Catching Fire

[osprey_archer]

The great Hunger Games Watch of 2018 continues! Today we watched Catching Fire, and I'm afraid I have had some more thoughts on How to Be a Better Dictator again, because this movie (like the first) gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse into Snow's plans and GOOD GOD MAN, you are an embarrassment to dictatorship.

Seeing Snow's decision-making process only makes it more obvious that Snow has made a spectacular series of miscalculations. First, he trusted Plutarch Heavensbee, who turned out to be a mole - why is your spy craft so unimpressive, Snow! He manages to get a photograph of the one kiss that Katniss and Gale share, and yet he can't keep enough of an eye on his Head Gamekeeper to make sure he's not part of a far-reaching conspiracy. GOOD LORD.

And THEN he lets Plutarch talk him into the truly awful idea of sending the former winners, who are now beloved celebrities in their own right, back into the arena.

SNOW. NO. You were so insightful about the need to give your people a narrow avenue of hope in the first movie! And now you are LITERALLY KILLING the hope which may at this point be the only thing keeping them in line!

His personal animosity against Katniss really clouds his judgment. There are better ways of getting her back in line, Snow. LET ME SHARE.

1. Keep her in the Capitol. What good does sending her back to District 12 do? Seeing the suffering there will only strengthen her stubborn, rebellious streak, as well as strengthening the people's sense that she stands with them. You want to disconnect Katniss from her roots. Show that she is not one of them.

2. And you have the absolutely perfect excuse in her upcoming wedding to Peeta! Make it a ludicrous round of non-negotiable revelry. Every single host and hostess in the Capitol is expected to give an extravagant party in Katniss & Peeta's honor and Katniss and Peeta must attend every. Single. One. At least one party a night.

3. Preferably in a different outfit each time. All those fittings should keep them busy. Take LOTS of photographs and broadcast them everywhere. You want to give the impression that the lovebirds have ascended to the 1% and couldn't care less about everyone they've left behind.

4. Can you plot a Lindsay-Lohan-like downward spiral for Katniss and/or Peeta? DO IT. It's fine if you have to make 75% of it up.

5. In short, make Katniss and Peeta look like a couple of selfish twits with not a care in the world beyond throwing the biggest, glitziest, most tastelessly lavish wedding ever. Thrust it down people's throats till they're sick of it. Make their names synonymous with horrifying Capitol excess.

You can't kill a symbol of hope, President Snow. That only makes a martyr. But a hope betrayed becomes despair.

Now I realize that President Snow hoped that Katniss would conveniently undermine herself by behaving badly in the Games, but that was a gamble from the beginning. The big glitzy whirlwind wedding, with lots of photographs of an endlessly ludicrous wardrobe and very few chances for Katniss or Peeta to speak to the press, would have achieved the same goal much more safely.

Also, let me be real with you, I think this would make a completely fabulous AU fic. Katniss and Peeta have to go through with the wedding. They are forced to keep up the charade, or at least try to; I imagine cracks would appear in the not-to-distant future, and why shouldn't they? Young love, you know, it never lasts. That can be folded into their story too.

The hope they represented slowly curdles - but in such a way that it is easy for the Capitol to slough off the blame. They just couldn't handle the limelight, you know. Personality flaws. Sad but true. People buy the gossip rags to cluck maliciously over Katniss's latest drunken antics (for she is following in Haymitch's footsteps now: the first Games where she had to act as mentor broke her).

"No time for the folks back home," they scoff, although in actual fact, Katniss is rarely allowed to leave the Capitol. She comes back to 12 when she can, but soon enough her visits only confirm the distance that has grown between her and her former home. She doesn't belong here. She doesn't belong anywhere, except maybe the hazily drunken society of the other victors.

Snow likes to come along on her yearly visit to 12. He claims to enjoy "the homey atmosphere," and takes a fatherly interest in Prim's studies. Maybe she'll come to the Capitol to study medicine; "Assuming, of course," and Snow smiles, looking like Santa Claus with his white beard, "you aren't chosen for tribute before you can attend."

Isolate her, Snow. Isolate them both. Remind them that you have the power to crush everyone they live with a clench of your hand, and don't give them access to any riotous crowds that might suggest another way out.

Comments

[kore]

....that is kind of evilly inspiring. It would make a great fic.

[osprey_archer]

It really would.

