Hey When You Make Posts, I Just Want You To Know, Thou/thee/thy/thine/ye Are Like He/you(object)/your/yours/you(subject)

I think what I found most fascinating about Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is the brilliant exploration it makes on empathy.

Capitol citicents have been programed to ignore their empathy towards the people on the districts. We see that on Coriolanus and Tigris's grandma, she is incapable of feeling it and feels entitled to despise them as creatures naturally inferior to her.

Generational thinking is vital to the prevalence of long term propaganda.

Snow and Tigris on the other hand, are orphan, their parents didn't have enough time to teach them to ignore that empathy.

And they have lived much more precarization as kids than their grandmother, and therefore have more in common with the people of the districts than with the adults in the capitol. Is easier fot them to feel empathy towards the tributes.

If Snow and Tigris had allowed themselves to dive into that empathy, to let it drive them, their children would have been even more empathetic then them. Their generation was already different, already putting in question all the propaganda, we see that in many instances with Coriolanus's classmates.

But all it took was one of them with the determination to think like the adults, one of them with the determination to perpetuate the order, one of them choosing to be driven by pride instead of empathy, for the chain of empathy to be broken.

And the system endulged him, impulse him to power. Because he could feed into it, help it evolve and survive. Because that's what systems like those do. They scratch and kill and make bloodbaths to keep themselves alive. They create their own keepers.

Coriolanus Snow knew exactly what he was doing. He knew the people from the districs were human like him, he knew on some level they were deserving of his empathy. He chose not to have any for them. The perpetuators of the propaganda are hardly belivers of it themselves. They pull the strings because they know what they are made of, what would happen if someone broke them.

They want the power because are able to recognize everyone else is blind to it.

It was honestly bone chilling to read.

pure as the driven snow is such a cunty song cause imo lucygray did not in fact need, love or trust snow and the whole song is a way for her to kinda assure the readers that she will be completely fine on her own.

The first real conversation Katniss has with Peeta is when he tells her that he wants to die as himself, that he doesn't want the games to change him into something he's not, and that he wants to keep his identity and prove he's more than just a piece in their games because that's the only thing he has left to care about.

The first time we see Lucy Gray she sings a song that basically says that nothing they could take from her was worth keeping. "Can't take my past. Can't take my history... You can't take my charm. You can't take my health."

The capitol has taken everything from them both, but at the same time, they could never take away who they are.

They are both likeable charismatic and funny, with the kindest hearts, and incredibly loyal to the people they care about.

At the same time, everything they do before the games, and during is calculated. Lucy Gray singing a love song and winning the hearts of the capitol. Peeta confesses he's in love with his district partner, therefore cementing her identity as desirable. Both of them know how to sway people with words, how to charm people, and how to manipulate crowds. Neither of them has any problem doing so to keep themselves, and the people they love safe.

Lucy Gray's song The Old Therebefore, about learning how to love and live her life to the fullest before death, a final and calculated stroke in a last-ditch effort to save herself from the arena. This evokes enough emotion in the watchers to get them to rise to their feet and plead for her life alongside Snow.

Snow, watching the 74th and preparing for the 75th Hunger Games sees Lucy Gray in Katniss. A young girl, from the 12th district. Unafraid at the reaping. Selling a false love story, manipulating a boy who loves her in order to get out and supporting the revolution with the mockingjay as her symbol.

He threatens her family to get her to sell that she and Peeta are in love, to prevent the revolution, because obviously, she's pretending. He's had experience with a girl just like her before. He has no doubt that she has the acting ability to sell this story because clearly, she manipulated the first Hunger Games in her favor, the same way Lucy Gray manipulated him.

Watching the interviews for the 75th Hunger Games he realizes-

Katniss is just an impulsive girl, in a Mockingjay dress she didn't know about, made by someone who supports the revolution.

Peeta is a boy who has the ability to move people with just his words. He made Katniss desirable, he was the one who sold the love story, and he was the one to make their romance seem real. Katniss only started the revolution because she would rather risk dying with him than live without him. A concept President Snow was completely unfamiliar with. And it is with all these realizations crashing around him Peeta drops the baby bomb. He knows the baby's not real, and so does Snow. But it evokes enough emotion in the watchers to get them to rise to their feet and plead for the lives of the tributes.

Is it Lucy Gray or Peeta?

By the time Snow realizes he's made a mistake, it's too late.

Peeta is still charming and manipulating the capitol. Katniss is in love.

He goes up against a kindhearted boy expecting to beat Sejanus again, only to find out that it's Lucy Gray he's fighting; knowing he will never be able to escape their ghosts.

-from a conversation i had with @grandtyphoonpoetry breaking down every character in the hunger games.

what makes Snow such a formidable villain within THG universe is that nothing he does was set in stone. there was no sense of inevitability about his actions and his brutality. Snow had enough perspective of poverty, capital cruelty, district hunger and not to mention his own arena experience’ and yet he actively chose at every moment to stray from natural goodness. its even more terrifying in the sense that he had the ability to care. Snow is not a mindless sociopath, he displays feelings to others such as sejanus, lucy grey and tigris but ultimately he will always choose himself. his ability to betray those he cared about in order yo advance himself makes him so much more than the stereotypical villain who is forced into his actions.

Okay, small detail regarding THG series epilogue, regarding Katniss and Peeta's family:

So if we were to take the timeline of Katniss and Peeta's parents, Katniss's Mom was 16/17 during the 50th Hunger Games and Katniss was born (74-16 = 58) during the year of the 58th Hunger Games, making her mom's age about 24/25. On the other hand, Peeta's parents had 2 kids before him (one is maybe 19 and the other 17/18) so they would've been approximately 22/23. If we were to take a book detail, Madge Undersee, her Mom whose aunt died at the 50th Hunger Games was maybe the same age as Katniss's Mom and had Madge at 24/25.

But for Katniss and Peeta, it took 15 years to have kids, making them 32/33.

So I can't help but wonder- why on earth is everybody complaining about Katniss and Peeta having a very "conventional happy ending" when unlike their parents who had children much younger than they were, they can have children without the fear of them ever participating in The Hunger Games and yet have taken so long to consider having children.

Trauma is real, people. And that is seen in the fact that Madge's Mom has trauma of headaches from possibly losing her twin and something else, but Katniss having faced more trauma (2 Hunger Games and a War where she too lost her sister), took her time to have children in a world that was supposedly safe. Another thing is Katniss feeling her daughter move within her which was absolutely terrifying, but having her gave her joy, because in some way, she reclaimed the caretaker that she became when Prim was born.

So technically, the epilogue shows how grief can coexist with love and how Katniss may never fully recover from the pain she has endured from losing her loved ones and the fear of having the world where her children safe and happy downslide into war again (much like our current times) will always taint her happy moments, but to live life well because others have made that happen at a personal cost is important.

What are people's thoughts on the epilogue?

i dont really get how some people can thirst over snow, like tom blyth was hand sculpted by the gods themselves but SNOW!?!? he was so evil from the get go, he hated the people from the districts like he was such an elitist and not to mention he went on to traffick and sell literal children. tbosas made my hatered for snow even stronger and i never thought that could ever happen.

time and time again i am reminded that resistance is and will always be a team effort.

no matter how much capitalism tries to push us away and shove individualistic competitive culture down out throats, we band together and wield our strongest weapon. we love and thats our greatest strength.

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

Rick: *actively puts Percy through more perilous situations by writing more pjo books*

Percy: RICKY WHEN I CATCH YOU RICKY