I can't be the only one who saw Hunger Games and realized (Spoliers)

Cafe Society
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Watched Catching Fire again. This time it was more clear that the brother/sister duo each won one game and they won them back to back.

Well, one would think there were plenty of people alive (especially in the Capitol) that knew about quarter quells, so if he made that up out of whole cloth it would have been weird. But the whole “pick the tributes from past survivors” thing was not a standard rule, at least not in the movie (I haven’t read the book). Quarterquells are special, so the President announces that this Quarterquell will be celebrated by the special games. Past Quarterquells could have been celebrated in different ways, like with banners and parades and whatnot. Or double tributes (4 from each district). Or really anything.

The beauty of it is, this wasn’t the President’s idea - it was the gamemaster’s. It was apparently the strategy to create a situation where they could smuggle her out.

Yes, this is explicit in the movie. The Quarterquell reap the past Tributes idea is brought to the President’s attention when Katniss blocks the Peacekeeper to save her boyfriend. That exchange has not only Katniss, but Peeta and Haymitch stepping in front of the Peacekeeper to talk him down. Well, that is what makes President Snow say the line about needing to kill off their whole species. Basically, Katniss is making a scene and all that, and the people have already been stirred up by her (whether she did it deliberately or not), but now other Tributes are taking their status too far.

It’s also explicitly stated when the Gamemaster converses with Snow, saying that they don’t have to kill her, but kill the idea, then the people will want her dead. Basically, he manipulates Snow all through their exchanges, feeding him what he wants to hear by highlighting it in a way that fits Snow’s agenda.

Killing her off would just stir up more rebellion, making her a martyr. They have to do it in a way to try to rob the rebellion of its symbol. So play up the wedding and how Peeta and Katniss are dolling it up and living large like everyone in the capitol while the executions and whippings and all escalate in the districts. The premise to Snow is that it will cast her as uncaring about the situation, as distant as the rest of the capitol population. But it is a counterplay, because all that escalating of punishments is precisely having the effect of stirring more unrest and feeding the rebellion.

Snow even observed that, it took the gamemaster casting the effect of the protrayal of Katniss to let him think some unrest stirring was acceptable if the outcome was focusing the rage at Katniss and then seeing her betray their rebellion ideas.

What doesn’t make much sense to me was the overall plan, the need to get Katniss back into the arena in order to rescue her. Why couldn’t they just smuggle her out of District 12 back when she was talking of running away? That seemed a very convoluted approach to rescuing her to start the rebellion. Although there were some very nice moves in prepping for the game that played her visibility.

I loved the big F U of the dress. So of course Snow gives Cinna his own F U response with the peacekeepers in the ship as Katniss is about to enter the game.

From a writer’s standpoint, it wouldn’t be very good to have all the Tributes in on the revolt, because that would remove the tension of the conflict in the game. There have to be bad Tributes killing people. So they only got about half the Tributes in on the revolt. But from in story, that sort of makes sense. You are planning a giant revolt, you are going to smuggle out Katniss as the symbol for the people to launch a rebellion. You have to be very careful who you let in on the plot. Who can you trust? Who will join and not turn you over as a “loyal citizen”? So that’s why only specific Tributes are in on the rescue. They’re the ones Haymitch knew could be trusted, the ones who were as fed up with the system as everybody else.

As for not telling Katniss and Peeta, there’s a lot of concern over how closely they, in particular, are being watched specifically for signs of rebellion. Plus, once they’re in the game, every word and every breath were being monitored, so it’s not like they could tell them then. That’s why they needed the plot about using the wire to electrocute the other tributes. Not because that was the real plan, the real plan all along was to short the forcefield. But he needed a plausible story to tell the gang out loud where Snow and everybody else was listening. So make it about the game, but hide the true agenda.

That’s also why they had to keep Peeta and Katniss apart at that stage - specifically to keep them from running off and to keep tabs on them for the rescue.

So what about the risk Katniss and Peeta would kill some of the ones who were in on it? Haymitch tried to set it up by getting Katniss to agree to partnerships, but that didn’t work, so he back-doored one he felt she would accept (because of the old lady), and relied on them both basically being good people who didn’t want to kill, so wouldn’t kill unless forced. And dropping the totem on the guy as a sign helped.

There was still plenty of risk to Katniss in the arena that couldn’t be controlled. Like one of the other Tributes getting the drop on her at the beginning, or the fog getting her, the force screen nearly took out Peeta, those baboons were ferocious. There was a lot of luck in getting through the game, even with the other Tributes sacrificing for her.

Which is why the plan was so ridiculous. Why was it necessary to do it that way?

