I more or less agree with everything said in the review, but with a different perspective in that I don't give a damn. I don't care whether or not women are empowered or people are racists or women are objectified. The story I took from The Hunger Games (the book I mean. I don't regard the movie as any sort of work that stands on its own. As far as I am concerned the film is simply a well-executed illustration for the novel) was one of tyranny, oppression and the ways the establishment marginalizes the outsider. I was not looking for a kick-ass girl hero, mostly because Buffy Summers, Egwene al'Vere & Daenerys Targaryen have all but permanently ruined such a concept for me, as the extensive amount of material devoted to each one allowed me to discern the flaws and hypocrisies in their characterizations and positions, and so I tend to disbelieve such a character can truly exist as advertised.

Everything the reviewer had to say about what is done to and for Katniss, and how little she does herself, is, in my reading of tHG, essential to the story I took away from that book. Katniss is the victim of an oppressive institution. She is told this is a contest to determine her fitness and she is competing for the glory of her district, but the truth is, she is made to compete as a punishment of her district, and she is forced to pander to an audience and even mildly prostitute herself to survive. Her own survival skills are negated by those running the games, who arbitrarily change the rules to endanger her or help her as it makes a better show.

Structurally, if written for an adult audience, tHG would have sufficed as a short story, without showing the Games much at all. The Game itself merely made explicit and obvious to a juvenile audience all the implications about the Games. The Games themselves were just playing out the real story of how the people of the districts are oppressed and how their children are taken to illustrate the power of the Capital.

They take the kids because they CAN, and they come up with ways for the people and the families of the children to consciously submit to and ask for their own degradation, such as the rules where a child can earn extra supplies for her family by increasing her odds of being selected for the Games.

The author of the review may be irate about Katniss' lack of choices or actions, but I saw that as the very point of the story - she, like the rest of her class, are totally without power. Katniss, when the story begins, has the main weight of supporting herself, her mother and her sister, and breaks the law to do so, though she also maximizes her income and sustenance through cooperation with the community and partnership with a youth in similar circumstances, and in spite of all the extremes to which she can go, she knows it can be taken from her at any moment by arbitrary enforcement of the laws, or by her being randomly selected for the Games, an outcome which she has made even more likely by trading on increased chances in the drawing in exchange for those extra supplies. And in spite of all the things she does to provide for and protect her sister, despite numerous entries in the pool herself, it is her sister, with a single chance, who gets randomly picked.

Katniss is a worthy heroine simply because of all she did to provide for her family and because of her volunteering herself in her sister's place. The Games are not her proving ground, and the story is not about an ordinary girl coming from nowhere to triumph, it is about how an oppressive and degenerate society takes a young, promising and worthy life and smashes it up just to make the point that they CAN do this as they choose. Katniss does every single thing she can for her family and herself to have a life and a chance to survive, and it is randomly and arbitrarily taken from her for the amusement and aggrandizement of an elite class with nothing better to do. She lays everything, including her life on the line to protect her family, and it is not placing her mortal flesh between them and an enemy that must be fought, it is not working herself to death to provide against scarcity, it is nothing more than being murdered for bloodsport, because those in power say so. She is not volunteering for a chance to kick ass, she is volunteering to die in her sister's place. This is made rather clear in the book from her perspective prior to the Games.

As for the fact of her being made into a showpiece and taught to focus on her appearance, well, that's kind of the point. The contestants are treated as amusements and entertainments for the capital, rather than serious competitors, because the Games are not about the competition or finding a winner, they are about putting on a good show and attaching sentimental value to these sacrifices, in much the same way a character in a war movie will surely die after revealing the loved ones and dependent he has waiting for him back at home - that fact of his backstory is only introduced so the audience will care about his fictive death. The capital of Panem, however, is populated by such a jaded, degenerate group of sybarites, that the fact of real people being killed is not enough, and so they must be presented and made into stories. In order to stay in the good graces of those who run the Games, Katniss must affect a relationship that does not exist, to give the audience the story they want. This is NOT a story about winning a gladiatorial competition because you're the best, it is a story about eating shit to survive an abuser. It's not a sports tale, it's a Holocaust story! Katniss' marginalization is not an act of misogyny on Suzanne Collins' part, it is the point of the story, about a good and worthy person having her life taken away from her arbitrarily and having it returned to her just as arbitrarily after being forced to submit and subject herself to the whims of a monstrous society. Complaining about her lack of choices is like complaining about the lack of heroic Jews kicking ass on the SS guards, and it explains why there are more movies about concentration camps then about the Warsaw ghetto uprising - people are making those movies to illustrate victimhood, just as Collins was in writing tHG.