(It's surprisingly hard to find a picture of these two besides the production shot
of the so-called "sugar-cube scene" from Catching Fire - oh, shippers....)
Maybe
this is my aceness coming through, but when it comes to The Hunger Games, I’m not particularly invested in the so-called
Team Peeta or Team Gale. Mostly, I just wish both guys would realize
Katniss has a lot on her plate trying to stay alive and overthrow oppressive
regimes, and she really doesn’t need them making her feel like a shrew for not
falling into their loving arms. While I
enjoy her fine with either boy, I greatly prefer Katniss’s interactions with
loads of other characters. This one
isn’t necessarily my favorite (it’s hard to beat the warm fuzziness of Katniss
and Cinna,) it’s pretty rich and infinitely readable. Note – I can’t even start to explain these
two without spoiling the central plot of Catching
Fire, but I’ll avoid major details from Mockingjay.
When
they first encounter one another during the lead-up to the Quarter Quell,
Katniss and Finnick both misjudge each other. She thinks he’s a shallow, slutty product of
the Capitol, trading sexual favors to vapid citizens for pretty much anything
he wants. He in turn thinks her
star-crossed-lovers bit with Peeta in the last Games was nothing but a stunt
and doesn’t realize the complexity of her feelings. Their early associations in the Quell are
excellent to read, because they’re thrown into an alliance despite a near-total
lack of trust. Through a good chunk of
their first day in the Arena, Katniss is trying to figure out when and where to
murder him, and Finnick casually holds his trident in an attack stance while
talking to her. There’s electricity in
the air as they circle each other while making a show of playing nice.
Over
the course of the Quell, however, they start to edge toward the oddly profound
comradeship that ultimately grows between them.
With Katniss’s small size and Finnick’s much-talked-of pretty face, they’re
both easy to underestimate in the Arena, but they prove themselves to one another
in strength, intellect, and valor. And
beyond this grudging respect for one another’s abilities, they begin to know each other. Finnick isn’t the promiscuous heartbreaker he
purports to be, and Katniss isn’t the girl who bats her eyelashes at Peeta for
the cameras’ benefit. Finnick starts to come
around sooner than Katniss, of course. She’s
practically allergic to trust, and even as she slowly loosens up, she never
fully lets her guard down; at the first hint of uncertainty, she’s ready to
believe the worst of him.
Both,
though, are put through the ringer, and it’s when each is brought low that they
really come together. In Mockingjay, broken by the events of the
previous book, they’re one another’s unstable shoulder on which to lean. They grope unsteadily through extreme
circumstances at one another’s side, each pushing through the heavy weight of their
own despair and panic to provide what small comfort they can to the other. Some make untrue assumptions about their
relationship, mistaking their closeness for heat, but these people don’t get
it. Because they can’t; in this book,
Katniss and Finnick are victims of the same cruel mind game, and only someone
experiencing the same torture can offer any understanding.
In this
way, through this new, painful kinship, they really and truly become friends
and allies. They muddle through their
shared trauma together, cling to, lose, and regain hope together, fight together,
and strategize together with mutual respect and solidarity. This affinity between them is lovely, and it’s
made so much more interesting by the long journey both of them take to reach
it.
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