in defense of gale
how anger and violence play a role in war and gale's character in the hunger games
I have a confession to make: I have always been a Gale Hawthorne sympathizer. I’ve been like this ever since I read The Hunger Games fifteen years ago. At age thirteen, I saw Gale and immediately fell for his dark brooding and flirtatious teasing. (What can I say, I have a type.) In fact, it took me years to ever warm up to Peeta. I felt a lot like Katniss, wondering why I should care about Peeta Mellark, hating his guts a little, and feeling guilty that someone so nice would like someone so dark as she.
As the years went by, post-Mockingjay and post-Josh Hutcherson, I did grow to love Peeta. He’s such a fascinating character, if only because he’s so Nice, and I can appreciate his and Katniss’s relationship much more as an adult than I ever did in my teens. I understand why she fell in love with him, and more importantly, why she and Gale were never meant to last. I’m not here to argue for their romantic relationship.
However, to this day I am still bitter about how people react to Gale’s character. For a long time, I think it was because I saw myself in Gale - that’s why I get so attached to the selfish, misunderstood male characters of our time - but now it’s for a myriad of other reasons. People actively misunderstand both who he is and his purpose in the series, and I think people get so caught up in the end of his story, and specifically his personal relationship with Katniss, that they don’t appreciate the beginning or the middle.
Gale represents a very specific group of people: those who are so angered by the injustice and oppression they’ve witnessed that they choose violence in order to make a change.
But let’s start at the beginning. Who is Gale Hawthorne? By the end of Mockingjay he is a soldier with blood on his hands, an important part of the army of the rebellion, but when we first meet him he is a young man entering adulthood. We focus so much on Katniss and her youth, but what about Gale? He’s eighteen when the story starts, but he was forced to grow up quickly just like Katniss. It’s easy to see him as a grown man, and yes, in some ways he is more of an adult than some of the children and teenagers we meet throughout the series, but he can’t be more than twenty when he chooses to enter into the war.
Let’s take a moment here to appreciate the coercion of military service. True, joining the rebellion isn’t quite the same thing as being enlisted in the United States’ Army, but isn’t it? Gale saw that his country - or better, his family and friends - needed protecting, they needed someone to step up and do the hard thing and fight, and he just so happened to be in a position where people like Coin could take advantage of him. Regardless of Gale’s personal views or his desire for a better world, the easiest way to get involved in making a change was to become a soldier. He didn’t have the platform that Katniss was given, he didn’t have the star power or voice Peeta had. He was just a boy in a poor district trying to make a difference. This is how the modern real-life military convinces young men to enlist. They offer money, food, support, and make these men believe that by shooting people who they deem “the enemy,” they can keep their families safe. It’s usually propaganda. It’s usually a fabrication of reality, a way of taking their emotions and fears and using them as weapons. But what can you do? Why wouldn’t someone like Gale be coerced?
Many people argue that Gale isn’t what Katniss needs, that he doesn’t understand her like Peeta does, that Gale is selfish and violent and Bad. But that’s not who I see when I read these books. (Maybe I’m the problem…) First, we have to consider that Gale is one of the people who knows Katniss best. He knows some of the darkest parts of her, and even though he doesn’t baby her like Peeta does, he loves her for who she is and respects her actions (he also is good at throwing tantrums in regards to her actions, but don’t all teenage boys do that?). He recognizes her inner turmoil, her seemingly dark moods, but he also understands that she’s fiercely protective and loyal and loving. He never asks her to be anyone she isn’t.
In some ways, Gale is just the male version of our main character. (With some caveats, of course.) A major difference here is that he doesn’t have a Peeta to even him out. The only real counterpart for Gale that we see on the page is Katniss. We barely see him with his siblings or even his mom, and there isn’t another person in his life that balances him. Katniss may disagree with some of his actions, she may fight against him on certain things, but overall she and he are two sides of the same coin. They’re both angry and hurt and ruled by the fire in their blood. They’re both like wild animals. The difference is that Katniss has a team of people keeping her in line, encouraging her, reminding her that she is good, and Gale doesn’t.
