Maysilee’s Final Poster Wasn’t Her Death, It Was Her Pin Being The Face Of The Rebellion 25 Years

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.

when your circle small but y’all doomed by the narrative

OK well ill just keep putting jesse pinkman into my chemical romance until something else comes up

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.

Love love love the implication that Lucy Gray came back to haunt Coriolanus Snow in his last years of life, through her mockingjays, her songs, and her District, particularly Peeta.

I also can’t get out of my head the idea of an 80 something year old Snow absolutely haunted by the fact that every time Katniss Everdeen opens her mouth, Sejanus’ voice comes out.

Slowly getting back into my marauder's phase I AM SO BACK WOLFSTAR !!!!!!

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

its haunting honestly

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.)

Started rereading the Hunger Games series and I feel like it’s so overlooked how in 74th and 75th Hunger Games, we don’t know every Tribute’s names, with Katniss only referring to them by their District numbers but in TBOSAS, we knew every single Tribute by name. We associated them with the clothes they wore on the Reaping Day and Suzanne even goes so far as to describe how they looked, however briefly. We see these Tributes and we’re familiarized with them by the little tidbits provided to the mentors and to Snow and Lucy Gray. But we never get this in the original trilogy.

In two generations, President Snow alienated the Districts from each other so much that Katniss didn’t even care to know all the names of the Tributes sent into the Arena with her, with the exception being those who posed great risk against her safety and those she felt great compassion for (e.g. Cato, Thresh, Rue, Mags, Betee, Wiress etc.). Katniss even went so far as to call the D6 Tributes in the 75th Hunger Games morphlings, for their affinity to imbibe in the drugs that help them forget their own traumas (an incredibly hurtful description, in my own opinion, to be known by the qualities you hate the most about yourself). We never know the real name of the 74th D5 girl, with Katniss only referring to her as Foxface and we don’t even know Marvel’s name until we get to the second book and he was Katniss’ first personal kill. Katniss even kills the D4 girl in the books with the same tracker jacker venom that killed Glimmer and yet still, we don’t know her name. We are so removed from the identity of the other Tributes that we don’t even know what some of them looked like beyond brief descriptions of mangled bodies and dead Tributes in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia.

And, the thing is, Suzanne established the importance of names in the series. Even in real life, we recognize the importance of being named. It is a fundamental aspect of being human. If you’re ever in a perilous situation where a person might be placing your life in danger, we’re told to remind the person that you’re human. “Keep saying your name, how old you are, where you came from. Remind them you are a human being just like them.” Before any propaganda can work against a group of people, refusing to recognize a person’s name is the first step to dehumanization. And just like the people of the Districts, we don’t care enough about the other Tributes to even want to know their names. Their propaganda worked on us, the readers.

In two generations, President Snow completely wiped out any sense of familiarity and camaraderie the Districts may have shared with the other. In two generations, Snow sowed the seeds of distrust and division into the Districts so deeply that even we, the readers, were affected by the effects of Capitol propaganda. In two generations, the Districts ceased to genuinely care about the others beyond the vague sense of injustice they feel for their shared plight. It’s why Career Districts don’t seem to care about killing the other Tributes. How can you care, to show your compassion and humanity, when you can barely see them as people? Yes, they may have been in the Arena with you. Yes, they may have been starved and beaten and forced into labor like you were. Yes, they might be children just like you. Yes, they might be subjected to the same deplorable system that turned you into virtual slaves. But they are not your friends. They are not your allies. They are strange, with different customs and traditions that you have. You do not share the same values. They do not care about you. At the first chance they get, they will kill you with your bare hands and they will do it with alacrity if it meant their survival. There can only be one Victor and it can’t be them. It has to be you.