Catching Fire

[shipperx]

Finished Book II of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire. Now I'm shocked that these books were marketed as young adult (I would give it a teen rating)  and I simply have no idea how they're going to make a PG  movie out of this (movies always seem more graphic than books for me).  It's brutal. I suppose the lack of sex is how they explain it, because I think it being a YA series is the only thing that keeps sex out of it.  On a character level, with death this omnipresent,  I can't help but think that someone would be jumping someone else's bones.

Katniss in hunter mode reminds me of a young Aeryn Sun.  They both have that cold, steely competence, but where the 'love triangle' is concerned she reminds me one freaking hell of a lot of Buffy Summers.   She's constantly breaking Peeta's heart in the most casual of ways, never realizing that she's doing it until it's become painfully obvious to everyone else,  and, like Buffy, is utterly clueless in making sense of her own emotions.  She sublimated them so deeply, buried under so much emotional damage that she's suffered that she can't make heads or tails of what she feels.  Unlike Buffy, she's not even afforded opportunities to try.  

This gladitorial Battle Royale-thing is beyond barbaric, making this one seriously dark universe for these books.

It's kind of crazy, though, how appealing I find Peeta to be  (Jeez, the character is what? 18 tops?).  Let's hear it for the beta heroes!  He wears his heart on his sleeve.  He has all the access to his emotions that Katniss doesn't have (which I guess is why I find it so painful whenever she breaks his heart).  I love that he isn't threatened by her strength, and I love the way that he loves her even when it cuts him to do so.

And boy it's easy to identify with Katniss's furnace of hatred for The Capitol. They're sadistic. .  President Snow needs a visciously brutal death.  The man may as well preside over the fascist empire as bad as 1984's... only with the added horror of reality television.   

I'll probably get into a more in depth discussion of it all when I've read Mockingjay... which will no doubt be this weekend.   Suzanne Collins did write a page turner.

Comments

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

It's funny that you mention Aeryn, because I've always pictured Katniss as a very aged-down Claudia Black :D (Unfortunately that won't be an option for the film!) Isn't Peeta lovely? I fell in love with him in the first book when he told Katniss that he knew he was going to die, but he wanted to die as himself, not as some kind of monster created by the Capitol. Awwww! (Maybe he's a young John Crichton?)

I do think it's basically just the "no swearing/ no sexytimes" that make these "young" adult! I can't wait to hear what you think of Mockingjay.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Physicall and self-possession-wise she does seem very Aeryn-like. That's sort of the niche she occupies in my head. And for some reason (I don't even watch the show!) Finnick is the guy who plays The Green Arrow on Smallville (It must have been something in the physical description because, like I said, I don't even watch Smallville). And EW saying they'd cast Robert Downey Jr. has Haymitch has somehow landed him as the Haymitch image in my head.

And I do thik the YA basically boils down to no sexytimes and no swearing because certainly thematically and emotionally (as in the emotional toll involved) it's quite adult.