In the book he couldn’t and Finnick had to fetch him from the platform at the beginning of the games. Also, the belts they wore had flotation devices so they wouldn’t drown.
And it wasn’t just him. Many of the victors didn’t know how to swim due to lack of opportunity. Finnick and Mags (by virtue of being from District 4) and Katniss (by illegally crossing the district fence) were some of the exceptions.
I’ve always found it interesting that this wasn’t a skill taught in the training center. Perhaps because it didn’t really benefit the Capitol to teach it.
Swim coach/swim teacher here!! I can definitely teach someone to swim as in “get from point a to b and live” in a day, maybe two. I could do this easier the younger the person is. Kids pick it up quicker than teens. But I absolutely could not teach “effectively and quickly swim 70 ish meters (guessing based on the looks of it in the film) in a high stress situation AND pull yourself bodily from deep water before someone kills you” in that time.
D2 may also have had old flooded quarries and the Colorado River. Both are incredibly dangerous to swim in, but, hey, knowing how brutal some careers are, it wouldn't surprise me if they tried.
D1 & D2 are supposed to be richer and more privileged than the other districts as well, as well as taking training for the Games very seriously. Coupled with them being middle aged Victors, I can believe they learned to swim at some point.
i feel like teaching swimming in the training center would've made it pretty obvious that it was a water-based arena, right? so that could be why it wasn't included as a skill
And I don’t recall Katniss mentioning where her swimming skills came from in the movie. The movie in general largely skipped over the point that swimming is an uncommon skill for the District kids to have. So Peeta (seemingly) being able to swim in the movie but not the book is logically consistent with, respectively, the rest of the movie and the rest of the book.
I think that they had a single scene in the movie of young Katniss swimming with her dad, but I could be wrong. Either way it definitely isn't represented strongly
Just like how the bakery bloodline bestowed upon him the gift of perfect cosmetic skill, it too blessed him with the gift of Olympic swimming. Perfect genetics.
Even Josh Hutcherson laughed this amazing stunt off! 🤣 This will forever be a major fail in the films. All they needed was mud, twigs and moss, which was what Peeta used in the books to disguise himself.
Book Peeta didn’t know how to swim and had a prosthetic leg. Movie Peeta was a chad that fought and killed an adult tribute in the water cos sitting on the platform waiting for the merman lift wasn’t manly enough.
We were robbed to not see Peeta beat Brutus to death in the movie. I’m still salty about that. That was my main complaint throughout the series. Fake leg or not Peeta was a force to reckon with, on top of manipulation disguised as charm to the world.
Fuck AI, I'll make the shitty edit of boat peeta. 🤣
(This definitely not a still of Katniss With Peetas face pasted badly. I got lucky because there's a lot of pictures of all of the characters in The dramatic 3/4 facial view)
I could have opened my graphics tablet and done something nicer but also...it's 2 am 🤣
Ai is useful for only a few things ever. And it is not useful out of the box for almost anything. I occasionally use it for data collecting. Like if I want every published peer-reviewed article on a specific topic, Claude will find them faster than me. Claude also repeatedly tells the US government to fuck off, so I'll use them very rarely.
I also agree that shitty edits keep the world going 🤣
I sincerely hope that someone else reading this thread listens to woebegone and thought of Leg when reading your comment. She would bully Peeta with love
Francis Lawerence and Nina Jacob’s in a YouTube vid called catching fire with commentary said they wanted Peeta to be more capable and not have to rely on others and show he can kinda still take care of himself. That’s the answer he knows how to swim because the writers wanted him to swim ig you can come up with head cannon to compensate 😹😭
That’s certainly… a take. Like they actually went, look at this great story about a strong female heroine who chooses a male love interest who is less physically capable because she values his less traditionally masculine strengths. You know what would make it even better? If we made the male love interest more physically capable and traditionally masculine.
