LogFAQs > #963186217

Leonhart4 posted...

Katniss shooting Coin was great because I thought she was awful.

There are three problems I had with that:

1. Snow had been the Big Bad for the whole series, and Katniss had been so desperate to kill him, so why does she suddenly trust his judgment and side with him?
2. Coin was awful - and the point was meant to be "leaders on both sides are corrupt" but it more came across as "leadership = bad" because of Collins' sloppy writing.
3. It felt rather impersonal. Like... what was at stake for Katniss? And then she got away scot-free.

Leonhart4 posted...

Never watched beyond the first Hunger Games movie but it is not better than the book

I think the biggest drop-off between the books and the movies is the loss of Katniss's voice. Her perspective is fascinating in Catching Fire in particular because she's a badass who's powerless because of people using her as a pawn. But a translation of a first-person book to a movie doesn't always go well because you still have to characterize the protagonist. J-Law does the best she can but the movie isn't written tightly enough to convey it all.

plasmabeam posted...

Didn't know this, but you're 100% right. "Never rush an artist."

I remember a couple of little things that felt so off to me. Like Katniss wanting a haircut after being "initiated" (despite her loving her braids) feeling very out of character. And the "survive without" comment I mentioned above. If Collins had gotten to revise the book, she might have noticed these things. It honestly felt like a NaNoWriMo draft that an idiot writer shopped around to publishers without going through the minimum two revisions. The entire point of NaNoWriMo is to create a draft, the foundation of something as opposed to an immediately publishable book, and Mockingjay is an example I'd use of why. Too many holes. Too many character inconsistencies. Too many weirdly-written scenes. She had the skeleton of something great, but that was just it - a skeleton. And...

It isn't setup properly and therefore has considerably less impact than it should. There could've been a scenario where Katniss tried to save Prim, then Prim sacrificed herself to save Katniss, and that might've had the emotional impact the story deserved. Instead Prim's character was utterly wasted.

This is why it feels like a skeleton. All the moments that should have emotional impact are not set up well, and they just sort of "happen" as they do. Prim is thrown in the trash for no reason and it feels like it happens out of nowhere, and that's why I had forgotten about it. It happened because Collins wanted it to, not because it was meant to. Prim didn't get the death edit so it was meant to blindside the viewer, but because Prim had hardly been relevant and her story was lacking, it didn't work. If Prim had been built up as something, and then we got what you describe, suddenly a sudden death becomes viable, and has the impact Collins wanted. But because she didn't revise the book, it has no impact and doesn't stick with anyone.

Similarly, Katniss executing Coin. It honestly felt like Snow pushed the narrative that Coin was responsible for Prim's death, without Katniss having thought that beforehand. She abruptly became too easy to push around, and it made no sense that she let the man she had longed to kill for the entire series do that. Katniss should've had more internal conflict and come to the conclusion azuarc did: That Coin would only have sent Prim there to kill her. And then her target would change to Coin. The thing is, this wasn't necessary, let alone well-executed. This was a failed attempt at a gut punch that tried to change the themes of the series at the last minute.

The best stories write themselves after a certain point. Collins didn't let that happen because her hands were tied. She finished the first three-quarters of the book just fine before her deadline loomed, and Scholastic was inflexible, so she rushed the assault on the capital. She wanted to kill Prim off, so she did, even though there was no story reason to do so. It's best to work with an outline that can change if the story tells you it should. This should have been changed. A lot should have been changed. But Collins had to finish the last quarter of the book quickly and was given no time to revise the rest. That's why what we got was shit.