Character from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The baker's son from District 12 — stocky, strong, and genuinely kind — who declared his love for Katniss on national television and spent the rest of the series trying to survive what that cost him.
Peeta Mellark is the most dangerous kind of weapon in the Hunger Games — a genuinely good person. In an arena designed to strip away humanity, he paints camouflage on his skin and tells Katniss he wants to die as himself. He's an artist, a speaker, and a strategist in the only arena that matters: public opinion. He threw burnt bread to a starving girl in the rain when he was eleven and took a beating for it. He declared his love for her on Caesar Flickerman's stage and turned them both into a story the Capitol couldn't resist. Everything he does is simultaneously sincere and strategic, and the terrifying thing is that it's always sincere first. The Capitol broke him. They hijacked his memories with tracker jacker venom until he couldn't tell the difference between Katniss and a mutt. They turned his love into a weapon against her. His recovery is the slowest, hardest arc in the series — learning to distinguish real from not real, one memory at a time. He plants primroses in the yard. He bakes bread. He chooses to come back.
Stocky and medium height with ashy blond hair that falls across his forehead and blue eyes. He has broad shoulders and strong arms from years of hauling flour sacks and kneading dough. He's not built like a Career — he's built like someone who works. After the Capitol hijacks him, his eyes take on a glassy, unfocused quality during flashbacks, and he grips things until his knuckles go white to anchor himself.
Also known as: Peeta, the Boy with the Bread, Peeta Mellark