The Hunger Games rant

Just a heads up to those who haven't read all three of The Hunger Games novels, this will potentially spoil everything for you.

To say that I'm emotionally distraught by the ending to The Hunger Games final novel would be an understatement. I'm completely shattered. I can't stop thinking about it. I run through scenarios in my head, think about what I would have done in that situation, wonder about what happened to side characters like Gale and Katniss' mother and Haymitch.
The strange thing is that I've read the books before.
It's not like any of the plots and sub-plots in the novel have changed, but I wasn't changed by the novel when I read it three years ago.

A few things stand out to me, for a few different reasons.
 I find myself taking the side of 'Team Peeta', as it were, in the fight for Katniss' love. In my last reading I was appalled when Gale is sidelined and Katniss gradually falls for Peeta, but now it makes a lot of sense. Peeta represents something bigger than himself. He is not just a young man, forced to kill or be killed, he represents something good in the world. Throughout all the books, Peeta is the one who takes the worst of everything. I didn't notice it the first time, because the novels are written from Katniss' point of view, but from start to finish, Peeta is the most damaged.
 He is picked for the Hunger Games, something that is worth pausing over in itself. As a bakers son, he no special skills. As soon as his name was called, he would know he was going to die. If that doesn't make you think, after he survived the Hunger Games, Katniss, who he loves, avoids him like the plague. He gets captured by the Capitol at the end of the second book and is tortured to the point where he believes he has to kill Katniss to be safe. While captured, the Capitol bomb his home, killing every single member of his family. Despite all this, and with Katniss not knowing if she loves Gale or him, when given the opportunity of revenge, he says no.
When President Coin tells them to vote on sending the children of the Capitol into the arena for one final Hunger Games, he votes no. Tortured by the Capitol, his family completely and utterly destroyed, he votes no to putting anyone else through what he had to. Katniss doesn't. She votes yes, and her reason for it is 'for Prim', her sister.
This is the second thing that stands out for me. Katniss is not a hero by the end. She's a hero in the first book, volunteering for her younger sister, taking care of Peeta in arena. In the second book, she decides to sacrifice herself to make sure Peeta survives, but the third she is almost completely focused on the assassination of President Snow.
 Yeah, we hear that all the time, all this stuff about anti-heroes, but by the time the book is done, she is not a hero at all. She's just the main character. When you reach the final chapter of the final novel, Katniss is an emotionally destroyed, suicidally depressed, nightmare-haunted, morphine-addicted 17-year-old. She demands justice for what was done, when others damaged more than her choose not to repeat history.
The one thing I think she does do right is she chooses to kill Coin instead of President Snow, essentially saving the lives of all the Capitol children she had condemned minutes before.

Suzanne Collins has captured something in a teen novel that I think most authors don't want to, and that is the horror of war. Not one character survives the war intact, which I think is very intentional. Katniss and Peeta are the most obvious, but then you start into the minor characters and see that it's true. Finnick dies, Gale loses the fight for Katniss and is more than likely haunted by whether his bomb idea was the one that killed Prim, Katniss' sister. Katniss' mother is left without a home, she lost her youngest child and her eldest daughter is a complete wreck.
Presidents' Coin and Snow both die, as does Cinna. Katniss' prep team are all tortured.
If one person was going to make it out somewhat intact, it would have been Prim, but as her character develops in the last book, Prim shows that she's all grown up, she understands more, and then...she is burnt to death.
Thanks Collins.