: the brother and sister because it is a nice part
Speaker 6: of the dynamic, But it also kind of felt like
Speaker 6: Susy Colin saying, I am not creating another love triangle here.
Speaker 6: He is just in love with his covey girl back home.
Speaker 6: That's all that's going on. Please don't think that that's
Speaker 6: what's happening here instead. Yeah, So I thought that was
Speaker 6: a nice way of her to being like, Nope, nope,
Speaker 6: cutting that off right at the past.
Speaker 7: Yep, I think what you want. But in this, in
Speaker 7: this canon, their family exactly.
Speaker 6: So in the Boat I mentioned that we haven't even
Speaker 6: gotten into the name of the covey girl who he's
Speaker 6: in love with, who comes to a very tragic end.
Speaker 6: That's in part because there's a great piece of art
Speaker 6: that is being referenced throughout that is U acted to
Speaker 6: something that I know Danielle has a deep interest in.
Speaker 6: So we're gonna talk about that in the members only section.
Speaker 6: By the way, if you want to become a member,
Speaker 6: it is only five dollars a month, fifty five dollars
Speaker 6: a year. Great would help support us all the informations
Speaker 6: in the show notes, and you get at every content,
Speaker 6: bonus content every episode, and bonus episodes once a month.
Speaker 6: But I'm trying that, and there's so much about this
Speaker 6: book that we haven't touched on. You had a great
Speaker 6: question Earlierre's any more questions you want to ask? I
Speaker 6: think there's probably one or two more comments I'm going
Speaker 6: to come up with, But anything else you want to
Speaker 6: ask about this book and kind of what we've said, well, I.
Speaker 2: Do have a follow up to the previous discussion. One
Speaker 2: thing that Danielle said reminded me of I pulled a
Speaker 2: quote from Suzanne Collins. She doesn't really like do much publicity,
Speaker 2: so there's very few like interviews and very few quotes,
Speaker 2: but one that I found she says, I don't write
Speaker 2: about adolescents. I write about War four adolescens, and that
Speaker 2: really like shows like how much respect she has for
Speaker 2: her audience, both young adults and adults, and it really
Speaker 2: made me think, like the classification of young adults is
Speaker 2: kind of bad in this case. You know, the three
Speaker 2: of us love our Star Wars cartoons, right, and we
Speaker 2: are all adults for like this is just good television,
Speaker 2: a good storytelling, And I feel like that's what's going
Speaker 2: on here. But just cartoons a lot of people think
Speaker 2: are for kids, but in our discussion, like no, like
Speaker 2: there's definitely like adult stories being told here and they
Speaker 2: are accessible to kids but can be for adults. And
Speaker 2: I feel like that's the same thing that's going on here.
Speaker 2: But just the fact that books are classified in this
Speaker 2: young adult section means that just by definition, they get
Speaker 2: bookended haha. Pun intended into this section where someone like me,
Speaker 2: like I have never considered reading Hunger Games until now,
Speaker 2: and like I think I should read, like because they're
Speaker 2: not even though they're they're classified as young adult, they're
Speaker 2: not necessarily for kids. Just like the cartoon discussion, they're
Speaker 2: accessible to kids, but they can be for adults.
Speaker 4: Now, I think they're all ages instead of being just
Speaker 4: for young adults.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and it's interesting, like just a little publishing history,
Speaker 7: ya wasn't a classification until the late nineties, early two thousands,
Speaker 7: and maybe even a little bit later than that. And
Speaker 7: it's purely business strategy, purely business strategy from publishing companies
Speaker 7: that has there's a lot of conversation amongst authors and
Speaker 7: readers and publishers themselves about about whether YA has been
Speaker 7: useful or not, whether it's it's kind of you know,
Speaker 7: boxed in these stories that people are trying to tell,
Speaker 7: and and and if the perception of it has maybe
Speaker 7: you know, led to some really great stories not getting
Speaker 7: into the hands that they should be in. And what
Speaker 7: I like about The Hunger Games being classified as YA
Speaker 7: is that, again, like the accessibility to kids, because I
Speaker 7: think that if Susie and Collins had wanted, she probably
Speaker 7: could have shopped this as an adult novel or adult
Speaker 7: series and it would have it would have been fine.
