New Blog Post

[grav_ity]

Today on the blog I talk about endings, why I love them and why it bothers me when people complain about them.

(Spoilers obviously)

A Note About Endings

Comments

[penknife.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I'd say I hate the ending; I think the ending made me uninterested in being fannish about the books. I don't have a horse in the Peeta/Gale race -- Katniss is written as too young for me to really invest in her romantic choices, and neither of the boys is my type in any way. Finnick is, and while killing him is certainly a perfectly reasonable choice, with Finnick and Cinna both dead, there's nobody left who I particularly want to speculate about in a fannish way.

And then there's Katniss herself, and I understand what Collins is saying about her -- that she's always been a pawn, that she's too damaged to take a leadership role or make any decisions beyond who needs to be killed, and that the best "happy ending" that's possible for her is a quiet life in which nothing actively bad is happening to her.

I'm just really uninterested in that story; I wanted this to be the story of how the (understandably profoundly damaged, and horribly morally compromised) tributes manage to do something important despite their scars, and to salvage what they can out of the wreckage. And the combination of Katniss still being a pawn all the way through the third book and her apparent inability to heal in any meaningful way really turned me off to the entire story.

That doesn't make the books bad! But I don't think I'll be reading Mockingjay again.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

I feel almost exactly the same way. I didn't want to do anything fannish in the after, either. Mostly I just wanted to nap. But when people argue Collins was being inconsistent, I get up in arms. ;)