And even more importantly, I think Katniss does have a bit more compassion in her than Gale does. Whether that’s due to Prim or her part in the Games or just simply her own personal character, we can’t really be sure. But Katniss is better at seeing Capitol citizens as human - even just the way she treats her prep team - and that keeps her from falling into the hatred that consumes Gale. However, that doesn’t stop her from taking matters into her own hands, disobeying authority, and giving herself up for the cause. Her survival instincts aren’t nearly as strong as her passion for justice.
Eventually, Gale doesn’t even try to stop Katniss’s crazy schemes because he knows her too well and he sees himself within her. The two of them are good at putting people in danger for the cause. (Granted, Katniss feels more remorse about this than Gale does, and she generally berates herself for doing so, but the point still stands.) For as good a person as Katniss is - and I know a lot of her self-loathing is misplaced and disfigured by her own grief and guilt - so much of her own redemption arc starts with Prim and Peeta.
And speaking of Peeta, how would you feel if the girl you’ve been in love with got taken away from you like that? We talk about Peeta and how horrible it is that he had to go into the games with his crush, but Gale had to watch it play out on TV. He had to sit by and watch as she kissed someone else. He had to grieve a relationship that barely started, that was never meant to be. That’s difficult for adults, but it’s especially hard for teenagers. It doesn’t matter that Katniss and Gale may not have worked out. It doesn’t matter that they might have had a hard time being in a real adult relationship. The point is that Gale had things to grieve too. That he was (understandably) angry.
More than that, Katniss had her own stuff going on that complicated matters. She did not make it easy for him, even though it wasn’t her fault, and one could argue that it was Gale’s fault for pursuing something when he knew that Katniss was conflicted. She didn’t know what she wanted, could barely discern her feelings for either of them, and she wanted to be with both of them in some ways. But when you have so little hope in your world, wouldn’t you do anything to keep something that could make you happy?
Sure, maybe Gale didn’t handle any of it in the best way, but he did his best. He’s barely twenty! What do you expect! I know men who are almost thirty who still manage to be emotionally immature, and they aren’t even living through a dystopian war.
It frustrates me to no end that people treat Gale like a full-blown adult and yet Katniss and Peeta are infantilized. Gale may have a few years on them, sure, but at the end of the day he is still just a young person trying to survive. He doesn’t have mentors in the same way Katniss and Peeta do. All he knows is that people are dying, the injustice is overwhelming, the love of his love is going through immense inner turmoil and is falling in love with someone else, and he has skills as a hunter that few people in his district - in his country - have. And again, he’s angry!
One of the most popular arguments when it comes to rebellions and revolutions is that violence is not the answer. Turn the other cheek, as Jesus says. Be more like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. Peaceful protests. And in some ways, I understand the point. Yes, violence is bad. Even as we get deeper into Mockingjay, one of the core themes of the book is that regardless of which team you’re on, if you choose violence, you will lose pieces of your humanity. Once you stop seeing the other side as human, we’ve all lost.
But this is also a tactic by oppressive forces to control the narrative and weaken insurgents. They point fingers at rioting and looting and fighting back and say, “See? They’re bad people. They want to hurt us, to hurt you. They cannot be peaceful. They are immoral.” As if those in power are not the real problem. As if it is somehow more ethical to starve someone, to withhold resources, than it is to shoot people down. (Which, by the way, the Capitol also does.) (There is also something to be said here about the genocide of Palestine…but you can draw your own conclusions.)
In a perfect world, nobody would fight. Violence would be unnecessary. We all know this. We all want this. But the hard truth is that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. Sometimes the only way forward to progress is with a little violence. It’s a hard decision, and not without consequences, but if all the oppressed people of the world just turned the other cheek, people in power would never be challenged.
