literal spoilers
The rebellion has won by false flag double tap bombing a bunch of children from an airship with the capital insignia on it, including Katniss’s little sister. President Coin is sitting at the round table with the remaining victors. They’re all wearing properly proletarian Chairman Mao jumpsuits (I don’t know if this was in the books, but I didn’t make this up they’re in the movie). She proposes that they host a new Hunger Games using capital children. Says it would satiate the bloodlust of the unwashed masses.
All the PTSD-ridden survivors of actual Hunger Games obviously vote against killing even more children in a system that didn’t make sense in the first place. Beetee asks her what theorist she would cite to justify such a thing because he’s a nerd like that and then asks why they aren’t discussing reeducation programs. Coin looks confused and angry at the same time and talks about how this revolution was practical not theoretical, but Beetee interrupts and explains that theory is there to help us prevent the mistakes of the past, which it’s pretty clear that enacting another Hunger Games would be.
Haymitch pipes in, “wait are we not all Maoists? I bought the suits because Coin already had the grey collar thing buttonup thing going on. I guess I never asked anyone’s tendency.” They go around the table. Peeta’s a demsoc (his grandpa was union and his dad was petit boug). Katniss is an anarchist. Johanna is a (mostly) ironic Posadist. Haymitch is a Maoist. Beetee is a FALGSC pragmatist who’s read everyone’s introductory texts and everyone cuts off his answer because it gets too long. It gets to Coin and she basically tries to copy bits and pieces of everyone else but it turns out she’s just a fascist who’s never read theory and used to work in PR. Her plan was to execute Snow and basically just take over in his position unchanged. Everyone agrees this was really obvious in retrospect but shoot her in the head anyway.
Beetee goes on to design an economic plan in which the entirety of California isn’t doing just fishing
Tag yourself in Beetee (or, at least, want to be).
Genuinely pretty cool. Thanks comrade.
I appreciate it. I think Beetee's the character who's most plausibly a comrade in the original. So him being a theory nerd checks out.
Maybe some of my issues with the series come from having only watched the movies, but as I understand it, the vagueness of people's motivations is the point in the books. It's all first person perspective of Katniss and she doesn't know who to trust, but knows no one's being straight with her. But in the movies it's frustrating.
More ending spoilers
Coin is enough of an opportunist that her right hand man and one of her highest ranking soldiers recognize her as such and are secretly rooting for Katniss to kill her. We, as an audience, know that Katniss killing her is supposed to be good and Plutarch's praise of the action is supposed to read as "Plutarch was good all along". But Plutarch has consistently been a double agent playing Snow, Coin, and Katniss all at once. There's absolutely no guarantee that he wants anything other than power. And this revolution? What exactly is its unifying principle? People don't organize that heavily just because "these rulers are bad". It was more than a revolt. It was organized. So what were their goals beyond gaining power? That part is kind of left up to the reader and in the end is seemingly just liberal democracy, which is just disappointing.
Also, Gale and Peeta are so uninterested in competing with each other over Katniss that they can sit down and have a conversation about their mutual admiration for her and acknowledge the value that the other provides in her life. Like, just be poly holy shit