by V. Arrow
The evidence for Seneca Crane planning the Second Rebellion lies mostly in the revolutionary outcome of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games. The level of clout he had in the Capitol and his role in the creation of the Games’ obstacles themselves would have allowed him access to the arenas and the ability to engineer the outcome of the Games to the rebels’ best advantage. The rule change at the end of the Seventy-fourth Games, rebellious enough on its own that it directly led to Crane’s assassination by Snow, suggests that it may not have been as innocent, as much for entertainment reasons, as it otherwise might seem. The film version of The Hunger Games suggests Crane was put to death solely for allowing the Capitol to be susceptible to manipulation—and by a teenage girl, no less—and therefore fallible. Although this does not necessarily imply rebellious intention, it does not refute the idea, either; the choice of nightlock berries, Katniss’ tool of rebellion, as the method of execution might even suggest such rebellious intent. And there is no clear indication either way in the books, where Crane’s death is unseen. We know he was killed for what happened during the Seventy-fourth Games, and nothing more.
However, Plutarch Heavensbee was also a Gamemaker or part of the gamemaking team under Crane during the Seventy-fourth Games (he references being in the judging room when Katniss shot an arrow into the apple in the feast pig’s mouth), in addition to becoming Head Gamemaker for the Seventy-fifth (a role, it’s implied, that was not in much demand after Crane’s death), and the evidence for his part in engineering the Second Rebellion is much stronger.
Certainly, by the Capitol party that kicked off Katniss and Peeta’s Victory Tour in Catching Fire, there is a true “revolutionary cell” that has been formed right under Snow’s nose, and it is clear that Plutarch holds a position of power within it. At this party, he shows Katniss the mockingjay image on his pocketwatch: a clue, Katniss finds out later, to the design of the Quell arena, as well as a covert symbol that he is on the rebels’ side. The rebels in the arena suffered, but ideal tools for all of the pieces to their plan—from Beetee’s cylinder of wire for the Quell plot’s electrified target (and the lightning storm portion of the arena itself to power it) to Finnick’s personal trident—did make their way into the Cornucopias.
In Mockingjay, his involvement in ending the Hunger Games from within the system is even more evident. He is one of the leaders of the base in District 13 and is tapped for a high position in the government of New Panem. The fact that he brought with him to District 13 some of his original team from the Capitol—Cressida, Castor, and Pollux—further serves to illustrate the depth of his involvement in the rebellion as a whole.
Mags
There’s another kind of access that would be of use to a potential architect of the rebellion: privileged information about the world, or at least Panem, before the current sociopolitical regime. The complete isolation of Panem from both a “rest of the world” (if there is such a thing in Panem’s time) and historical record (beyond general geography, such as Katniss’ reference to District 12 being located in “Appalachia”THG41) lends itself to the almost illogical organization of Panem as a nation under the Games system and Snow: economists would argue Panem would be a nation on the brink of collapse even without revolutionary leanings. The Capitol simply does not know how to beget loyalty in Panem’s citizens, or how to most successfully organize the country’s communications, transport, or production—which is part of why the first objective of the rebels was to organize work stoppages and strikes. The Capitol’s weakness would be easiest to recognize and perhaps even best exploited by someone who had seen a world before it was dictated by the Capitol, and there is one person we meet during the course of the Hunger Games with both that knowledge and the personal motivation to use it.
Mags is the oldest living victor; she was alive, though very young, during the First Rebellion, and her potential authority in the rebellion is mostly a matter of circumstantial evidence, along with sheer longevity. If we assume that she does in fact speak Spanish, it would give her the ability to speak her mind without being understood by the Capitol. That and her age and breadth of experience working as a liaison between the districts and the Capitol—as well as the apparent level of authority she held over other victors, particularly Finnick, who was a naturally charismatic leader himself—have led to speculation that Mags may have had a long-running role in at least uniting the victors of each district as they became mentors, if not in the strategic planning of the Quell plot or the early stages of the rebellion itself.