Let’s look at this in another work of fiction before we get back to our friend Gale. In Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, one of the prominent storylines follows a group of university students fighting for a revolution in France. These barricade boys end up protesting by building blockades and hoping to outlast the firing squad brought out by French police. (Unclear why they thought that would solve their problems, but who am I to question them.) While I doubt most of these men set out to actively murder anyone, the result of their last stand is that people do end up dead. Enjolras in particular makes the choice to shoot at least one civilian in order to carry out their insurrection. He does not want to do it, but he deems it necessary.
Victor Hugo has an entire section about progress - and specifically how violence plays an important part in progress - and I think it translates well with Gale and even with District Thirteen as a whole. While there is a lot to criticize about Coin and how her district handles the revolution, and specifically where we can imagine she would have taken the country had she survived, I think the thing to remember is that these people were desperate. The common people of Panem were subjected to oppression for seventy-five years, and they could not peacefully protest to change their situation. They had to make hard choices or else there would have been 75 more years of the Hunger Games. The fire was already burning when Katniss used those berries. It had already turned into an inferno by the time Gale was asked to contribute his skills for Thirteen’s weaponry.
For a series like The Hunger Games that is so dark and so complex, it frustrates me that people hold Gale to such high standards. This man is angry. He’s trapped. He’s just recently watched the love of his life go through hell in the arena all the while falling in love with another man, and as a result of her actions, the rebels are on the brink of a massive opportunity to create change. Nobody criticizes the districts for their violent uprisings. Nobody criticizes Katniss for shooting down Capitol civilians (which happens at least once, by the way). And nobody bats an eye at Beetee for contributing his smarts to the cause. And yet, when we look at Gale, all we see is his idea for a bomb.
Don’t get me wrong, the bomb is horrible. It’s a cruel concept, and the consequences for our main characters are even crueler. I’m sure Gale lives with that guilt for the rest of his life, and I’ll bet he regrets it. But there’s two things we need to consider. First, Gale’s idea is less at fault than Coin’s actions. And second, his bomb is kind of the point of the whole series.
For as much as we blame Gale for Prim’s death, Gale is only a part of the big picture. Yes, he maybe should not have been so cruel when dreaming up weapons. (Although, to stick with our previous argument, what about all the horrible things the Capitol has done? How can you dictate how an oppressed person fights back?) But that bomb would not have gotten made if not for Beetee’s genius, and Coin’s command.
Now, obviously we can’t know if the bomb was sent in by 13 or the Capitol. To this day, I still believe it was Coin, and I think there’s plenty of evidence to support that. (If it’s the Capitol, how can we blame Gale for this?) So if we are to believe that the rebels made use of this design, that command comes back to Coin. She’s arguably the real villain here. She saw Gale as an opportunity and a weapon, and she did not consult him if/when she decided to make use of his ideas. Believe it or not, Gale was still young and I’m sure he was easily manipulated, if only because he was ready to fight for the revolution. Beetee suffered a similar fate as Gale: being used as a weapon, regardless of his own desires. (Although we know less about Beetee and his intentions.)
We can’t know if Coin intended those bombs to hurt rebels or Capitol children or anyone in particular, but based on her character, I don’t think she cared who was bombed, rather that the weapon was used at the proper moment. She seized an opportunity, it just so happened that Gale had the idea. And obviously Gale did have some malicious intentions when designing the bomb. We can’t overlook his own fire. But his anger in a detached bunker when dreaming up ways to kill his enemy is far removed from Gale staring at a bunch of helpless children going, “Press the button! Send in the bombs!” Give the man some credit.
But this brings us to the main point of the story. Prim was doomed by the narrative from the start, and even Suzanne has stated that she was always destined to die. Regardless of how it happened, Prim had to die to demonstrate the central theme of The Hunger Games: war does not discriminate. And I think to take it one step further, often in times of war, there is no winner. Even if the good guy succeeds, even if we conquer the oppressors, there is a loss of innocence. Nobody comes out unscathed.