Speaker 7: Would it have gotten the amount of attention it did
Speaker 7: if it hadn't been classified as white? I don't think so. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I think that teenagers really like the the marketing Scholastic
Speaker 7: did for this Harry Potter levels, which I mean Harry
Speaker 7: and Harry Potter like not to talk about that, but
Speaker 7: just as far as marketing goes. That was really word
Speaker 7: of mouth, that was booksellers and librarians and you know,
Speaker 7: putting these in the hands of kids. And I think
Speaker 7: Hunger Games followed a similar similar route. But I do
Speaker 7: love that it is something that teenagers. I don't know
Speaker 7: if it's the same now as it was when I
Speaker 7: was a teenager, but when I was a teenager, it
Speaker 7: did feel like like this is ours, this is ours,
Speaker 7: And maybe I didn't understand it the way that I
Speaker 7: do now, but I think there's something to be said
Speaker 7: about about kids feeling like that's something for them too.
Speaker 6: I mean, certainly the number of times I see younger
Speaker 6: millennials and gen z is talking about like, why are
Speaker 6: you so active in protests against the tyrannical government stuff,
Speaker 6: and it says because the ya I read like that
Speaker 6: certainly is a mark in its favor, And yeah, I
Speaker 6: think because to me, I think part of it is
Speaker 6: that right now there is a big push to like, oh,
Speaker 6: don't introduce kids to themes that they're not ready for,
Speaker 6: which most often means like don't tell them that gay
Speaker 6: people exist, or the trans people exist, or that you know,
Speaker 6: racism has ever existed. And Susanne does cover those kind
Speaker 6: of things. Like, you know, one comments made up with
Speaker 6: the Hunger Games is that everyone seemed to be straight.
Speaker 6: She she very intentionally puts in a character who has
Speaker 6: two fathers who are clearly in love with each other
Speaker 6: as just a night, not a big deal, but just like, hey,
Speaker 6: this is just a normalized part of the world. But
Speaker 6: I think one of the things that that Susane Collins
Speaker 6: is really getting at in her books is like, as
Speaker 6: you said, it's a it's a book about war for adolescents,
Speaker 6: because the thing is that in our world right now,
Speaker 6: war is happening to adolescence. You know, the bombs in
Speaker 6: Gaza and Yemen and all over the world. Don't like say, oh,
Speaker 6: well there's a teenager in this building, We're not going
Speaker 6: to bomb there. You know, the horrible immigration stuff that's
Speaker 6: happening in this country, like obviously kids are getting deported
Speaker 6: to Like she writes about these experiences for kids in
Speaker 6: young adults in part to remind people who are in
Speaker 6: much safer circumstances that the stuff is happening to kids
Speaker 6: right now. You know, both young adults, but also people
Speaker 6: as young as prim or Lulu or or rou you
Speaker 6: know who aren't teenagers yet really.
Speaker 7: And they're going to be exposed to it anyway. Like
Speaker 7: that's the thing is that you can't you can't prevent
Speaker 7: how you can't prevent kids and teenagers from being exposed
Speaker 7: to these themes. You can encourage how they're confronted with it,
Speaker 7: And I think that literature is such a good way
Speaker 7: at not controlling the narrative, but at being honest with
Speaker 7: them about it instead of really I mean, I mean,
Speaker 7: it's another form of propaganda, it really is, Like I mean,
Speaker 7: like I said, not all propaganda is bad, but you
Speaker 7: can introduce it to them in a way that is
Speaker 7: more honest maybe than other ways are. And it encourages
Speaker 7: them to think about it themselves and doesn't just give
Speaker 7: them the answers. And I think that that's that's what's
Speaker 7: so important I think about these books and what especially
Speaker 7: Sunrise does is that it encourages thinking. It encourages really
Speaker 7: kind of self exploration and asking these questions that no
Speaker 7: one really has the answer to, but that we should
Speaker 7: be thinking about anyway.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, Danielle, you mentioned earlier that you felt that
Speaker 2: Suzanne Collins was angry when she wrote this, right, like
Speaker 2: angry about what's happening in the world, about the fascistic
Speaker 2: forces that are taking power in a lot of places.
