It's The Things We Love Most, That Destroy Us.

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.)

Theres something to be said about Sejanus recognizing the peoples’ humanity and using it to defend them, while Snow saw that same humanity and used it against them

rebog

The thing Peeta valued and feared losing most in the games was his humanity. That the games would change him, strip him of his kindness and heart. Death was never his fear. Because Peeta knew early on he likely wouldn’t survive and he also knew that he was willing to die if it increased Katniss’ chances of winning. Again, when he’s pulled into the quarter quell it’s not death he fears. Never death. His humanity is the part of himself he values most, and it is what Snow takes from him with the high jacking. But despite that being his biggest concern from the start of the series, the fear of losing himself and becoming the monster the capitol wants, I have no doubt Peeta would lose himself over and over again if it meant Katniss was safe. Because while Peeta maintaining his humanity is his biggest concern regarding himself, his biggest concern in general is Katniss’ safety, and her survival has always outranked his own needs in terms of importance.

Everyone has been focusing mostly on Snow shitting his pants when he heard "The Hanging Tree" sung by Katniss but if I remember correctly, that clip of her singing wasn't transmitted in the Capitol so it's unknown if Snow saw it. But there is another clip of Katniss singing one of Lucy Gray's songs that Snow definitely saw and it definitely haunted him.

The Meadow Song.

And you know what probably made him shit his pants even more? How Katniss not only sang one of Lucy Gray's songs but she also honoured a dead tribute. In that moment he wasn't only haunted by Lucy Gray's ghost, he was also haunted by Sejanus'.

i’m obsessed with the significance of the hunger games’ utilization of food as a metaphor for a character, their perspective, and their story. on that note, coriolanus and tigrid witnessing a starving man eating his maid’s leg.

understandably, a large amount of coryo’s food metaphors are centered around his distaste for food he considers undesirable. or, food that doesn’t live up to that which he is entitled to.

but i’m stuck on cannibalism. coriolanus knows what its like to be starving. he has never literally eaten another person, can barely wrap his head around eating “poor people food”. but coriolanus knew, from a young age, that desperation turned a man into an animal. he decided he would never succumb to that hunger, would never let desperation control him. yet he still deluded himself into believing he killed in self defense, that he killed to survive.

coriolanus says the hunger games are intended to reveal what humans become when they are desperate to survive. president snow somehow convinced himself that district-born were subhuman, yet he acknowledges their humanity as a definitive statement. the purpose of his greatest achievement; turning humans into animals.

humans, if starved for long enough, will become cannibals, or die trying to be anything else. the districts have eaten each other, and then their own tails.

coriolanus, with an infinitely widening margin of what is and is not starvation, kills whenever he is threatened with the possibility of hunger. somehow, he thinks this is different. that he is not terrified of starving just like every child he has locked into a cage to secure his own fullness.

eat his own words, eat his past, eat himself whole; both the starving man and the maid. maybe he died realizing, for the last time, that he’s always been an animal. his final exhale around a mouthful of blood.

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.

I wish someone would hurry up and invent a game where I help a woman who is permanently dripping mud get a makeover and leave her shitty boyfriend, or perhaps an army game where I lead my troops through basic arithmetic functions such as +10 and x7

rereading catching fire and remember the part where snow ambushed katniss in her own house and was letting her know that he was keeping track on her/knows everything she’s doing even out in woods? this is probably obvious but i just realized that was probably because of lucy gray? snow probably bugged the hell out of district 12 the second he had the power to do so because you know he was paranoid like that. he didn’t want to leave any possibility that she was still alive out there, and as years go by, he forgot all about it until katniss beat the game lmao

"He's still smiling when he settles the second on my head, but his eyes, just inches from mine, are as unforgiving as a snake's.

That's when I know that even though both of us would have eaten the berries, I am to blame for having the idea. I'm the instigator. I'm the one to be punished." (THG pg 348)

Snow ignored Lucy Gray's flaws. He looked past them thinking that she belonged to him and therefore it was forgivable. He could look past it by saying she just didn't understand. He rationalized it for her in order to not have to feel he was compromising his own fucked up morals.

But it's the very thing he rats Sejanus out for. He's a part of the rebellion and Snow can't look past it. Both Sejanus and Lucy Gray dislike the Capitol but Snow ignores it for Lucy Gray.

He also pretty much ignores Peeta, the boy who reminds us so much of Lucy Gray. He's a performer, a lover at heart, and more importantly he's just along for the ride.

Katniss is who Snow blames. She's another Sejanus. She's set on tearing down the Captiol and watching it burn. I was just so shocked to find this beautifully reflected back in the original Hunger Games book one.

Suzanne Collins has such a deep understanding of her own material. It's rare to see books hold up so long and even more so to get a good add on to a series years later.

But still you can find a ton of small moments in the original trilogy that hammers home what tbosbas says.