What I think is most different and most striking about Sunrise on the Reaping is how CYNICAL it is. To some extent we knew it was going to be. This is a midquel. That the reapings go on and the Hunger Games only ends 25 years later is a forgeon conclusion. We know nothing that happens here is going to work.
The book is about implicit submission, and why, with numbers on their side, the many submit to the few, even when the few are unjust. And it's because, the book seems to say, numbers aren't ENOUGH. the Newcomers alliance is much bigger than the Careers. They should be able to team up and defeat them easily. But they don't. Eighteen of them are killed outright, because the Careers have the strength, the skill and the training. And that's just that.
Plutarch asks why the tributes don't overwhelm the Peacekeepers during training, and Haymitch is rightfully outraged at the privilege of this question. Why don't they? Because they probably couldn't kill them all, and even if they could, what good would it do? It wouldn't stop the Hunger Games. It wouldn't change a thing. No one would even know about it outside that room, because the Capitol would change the narrative. Just like Katniss and the Star Squad can't REALLY take on the Capitol single handed and assassinate the president, the scrappy alliance of kids can't really do any real damage to the system the Capitol has in place. All they can do is choose if they want to die now or later. So why don't they, if there's no difference to them, as Plutarch asks. Because, as Snow puts it. Hope. The slight chance that one of them will come out of it. And, more cynically, the hope that if they are good tributes and obey, their families will be left alone. If they choose to rebel and choose to die now they guarantee retaliation against their families and perhaps their entire district. We see that even in the tributes that attack the Gamemakers in the arena. They rise up, they break that bond of implicit submission--and they die bloody for it.
Why don't they rebel? Because they don't have the privilege to lose.
Even Lenore Dove, the Joan of Arc of Twelve, fails to do any real damage or have any real effect. All she does is get herself a reputation for being a trouble maker, and eventually get herself killed. Was she killed as part of the retaliation against Haymitch, or was her punishment because she's a rebel, and that's what happens to rebels? (and Snow hates covey girls.) but she fails because she IS alone. She focuses on small, symbolic acts that do nothing, but that she hopes will rally the people to action.Unfortunately, the people of Twelve don't want their lives to get any worse, and they don't have the privilege of spending time and energy on revolution the way a teenager girl whose family doesn't need her income to survive does--sadly, Twelve will remain this way, in an uncanny valley where they're beaten down enough to need change, but not enough to have NOTHING to lose. They are not one of the districts that rise up. So acting alone does nothing, teaming up does nothing. How does one fight an enemy with better technology, better weapons, and better organization? Beetee's plan doesn't work out. Of course it doesn't. Could it ever? Was it just borne out of grief for his son? And even if it had, then what? What was the plan? Haymitch's poster gets edited away. The Newcomers fail. Lenore Dove dies. The most you can say is Haymitch himself becomes too important to kill, like Beetee, and Snow let him live to fight another day, but so destroyed that he no longer WANTS to.
The answer is, quite cynically, Plutarch's version of the world. Numbers mean something, there are more of US than there are of THEM , but that isn't enough. You need weapons, you can't bring a knife to a gun fight, you need EVERYONE on your side. You need organization, not just a series of disconnected rebellions, and you need an Army, provided by Thirteen, as problematic as they are. The timing just needs to be right. And most crucially, what I think Plutarch and everyone involved here learned is that victory belongs to those who control the narrative. Those who control the flow of information and tell their story. And it's not Plutarch, for all his cameras and his propos and his idea behind The Mockingjay, who eventually does that well.
Who learned to tell a story and sell a narrative with himself and the Newcomers. Who tried to paint his poster in the arena only to see it rewritten in front of him. Who won't make that mistake again. When it's time for the deciding factor in the revolution, it's Haymitch who creates the Mockingjay-- and is he also using Katniss and her image? Yes. but he at least sees Katniss and the human she is inside it, unlike Plutarch who hasn't changed much from the man who makes a grieving family do reshoots over and over so he can get his footage, while congratulating himself for letting Haymitch have his goodbye.
When Katniss sets off the spark twenty five years later, the world is ready. The work is in place. Plutarch, Haymitch, Beetee, everyone can say GO , and this time it'll work. So buckle in, and wait for the Long Game, even though only Plutarch really has the privilege to wait, the rest of them don't have a choice. It's cynical. It's awful. People die. The lone rebels and the plucky girls and the alliance depending on its numbers all fail. Plutarch motherfucking Heavensbee, the richest of the rich the privilegedest of the privileged, pulls off the revolution, takes the credit, and lives to see the end of it, without ever once examining his own privilege, and unpacking the fact that despite his head being on the right side of history, he's never managed to see the Districts as PEOPLE . (and you could argue, ANYONE as people. ) But it's just the only way.
But this book isn't the middle of the series. It's the end. How awful would it be to read if we didn't know that Katniss and the Mockingjay rebellion would eventually succeed. We know that despite the cynism of a failed revolution and all its players, that one day it WILL work out. This book is called sunrise on the Reaping....the sun rises on a world where this is inevitable. But one day it won't be.