Speaker 2: And one of the reviewers I read also suggested that
Speaker 2: she is angry or perhaps like wants to change course
Speaker 2: from how her novels were adapted into the movies and
Speaker 2: the way that the message in the movies is a
Speaker 2: little more diluted and the focus is a lot more
Speaker 2: on like how great Catnus is is the protagonist, and
Speaker 2: so like this this newest novel, Sunrise on the Reaping,
Speaker 2: is kind of like a hey fan, my fans, like,
Speaker 2: you're you're kind of missing the point that this is
Speaker 2: what I want. Want the point to be is that.
Speaker 2: Do you feel like that's a fairly accurate read?
Speaker 7: I think the situation, yeah, I think on some levels. One,
Speaker 7: she had a lot more to do with the script
Speaker 7: in the Mocking Jay movies than she did Catching Fire
Speaker 7: and the Hunger Games. And I think you see that
Speaker 7: a lot in the Mocking Jain films because it focuses
Speaker 7: on collective action. There's lots of scenes that we don't
Speaker 7: get in the book of the districts uprising and and
Speaker 7: the things that they do, the sacrifices they make to
Speaker 7: further this rebellion, and and so I think that was
Speaker 7: also like in response to like, hey, this isn't just
Speaker 7: about Catinus Catiness, isn't the only one doing these things.
Speaker 7: These other people like as a reminder, like all of
Speaker 7: the districts are willing to sacrifice themselves for a better
Speaker 7: future and to to you know, like kind of unchain
Speaker 7: themselves from the capitol. And with Sunrise, I think what
Speaker 7: I saw more maybe was that Vallid I don't know.
Speaker 7: Have you seen Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Ricky? I
Speaker 7: had not, Okay, But like I said, the book is
Speaker 7: written in third person, and to me, that was very
Speaker 7: an intentional choice because I think that Snow excuses his
Speaker 7: actions and explains them away to himself by separating himself
Speaker 7: from his feelings. And so if you write in third
Speaker 7: person instead of first person, third person is how Snow
Speaker 7: thinks to himself, Like ye, like that is like you know,
Speaker 7: he he thinks about people really horribly, like absolutely disgusting
Speaker 7: thoughts in his mind about some of these people that
Speaker 7: he pretends to really care about, and on some level
Speaker 7: he does care about them, but he doesn't want to
Speaker 7: admit that he does. So again that's where the kind
Speaker 7: of third person is, that degree of separation between true
Speaker 7: feelings and the mask that you're kind of using to
Speaker 7: cover that those up. But you still get, like, you
Speaker 7: get all of his off thoughts, all of his his
Speaker 7: you know, really ridiculous reasoning for his actions. That's hard
Speaker 7: to translate into film because you don't get those. You
Speaker 7: don't get his internal monologue, even if it's in third person,
Speaker 7: it's still there in the film, it's not. Instead, you
Speaker 7: get mostly the mask that he shows to everyone else.
Speaker 7: And that mask is very charming. Yeah, like it's it's
Speaker 7: very very charming. Tom blythe who plays him, is very attractive,
Speaker 7: and so you get a lot of people who make
Speaker 7: kind of like thirst at its about it, like like
Speaker 7: on on TikTok and how kind of romanticizing him and
Speaker 7: almost in some cases excusing who he is. And I
Speaker 7: think that that goes against everything that the Book of
Speaker 7: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is trying to show. And
Speaker 7: based on some of the things we find out that
Speaker 7: Snow did to Hamich and his loved ones in Sunrise,
Speaker 7: I wouldn't be surprised if she went in and wrote
Speaker 7: the parts that Snow is in this with the idea
Speaker 7: of like, hey, by the way, as a reminder, this
Speaker 7: guy that you've been romanticizing for the past like year
Speaker 7: and a half almost two years is a horrible person,
Speaker 7: and he is horrible by choice. And here's your reminder
Speaker 7: of that, because here's this list of horrible things that
Speaker 7: he's done and that he will continue to do to Hamig.
