#also i totally cried when Prim was reaped

[bethanydelleman]

Now I'm reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Katniss being like, "Ah, Peeta crying as he leaves the only home he's ever known for near certain death *must* be a strategy. Though I can't be sure which strategy..."

It's so darkly funny that she doesn't even stop to consider for a single second he might just be like, sad.

[porchwood]

ToastedTHG: Does Katniss (protectively) infantilize Prim?

[I may revisit this post later in light of CF and MJ, but it’s ridiculously long already and I really want to stick with THG for the moment.]

I don’t mean this as harshly as it sounds, simply that, to my way of thinking, Katniss depicts - and likely perceives - Prim, especially early on in THG, as a much younger child. I find with older siblings (my own sister and friends that have little sisters), the younger sibling sometimes gets “stuck” in their head at a certain age/stage, and it stands to reason that Prim would be locked in Katniss’s mind by the trauma of Mr. Everdeen’s death, Mrs. Everdeen’s neglect, and the girls’ near-death by starvation as seven-year-old “sweet tiny Prim, who cried when I cried before she even knew the reason.”

When I first started reading THG fic, it bothered me that Prim always came across as so much younger than she’s supposed to be (though I found myself doing the same with her character when I first started writing THG fic). She always seemed to be about eight years old, whether Katniss was twelve or eighteen. And then I went back to THG and really looked at how Katniss presents her:

She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. 

My little sister, Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother’s body, their cheeks pressed together. 

The community home would crush her like a bug. 

Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. [...] Prim might begin to repeat my words and then where would we be?

I reach out to Prim and she climbs on my lap, her arms around my neck, head on my shoulder, just like she did when she was a toddler. 

“She’s just twelve.” (not that age twelve isn’t still childhood, but this reads to me like “She’s just seven years old...”)

The woods terrified her... 

...Prim, who’s scared of her own shadow... 

In this way [Rue’s] exactly the opposite of Prim, for whom adventures are an ordeal. 

I’m not suggesting that any of this is negative or untrue, and as I’ll explain in just a moment, as the story goes on, Katniss paints quite a different picture of her sister between the lines. But as I revisited each of these passages (not to mention the “little duck” references on reaping day), I couldn’t help feeling that Katniss is still seeing and describing a sweet, frail, starving seven-year-old. And it’s not hard to see why.

I protect Prim in every way I can, but I’m powerless against the reaping. The anguish I always feel when she’s in pain wells up in my chest and threatens to register on my face. 

Katniss is an exemplary protective older sister - the only thing she wanted in all of this is to protect Prim :_( - and I would never find fault with her depicting Prim as a tiny frightened thing who needs shielding from the world at all times. But there’s a whole lot more to Prim that her sister eventually lets slip out (intentionally or otherwise):

Sweet tiny Prim...who brushed and plaited my mother’s hair before we left for school, who still polished my father’s shaving mirror each night because he’d hated the layer of coal dust that settles on everything in the Seam. (This is that same tiny vulnerable seven-year-old taking care of her adult mother and tending to her dead father’s memory - every single day, even while she’s starving to death! I can’t think of anything I did that consistently at age seven, let alone taking care of another person!)

On the table, under a wooden bowl to protect it from hungry rats and cats alike, sits a perfect little goat cheese wrapped in basil leaves. Prim’s gift to me on reaping day. (As @ghtlovesthg pointed out - this means Prim must have been up before Katniss!)

“I’ll be all right, Katniss,” says Prim, clasping my face in her hands. “But you have to take care, too. You’re so fast and brave. Maybe you can win.” (Prim reassuring Katniss at the Justice Building! I’d forgotten about that one!)

...When she sells her goat cheeses at the Hob... (Prim is a businesswoman, not just a sometime-trader! Discussed a smidge more in this post.)

Prim milking her goat before school. (Again, uniquely responsible in a child, because this is an every-single-day responsibility, not something you can skip if you sleep in or rush if you’re running late. At least, not if I understand milking correctly.)

