Sometimes I look at those Hunger Games confession blogs and I’ve read many times that Katniss settled for Peeta and that she didn’t really love him. Well, I don’t agree with that.
The thing is that most of us are used to be bombarded with those stories that speak of an all-consuming and sudden love, but the love that lasts isn’t necessarily the most intense, but the steadiest. Katniss would have never chosen Peeta unless she really wanted to.
One of the main reasons why this sub-plot in The Hunger Games was so interesting to me is precisely because it wasn’t this story of instant, loud passion that so many times is depicted in other novels (there seems to be a weird pattern in YA fiction).
I’d like to show why I don’t think Katniss settled down by looking a little at each book of the trilogy…
Let’s start with The Hunger Games. Katniss’s connection to Peeta began in the day that he gave her the bread. She couldn’t shake it even if she wanted to. He helped her when no one else did and that made him different. She admitted to herself that she had kept track of him, but the first moment that really had an impact on me was this little quote from the Tribute Parade:
And then he gives me a smile that seems so genuinely sweet with just the right touch of shyness that unexpected warmth rushes through me.
She immediately repproaches herself for reacting that way, but this shows that he had also begun to have some kind of effect on her.
Throughout the games we see her growing care for Peeta. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not, but you can find a few genuine moments where Katniss isn’t pretending at all like when he’s stroking her hair and, “unlike the staged kisses and caresses so far, this gesture seems natural and comforting” to her. Or the thoughts that lead to the first kiss that truly holds any meaning to her and makes her want another, because, like she says, she doesn’t really want him to die, she doesn’t want to lose the boy with the bread.
She allows herself to be vulnerable in those moments (something she’s deeply afraid of). From my point of view she’s starting to feel something, even if she doesn’t realise it, even if it’s way too confusing and undefined. I could mention too how desperate she is when the doctors are trying to save Peeta in the hovercraft.
Catching Fire is crucial in the development of Katniss’s feelings for Peeta. In the beginning of the Victor Tour she says to herself that she really played the love angle in the Games, but she also admitted that “there had been times when [she] didn’t honestly know how [she] felt about him” and that she didn’t know yet.
I like it how Suzanne Collins shows Katniss’s growing admiration for Peeta because of moments like the speech in District 11 (“at this moment, it’s impossible to imagine how I could do any better”) or when he painted Rue in front of the Gamemakers (“looking at Peeta with a new sense of appreciation”).
I can also point out how they help and comfort each other when it comes to fighting off their nightmares. Or the way Katniss pays attention to Peeta’s expression while painting, and becomes “a little fixated” on his long, golden eyelashes. Or their electric embrace in the train after the reaping for the Quarter Quell (“warmth radiates from the spot where his lips just touch my neck, slowly spreading through the rest of me. It feels so good, so impossibly good, that I know I will not be the first to let go”). Or how much she missed him sleeping beside her and how “starved” she had been for human closeness. Or how she completely freaked out in the Quarter Quell when she thought Peeta had died or when Peeta was taken by the Capitol.
In the Quarter Quell, she kisses Peeta right after she says that she needs him, because she’ll be truly “damaged beyond repair” if he dies. She starts feeling a new kind of hunger, one she hadn’t felt before. And when she wakes up the next morning, she has a “brief, delicious feeling of happiness” connected to him.
Well, Mockingjay is truly a wake-up call for Katniss. Tragically, this is when she fully realises the depth of her feelings because she believes she has lost Peeta forever. Classic case of you-don’t-know-what-you-got-til-it’s-gone. Now she can “fully appreciate the real Peeta”. There’s this passage that’s very meaningful in my opinion:
It’s only now that he’s been corrupted that I can fully appreciate the real Peeta. Even more than I would’ve if he’d died. The kindness, the steadiness, the warmth that had an unexpected heat behind it. […] Sometimes when I’m alone, I take the pearl from where it lives in my pocket and try to remember the boy with the bread, the strong arms that warded off nightmares on the train, the kisses in the arena. To make myself put a name to the thing I’ve lost. But what’s the use? It’s gone. He’s gone. Whatever existed between us is gone.
It’s so obvious what’s implied here… Like someone once wrote on Tumblr, she even managed to convince President Snow, that’s why he took Peeta away and did to him whatever it was necessary to break her (like Prim had ominuously predicted).
And what about her reaction to the first time she watches one of his interviews? She’s hypnotised by the images on the screen (on which she rests her hand) and remembers “the battered, bleeding boy who haunts [her] dreams”. Or what about Katniss’s reaction at the prospect of seeing him again after his rescue from the Capitol? She’s “light-headed with giddiness” and begins to wonder about “those last kisses on the beach in the arena”, the ones she had never allowed herself to think about. If she had never allowed herself to think about that, that’s because it was something so meaningful and yet so scary that it was safer to just repress it.
Can I just point out a parallel between their most meaningful kisses in each of the three books? In the first Games Katniss admitted to herself that she didn’t want to lose Peeta; in the Quarter Quell she told him she needed him; and in the Capitol, the place of the unofficial 76th Hunger Games, she kisses him to save him from himself while telling him to not let the Capitol take him away from her.
When Katniss asked Finnick if he had loved Annie right from the beginning, he answered that she had crept up on him. Well, when I first read this, I also made a connection to Katniss and how, little by little, Peeta crept up on her, because, like she once had said, “kind people have a way of working their way inside me and rooting there.” Just because it’s a slow burning kind of story, doesn’t meaning it’s less valid or genuine. In my opinion, it’s even more interesting and rewarding (think about the novel Pride and Prejudice, for example).
Their connection, their love for each other wasn’t born out of pity. Katniss’s love for Peeta didn’t just appear because there was no one else, it already existed. The pieces of puzzle are scattered across the books for the reader to put them together. If anything, it’s remarkable how they grew back together despite all of their traumas, but they did because they had a strong, deep connection. It just took time to bring it back to the surface. Do you still believe that Katniss didn’t love Peeta?
