Y'all, the concerns expressed in this post summarize a lot of the reasons why I'm having mixed feelings about the casting issues for Catching Fire. When the people in charge of casting The Hunger Games decided to make Katniss white, they opened the floodgates for a lot more skeezy racial issues than just the most obvious one-- issues that they could have avoided by sticking close to the book descriptions of Katniss and the other characters from District 12. I think keeping more of Rue's conversations with Katniss, and thus more of the development of their friendship and of Rue's individual character and also more of the information about what life was like for dark-skinned workers in District 11 under Capitol rule, would have helped with this too, but that might be the influence of my general NEEDS MORE RUE bias.