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[faithful_summer]

Poll: The ending of Mocking Jay sucked. Real or not real? Discuss. How would you have ended it?

Do not read comments if you have not yet read the book and don't want to see spoilers.

Comments

[akiko]

I disagree that it sucked. Let me find and copy a comment I wrote in someone else's journal, because I like that comment I wrote a lot...

Katniss said she didn't want to have a child that would be raised in the same environment she had, with the constant threat of the Games hanging over their heads, because she wouldn't be able to protect them. So when Panem was changed and the Games were abolished, she changed, too.

I think to make the ending more satisfactory inasmuch as drawing a line between the ending and the epilogue there would have needed to be another at least 50 pages, if not 100. Which is beyond the usual YA page count (except Harry Potter).

She kind of pulled an Eowyn, in a way. They're both very damaged, if in somewhat different ways, and they have similar responses: fight, literally, to protect the people/country you love. They both find healing when the fighting's over in similar ways. Eowyn and Faramir recover from their shell shock PTSD the Black Breath together, and they both dedicate the rest of their lives to

[faithful_summer]

I was happy for her to end up with Peeta (though I went back and forth over that pretty much throughout the whole series), but the things that bugged me most were

[akiko]

See, I thought it was a really nice touch that we got to see Katniss suffering from some serious PTSD and taking medication for it. There's such a stigma against medicating for mental illness in this society that having this major character take meds is huge.

What the friend whose post I commented on said in response was interesting: the reader is in a way as much of a voyeur as the people watching the Games, so Peeta and Katniss healing off-screen finally gives the some privacy. Whether that was deliberate on Collins' part, who knows, but it's certainly an interesting reading.

I think with Gale, and the chance that it was his bomb that killed Prim, there was no going back for Katniss there. She can't live with the unresolved question of whether he did it or not, and he wasn't talking.

[cantstopthedawn]

I think it's realistic that she got so broken and stayed that way. She was a warrior. War is like that.