Speaker 7: And that to me, if Sunrise, if any part of
Speaker 7: Sunrise is a response to how the movies have intentionally
Speaker 7: or unintentionally skewed the message of her books, it would
Speaker 7: be that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it is so true, and like to
Speaker 6: really understand what they do with Snow Online, I think
Speaker 6: it's the characters are not the same. But I think
Speaker 6: if you think about like the Anakin thirst edits you know,
Speaker 6: and the like, oh well, it wasn't his fault he
Speaker 6: became this horrible person, and there's some of that with
Speaker 6: snow as well. And I think, honestly, to me, one
Speaker 6: of the we mentioned it before as kind of a
Speaker 6: like stop the fanfic, But I think one of the
Speaker 6: biggest changes is there isn't a romance at the heart
Speaker 6: of this book. Well there is, but it's mostly off screen.
Speaker 6: And that he's doing everything to get back to the
Speaker 6: woman he loves, and the woman he loves dies horribly
Speaker 6: in a very sadistic way. That's clearly what parts it
Speaker 6: breaks him. But for most of the book there's no
Speaker 6: romantic tension, and like young adults love romantic tension.
Speaker 4: I love romantic tension books.
Speaker 6: It can be great, but I think, like when you
Speaker 6: look at how often like there'd be posts about like, Okay,
Speaker 6: the most interesting question is should Catnus have picked Gail or.
Speaker 4: Peat which misses that.
Speaker 6: Like the whole point is that the capital put her
Speaker 6: in a situation where she could only consider which boy
Speaker 6: was most houseful to her for survival. She can never
Speaker 6: actually consider like, oh, which boy is cuter, which one
Speaker 6: has better eyes, which one is better job prospects? Like,
Speaker 6: and I'm saying that kind of what sounds like a
Speaker 6: sexish way, like every gender does that kind of a thing,
Speaker 6: But like, I felt that that was a very intentional
Speaker 6: choice of her being like, no, stop focusing on the romance,
Speaker 6: focus on the dystopia, because yeah, I think I think
Speaker 6: that they're just I didn't even know that that Susannah said.
Speaker 4: That, but it makes so much sense. I think with
Speaker 4: a lot of things in this book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a certain irony to any fiction like this
Speaker 2: that tries to tell people to focus on the dystopia,
Speaker 2: to focus on the fascism like in your life, but
Speaker 2: then becomes so popular that it itself is a distraction
Speaker 2: from from what's going on in our lives. And I
Speaker 2: think that's unavoidable. That's just like popularity and how media works.
Speaker 2: But something like this, I think, like, is well written enough,
Speaker 2: you can still focus back on that, right. I think
Speaker 2: that's what's going on here, And that's what has me
Speaker 2: most interested in actually reading these is that she is
Speaker 2: the author herself, knows what she's doing, yeah, and is
Speaker 2: making deliberate choices to keep the focus on certain things
Speaker 2: and not get distracted by the team Peter aspect of
Speaker 2: it all.
Speaker 4: I think she is.
Speaker 6: And it's a learning process, you know. I think that's
Speaker 6: one of the things the book is about. Is also,
Speaker 6: like I said, because there is kind of a proto
Speaker 6: rebellion in this book and it fails miserably. Yeah, And
Speaker 6: part of its about how people learn about that. And
Speaker 6: so I don't bring up actually one of the last things,
Speaker 6: because we've already gone a long and are probably gonna
Speaker 6: go longer, but I do want to start rapping so eventually.
Speaker 6: One of the complaints about the book is that a
Speaker 6: lot of characters who we see in later books show up,
Speaker 6: and some of them like have to because it's already Kennon, like,
Speaker 6: for example, that there's a scene in Catching Fire when
Speaker 6: she's watching the video of Hamish's games and she recognizes
Speaker 6: her mother as one of the best friends of Maisley Donner,
Speaker 6: so like that was already in there, but like, you know,
Speaker 6: Hamish's best friends with her father, and we get to
Speaker 6: see them romance. We get all of the people who
Speaker 6: are mentors to Catnus, are mentors to Hamich are people
Speaker 6: who we will later see in those books, Mags and
Speaker 6: Beatie showing up and Wires and all of them.
Speaker 4: When the person who goes from.
