This is worthless garbage. You're mixing and matching sources from different parts of the country and different time periods, not to mention that your sample size is microscopic. Do you not understand the most elementary things about statistics? You can't draw trends from five points of data. Don't you realize just how big and diverse Panem is? Or that, rather than being a static entity as you seem to think, it constantly undergoes changes like any other country?

Thumeka closed the window, but her mood was already ruined. Mr. Yamela had praised her final essay idea, but that meant nothing when someone had commented this on her blog. Thumeka disagreed with them - she had specifically pointed out that her handful of sources could not cover the entire country and any trends she tried to point out were always going to be speculative - but she still felt awful and wanted to cry.

Thumeka had liked Panem since that defector interview she had read in Grade Eight. Something about just how weird it was had drawn her attention and led her to the library, and she had never looked back. At the beginning, Thumeka had daydreamed about becoming a journalist and sneaking into Panem. She still dreamed about that a little, though her rather more practical ambition was to become a journalist, work on the southern border of the Eight Nations, interview defectors, and write books about Panem. There was someone who did that in South America with Spanish-speaking refugees, but nobody did it in North America with English. Thumeka was good at English, she was going to write her C1 exam in a few weeks. Mom and Dad thought she wanted to become the ambassador to New Zealand or something. Thumeka didn't tell them the truth. Being interested in Panem was something creepy boys did. Thumeka wasn't interested in it in the creepy way. She just thought the country was interesting and watched smuggled footage of the 'Hunger Games' out of morbid curiosity, not because she liked watching people die.

This year, people were paying attention to the Games, as Thumeka privately called them. The word had a certain meaning in English, so it made more sense to translate it into Shona, Thumeka's first language, than to leave it as a mishmash of sounds. But people didn't like how normal translation made it sound, so they transliterated instead, which always made Thumeka feel like her eyes were bleeding. It was especially bad this year. A Jewish girl had been Reaped - that word, too, was usually transliterated - and then won - everyone said 'survived', but you couldn't understand a country if you refused to learn its slang - and Israel had collectively exploded. There were giant protests all over the country right now. Even in Zimbabwe, it was front-page news. And none of the journalists seemed to understand anything about the country.

The blog post that had drawn the commenter's ire had been her civics essay draft on how the Games shaped Panem society reworked to add in some stuff about religion. Thumeka had actually scrounged up her courage and contacted a defector for an interview. He was very nice and willing to explain all sorts of things to her. Mr. Thomas Elwyn had actually been the one to tell her a piece of information that had made Mr. Yamela declare her work to be university-level. Elwyn had mentioned that in Panem, TV shows about competition did not have elimination. Instead, contestants got points each round that were tallied at the end, and the fun lay in speculating who still had a chance to win and who was too far behind. Thumeka decided this was because elimination was too associated with the Games and using it in entertainment would be watering down the concept. It didn't seem like some great realization to her, but Mr. Yamela said that he really liked her draft and she'd probably get top marks when she submitted it. Thumeka was usually a B student, so that was kind of crazy.

Right now, Thumeka was working on a blog post on a similar topic. The Games as entertainment and what this meant for conventional entertainment. Death as fun wasn't a new thing, just look at ancient Roman gladiators, and ritual combat also had a long history. The official Panem government line to its population (it never said a word to the rest of the world) was that the Games were noble combat, a chance for the youth of today to live up to their ancestors' heroic deeds in the Panem Civil War (glossing over the at least five different sides to that conflict), atone for any treachery that may have happened in their family tree, and serve themselves up as an innocent sacrifice so that the nation may live. It seemed completely insane to Thumeka, but Mr. Elwyn had said he still kind of believed it even though he knew it was wrong. So how did this martial notion of heroism and sacrifice go together with how people cheered on their District's tributes as if they were watching soccer?

Did being used to it desensitize people? Did they have to be convinced or was it something you just picked up living in this kind of society? Did the general brutality of Panem society make it more bearable, or were the Games a logical extension of the brutality of the Panem Civil War? Was there a difference in how the educated and uneducated - Panemites were mostly illiterate agricultural workers - viewed it? Did people secretly disagree? Were the families of Tributes actually proud or saying the right things because they had to? How much dissent was there, really? And the number-one question asked of all dictatorships: how much was consent and how much - coercion?

Thumeka glanced at the clock. Her parents were at work, as was her older sister Zandile, who worked in a bakery with her boyfriend. Mom and Dad were surprisingly okay with Zandile's line of work. They were really nice generally and told Thumeka she could do whatever she wanted. The only problem was that so far, the most out there thing she had wanted was English classes, and that wasn't really that out there. Even if lots of people thought that was dumb - 'the English ruined everything for us and now you're learning their language!'

Well, England had been a total mess ever since the Cataclysm and Zimbabwe had been a Class 1 nation for nearly eighty years, so honestly, Grandpa really should have been over the 1800s by now.