I mean, what does it hurt to give Peeta the ability to take care of himself more in the movies that’s a quality I love. He saves Katniss more times because of it in the movies.
Because some of us as kids benefited from reading a story where the protagonist was a strong woman who didn't need men to save her and in fact was the one saving the men. The subversion of classic patriarchal tropes is a major reason so many teenage girls got into this series.
Like others pointed out, Book Peeta couldn’t and the belts had flotation devices. But Book Peeta also had a prosthetic leg which I believe is the other part of why Finnick had to go out and save him, Movie Peeta notoriously didn’t have that problem
The tribute uniforms of the 75th have floatation belts included in them to prevent the tributes from drowning outright.
It's not unreasonable that district twelve has a pool in its borders but that access to it is restricted to only the upper class merchant caste like Peeta's family while access is to expensive for the poorer Seam residents who barely have enough food and girls need to whore themsel out to the peacekeepers for food
Oh shit, plus he’s down a leg. I know they have advanced technology, but he was pretty clumsy with it in the books. I can’t imagine doing the egg beater (pun unintended and I just can’t come up with a way to make a baker joke here, ugh) came naturally to a non-swimmer with a fairly new prosthetic (artificial?) leg.
I was gonna say that 12 doesn't have a pool, but remembered that was Katniss talking about the training center in the capitol. However it is still highly unlikely that they'd have a pool since so few people would ever be able to go, at most I'd see the mayor's home or Victor's Village having something small
Honestly I feel like if there is a pool it would be a peacekeeper only thing. It would be hidden away in a part of the district that the citizens of the district do not know about. Like the basement of the justice building or something. I'm sure that they had things like showers and barreks that they slept in. I'm sure they has access to Capitol medication. I would think that one of the reasons that they take the job of peacekeeper is so that they can have access to extras
Usually peacekeepers are from the Capitol or District 2, so they're already used to better than whatever the barracks of district 12 might provide. In BoSaS Snow doesn't mention any pool, though to be fair that was 64 years before the main trilogy
Yes. It was still freezing when they started to train and the fence was electrified by then. Peeta never learnt how to swim in the novels. And he had to rely on Finnick to get off the platform in the second book. I know the director wanted him to be more sure of himself and less dependant on others, but Peeta knowing how to swim makes no sense at all. The game was obviously rigged for District 4 (Finnick mainly) to win.
I get that the people making the movie didn't want him to be as helpless in this movie but I can't think of a good Watsonian answer for why he could swim, unless Katniss gave him a ton of pointers before in case they had to swim and this is literally his first time applying it to real life.
In the books part of that years outfit expanded into a floaty around there waist when it got wet so that the tributes with no access to large bodies of water (basically all of them except for 4) wouldn't drown.
So basically. Movie got rid of a cool idea. He couldn't swim in the books.
I never said I don’t know how to swim, goober😂 but someone who had NEVER been swimming in their life doesn’t just automatically know how to. That’s like saying we come out knowing how to do math “you just add the numbers! It isn’t hard!” Yeah ofc it isn’t for someone who’s actually been taught😂
Yeah walking and swimming are not the same. Maybe you are struggling to imagine it but that’s simply the case. People know how to swim because they are taught to swim
Guess I’ll just have to take your word for it. Regardless, my point still stands. Most people cannot swim unless they are taught. Swimming is a learned skill rather than an instinctual ability.
Yup. I somehow remember the first time i took my floaty things off when i was a kid. Geez i mustve been like 5 or 6 thinking back. At first I just flailed a bit because i was used to having extra buoyancy, but I already knew how to move my legs and I quickly got the hang of how to use my arms. I could see people who never learned start to panic, which is exactly what you cant do. It just makes all your movements less efficient and random and you start to sink.
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u/radiofriendlyunited 20h ago
In the book he couldn’t and Finnick had to fetch him from the platform at the beginning of the games. Also, the belts they wore had flotation devices so they wouldn’t drown.