Unfortunately, one of the narrative consequences of Mags’ death in the Quarter Quell is that we never see her interact on the page with other rebellion leaders like Haymitch, Plutarch, or Coin, and cannot see what her relationship to them is like in terms of leadership, cooperation, or alliance. However, given the smallest glimpse that we do see—her insistence that the skill she demonstrates for the Gamemakers will be “napping”—we can guess that if she did lead, she did so with humanity and humor, and garnered respect for her wisdom by being genuine in her actions.
Mr. Everdeen
My father could have made good money selling [his bows and arrows], but if the officials found out he would have been publicly executed for inciting a rebellion.THG5
Could Katniss have come by her involvement in the rebellion naturally—through her father? Though Mr. Everdeen’s potential role in the rebellion is necessarily limited, given his death several years before the Seventy-fourth Games, the text does imply that his sympathies, at least, lay with the rebel cause.
A popular theory within the Hunger Games fan community (though one minimally substantiated through the novels’ text) is that the mine collapse that killed Katniss’ and Gale’s fathers was a calculated political assassination—an attempt to quash a rising mutiny. Given that both men were roughly the same age as Haymitch, another popularly theorized architect of the Second Rebellion, some have theorized that there was a “rebel cell” in District 12, and that Haymitch, Mr. Everdeen, Mr. Hawthorne, and others killed in the mine collapse may well have been emulating the fabled rebels who utilized the mockingjays to send messages between districts. Although Katniss offers only minor indications of her father’s politics—likely because, given that she was so young when he died, she didn’t fully notice or absorb them—we do get a few intriguing nuggets of information.
Although the song “The Hanging Tree” holds personal significance for Katniss, because of its connection to memories of her father, her mother’s reaction upon hearing her husband and daughter singing it—panic—suggests that it may have been tied to outlawed, or at least frowned-upon, attitudes and/or behaviors. Given that Mr. Everdeen also spoke openly to Katniss about injustice and the unfairness of the Capitol’s Games–tesserae system—potentially in the forest where he also taught her to hunt: as we learn in Catching Fire, the Capitol has bugs of some sort there, and there is no telling how long they have been in place—it’s possible to infer that the song is connected to rebellion in Panem.
And of course, Katniss’ initial thoughts on mockingjays tie her father and rebellion explicitly:
A mockingjay. They’re funny birds and something of a slap in the face to the Capitol . . . The rebels fed the Capitol endless lies, and the joke was on it . . . My father was particularly fond of mockingjays.THG42-43
Madge Undersee
Madge walks straight to me. She is not weepy or evasive, instead there’s an urgency about her tone that surprises me. “They let you wear one thing from your district into the arena. One thing to remind you of home. Will you wear this?” She holds out the circular gold pin that was on her dress earlier. I hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but now I see it’s a small bird in flight.
“Your pin?” I say. Wearing a token from my district is about the last thing on my mind.
“Here, I’ll put it on your dress, all right?” Madge doesn’t wait for an answer, just leans in and fixes the bird to my dress. “Promise you’ll wear it into the arena, Ka
tniss?” she asks. “Promise?”
“Yes,” I say.”THG38
Madge Undersee clearly plays a key role in the course of the Second Rebellion. She is the one who puts the mockingjay pin in Katniss’ hand and makes her promise to wear it into the arena, therefore inspiring the chief symbol of the rebellion. She does so with a surprising amount of intensity, which raises the question: Why? Is it just because of who the pin used to belong to, her mother’s fallen twin sister, another District 12 tribute? Or is there some other, more seditious motivation at work?
The most important thing to remember about the mockingjay pin is that it first belonged to Maysilee, Mrs. Undersee’s sister and Madge’s aunt—and Haymitch’s district ally in the Fiftieth Hunger Games. A tribute had already worn that pin into the arena, and she died wearing it.