Speaker 6: The Capitol to get the tributes is a real screw
Speaker 6: up who steps in but a young Effie. And I
Speaker 6: don't want to get into the cameo's discussion nonsense, because
Speaker 6: I think a lot of times that's in bad faith,
Speaker 6: and like cameos happen all the time, there's nothing wrong
Speaker 6: with that for me, at least, though I didn't love
Speaker 6: it because did make the world feel very small, just
Speaker 6: in terms of like having it be like it made
Speaker 6: the It made District twelve feel very small, It made
Speaker 6: it feel like like I would have I liked some
Speaker 6: of it and some that I think was necessary. But
Speaker 6: I'm curious Danielle your thoughts because I've heard you defind
Speaker 6: it from the cameos conversation. But I'm curious what you
Speaker 6: thought of in terms of like, would you have liked
Speaker 6: to see more characters, more newer characters to remind you
Speaker 6: like there were a lot of other tributes, there were
Speaker 6: a lot of other people in District twelve, or do
Speaker 6: you like it being so self referential to other characters
Speaker 6: we've seen before.
Speaker 7: I actually thought that it made sense because District twelve
Speaker 7: isn't big, Like District twelve is actually very small. Catenus
Speaker 7: comments on this in the original trilogy when her and
Speaker 7: Peta are on their victory tour. She notes the District
Speaker 7: eleven and I can't remember which other one, but some
Speaker 7: of the other ones are massive compared to twelve, right,
Speaker 7: and that really when she walks around, there's no one
Speaker 7: that Catenus doesn't know in twelve, like there's no no
Speaker 7: part where she, you know, is you know, there's just
Speaker 7: this random person like she knows everybody, and like it
Speaker 7: really seems like District twelve is just this this this
Speaker 7: really close knit community to the point of even like
Speaker 7: close knit in the sense that like not everybody loves
Speaker 7: each other, but they all know each other well enough
Speaker 7: or have heard of each other to the point where
Speaker 7: you know they are there, they're each other's like, and
Speaker 7: so that made sense to me. I think it would
Speaker 7: have made less sense to me if there weren't as
Speaker 7: many people that we had heard of before that were
Speaker 7: being referenced, because it, I mean, twenty four years is
Speaker 7: a long time, but it's also not that long. I
Speaker 7: am realizing that again as you know, as I get
Speaker 7: older myself, is that these people are still there. They're
Speaker 7: still in Catus's life. It makes sense that they would
Speaker 7: be in Hamage, especially because they're both from the scene,
Speaker 7: right and so there's goals would have been relatively similar,
Speaker 7: and so that didn't bother me. The capital didn't really
Speaker 7: bother me either. When I will say, when Effie was
Speaker 7: first brought in, I was my immediate reaction was, okay,
Speaker 7: this feel this is starting to feel a little bit
Speaker 7: like not necessary, But then I actually really liked it
Speaker 7: for a couple of reasons. Effie is the perfect example
Speaker 7: of propaganda working of capital propaganda doing what it was
Speaker 7: meant to do, and that I don't see that in
Speaker 7: the audiences at the interview who are fawning over Hamage
Speaker 7: and clapping and loving him. That's a form of entertainment
Speaker 7: and that is an element of propaganda. But what propaganda
Speaker 7: genuinely wants and how it becomes so long lasting, is
Speaker 7: that it genuinely gets people to believe what it is
Speaker 7: telling them. And for the Capital and the Hunger Games,
Speaker 7: what they want people to believe is that it is
Speaker 7: absolutely necessary to peace, is absolutely necessary for peace and
Speaker 7: penem to last, and for there to never be another war,
Speaker 7: for there to never be any of any more disrupt
Speaker 7: there has to be the Hunger Games. And Effie has
Speaker 7: bought into that, as Hamich says, hook Line and Sinker,
Speaker 7: and the crux of her character is that she's not
Speaker 7: a horrible person. Like she doesn't relish the thought of
Speaker 7: the Hunger Games, she doesn't relish the outcome of them,
Speaker 7: she doesn't celebrate people's deaths, but she still believes that
Speaker 7: it is an absolute necessity to the longevity of pinem
Speaker 7: and it takes her a long time to kind of
Speaker 7: deprogram herself from thinking that way and never really even
Speaker 7: see her like the outcome of that in the books.
Speaker 7: And so to see her in this made absolute sense
Speaker 7: to me because there's no character I can think of
Speaker 7: where it would have hit hard, like as hard as
Speaker 7: it needed to then Effie for how propaganda is working
Speaker 7: in the Capitol at this time, but also on top
Speaker 7: of that, you introduce that, and then you have to
Speaker 7: introduce some reason as to why we shouldn't despise her.