...I may end up writing at least a short fic around it. Four years after her victory, three years after the glitzy society wedding that almost overshadowed that year's Games, and two years after the drunken meltdown that the Panem tabloids gleefully recounted in excruciating detail, Katniss returns to District 12 for her yearly visit for Prim's birthday.

She arrives to discover President Snow already ensconced in her living room, reminiscing over Katniss's wedding photos with her mother and sister.

[missroserose]

Brian and I quit watching Catching Fire about halfway through for precisely this reason. We'd already been through all of it with the books, and seeing it onscreen somehow just made everything that much more egregious. To quote him, "You could take a copy of The Prince off the shelf, inhale deeply, put it back on the shelf, and still come away with more knowledge of political philosophy and power-broking than Suzanne Collins apparently has."

I love your idea for a fic, although I probably wouldn't read it, heh. Weirdly, it makes me think backwards a little bit - looking at our own cultural epitome of the selfish-twits-uncaring-of-anything-other-than-being-as-publicly-over-the-top-glitzy-as-possible, the West marriage, I find myself wondering what subtleties of personality and situation are being glossed over. Not that I don't think the two of them aren't self-absorbed, precisely, nor do I think they're the subject of a government conspiracy to discredit anything they might say...but the tabloid machine needs feeding, and it *is* interesting that one of the few celebrity POC couples most people could probably name (other than the Obamas) is regularly heaped with such scorn...

[osprey_archer]

Goodness knows real dictators have made foolish decisions sometimes (they keep invading Russia! And Stalin had that weird Trotsky obsession that sort of parallels Snow's Katniss obsession), so it's not that it's unbelievable that Snow would make a series of mistakes that eventually led to his downfall. It's just... I don't know. They're very convenient mistakes for a young adult series where the heroine has to have a central role in the uprising. I can sort of see the puppet strings making him do it.

[asakiyume]

I'm very, very glad no one has offered you a dictatorship yet--you'd do it too well!

There are times when I don't feel like going beyond the first ... item (book, movie) in a series: the first one suggests things and it's all right if not every detail is filled in--the mind repairs holes and elaborates on possibilities. But when subsequent installments in the story come out, the flaws in the worldbuilding are unavoidable: clumsy, foolish, or just plain wrong-headed stuff is canon. That's definitely how I felt even as a kid about Star Wars. I liked the first movie. The end. And I think I feel that way about the Hunger Games in both its incarnations (though in fact I've never read any of them and only watched the first movie--but still. I feel like I know the story through cultural osmosis).

[osprey_archer]

I would be a terrible dictator. I'm not sure if I mean this in the sense that I would have a lot of people shot for saying mean things about me, or in the sense that I just wouldn't do much at all because what's the point of being a dictator if you can't order your minions to do all the governing while you sit in your bay window with the picturesque view, drinking an endless succession of cups of tea brought by discreet servants and reading?

Actually I think you'd have to be a hereditary monarch to pull the second one off. Or possibly related to a monarch but not actually a monarch oneself; otherwise they'd forever interrupt you to come cut ribbons and slice ceremonial cakes.

I think Harry Potter suffers a bit from this series problem - because it's so long, I wouldn't cut it down to just the first one, but I think by the fourth book or so the flaws in the worldbuilding start to become unavoidable. The wizarding world just doesn't make much sense if you try to take it too seriously.

[artemis_wandering]

Your version is brilliant. I think the only thing he was considering was that, by sending her back to 12, she would fade into obscurity. I'm sure he saw keeping her out of the people's eye as the right direction, not even considering she would be motivated, or that people back at home would continue to be motivated by her. That, and the peacekeepers are his big mistakes and ultimately reflect the mistakes of real dictators. There is a fine tipping line for violent oppression and enough violence that people stop caring enough about their deaths because they have no reason left to live. What are successful example of dictators/empires? NK which starves its people and keeps the outside world at bay (isolating the pop but also keeping it too weak to fight back), and frankly, the US. Institutional racism/sexism/heterosexism is the most effective form of control because it does, essentially what you suggest he should have done - lets the people see a) some minorities getting somewhere so it must be okay and b) leaves others feeling apathetic and antagonistic enough to not become allies and united (i.e. making the people think Katniss no longer cared). If Snow had spread the Capital's wealth even a little more, he'd likely never had such a revolution united under Katniss. Dictator's all eventually overreach or miscalculate. Snow and whats-her-name both did.