Thumeka finished a paragraph and went to read a blog that she liked. It was about serial killers and was run by a girl with the username 'LittleMushroom236' who Thumeka had figured out by now was a year younger than her and also lived in Harare. Thumeka had a crush on her, but Mushroom didn't like girls. Sometimes Thumeka thought it was weird she liked multiple girls at once, but given that of the four girls she liked three either couldn't or didn't like her back, that was probably just her brain hedging its bets.

No big deal anyway. Thumeka, or 'Not_A_Journalist', liked being friends with Mushroom. People said being interested in serial killers was as creepy as liking Panem, but like her, Mushroom wasn't doing it in a creepy way. She liked forensics and psychology and wanted to become either a detective, a pathologist, or one of those people who ran around fields looking for body parts. Thumeka checked her chat and found that the girl had replied.

LittleMushroom236: yeah, I also think that's interesting. kind of weird to think about people thinking it's perfectly normal to have ur country kill u like this.

Not_A_Journalist: That's the question - do they? I was reading a book a while back where a defector said he always saw through it all, but then again, he did defect, so probably not a representative sample.

Not_A_Journalist: Wish we had more information from Panem.

Not_A_Journalist: But then again, had it not been so ridiculously isolationist, it would not have been itself.

Not_A_Journalist: How did your Maths test go?

Mushroom's recent post had been about a Chinese study about gender roles and domestic violence (she had speculated about what this could explain about the demographics of serial killers and their victims). As she read it, Thumeka jotted down some questions this gave her about Panem. Did this apply to a society where gender roles had been thrown out the window decades ago for the sake of putting anyone who could be grabbed under the gun? Obviously most men were still bigger than most women, but if women as well as men were taught to be violent from childhood, what did domestic abuse statistics look like? Were Panemian men as violent as men in societies with rigid gender roles, or did violence not being a male prerogative actually make them less violent on average? What did being a man or a woman even mean in a society where everyone was told that combat was the highest honour? What sort of moral significance was given to motherhood and fatherhood? Thumeka didn't have the faintest idea how she could answer any of these questions. Maybe she could write to journalists who wrote about defectors and ask them to conduct a study.

Thumeka wondered what to do now. Homework? Nah. Study for A-levels? Nah, that was in November, she still had months. Study English? Nah, she had gotten good results on several practice exams. Read that book on the PCW (or the Dark Days, as it was called in Panem) she had gotten from a university library? Yeah, that sounded nice.

But before that, Thumeka rechecked her favourite forums, tapping her fingers impatiently against the table as she waited for the pages to load. She usually used the family computer when nobody was home, partially because she didn't want them to judge her for reading about Panem, but mostly because Mom was always on the phone with her friends and you couldn't use the Web and a phone at the same time, so she had to play solitaire while waiting for her to get off the call.

Thumeka went on a long thread where people who thought they knew everything about world politics argued with each other. When Thumeka had been little, they had only had other annoying people at the bar to 'enlighten', but now lots of people had personal computers and could share their ideas to everyone who knew their language. Thumeka wondered what computers were like in Panem. Given how backwards it was, they were probably still stuck with imported supercomputers from seventy years ago that needed a giant room and twenty technicians. Thumeka doubted they had enough engineers to independently figure out a way to shrink them while still maintaining a decent amount of computing power.

That's not true, she wrote in response to someone being wrong. Thumeka knew it was stupid to argue on the Web, but she couldn't stand the thought of people who knew nothing about the topic believing nonsense. It's possible to create healthy human clones by now, it's just that it's strictly banned by international conventions, and also why would you need babies that happen to have the same DNA as someone else? I wouldn't be too surprised if some random researcher in Panem cloned someone because they felt like it, but there's no way it's a large program.

Usually, discussions on Panem genetic research veered towards the conspiratorial, especially in light of the artificial epidemic in District Thirteen that could have sterilized three-quarters of the fucking globe had it gotten beyond it. That annoyed Thumeka, because messing around with pathogens was one thing, but human gestation was long and taking care of babies took a lot of effort. She generally disliked the entire theory of human cloning in Panem, but someone doing it as just one of those weird things that happened in isolationist dictatorships was at least plausible.

She then went to a comment about her least favourite Panem conspiracy theory (okay, second least favourite, she liked theories about who Panem was secretly trading with even less because they were usually motivated solely by someone not liking their country and that annoyed Thumeka). I don't see the point of that. One of my friends has an identical twin but they're very different, they like different things and have different groups of friends even though they were raised together and treated in the same way. Clones of Coriolanus Snow would have nothing in common with him. I think he's more likely to pick a protege once he knows he's dying, like McCollum did with him, or simply not pick an heir at all and let everyone fight over it instead. Or maybe he's got secret grandkids, that's less hassle than secret clones. Honestly, grandkids raised by him would be more like him than clones raised in some research institute.

Thumeka took a deep breath, heart racing even though she was just typing on her keyboard. Then she clicked 'post', logged out, and went to read her book. It was called The Ideologies of the Panem Civil War. She grabbed a notebook and a pencil, settled down on the couch, and prepared to take notes. Her blog post would be so historically rigorous, people would have to be impressed.