Speaker 4: Yeah, why we.
Speaker 7: Shouldn't you know, be like, oh, I can't believe, Like
Speaker 7: she's almost like the worst. And it is her kindness,
Speaker 7: her genuine kindness to Hamage during his lowest moments. And
Speaker 7: I think there was some comfort because Hamige goes through
Speaker 7: so much in this, like like he was a punching
Speaker 7: bag in this almost for the amount of trauma just
Speaker 7: kind of thrown at him left and right. The comfort,
Speaker 7: I think, at least for me, was knowing that he
Speaker 7: has had a familiar face that entire time, at least
Speaker 7: someone who is genuinely kind to him and who may
Speaker 7: be annoyed at him for his antics the longer that
Speaker 7: his alcoholness continues, But who has been there and who
Speaker 7: extends a kind hand to him every now and then,
Speaker 7: and that is e Fie And and so in that instance,
Speaker 7: it like I just I went straight from being like
Speaker 7: I don't know she needed to be in this to
Speaker 7: feel like there's no other character who needed to be
Speaker 7: in this more. I think actually, and the other virus
Speaker 7: and Mags and BT being in it again, I think
Speaker 7: that they their purpose was to show that these people
Speaker 7: have been trying for so long, and at least two
Speaker 7: of them aren't going to see the outcome of everything
Speaker 7: they've worked so hard for. They don't they're not going
Speaker 7: to get to enjoy a penem without the Hunger Games.
Speaker 7: But they did everything they could to ensure that it
Speaker 7: would happen for someone, and they didn't let this instance
Speaker 7: that didn't work bring them down. Yeah, they just tried
Speaker 7: harder and they kept going. And I think that that
Speaker 7: is such an important message for young people, especially that
Speaker 7: just because one doesn't work doesn't mean that the next
Speaker 7: one won't. And you keep going and you keep going,
Speaker 7: and so you kind of need those characters that people
Speaker 7: are already familiar with to make that message work, and
Speaker 7: so I get it. I mean I also get like,
Speaker 7: I get the initial like put offness, but of that
Speaker 7: some people have of it, but it didn't make it
Speaker 7: seem small to me. It made it seem I don't know,
Speaker 7: it made it seem real. But I also think that
Speaker 7: you talk about like smallness of it is I think
Speaker 7: I don't think the capital is huge, like, I don't
Speaker 7: think it's like a huge, huge place.
Speaker 6: I think you're making a case I completely agree with.
Speaker 6: I think it's more small, tempoorly, you know, in terms
Speaker 6: of like the like, because we also get when we
Speaker 6: meet snow, you know his mouth is bleeding because he
Speaker 6: has just poisoned somebody, which is something that gets referenced later.
Speaker 6: So but no, I think you make really good points.
Speaker 6: It wasn't my favorite, but I can really understand where
Speaker 6: you're coming from with that.
Speaker 2: I think the word I would use is connected. Right,
Speaker 2: instead of making the world feel small, it makes it
Speaker 2: feel connected, And especially for these characters that will become
Speaker 2: a part of a successful rebellion later on, you want
Speaker 2: to see those connections and understand how each of those
Speaker 2: characters reach this point. And of course like in our
Speaker 2: favorite property Star Wars. We are also seeing that, you know,
Speaker 2: with and Or, we are seeing the connections that are
Speaker 2: being made between disparate rebellions and rebels and characters and
Speaker 2: how they all end up, you know, on Yavin or
Speaker 2: wherever within the rebellion. So I enjoy that, Like for
Speaker 2: me when I think of like of cameo that makes
Speaker 2: the world feel small, like in Rogue one, the character
Speaker 2: of doctor a Vasin right, the I don't like you either,
Speaker 2: guy from the Canteen. Yeah, just randomly bumping into cassiean
Speaker 2: on Jeda. I was like, at first, it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's that guy. And I did the point and I
Speaker 2: was like, what is he doing?
Speaker 7: That's good, that's a good example. Actually that's fair.