From a literature standpoint, it’s poetic for Prim to die when and where she did. She was always supposed to be apart of the games, and even though Katniss volunteered to keep her out of the arena the first time, she could not escape it forever. Even if Coin dispatched the bomb, it was under the guise of a Captiol plane, and the bombs themselves feel very similar to the types of traps set by the Gamemakers in the arena. It’s not a fair death in any sense and it was not earned. But she’s not like Katniss or Gale. I think had she been in the arena, she either would get killed trying to save someone else, to make a sacrifice, or else she would die by her naïveté and lack of experience or a cruel trick from the Gamemakers. She grew up a lot in the years since Katniss volunteered, but Prim was never a survivor.
While it’s tragic that Gale contributed to Prim’s death, she could have died in any number of ways. (I’m not trying to suggest that this was a merciful death at Gale’s hand. It was horrible. We all know this.) The point is less that the bomb killed her and more that she died tragically, as an innocent. Her death just so happens to serve another purpose: the final nail in the coffin of Katniss and Gale’s relationship. In some ways, Prim’s death even leads to Katniss and Peeta falling back together. Gale faced the consequences of his cruelty, and he was forced to reckon with his actions.
While we can’t know how he changed with age and we can’t know for certain how that bomb altered the trajectory of his adult life, I’d like to think that he softened a bit. He cared about Katniss and Prim too much to not be affected by that loss.
I’m not here to dispute Gale’s morality. I think he did some cruel things in the name of progress, and he lost some of his humanity in the fight. But I am saying that a lot of who he is comes as a result of his suffering. You cannot be unmoved by the types of horrors he’s seen. It’d be nice if everyone was a Prim, kind and generous and slow to anger, but that’s just not how it works. War changes you, watching mass destruction changes you, and anger can shape you into a blade.
If we lose our humanity, are we still allowed to be human? What is humanity, if not messy and contradictory? Can we not love while also harboring an ocean of hate? Even though it is braver to be kind, who are we to fault the oppressed for their anger?
While The Hunger Games is a story about war, at its heart, it is a story about humanity. We live in constant circles, injustice leads to rebellion which inevitably will put new people in power, and eventually you will live long enough to see the victors become the villains. This becomes more prevalent if you take Coriolanus Snow’s story into account. A young man struggling to survive, feeling as if the system is against him, rising to power to combat that injustice, and then falling prey to power just like anyone else. Humanity is prone to corruption, either from pure selfishness or else from the fear of loss, and at the end of the day it is easy for us to become animals.
Even if we zoom out and reflect on how we interact with the story of The Hunger Games, we can notice that we too are apart of the games. Yes, it’s a piece of literature we can use to understand oppression, to analyze and compare to the real world, to enact real change. But at the end of the day, this is entertainment. At the height of the fandom, when the films were released, the general public focused more on Katniss’s romance than the story of injustice. We are no better than the Capitol. We are not angry enough. We just shudder at the violence, thank the gods that we don’t have to deal with that in our comfortable lives of privilege, and carry on with our day.
Anger can be selfless. In fact, I think a lot of Katniss’s selflessness relies on her anger. Being angry isn’t inherently a bad thing. If unchecked it can lead to violence, but anger is a healthy emotion that we need. The reason rebellions and revolutions happen are because people are angry at the suffering of others. Sometimes our very selves are lumped into that suffering, sometimes what fuels our anger is our own mistreatment, but we often are more angry when someone we love is threatened. Gale and Katniss are fighting not for their own lives, but for the lives of their family and friends. It’s why they are both such effective soldiers: they aren’t afraid to die for the cause.
You don’t have to like Gale. At the end of the day, Katniss probably was aware of all of this, how it’s not entirely his fault, and it still wasn’t enough for her to keep him around. But I wish people would stop acting like he’s some big bad horrible man with murderous tendencies. He was a boy the same as Peeta. He was just trying to survive like Katniss. He was used just like they were.
Reading the newest books now, and I agree with everything you wrote. I think Gale and Katniss are almost the Laurie and Jo of THG. So alike and have been through so much. Peeta is ultimately the better choice, but you can't deny why Katniss took so long to choose. I mean, she was leading the rebellion after all.
i NEED to reread the hunger games after reading this omg