(Spoilers)
I cried.
It took me a while to find myself back in Panem; to understand the threads of plot and the shapes of life there once more, but once I did, I cried. Oh how I cried.
But even as I lost myself in this, I thought about love and how at the heart of this film, this series, there is a core of harsh, bruised love.
I thought about the honesty of this complex, hard, exhausted relationship (this fought for thing) between Katniss and Peeta, and I thought about the truth of their love.
Love and truth and pain and hurt and wholeness, wholeness, the finding and the losing and the finding once more.
This isn’t a review of the film, but rather a review of Katniss. If such a thing is not impossible, improbably. To review a character? Yes. Perhaps. Rather, this should be a review of what she means. What she is.
Katniss is is truth.
She is angry, sad, pained, brave, foolish, stupid, naive, brilliant, inspiring, wonderful. She’s a thousand other adjectives all at once.
(And with Jennifer Lawrence playing her, she is eyes and stillness and the fragility of self).
I love stories. I love that these stories exist. I love that they exist with such complex, such wonderful, such challenging, characters as these. I love that she isn’t happy, that she doesn’t compromise, how she isn’t – fake.
How’s she’s truth, she’s truth, all along.
Here’s to those characters who let the truth be who they are.
(And here’s to the writers, the readers, and the people who let them fly. Here’s to us. We’re doing okay at this.)
Daisy May Johnson 