Speaker 6: All right, last question we're gonna throw out, and then
Speaker 6: I promise we're gonna wrap this up and do a
Speaker 6: quick bonus member section. You talked Danielle earlier about how
Speaker 6: there are so few two dimensional characters and that we
Speaker 6: do get to see so many point of views, and
Speaker 6: what came to mind is the one point of view
Speaker 6: I think that we very rarely get to see much of.
Speaker 6: We see little bits of it here and there, what
Speaker 6: we the one group. I feel like that has really
Speaker 6: still been demonized by our point of view characters and
Speaker 6: hasn't gotten into too much detail. Beyond that are the careers,
Speaker 6: And Susan's not going to write another novel again to
Speaker 6: she has something to say, And I think when people
Speaker 6: hear a career novel, they what they really want is finnic.
Speaker 4: I don't think we're ever going to get that. Some
Speaker 4: midication has.
Speaker 6: Been made, But for me at least, I feel like
Speaker 6: the point of view character that I most want because
Speaker 6: they feel like we haven't gotten from their perspective are
Speaker 6: the careers. Just want to throw that out and get
Speaker 6: any said comment you have.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that the way that Susanne Collins shows
Speaker 7: the humanity of the careers is so interesting. In the
Speaker 7: Hunger Games, like the original trilogy, you get the moment
Speaker 7: when Kato, like at the very end in the books,
Speaker 7: Kato is terrified of the MutS that are going after them,
Speaker 7: and so much so that he goes straight past Catenus,
Speaker 7: doesn't even try to kill her because he's terrified of them,
Speaker 7: and then in the end he's like begging her to
Speaker 7: kill him because he's being torn apart by these MutS
Speaker 7: and it's a slow, painful, awful death. And and Catinus
Speaker 7: in that moment is like she doesn't see Kato or
Speaker 7: she doesn't see a career, she doesn't see an enemy.
Speaker 7: She just sees like a kid, yeah, dying and that
Speaker 7: that could easily be her, and she, you know, puts
Speaker 7: him out of his misery. And in this book, that
Speaker 7: moment is with the career who like there's it's just
Speaker 7: Hamuch Welly, another little girl from one of the other districts,
Speaker 7: and one of the career tributes left and Hamich and
Speaker 7: Welly are both up in a tree. Welly is not
Speaker 7: long for this world. Hamuch is trying to nurture her,
Speaker 7: and at the bottom of the tree is the career
Speaker 7: tribute and she's crying. Haymich cheers her crying, and him
Speaker 7: and Wally have just been sent some chocolate in their
Speaker 7: parachute and he drops a bit of chocolate down and
Speaker 7: the crying stops. And for that moment, for those few
Speaker 7: hours of that night, they're not like tributes. They're not competitors,
Speaker 7: they're not enemies to each other. They're just kids who
Speaker 7: were terrified and who have been left alone like this
Speaker 7: Career Tribute had a partner and her partner has been
Speaker 7: killed and she's all alone now. She doesn't even have
Speaker 7: another you know, a person who she's aligned with to
Speaker 7: comfort her. And that was so heartbreaking to me. Like
Speaker 7: I cried during that scene because it was just like
Speaker 7: I cried because hay Much is such like pure goodness
Speaker 7: in him really like shined through there. But also for
Speaker 7: the Career Tribute, who is just a kid. And a
Speaker 7: lot of people speculated that the way that she kills Welli, which,
Speaker 7: by the way, earlier I said Lulu's death was one
Speaker 7: of the most terrific in the book. No, it was
Speaker 7: Wellie's death. Sorry, the way that she kills Wellie is
Speaker 7: so awful. But a lot of people have speculated that
Speaker 7: she did that to make up for thath like weakness,
Speaker 7: weakness like quote unquote weakness that she showed the night before.
Speaker 7: And I think that that's true. And I it would
Speaker 7: be really interesting to get like a point of view
Speaker 7: from a career district, a Career Tribute because of how
Speaker 7: they're raised, how they're raised to view the Hunger Games
Speaker 7: as another another form of propaganda, like they've bought into
Speaker 7: what the Hunger Games are what the capital wants the
Speaker 7: tributes to view the Hunger Games as, which is a
Speaker 7: lifeline and something to aspire to to some greatness that
Speaker 7: makes you like a warrior, you know, a king in
Speaker 7: your own right essentially, and the careers have by necessity,
Speaker 7: but then sometimes willingly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'd love to see that.
