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petruchio · 3 years

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Im rereading thg and just read your post abt mockingjay right as gale tells katniss he loves her in the second book. And I gotta admit, I understood why ppl thought that katniss and peeta were good together, I agreed. But I still thought that gale and katniss should’ve gotten together. Yet, idk how I missed that gale /doesn’t see all lives as equal/. Like yeah it’s right in my face and shit, unfortunately I’ve never been the most observant. Your post though, has just changed my whole view on the love angle, bc peeta is the exact type of person katniss needs to help free her from the whole social divide. So like, thx so much.

But I would like to ask, how does the capital NOT benefit from the games? Is it bc they just give the districts even more fuel for the rebellion? Or am I missing smth else? Once again, thank you for that wonderful post!!

what a kind ask!!!! i’m so so so glad that you liked my post anon!! literally i had to stand up and walk around my room before i could answer because this made me so happy hahaha. (and i don’t think it’s a case of being unobservant necessarily!! i think mockingjay is really subtle in its commentary at times and it can be really confusing.)

i think that the captiol doesn’t benefit from the games for a few reasons.

the first reason is the one katniss lays out in her quote during her recovery: “i think that peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences.” i think this is really one of the key quotes in the entire series and one of the things that the movies really warped by casting adults--that katniss and peeta and gale and all the tributes who get involved with this are just kids. and i think the point more broadly is that any society that can so easily detach itself from the lives of its children in the name of entertainment is so morally corrupt that it cannot hold. so the captiol citizens really aren’t benefitting. they’ve been brainwashed to believe that the lives of children are expendable in the name of entertainment--they’re disgraceful in the callousness, to be sure, but it’s also a tragedy to imagine that they don’t even see this as wrong. (and i’m talking here about the regular citizens of the captiol. not the gamemakers, but the people who watch the games without considering the deeper implications of what they’re watching. they’re not benefitting from being able to view human children and their deaths as vehicles for entertainment. i think, morally, they’re suffering.)

the other thing i would argue about the captiol is: are the citizens of the captiol happy? the thing is--i don’t think they are. i think the implications are subtle, but one thing i would argue (somewhat controversially) is that many of the captiol citizens are as much victims of this system as those in the districts. to be clear, in no way am i saying that the citizens of the captiol are right, or deserve our sympathy more than the citizens of the districts. but they are still slaves to the system in their own right. i think all the scenes where katniss is getting “beautified” kind of exemplify this, but i think it’s harder to see this because for most of us, what katniss is going through isn’t that strange. but thinking about when she gets her legs waxed, or her eyebrows done, and she hates it. like it’s uncomfortable, it hurts, it makes her feel terrible. and that’s just something that’s just normal for the citizens of the capitol. so is that good? is a society good that commands us to rip ourselves to shreds in the name of beauty? that commands our children to tear the hair out of their bodies so that the adults around them can find them more beautiful?

i think it’s really hard to read the hunger games this way, because that doesn’t seem strange to us. our modern celebrity culture nearly demands it. it doesn’t seem odd that britney spears, at age 16, was asked about her virginity by 30 year old paparazzi. it doesn’t seem odd to us that millie bobby brown was wearing strappy heels and black satin dresses and smoky eye looks to awards shows before her 15th birthday. because that’s the society we live in. the capitol seems terrifying until we realize that we’re not that far off from it. katniss talks about people dyeing themselves blue, implanting things into their bodies, and tattooing themselves all over in the name of beauty--painful procedures that warp their appearance and make them nearly unrecognizable.

and so, i think, the hunger games asks us to think twice: is this worth it? is it all worth it to say, simply, beauty is pain? to place so much value on external appearance that we forget our very humanity? the citizens of the captiol are not benefitting from this kind of society. they’re suffering from it. and so are we.

#anonymous #answered #thg #more hunger games essays?? MORE????#thg thoughts

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letterstomilen · 3 years

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i discuss the classification of igneous petrology as you fall asleep during my lecture (PART 1) (ASMR)

Childe/Zhongli, Alternate Universe (read part 2 here) When Childe's younger sister tells him about the volunteer at the library, he does not make the connection between that and his new favorite ASMR YouTuber, Rex Lapis.

Childe has a very effective method of getting through college. His little sister, who’s caught him making coffee at three in the morning on more than one occasion the past week alone, would beg to differ.

