via
http://bit.ly/2K7piwpink-splotch:
ok ok ok so that song about the hanging tree from mockingjay— it’s amazing. it is so many things.
it’s katniss mourning; it’s a call for peeta to call out and warn his lover, while he sits there with a noose (a collar) (a rope) around his own neck; it’s a dirge that people sing for their own selves.
it’s not heavensbee, the propagandist, smirking proudly in his lab— he wants it to be, but he’s just twisting it and none of the other singers listen to him. ’listen,’ he tells coin, who smiles back, ‘i took ‘necklace of rope’ and turned it to ‘necklace of hope.’ because you see, you see— the ‘leaders’ of this revolution do not understand the fight. and it’s fascinating how this story takes that apart— this song!—agh ok
heavensbee turns ‘rope’ to ‘hope,’ but peeta, you see— peeta knows there is a noose around his neck. he knows a man is dying at this hanging tree, but maybe if he shouts katniss will be able to run. the people who march on the dam, this song on their tongues, they know—they will not make it through this alive.
heavensbee and coin don’t understand and the story makes it clear over and over— coin’s slow fall, the way she sees fronts and sieges but forgets to see the civilians on the ground. she has lost and she has fought, but she has never been powerless, her life a whim, the odds never in her favor. they show it in heavensbee blanching when the bombing finally starts in district thirteen—and in the way heavensbee smirks, here, as he takes a song that is katniss mourning, takes words that will drive peeta to desperate action, takes the sound that will die, drowned, on a hundred lips—
‘a necklace of hope’ heavensbee says, and smirks, because he thinks he is inspiring people. he thinks he is leading. he thinks he understands.
this song starts out with katniss, mourning, singing an old song about love and lost things— peeta catching snippets of it and conjuring his strength— heavensbee twisting it into the toothless ballad he thinks people want, the war song that doesn’t cut back at you and promise loss—
and finally the song ends in the hands it belongs to.
when the district men and women march on the dam, they are not singing about a necklace of hope. this is not a story we are all going to make it out of. that’s not how war works. they know.
their voices take over the song. the thing around their necks is not hope. it is a choice and a death and a duty and a surety— this is a sacrifice. the last voices they hear are their own.
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