Two Days Before Mockingjay!

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Three Days Until Mockingjay! The First Family is even reading The Hunger Games; perhaps we’ll have Obama sightings at the New York City or Philadelphia Main Line ‘Midnight Madness’ release parties next week. Sunday I’ll ask where you’ll be that night, how you are getting your copy, and what plans you have for reading it; I’ll share then the Hogwarts Professor plans for next week’s discussions and the site’s spoiler policies. Monday will be our last chance as a group to share our speculative genius on the record — and I hope you’ll all write out your top 10 guesses for everyone to see. No fair saying “I knew that would happen!” on Tuesday if you didn’t dare put it in print on Monday.

Today, though, I want to share some thoughts about Cinna, the stylist behind Katniss’ Mockingjay line of formal wear: we’ll review his appearances, then discuss Cinna’s alchemical function as well as his role as the story’s ‘portrait of the artist’ or ’embedded author.’ [Read more…]

Four days to Mockingjay! We’re in double digits on the ‘hours left count,’ folks — and we’re already getting audio leaks and spoilers. Please do not post anything in the comment boxes here if you have read or listened to part of the story today.

Yesterday I wrote about the “sure things” that pretty much have to happen in Mockingjay because they’re Hunger Games story formulas — three parts, 27 chapters, etc. — or story arcs for principal characters. The operating principle  for this mechanical kind of speculation is that the trends and story items we see in the first two books are the best indicators of what will happen in the series finale. Authors rarely leave the rails as they pull into the station; the direction the rails have been pointing through the opening novels was set with the finish in mind.

Having established that as our compass, it’s hard to side-step the conclusion that Peeta is a goner. The story arc for his character as well as his ‘deaths’ in Games and Fire all point to his sacrificial demise in Mockingjay. [Read more…]

From Sharon Jackson in Australia, an allegorical point that deserves our full attention:

Re Point (2) in Suzanne Collins: Writing “War Stories”?, where John said, “It’s an interesting question because the evil regime she has set up in the Capitol is a picture of the US as the world sees us…”

Living in part of the rest of the world, I can easily see this in the book. That was indeed how I read it the first time, which admittedly was a long time ago (when Meyer first recommended CF on her site). And given that the US is the nation with a “Capitol Hill”, (since the rest of the English-speaking countries spell ours with an a) I think the connection is blatantly obvious for this reading of one allegorical interpretation of the story. [Read more…]

Five Days to Mockingjay!

In the run-up to the release of Deathly Hallows, HogwartsProfessor featured seven days of predictions about the Harry Potter series finale. That was a lot of fun, if, of course, most of the predictions didn’t play out. One kind of prediction, though, all came in as winners: the ones that said only that we’d see the story formulas that worked in the first six books of the Hogwarts Saga in the seventh installment. Sure enough, in Hallows we got the hero’s journey, the narrative misdirection, the alchemy, the Christian symbolism, everything that made the previous books what they were.

So in the few days left to us before Mockingjay is published and all the speculation about ‘what happens’ is even more obviously comic and pointless, let me spell out from Ms. Collins’ Hunger Games formulas what pretty much has to happen unless she leaves the rails entirely. [Read more…]