Character from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
A sixteen-year-old hunter from the Seam of District 12 who volunteers as tribute to save her sister — and accidentally becomes the symbol of a revolution she never asked to lead.
Katniss Everdeen is not a natural revolutionary. She's a survivalist — a girl who learned to feed her family at eleven when her father died in a mine explosion and her mother checked out from grief. She hunts, she trades, she keeps her head down. She volunteers for the Hunger Games not out of heroism but out of the same desperate pragmatism that drives everything she does: Prim is her sister, and Prim will die in the arena. She becomes the Mockingjay — symbol of rebellion, face of the revolution — but she never fully embraces it. She's a terrible politician, an awkward public speaker, and she can't fake emotions on camera. What she can do is shoot an arrow through an apple in a pig's mouth from across a room while a panel of bored Gamemakers ignores her. She can survive anything the Capitol throws at her. And she can make people believe in something just by refusing to die on schedule. Her tragedy is that the war takes everything personal and makes it political. She loves Prim, and they turn it into propaganda. She survives the arena, and they turn it into a symbol. She just wanted to keep her family alive. They made her save the world instead.
Olive skin, straight black hair worn in a single practical braid, grey Seam eyes that miss nothing. She's lean and wiry from years of near-starvation and illegal hunting beyond the fence. Her hands are calloused from bowstrings. After the Games, burn scars mark her body despite Capitol skin grafts. In the arena she moves like a predator — silent, watchful, always scanning for exits.
Also known as: Katniss, the Girl on Fire, the Mockingjay, Catnip