The Thing Peeta Valued And Feared Losing Most In The Games Was His Humanity. That The Games Would Change

i dont think my mental state can handle "class of 2013" by mitski right now

Katniss described Peeta as a dandelion in the spring. Lucy Gray described Coriolanus as pure as the driven snow.

I want to talk about Gaul and her view of the Games as a representation of human nature, which for her is that human beings are bad at their core, so when they are stripped of civility (even if you can argue the tributes were never treated with any civility at all anyway), they are violent and will do anything to "fall on top".

And that's very interesting to me because as much as Gaul thinks the Games are a representation of that, Leftie (on TikTok) explained very well that the 10th Games are filled with people proving her wrong again and again by showing mercy and compassion in their own ways - case in point, Reaper giving the fallen tributes a proper homage in their deaths, Lucy caring for Jessup, and even Lamina killing Marcus out of mercy.

More than that though, I think it's so ironically dry of Suzanne Collins to put Snow - civil, educated, polite, well-bred young Coriolanus Snow - as the one who actually has those instincts to be violent and do anything he can to win ("Snow always falls on top") in situations which are nothing like the desperate environment of the Games, but in the society they deem so superior - the Capital.

But even more than that, the more I think about the true State of Nature, the more I see Doctor Gaul's beliefs as extremely frail from a biological point of view: when we talk about human's state of nature, the closest we can get to observe that today are native tribal communities, as some scientists do to understand better how our ancestors lived.

But what we can observe from this too is that (and we all learned that before) human beings are social beings - we need a community (or a support net, as we can call them) in order to thrive, but community only forms with connection. If we were selfish, individualist, and violently prone to survive (bad, in fewer words) in our cores, then it'd make no sense for us to be social creatures because we wouldn't be able to form connections deep enough to live in communities.

Not ones that thrived as much as we did, anyway. We'd most likely be lone creatures. Instead, our understanding of community is directly linked to safety, both emotional and physical, to the point where our own language reflects that: the found family trope being so popular in books, poor families being more likely to stick together as an act of self-defense, the fact we love so much to consume friendships in artistic works, the instinctual need to find protection on other people when we feel threatened, and so on and so on.

"A child rejected by the village will burn it to feel its warmth", meaning not only that we need a community to thrive, but its lack leaves deep scarring in a person's character.

So when it comes to the state of nature of men, I'd say I believe much more in societal corruption - like Frankenstein - rather than a violent or bad nature by itself, unless of course, there's a natural precedent for such (like a biological inability to form deep emotional connections).

SotR is a realisation. A realisation that the rebellion didn’t start with Katniss. That all the people we see supporting her or helping her have all been wanting to fight but they’ve been failing. That there weren’t merely “rumours” of a revolution but there were many active plans playing out and failing.

It’s a reminder that the perfect Hunger Games we saw in the first hg book was an illusion because we had Katniss as our narrator. We didn’t have Haymitch, hell, we didn’t even have someone like Peeta because these people played the games. Katniss didn’t.

Katniss was introduced to us as a mad, simple, naive girl who literally only survived because of others. She didn’t know how much her taking Prim’s place mattered because she didn’t realise what it meant to everyone who came before her. To everyone who had heard rumours of how the last District 12 victor actually fought his games. No, Katniss had just kept her head down, hunting and providing for her family.

See, she grew up way before the Games got to her. She’d already lived through her dad’s death and watched it destroy her once lively mom. Haymitch didn’t have to go through that. Lucy Gray didn’t have to go through that. They were both angry, yes, but at the Capitol. Katniss? She was first and foremost angry at her mom. At her dad. She knew who was to blame but she had too much to do and deal with to think about that. She was already jaded in a way that the Games couldn’t touch.

Peeta? He was Haymitch. He knew what he was getting into and realised he was just on a chess board with no control. So, he adapted. He played the knight, the rook, the king, the pawn. Katniss? She just… did. Changing directions, not playing the piece she was assigned because she didn’t realise that’s what was going on. Remember her surprise at the crown twisting into two after the Games?? She was so oblivious. Until Catching Fire where everything caught up to her. Where everything so many other people had been waiting and working for caught up to her.

SotR is a history book. Rewritten and edited and published as a piece of fact. SotR is a mirror and it’s a reflection of what actually happens vs what ends up being shown. SotR is the playbook of those in control of any and every kind of media that we come in touch with. SotR is a wake up call and I truly don’t know how many will see it as such.

“what radicalized you?” bitch what made you a stupid asshole?

i truly disagree with and resent the idea that “everlark is what snowbaird could have been”. rachel zegler said it recently in an interview, and in my opinion it couldn’t be farther from the truth. describing coryo as “a kind eyed blond” is so inaccurate it’s laughable. even in the film tigris says about the hatred in coryo’s eyes. from even the beginning of the ballad of songbirds and snakes novel, we see how highly coryo deifies power. from the start, he keeps up his image as a charming but humble rich boy, regardless of the fact he’s starving and penniless, simply because its the best way for him to maintain control over others.

coryo only ever is kind to others when it is convenient for him - take sejanus for example. his parents gave him gifts and fed him and treated him with great respect (to the eventual point of leaving him their fortune when sejanus dies) simply because coryo pretended to care about their son to receive those effects.

with lucy, it was, to use her own words “written in the stars” that their relationship would end up in ruin, because ultimately coryo was never a person who valued love over power. i stand by the fact that while he may have cared for and loved her, the ultimate truth is that that love did not trump (in coriolanus’ values) the inheritance of power he believed he was owed generationally, from his father and every other snow before him. he would have done anything to get back to where he “belonged”, in the capitol. even had she not run from him, it would have happened a different way eventually.

SHJDJFN STOP PUTTING SNOW ON A PEDESTAL AND SAYING U CAN FIX HIM NO YOU CAN’T HE’S HORRIBLE!!!!!!!!!!! THE WORST!!!!!!

i don’t think any love of his would have led him to a redemption!!

I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"

Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.

Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :

They make a hateful, fascist statement

Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong

We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process

We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go

They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.

Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.

Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)

Guandalupe Nettel, from her novel titled "Stillborn," originally published in 2020

#love gay people

Fun family story: when my aunt was marrying her wife everyone was really excited but also dreading it because my aunt is known for her insanely long speeches so everyone knew her vows would be like 9 hours long so when it came time for her to say her vows she had a shit ton of cue cards in her hands and even her wife started groaning and my aunt took a deep inhale and then unravelled all the cue cards which were taped together and they all just read ‘HOT DAMN’ in giant letters and those were my aunts vows.

This YouTube comment has been on my mind since I finished SOTR so this is what I came up with:

Lucy Gray was the mockingbird, living on the outskirts of district 12 and was there at the wrong time when they were forced to stay there after the Dark Days. They were subjected to the Capitol’s politics despite not being a part of Panem, technically speaking. Lucy Gray became part of the Games and, likewise, the mockingbird became affiliated with the Capitol through the jabberjay’s release into the woods, but it still continued to sing its own song.

Haymitch was the jabberjay, a Capitol tool that did what it had to in order to survive. The Capitol thought they could control them, but they retaliated in the form of rebellion. Haymitch refused to be a piece in their game and tried to end it, and the jabberjay, in the eyes of the Capitol, created a freak of nature that showed the Capitol’s lack of complete control.

Katniss was the mockingjay, a slap in the face of the Capitol, something that was never meant to exist. Together, the song of the mockingbird that lived on for generations and the stubbornness of the jabberjay that refused to die, the mockingjay had the best of both worlds. It was a symbol of rebellion and unity.