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This is explained in more detail in the books, but the Quarter Quells always have some special twist that’s supposed to make the game more challenging. The two previous Quarter Quells both involved changes in the way the tributes were selected; in the first the districts had to elect their own tributes, and in the second there were in fact four tributes from each district.

It’s said that the original founders of the Hunger Games game up with a long list of Quarter Quell ideas and that one is selected at random every 25 years, but it seems unlikely that this is really true.

This is the case in the movie, but IIRC the book does not reveal who came up with the idea. The books are entirely from Katniss’s perspective, so President Snow, the two Gamemasters, and the guy who hosts the Hunger Games on TV are a lot less prominent in the books than in the movies. In the movies they mostly serve to give the audience information covered by Katniss’s interior monologue in the books, but I don’t believe Katniss ever learns who came up with the idea for this Quarter Quell.

Again, in the book I don’t think it’s revealed who came up with the idea for this Quarter Quell. So for all the reader knows it could have been President Snow’s idea that the rebels managed to turn to their advantage. But either way, smuggling Katniss out of District 12 would have been tricky to arrange since Katniss was not in communication with the rebels and didn’t even know that an organized resistance movement existed. I don’t remember the third book (which I didn’t really care for) that well, but the rebels presumably would not have known that Katniss was thinking of running away or even whether she’d be willing to leave District 12 without Peeta.

Rescuing Katniss was also not the primary goal of the rebellion. The Quarter Quell was an opportunity to get not only Katniss but several other past victors at once, AND to do so in a very public manner that would undermine the authority of the Capitol.

Beyond that, the series is called The Hunger Games. It would be strange to abandon the basic premise after the first installment.

More is made of this in the books, but Katniss is also a lousy actress. Haymitch deliberately keeps information from her in both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire because she can’t be trusted to convincingly play innocent.

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This last bit seems important. Smuggle her out, and Snow can claim she was killed, or that she murdered someone and fled, or something. Instead they made a giant big old deal out of her, turned her into an even greater symbol, and then while everyone was watching the Games thwarted the games. They showed that Panem was fallible, on live TV, during the event most calculated to show the power of Panem.

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So I’m as smart as the author. Yea!

Well, yes, from a writer’s standpoint, that certainly is a given. I was just looking for an in-story explanation for such a risky method of “rescuing” the hero.

That makes more sense. It’s a giantly public act of F U to the President and the power of Panem. It twists the games by having the Tributes work together instead of turning on each other, and then defying the Game and breaking out. Bonus points for rescuing several past Tributes, but not full credit because plenty of them die along the way.

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Keep in mind that the rebels only had a short time to plan the whole thing, which only began after the Quarter Quell guidelines were announced. While the arena itself had been planned for several years, no one except Snow knew that Katniss would be going back into the arena. That’s slightly different in the movie, but in either case Heavensbee only had a few short months to do what he could to help break the rebel-friendly tributes out. He couldn’t really help or protect them all that much while they were in the arena without seeming suspicious. He did make sure the wire was in the cornucopia for Beetee. The whole rescue was a huge risk, but had to be done because Katniss was hell-bent on dying to protect Peeta. The tributes in on the plan (the rebel-friendly tributes all knew something to a varying degree but only a few, Beetee, Finnick, Johanna and maybe Wiress, knew everything) had to protect Peeta too, die if necessary, to save Katniss. Which confused the hell out of her.

[QUOTE=Lamia]
the rebels presumably would not have known that Katniss was thinking of running away or even whether she’d be willing to leave District 12 without Peeta.
[/QUOTE]
They would have known that she was thinking of running away and trying to get Peeta (and his family and her family and Gale and his family!) to go too, because she told Haymitch, because she wanted Haymitch to go too, and Haymitch was in the rebel network, big time.

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Other than it makes a much more exciting movie? Do we really need a reason?

I did not get the impression from the movie that it was Plutarch’s plan to put Katniss back in the arena, but I may have missed that.

If we must analyze every motivation in the movie (and, yes, let’s, it’s fun), then I would point out that the Rebellion could probably do very well with Katniss’s death in the second games. Martyrs are very effective marketing tools.

So, the possible outcomes would be a poor little girl who managed to survive the second games, by uniting the districts symbolically by uniting (most of) their Tributes, OR a martyred little girl. Either could work for them.

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One weird thing I’ve noticed; is that the novel series Hunger Games and Divergent both go through pains to describe a physically plain, almost unapplealing protagonist. I get that an “ugly” actress won’t work in today’s Hollywood, but the authors state over and over how their looks contribute to the alienation Katniss and Tris feel, and I think, contribute as a part of their armor. While kudos to the authors for creating characters who weren’t classically beautiful, I almost see some sexism in that stance too.

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I’m pretty sure that after Cinna does his magic, Katniss is described as being incredibly beautiful.