Speaker 2: Yeahs as the audience surrogate here, I had to look
Speaker 2: this up. The career tributes are the contestants, the tributes
Speaker 2: from the lower number districts who have basically trained for
Speaker 2: the Hunger Games and have like used the privilege of
Speaker 2: their districts to be like super athletes like panem gladiators,
Speaker 2: and they actually volunteer for the games because they've trained
Speaker 2: for them, and many of them win because of that
Speaker 2: advantage versus people from the higher number of districts who
Speaker 2: are selected by by which McCall.
Speaker 7: It the reaping. Yeah, there's I think the official careers
Speaker 7: are one, two, four, four, three interesting left out because
Speaker 7: they're like technology and they trained for that instead. But yeah,
Speaker 7: Finnic famously is one of the careers.
Speaker 6: I think that's such a great point that you bring up, Riki,
Speaker 6: because it's one last part of propaganda, one of the
Speaker 6: best kinds of propaganda is showing that there are people
Speaker 6: who like the system and that they are willingly consenting
Speaker 6: to the system, as though that means that the system
Speaker 6: is okay, because you're not showing how much they were
Speaker 6: brainwashed into that. And so I think one of the
Speaker 6: justifications given sometimes for the the Hunger Games is, look,
Speaker 6: the careers want to do this, they're not being forced
Speaker 6: into it, and that if only the other districts could
Speaker 6: see that that this is consensual, they're all happy to
Speaker 6: be a part of it. And and I think you
Speaker 6: know that it's it's it's the consent of you know,
Speaker 6: highly propagandized, you know, very limited options kind of a
Speaker 6: thing where where someone's setting up a winner and a loser,
Speaker 6: but you're both still trapped in this game that you
Speaker 6: actually have no escape out of.
Speaker 7: What is it that I think Snow says in one
Speaker 7: of the movies, I think it's the first Hunger Games movie,
Speaker 7: because it's not in the books. Obviously Sowe don't get
Speaker 7: this perspective, but he tells Seneca Crane, the head game
Speaker 7: maker of Cantus's first games, that you have to give
Speaker 7: them just enough hope to get them to buy into
Speaker 7: the system, but not too much hope where they start
Speaker 7: to question it. And I think that that's what the
Speaker 7: careers are a part of, that little bit of hope
Speaker 7: that that almost almost like climbing the like social ladder,
Speaker 7: like the day link fruit, like you can have this,
Speaker 7: you can have this, but actually you can't. You will
Speaker 7: never be at this level. You will always be something else.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think the comparison I made to American
Speaker 2: gladiators is apt because they were presented as this like
Speaker 2: physical marvel that the normal quote unquote normal contestants would
Speaker 2: try to beat, but as we have learned later on,
Speaker 2: like they were taken steroids and they had unfair advantages.
Speaker 6: Yeh very much. So well, he's been a great conversation.
Speaker 6: Thank you both so much. To our listeners, thank you
Speaker 6: as always. I will say that I read parts of
Speaker 6: the book, but also a lot of it I listened
Speaker 6: to on Audible. I have subscription Audible, which means that
Speaker 6: I get a certain numn of credits that I get
Speaker 6: to use once a month, as well as discount and
Speaker 6: all the books, and it, like so many books on Audible,
Speaker 6: it was just wonderfully produced.
Speaker 4: We have a link in our show notes.
Speaker 6: If you want to get a subscription to Audible, I
Speaker 6: think you get a little bit of a discount.
Speaker 4: We get a little bit of money back.
Speaker 6: And just if it's hard for you to read books,
Speaker 6: because it's hard just to sit down out and open
Speaker 6: up a book, audiobooks are things I can listen to
Speaker 6: while I'm driving, while I'm doing the dishes, while I'm
Speaker 6: doing laundry. It's just a wonderful way to make the
Speaker 6: written word a part of your world. If sitting down
Speaker 6: and reading a book is a little harder for you,
Speaker 6: so I definitely recommend that recommend again becoming a member.
Speaker 4: Most of all, though, thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 4: May the Force be with
Speaker 2: You, maybe the odds, and with me in your all guy,
Speaker 2: Is that right,