Madge would have known the significance, to Haymitch if nothing else, of giving Katniss the pin that her aunt had worn. Haymitch would have recognized that pin. Whether Katniss was aware of it or not, that pin on a District 12 tribute would have reminded Haymitch of Maysilee and the circumstances of her death—that she had died after leaving her alliance with Haymitch. Perhaps Madge only meant to rouse Haymitch out of his drunken stupor, to give Katniss the mentoring she needed to have a fighting chance at surviving. But perhaps it was also a message: that the strategy Haymitch and Maysilee had attempted, in their short-lived alliance, could be used here. (Though we have no direct evidence Madge knew about Peeta’s crush, it seems like it was a pretty poorly kept secret—except, of course, from Katniss.)
Perhaps, too, the mockingjay pin meant something more, and not only to Madge. The mockingjay pin sees two tours into the arena—both times that District 12 managed a victory. The pin represents survival—both literally, in that it presumably inspired both Haymitch’s strategy of cooperation and Cinna’s designs, and figuratively, in that the mockingjays are throughout the Hunger Games a symbol for the will to survive against all odds (pun intended). The pin represents the Capitol’s failure to understand the ability of its oppressed people to survive, just as it did with the jabberjays it released into the wild to die. Giving Katniss that mockingjay pin made a likely intentional anti-Capitol, anti-Games, pro-teamwork statement. And as one of the few people in District 12 who, as the mayor’s daughter, we can assume would ever be in a position to meet people from other districts—to meet people, too, from the Capitol—Madge could have known that others would recognize it, too.5
The mockingjay pin itself finds its origin in a social class that, as was argued earlier, can be seen as specifically designed to oppress Katniss’ own social class, and yet is owned by and identified with Katniss and used in overthrowing that oppressive system. Similarly, Madge doesn’t conform to the ideals of the Capitol and her Capitol-appointed father, and some fans suggest that she could have used her wealth and position and privilege to help take that system down.
Katniss always describes Madge’s behavior as unusual, given her father’s position and her membership in the merchant class:
[W]e go to the back door of the mayor’s house to sell half the strawberries, knowing he has a particular fondness for them and can afford our price. The mayor’s daughter, Madge, opens the door. She’s in my year at school. Being the mayor’s daughter, you’d expect her to be a snob, but she’s all right. She just keeps to herself. Like me.THG12
Katniss even says that Madge’s white dress on reaping day isn’t typical for her—that Madge usually wore the same plain clothes as anyone else in the district, a further deviation from what would be expected, given her Capitol-sponsored lifestyle. Fandom has twisted Madge into a strawberry-swilling, lace-dress-wearing Capitolite Lite, but the way Madge is described, she seems much more interested in playing down her father’s authority and her family’s wealth than luxuriating in them.
Katniss also notes that:
Since neither of us really has a group of friends, we seem to end up together a lot at school. Eating lunch, sitting next to each other at assemblies, partnering for sports activities. We rarely talk, which suits us both just fine. THG12
If Madge had been coming to school with full feasts for lunch while Katniss was starving to death, it seems doubtful Katniss would have been friends with her at all.
In Catching Fire, Madge breaks the law by bringing Gale the morphling that her addict mother depended on. Whether you ship6 Madge and Gale or not (as many online Hunger Games fans do), this act shows a stronger respect for true justice and for humane treatment than for Capitol law.
This sense of compassion could have come from many places, but one option is her privileged access, as the mayor’s daughter, to the Capitol and to past victors. Because Madge had more access than the majority of district citizens to Capitol media—her father’s newspapers, for example—and likely met Hunger Games victors year after year on the Victory Tour and saw their humanity and their suffering, her belief in justice and humanity could be rooted in knowledge that the Capitol is wrong. Some believe such knowledge may have driven her, or her family, to use her position to help rebellion conspirators communicate with each other across districts to forge plans.
Cinna
Cinna is perhaps the most natural candidate for lead architect of the Second Rebellion. Without him, there is no fire, there is no mockingjay, there is no rebellion—at least as we know it. He is the one who tells Katniss and Peeta to hold hands during the chariot scene, creating the idea of their partnership for the Games’ audience. He designs the “wedding” dress that cements Katniss as the mockingjay, at the cost of his own life, demonstrating his commitment to the cause. He is instrumental in creating the necessary conditions for Katniss’ survival and the eventual defeat of the Capitol. The real question is whether the latter was intentional right from the start.
