I’m still not very impressed, to be honest. Firstly, I think it’s an exceptionally badly written argument. It seems almost designed to confuse. The problem is that TLP has chosen to frame a logical/moral argument about the best way to oppose totalitarianism as a mathematical argument. Mathematically, what he wrote is entirely wrong. There is no scenario in which your odds of dying in the Hunger Games are 100%. Either you get chosen, and your odds are (all things being equal on the battlefield) 1/24, or you don’t get chosen at all.
His point seems to be that by playing in the Games you continue to perpetuate the story’s peculiar totalitarian system and so viewing Katniss as a rebel is wrong. She’s not a rebel, she’s a tool of the system. His evidence for this seems to be the very existence of the Hunger Games itself. As HMS Irruncible points out, President Snow could just kill 2 kids from each District and leave it at that, but he doesn’t because that would erode the hope of the residents of the 12 Districts to the point where he couldn’t use it to control them. This is a point that is also made in the books and the second movie. TLP concludes that the only way to truly oppose the Games is not to play. Everything else is collusion. This, to me, ignores three points:
1). Katniss is not a rebel and never pretends to be. She’s just a girl doing what she has to in order to survive and protect her family and those close to her. At the start of the story, she has absolutely no revolutionary ambitions whatsoever. She is, at most, a very reluctant hero.
2). President Snow may well not feel comfortable just killing two kids at random from each District. Killing a kid and his entire family for refusing to participate in a hated but accepted ritual after being picked, however, is quite another matter. The second movie makes it abundantly clear that he’d have no problem doing something like that. He may not have complete control, but he has enough control that refusing to participate simply isn’t an option. In Panem, not playing would only succeed in incurring Snow’s undivided attention, and that does have a 100% fatality rate. Again, Katniss is not supposed to be a revolutionary. All she wants is to survive and go home. She has no motivation to do what TLP seems to expect her to do and refuse to play.
3). It’d be a pretty boring story if Katniss just said “No thanks” and went home.
TLP’s argument is slippery, and hard to pin down because, again, it’s very, very badly expressed. Is he attacking Suzanne Collins for creating a character that isn’t what he considers a true bad-ass? Or is he attacking us for viewing her as a bad-ass even though she’s not in open rebellion against the system? It’s hard to say. For my part, I think the former is flawed because he’s misinterpreting Collins’s intentions. It’s very clear (at least to me) that Katniss isn’t supposed to be a rebel and doesn’t think of herself as one. If he means to make the latter argument, I think he’s arguing on the basis of a flawed assumption. People may think Katniss is a bad-ass, but but if they do it doesn’t necessarily follow that they think she’s effectively opposing the system. They can think that simply because she’s a brave girl trying her best to survive against the odds. There’s more than one kind of bad-ass, after all.
I’m not railing on the guy about race, it is just that when race comes up is when he goes off into his own private mental space and loses me.