“You’re the best older brother,” she starts off, and he’s sure she’s trying to convince herself more than him at this point, “but you need to fix your sleeping habits.” Then, because she’s his little sister, she’d flash him a smile and pat his shoulder reassuringly.

(The comment is not lost on him though. He understands his sleeping situation will eventually wear him down if it hadn’t already, but he believes if he’ll drink a coffee every morning and a Monster every night, he’ll get through three days. By the third day, he’ll hardly be coherent but that doesn’t matter because he’ll conk out for the next twelve hours and then repeat.)

“Don’t worry, Tonia,” he says, trying to sound as reassuring as possible as he contemplates whether it’s worth it or not to swallow a pill of 5-hour energy with his morning coffee. “Once break ends, I’ll get back to normal.”

“You said that six seasons ago.”

Childe frowns, trying to remember if his sleeping schedule was this dysfunctional last year. “Huh?”

“The Walking Dead seasons,” Tonia clarifies, as if she’s not twelve years old and the show is for grown adults. He thinks. He hasn’t checked Commonsensemedia ever since La Signora labeled him as a “helicopter parent” and his Netflix tab has been playing How to Get Away with Murder as background noise for the past few weeks.

Isn’t it a show about zombies though? Tonia’s sheepish smile tells it all, because it’s the same exact guilty look he had when he got caught red-handed as a kid.

(Once he remembers later, Childe promises himself, he’ll check out The Walking Dead.)

“Oh. Well. I have a lot of shows to catch up on, you know. Not to mention a ton of my professors gave me reading for over the break.”

A half lie. They did give him a lot of reading because each professor assumed that their classes were his only one, and with seven days left, he still has a textbook worth of reading to go through. But there are no shows that Childe would sacrifice his precious sleep for. As a matter of fact, he would love to sleep. He’s spent the majority of his classes back in high school sleeping and faking attention, saving his grade at the last minute — it was quite the extreme sport really, if he says so himself.

Whenever he tries to sleep recently, his thoughts run at several hundred miles per hour, and he spends several hours staring at the ceiling before succumbing to the computer at his desk and watching trashy movies. At this point, he must have gone through the entire romance comedy list on Netflix. (Not a proud point in his life but if anybody ever wanted him to give a list of best to worst romance comedy movies, he now has one.)

Tonia, on the other hand, isn’t incredibly convinced.

Admittedly, the excuse was lame. Also, he can’t easily lie to his little sister, who’s far shrewder than he takes her for at times.

“You never start your reading in advance. You like to speed read it right before your class or watch a five-minute video on the chapters while your teachers take attendance. But that’s… uh, ‘a bad work ethic.’” Tonia looks immensely proud of herself as she says this, finishing it off with, “Zhongli told me that.”

“Zhongli?” he repeats, trying to remember if that’s one of her classmates or some stranger that’s hoping to kidnap his sister.

“The guy that volunteers at the library sometimes. He recommended me a loot of good books to read, but he talks like an old man.”

“How old?” Childe can tell she’s enjoying this — talking about her new friend at the library that he’ll probably have to run a background check on.

“Like he’s in his sixties or something. But he looks… actually, he looks your age! And he’s a student too. I told him all about you.”

Well, that doesn’t sound very reassuring coming from the mouth of a twelve-year-old. He’s not sure if that translates to his social security number, his current dilemma, or just that he’s her older brother.

“Like all of the stories you told me when I was a kid. And then when Lumine came to pick me up, she stayed to show him pictures of you too.”

“Of course she did,” he mumbles, ruffling her hair. One of these days he’s going to move without telling his classmates and the twins won’t enter his apartment unannounced. (But Tonia adores their company and the stories they tell her far too much for him to actually do it. But that doesn’t mean he’s above making threats when they tell his little sister about the bet he made about white-out and how it could dye hair. The jury is still out on this one.) “She’s just mad because I get away with it and she doesn’t. But don’t do it yourself. It’s a bad habit,” he adds, remembering that he should at least try to be a good influence on his younger sister when he can.

“Okaaay,” she says unconvincingly, before shaking her hair and running off to her room with lunch he prepared for her.

Watching her close the door and no doubt continue her binge of The Walking Dead, he takes out his phone and texts Lumine.

Childe