Several hours later, Thumeka's cell phone chimed. It was Kunashe, the girl from her class who had asked her out a few days ago. Thumeka grinned and opened the text message. She was still shocked that the hottest girl in the class wanted to date her. Privately, she was worried that Kunashe had only asked her because she was the only single and interested lesbian in Grade 13. There were a few other students who had come out to her but weren't out to anyone else because their parents would have disapproved. Thumeka felt bad for them. Especially the girls who had a crush on Kunashe. Though honestly, Thumeka was really lucky there was so little competition, because it was hard to believe the hottest girl in the class was interested in the weirdo who monologued about Panem all the time. Zandile insisted that Kunashe could have always gone to a club to find someone if she hadn't been interested in Thumeka or asked someone from Grade 12, but Thumeka didn't really believe her.

Hey, now that was an interesting line of inquiry. Defectors reported a total lack of homophobia in Panem even in regions where people were very religious and that there was really good representation in the media, which might have been the reason for that. The obvious question was - why in the world? Sure, people who could or would not have biological children had a useful societal role as the ones who adopted the orphans, which would have been useful in the aftermath of the civil war, but Panem was unique in this regard. This wasn't how normal dictatorships behaved. Yes, there had been the post-Cataclysm civic and military popular mobilizations and later the same thing during the civil war, but then the period of stability now should have been seeing a return to whatever was considered traditional there.

A book Thumeka had read a while back had attributed this to two factors. The regime didn't feel threatened by gender nonconformity and transgender people because it simply didn't (gee, thanks, author, very helpful) - it built itself around different things, and besides, the loss of traditional gender roles had resulted in people caring less about that. The question remained why traditional roles hadn't come back in the past six decades. As for same-sex relationships, that was chalked up to Ravi Chaterhan, an industrialist who had asked McCollum to legalize gay marriage nationwide so that he could marry his boyfriend. Generally, Thumeka was reluctant to ascribe that level of agency to anyone, but if there was a country where homophobia could become unacceptable overnight because some rich man wanted to marry a man, Panem was it. Perhaps the reason for the exceptional level of acceptance in the current day was that once the elites had gotten a chance to live as they wanted, they weren't going to allow that to be rolled back.

But why in the world was Panem one of only two countries where intersex people were assigned a third gender at birth? Usually, in places that didn't have the infrastructure to forcibly perform surgeries, people were just labelled as one or the other and that was that. Maybe there, too, some rich person had felt very strongly about not forcing their baby who had ambiguous genitalia into the binary?

Thumeka realized she had been staring at the wall for over a minute and focused on her phone.

Just had smtg come up tmrw. Today ok?

Thumeka grinned, forgetting entirely about queer Panemites and the annoying person on the Web. :D where?

my place at 1830 good?

yeah!

The address followed. Thumeka checked the time - forty-five minutes left. She put aside her book, which had somehow become a detailed description of post-Cataclysm anarchism in North America (honestly, she should have expected that from a 1400-page book from the university library) and ran to get ready. Thumeka had recently cut her hair short to look more like one of those journalists who covered armed conflicts right from the trenches, so no more wash days or spending hours at the hairdresser, but also no doing fun stuff with it. Maybe she should have gotten a wig. She used her wide-toothed comb to smooth out her hair a bit, remembered to get dressed, ran to her room to put on her shorts and T-shirt (not like Kunashe didn't know she couldn't dress nice to save her life), and went back to the bathroom to put on makeup. There was still some time left, so after putting her phone in her pocket, she logged back into the World Affairs forum and went to the Panem subforum. Someone had left a comment on her comment about religion in Panem.

What are you, autistic? There's no way a totalitarian regime can tolerate powerful religious organizations, unless it's explicitly religious itself.

Thumeka was going on a date, so she didn't care. I am indeed autistic, and haven't you read 'The Meaning of the Word' by Ana Castillo-Suarez? Panem's nowhere near as totalitarian as it tries to be. Case in point - Diana Cohen's survival. You're an idiot and should at least try to think before posting.

She logged out again, so that her family couldn't know she was writing this (they didn't know her username, of course), and went to her date, bouncing from anticipation. Kunashe was so pretty and her figure was so sexy. Her friends would all be so jealous.


A/N:

Diana: nearly gets murdered by her government

Thumeka: let me enlighten the Internet on the finer points of Panem's government structure and ideology

(for more Thumeka, see my story 'The Sword and the Scales')

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the matter, and eventually came to the conclusion that I simply cannot read Panem as an allegory for the world. For if it represents the world, then there is no room in the story for a person who lives very far away and whose interest in the horrors is purely academic. Someone who has the luxury of deciding whether they will care about that distant country and its atrocities. Someone who is not necessarily privileged in the financial sense, but is privileged in a much greater way, having the ability to speak without fear and write without self-censorship. Someone like me.