One reason many believe Cinna may be a chief architect of the rebellion is his historical namesake: Cinna Cornelius, an infamous conspirator against Julius Caesar. While other characters share names with the historical men who took down Caesar, Cinna is named after the man Shakespeare immortalized as, literally, “Cinna the Conspirator.”
We know that by the time Katniss returns to the Capitol for the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games victory party, Capitol citizens have begun wearing the mockingjay symbol as a fashion statement. By initially introducing this symbol into Capitol culture—or, perhaps more accurately, Capitol pop culture—by making sure Katniss wore it into the arena, and, later, by reinforcing it through her transformed wedding dress, Cinna made sure that the image of the mockingjay became synonymous with Katniss and, therefore, emblematic of her cause.
In some ways, the Hunger Games’ Cinna is as Machiavellian as Snow or Coin, though unlike Snow and Coin, his morals are pure despite his murky ethics. He used Katniss as a game piece, made her a symbol—but when it really mattered, he gave her a choice (even after his own death): Did she want to put on battle armor and “decide to be the Mockingjay on [her] own,”M43 or let others lead the charge in the war? Cinna set up the board for her to become the rebellion’s symbol, but of all of the adults who use Katniss for their own ends (Snow, Coin, Haymitch, Plutarch), he is the only one who gives her the choice to be used—and, I think, would have allowed her to say no.
Although Cinna may not have been the lead architect of the rebellion, he is irreplaceable in his importance in the rebellion and to the Hunger Games as a series—and, as we’ll see, inscrutable enough that considering his role in the rebellion raises as many questions as it answers.
5 In this single interaction, the course of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games has been subtly spelled out: the mockingjay pin attracts notice; notice begets favor, especially in terms of life-saving monetary or goods transfer—and money leads to berries.
6 “To ship” is a fandom term for “to believe in, promote, or condone a romantic relationship between.”
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Truly, My Name Is Cinna
Cinna is a deeply enigmatic character, and one of the most tragic tales in a ser
ies full of tragic tales. Unlike many of the other Capitol characters, his last name is not revealed. And the full motives behind his actions remain unclear.
Who was Cinna to the rebellion? Where did he come from? Was he driven initially by devotion to his art versus devotion to his cause? How much, precisely, does Panem owe him for its freedom?
Cinna the Outsider
Cinna presents himself differently, both in personal style and in demeanor, than the rest of the Capitol, even his own prep team. He dresses simply, all in black, and his face is unpainted save for gold eyeliner “applied with a light hand,”THG63 in stark contrast to the heavy, caked makeup of Caesar Flickerman or the full-body modifications of Octavia or Tigris. Katniss notes that Cinna’s voice even lacks the Capitol accent.
Cinna is clearly marked—or marks himself—as an outsider to Capitol culture and ideology, despite his proficiency with Capitol style. And through his interactions with Katniss, as well as his sacrifice for the cause of rebellion, it appears that his true sympathies lie with Panem’s districts. All of which raises the question: Is Cinna from the Capitol at all?
There are almost as many theories as to Cinna’s origin as there are fans of the Hunger Games. Here are some of the most popular and salient.
The Capitol
The evidence for Cinna being originally born and raised in the Capitol stems mainly from a straightforward read of the text: if Cinna lives in the Capitol and works in the Capitol and it is not specifically stated that this was not always the case, it can be assumed that he has always been a Capitol citizen. His visibility in major Capitol media, through the popularity of his fashion, suggests he is somewhat influential in the propaganda machine of Capitol politics as well, indicating the absence of any reason for Snow or the other political leaders of Panem to doubt that he holds with Capitol ideals (which they very well might, if he were originally from one of the districts). Cinna also works in a highly skilled artisan profession, which may only be possible to attain in Panem in the Capitol (although, by the same token, we are never directly told that is the case).