Sunday, March 16, 2014

The Hunger Games Synopsis Chapter 5

Hey people! Welcome back to more Hunger Games summaries. Today we're going to discuss about chapter 5, in which Katniss and Peeta are made ready by different specialized people in their district to look attractive in front of the huge crowd at the Games. This chapter mainly focuses on the looks of the tributes of District 12, what they should be wearing, etc, etc (basically it's like a model show, but this time in a book). I'm not ready to leak all the details of the chapter at such an early point of the book, so why not just go into the summary right now?

The first thing you see in this chapter (come to think of it, "read", not "see") is Katniss being smothered with overdosed Capitol beauty treatments (tearing out all the leg hair, adding a type of gritty foam that washes away at least three layers of its user's skin, and other unspeakable treatments I don't have the honor of discussing in this post), which eventually makes her look like a model after her plastic surgery (to be honest, I wasn't not sure of that statement; first because I've never actually seen an awful lot of celebrities who got plastic surgery (at least I didn't KNOW they did) and two, there's no visualization in the movie, not that I remember any).

Then Katniss met with her stylist (yes, her stylist. those people who executed "unspeakable treatments" on her were merely a group of servants (like the maids who don on clothes for their master's kids, more like) who were just purifying Katniss of her "in-humanness" (if "purifying" and "in-humanness" are the right words). This one was the actual fashion designer, with a sense for top-model stuff). His name was Cinna (not to be confused with the WWE wrestler). Before he started doing some fashion designing on the tribute, the stylist decided to ask a few questions to Katniss, a few about her fashion sense and another few about her being a newbie in the games. Afterwards they went straight to the fashion stuff.

A small portion of the first few paragraphs of this part of the chapter (forgive me for all the "of's") is what is in Katniss's head when she's thinking about replicating Capitol food. You realize the difficulty of creating such rich food with so little ingredients in your district. Anyway, that's not important. What IS important is that in THIS part of the story, Cinna discusses with Katniss about what outfit would fit best with the district's principal industry (District 11: Agriculture. District 4: Fishing. You know, that kind of stuff?). As luck would have it, District 12's main industry was (ta-da!) coal mining. For this part, I don't even have to tell you what the tributes have to put up with for outfits.

Fortunately, the stylists had an idea. Coal= fire. Fire= BADASS. So in the end, they actually came up with the most dazzling outfits: A dress (for Katniss) and a suit (for Peeta) set ablaze with a "synthetic flame" (that's "fake fire" to you), which is the perfect crowd winner. To prove this, the other districts threw District 12 (or at least their tributes) dirty looks of jealousy. For the first time in years (come to think of it, DECADES), District 12 came up with over-the-top outfits for the Hunger Games.

From this chapter, we discover that Katniss is a bit shy when it comes to her district's (mainly their dresses) impression in the Hunger Games. She was afraid that they were going to pair her body with some baggy coal miner's suit (or an even worse, even more inappropriate outfit that I dare not speak of in the formality of blog language), but as we have discovered in the chapter, did not turn out to be such a big problem after all. Not much else is told about the other characters, since this is just the "fashion" phase of the book.

If you ask me, it was actually quite a good call for the stylists to come up with those flaming robes. I mean, you could very well imagine what would have happened if Katniss and Peeta were instructed to wear some baggy coal miner attire. Now that would be a total disaster. For me, that's the moral of the chapter: Unless you change something, that "something" will stay the way it is for eternity until someone does something about it. In this case, District 12 (or at least its tributes and stylists) decided to change their uniform, boring attire into kick-ass, flaming clothes. Change is good!

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