When things had finally calmed down after Wiress' death and the unexpected intervention of the Game Maker, I could finally allow myself a few minutes to let what had happened sink in.
The thing that rankles most is the sense of waste. A brilliant mind, nestled inside a human being who carried no threat to anyone, snuffed out in an instant. A loss to Panem that this country will probably never know, let alone appreciate. It would be no surprise at all if there wasn't a person in the Capitol who considered for a moment where there various toys, gadgets and conveniences originated.
Ideas have to come from somewhere or someone. Wiress had ideas. Dozens of them. She couldn't see them all through; sometimes couldn't even find anyone around them to understand them. Just as the artist needs a muse, so a technological society needs a constant flow of new ideas.
In this country made up of a Capitol that can only wallow in self-indulgent desires, unable to even see a televised fight to the death as anything other than a form of cheap, disposable entertainment; surrounded by districts whose only focus is to survive in the face of the hostility and brutality they face from the despotic central regime, the greatest loss might be the way those who opt for pursuits of the mind are summarily ignored.
When the people of the districts are reduced to mere providers of a particular resource for the consumption of those deemed above them, with two each year suffering the further ignominy (or fleeting fame from the point of view of those in the Capitol, hungry for their sport) of being sent to their likely deaths; when one with a brilliant yet fragile mind can be subject to the mindless slaughter that has been termed 'Games' – not once but twice – how can there be any hope of rising from the shadows for any reason other than being the last person standing atop a pile of corpses?