So, In Case Anyone Is Curious About The Whole "Easter Ceasefire" Thing Putin Promised...

The way Haymitch constantly had to reassure us that he "only liked Maysilee as a sister" was kinda annoying. Can you tell Suzanne doesn't want them to be shipped together?

Isttfg, it's like when Nina Dobrev left The Vampire Diaries, and Bonnie and Damon had to refer to each other as "my best friend" every fucking time they shared a frame.

Since being angry about Severance seems to have turned me from a lurker into a poster, here, have a very cursed HP theory*.

Slughorn has tried to create a horcrux - and failed miserably at that. The idea is that Slughorn is "deeply ashamed" because he taught metaphorical Hitler how to create metaphorical nukes, but it doesn't work. By the time Voldemort asked Slughorn about horcruxes, he had already done all possible research and was clearly intending to do some soul-splinching. So a much closer analogy would be a Hitler asking a scientist: "Look, I'm definitely gonna nuke one city, do you think I would be able to nuke one more after that?"

And Slughorn's reaction was more or less "Dude, what the fuck". And then the infinitely charming little orphan Voldemort managed to convince Slughorn that his interest was exclusively theoretical.

So why the hell is Slughorn "deeply ashsamed", then? Ginny Weasley has done worse when compelled by Voldemort, but she seems to be able to shake it off.

So, my guess would be that Slughorn (who is an incredibly vain and self-serving character**) has tried to create a horcrux for himself. Maybe out of the stupid hourglass we see in the movie. But something didn't work. Slughorn is a potion master, so I suppose he would try to incapacitate his potential victim first. And then he either miscalculated the potion proportions or chickened out in the last moment. Third, much sinister option - he did manage to kill somebody but didn't have enough magical prowess to actually create a horcux. Now, that's something to be ashamed and shady about.

The potential horcrux:

*this should go without saying, but I do not support jk's horrible transphobic beliefs.

**this is not a criticism against the character or the actor, I actually love Broadbent in this role, he is one of the two good things about the sixth movie.

I keep rereading this paragraph, and it keeps hurting my brain. So, who is supposed to be homophobic in this society, Suzanne?

We are definitely meant to read it as "peacekeepers will harass you, but the D12 citizens are fine with you being gay."

Why, though?

Peacekeepers come from Capitol (or D2 that aspires to be as similar to the Capitol as possible), and we know from MJ that in order to shock the Capitol citizens you need to engage in something really scandalous, like incest.

(Meanwhile, Finnick's "clients" (i.e., rapists) are never specified to be exclusively women. Even Katniss, who is somewhat prudish, is bothered by the quick turnover of his "partners", not their genders.)

Do the peacekeepers go through an insensitivity training of some sorts? Does President Snow personally come to the training centres and explain what kind of bigots they need to be? How are those peacekeepers supposed to act if they later return to the Capitol?

I'm pretty sure Collins just aimed for the "police & authoritative state are homophobic" narrative, but it makes no sense if the Capitol itself is a sex-positive environment. Like, ussr (which is usually a template for the secular YA dystopias) outlawed homosexuality, but they used the "male homosexuality is a sickness, female homosexuality doesn't exist" explanation. Is that something Capitol tells the districts?

Homophobia might have developed under the guise of "replenishing the population after the war", which would make a lot of sense in a post-war Panem, but despite the excessive talks about propaganda and posters we see nothimg about "needing more people" or "having more kids" (as kids would later potentially become tributes). Also, that would surely affect the districts more than the Capitol.

"Fired from jobs" is even weirder. I would understand if D12 was a small and traditional community that persecuted queer people, especially if queerness was something associated with the Capitol and its decadence. But no, we are apparently meant to think that the D12 folk are not homophobic at all, even though there is a pretty clear social divide between the merchants and the Seam miners. Also, who is supposed to do the said firing? Peacekeepers function like an army, so they answer to their higher-ups in the Capitol. I can believe that D12's coal mines are also under the total control of the Capitol, but who is going to fire the window-maker (especially since D12 is very small, so it's unlikely they have more window-makers)? The sellers from the black market? The "goat man"? Are the merchants not in control of the employees in their stores? What about the family-owned businesses, like the Mellarks or the Donners?

"Arrested" finishes me. So, say, you get arrested for being queer. Then what? Are you going to be executed? That was never mentioned as a motivation to shoot / whip / detain someone, even though in CF we see a lot of peacekeepers' crackdowns on D12. Are you going to stay in jail? That's gonna cost Capitol a lot of money. Does D12 even have a jail (Lenore Dove was kept on a "peacekeepers' base" in SOTR)? Are you going to continue working in the mines, but without salary, if we are continuing the ussr metaphor?

More importantly, are gay teenagers more likely to be reaped?

Make it make sense///

Yes, it's a book for kids. But if my kid is old enough to read about war, rebelion, and teenagers killing each other with melee weapons, they are totally old enough to read about gay people.

Had to review a few essays several months ago. Some of them were clearly written by chat gpt, using words and phrases waaay above the students' levels.

We spent a whole lesson trying to make sense of those overcomplicated sentences later. The best grade (as well as my heart) went to the student who sincerely wrote, "I confess, I still use facebook because I want to see how ugly my classmates have become!"

"you shouldnt use ai for schoolwork because its not actually helpful" this is true "and anyways if you cant even write a 600 word essay then you're stupid and an idiot" well now i think we've gone too far in the wrong direction.

Sumy, Ukraine right now after russian strike 💔

I have a lot of complaints about THG, even more about SOTR. But I really, really appreciate Suzanne Collins making orange the colour of the revolution.

yep, how about trying to have a normal working week (from home or from the office) while getting like 8 hours of electricity per day (4 of them during the night, btw). also, keep in mind that water supply in some buildings depends on electricity as well, and modern apartment complexes don't have gas, so heating and cooking become a huge problem.

and all of that while being under constant barrage of rockets and shahed drones, the average Ukrainian experience :)

if I see another "how i survived the worst power outage in Europe", I will throw hands

It is totally unintentional, but a sad implication that Suzanne Collins established is that Haymitch was never too present, nor cared a lot about the other tributes. The tributes he mentored before Katniss and Peeta, so wholly unconnected to his personhood, who didn't remind him at all about the people he cared for, didn't get the Haymitch we see in the og trilogy. The implication, in the end, is that they get a mentor who's constantly drunk blubbering about his 16 year old dead girlfriend.

Maybe that's why I can never forgive Suzanne Collins when it comes to the retconning of his characterisation. The narrative gives him no chance but to love Katniss and Peeta, but the fact that virtually all of his problems lead to Lenore Dove and not to the kids he had to see die... not only does it take so much of his depth, but tells you that the other kids never had a chance in the first place. Haymitch losing hope on getting his tributes home year by year is one thing, but never having cared in the first place makes his character so one dimensional, and takes away so much about the importance of every tribute despite their loss in the Games.

Maybe I'm just a dumb and bitter atheist but I don't really want to hear all the takes about how "good" and "woke pope" Francis was, and the retrospectives on his time as pope are going to be insufferable. He was another one who perpetuated the horrors of the church, and covered it with a thin layer of paint that made him slightly more sensible to a mid-2010s brain. He still covered for abusive priests, he still hated queer people and thought we were disfiguring ourselves, he still contributed to the modern right wing wave we're in.