What’s funny was, Prim, who’s scared of her own shadow, stayed and helped. (With that miner’s awful leg wound)

That’s another thing about my mother and Prim. Nakedness has no effect on them, gives them no cause for embarrassment. Ironically, at this point in the Games, my little sister would be of far more use to Peeta than I am. (I’m almost 40 and I’m still squeamish about male nudity! It’s part of why I love Katniss so much! And I love Katniss’s admission of sweet, tiny, vulnerable Prim being useful to a mortally wounded Peeta.)

Something that’s only faintly nodded to (and that in CF) is that Prim has been dealing firsthand with pregnancy/labor/delivery, probably alongside her mother - I’d hazard she’s something of an apothecary apprentice at this point - but certainly with Lady, her goat. Lady was a gift for Prim’s 10th birthday (just over two years before THG begins), which means she’s been tended by Prim through at least two pregnancies, as well as the mauled shoulder. I belabored this a bit in WtM, but this also means that Prim had a small side business in goat kids, either trading them back to the Goat Man for the stud service that keeps Lady in milk, selling male kids to Rooba for meat (which would probably break Prim’s tender heart a bit), and/or selling females for a tidy sum as future dairy goats.  

What’s more, if Prim hasn’t gone through menarche herself by the start of THG, she’s surely intimately aware of it (between close living quarters, limited “sanitary supplies,” and her mother’s patients). This is something else I’ve touched on (and will belabor in the near future) in the Mooniverse, but I think menstruation was both a hopeful and a terrifying thing to the women of Twelve. (On the one hand, they would certainly experience irregular/absent periods, delayed menarche, etc due to malnutrition, so the appearance of a steady cycle would mean joy for those who dearly wanted to get pregnant, but there would also be something of Katniss’s “terror as old as life itself” at the prospect of those children who might result.) We never get a chance to see this, sadly, but I’ll bet Prim had a crush (on Peeta’s oldest brother, who was crazy about her in turn). Did she share Katniss’s fear about bringing children into the cruel world she lived in, or was she looking forward to being a mother one day? 

To wrap this up, for a little perspective, let’s take a quick peek at another example of a twelve-year-old female character. Say, an intelligent one with an ugly yellow cat...

(yes, I know Crookshanks comes along a smidge later, but I’m not crazy about movie!Hermione and this gif was too perfect!)

At the beginning of THG, give or take a few months, Prim is the same age as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. 

Please tell me this gives someone else a wee start (and I don’t mean the gif of Captain Kirk)!

Now, I’m not trying to equate these characters by any means, though there are similarities between the two (and I’ve been wondering for days now: if Prim was Hermione, Rory Hawthorne would be Ron, for so many reasons, but who would be Harry??)...The Grangers are dentists, Mrs. Everdeen is a skilled apothecary; both girls have a heritage looked down upon by some of their peers (though it’s interesting that, at least from Katniss’s perspective, Prim is universally adored rather than scorned as a “Seam brat” - and she’s got to look the tiniest bit Seam in some way!). I would hazard that Prim knows the plant book cover-to-cover at this point - and heck, Katniss even describes Prim (and their mother) as “work[ing] magic” in their healing! :)

I freely admit that Hermione had loads of advantages Prim could only dream of (relative affluence in the Muggle world, 20th-21st century conveniences, access to superior education from the get-go, not to mention real magic), but one would expect - and I think, will find - a similar emotional maturity in Prim at that age, if not more weighted to Prim's side, since she's living in a brutal post-apocalyptic dystopia where she lost her father (in terrible circumstances) at a very young age and works alongside her mother to tend sick/wounded/dying coal miners - surely a harrowing experience for even a seasoned healer.

Anyway, I found it interesting to compare the two, however briefly, and consider just how competent Prim totally is may be behind the scenes. I mean, she should have a Time-Turner by CF, at the very least. :)