What Gets Me Is The Implication That None Of The Previous Children On Their Way To Die Never Reminded

Was curious how far Ithaca was from troy today while listening to epic the musical and rereading the illiad and I found this map

I think odysseus would have been better just to walk😭

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.

sooooo

A few days ago, I put on a video of a girl watching Anora as a background. I'm Ukrainian, so watching the movie itself is not an option; too much exposure to the russian culture makes me wanna explode à la Soldier Boy.

And the only point that made the reviewer pause and talk for several minutes?

It wasn't the stereotypical "a girl from Eastern Europe is a stripper / an escort / a mail-order bride". It wasn't the way the russian oligarch-junior treated the main character. It wasn't the scene in which russian oligarch-senior's goons completely destroyed someone's small business.

Nope.

The watch-along girl was indignant because the main character used a slur while arguing with the goons. You know, the people who called her a whore, attacked her and tied her up.

Now, I'm usually the annoying woke friend who would tell you to avoid using people's nationality or sexual orientation as a means to offend them. But if the person in question is attacking you - you don't fucking owe them anything. You have no obligation to be polite or respectful towards a guy who tries to tie you up or a guy who calls a slur based on your profession.

I'm starting to understand how Mr "Why aren't you wearing a suit?" got elected though...

so, in case anyone is curious about the whole "Easter Ceasefire" thing putin promised...

yep, that's an app that notifies us about air alarms. 21:52 means 9:52 pm for those who use am / pm system, weeell after 6 pm.

oops, that's some rocket danger!

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.

fucking seriously???

I've been genuinely worried for this woman, and now you're telling me that she's a tolstoevsky lover?

urgh

and yes, I have a right to be angry about this, I was watching this episode while listening to the russian drones being shot down near my home

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.

Haymitch and character assassination bc I have ~thoughts~

Specifically, the thought I kept having while reading SOTR was "Suzanne, don't take my tragic fuckboys away from me!"

Like, I don't care about the shipping, I don't give a flying fuck about Maysilee hating the pin, I honestly just wanted to read more about the character I truly enjoyed in the original trilogy. The problem seems to be that Suzanne didn't understand why people liked Haymitch.

In THG, he was a rude and condescending alcoholic who had already become completely disillusioned with pretty much everything in his life. We knew he was cynical ("you're never gonna leave this train"), incredibly smart even despite years of drinking (he was able to convince both Katniss and Peeta that they were going to save another person) and manipulative (he was capable of selling the tragic romance between his tributes to the Capitol citizens).

These features made Haymitch a useful ally to the rebels and a character the readers would root for, but they were balanced out by his meanness and the way he seemed to despise everybody else. That's why Haymitch's Games were my favourite part of CF: here we get this snarky kid who sneers at everybody and proclaims himself to be the smartest. And then he goes and proves himself to be exactly what he claimed to be: an intelligent guy that managed to win using Capitol's technologies. It also gave us an understanding of what Haymitch's idea of himself had been. Unlike Katniss and Peeta, who constantly underestimated themselves, Haymitch knew what he was good at. He was a scrappy and snarky kid from a poor district, so he had no reason to respect the Capitol citizens or his fellow tributes (in THG we learnt from Katniss that people knew virtually nothing about life in other districts) and was not afraod to show it.

And here comes SOTR, and Haymitch goes "oh, I only know how to make moonshine and maaaaybe something about mechanisms". So where did his vast knowledge come from? Did he go to a nightschool in between his drinking sessions in D12? Did Lenore Dove's braincells leave her body and attach themselves to Haymitch after her death?

Yes, people tend to be a lot smarter at 41 than they used to be at 16, but we were shown in CF that Haymitch was incredibly intelligent, why take that away from him?

Moreover, Katniss is also 16 in the first book and she is naive but far from dumb: she manages to decipher Haymitch's messages, she devises a plan to kill several Careers, she has been feeding her family for years, ffs. And we know from CF that Haymitch was from Seam (and we get no mention of his father), so he was likely forced to earn some money even before the Quarter Quell. But no, apparently the only use Haymitch has for his brain in SOTR is to learn a single fucking poem.

The only thing I find more annoying than dumbing an already established smart character down is making them **nice**. The original trlogy Haymitch was perfect as an adult figure who has had more experiences (almost exclusively bad experiences, mind you) and therefore was biter and unpleasant. The Haymitch from the Quarter Quell was a teenager on his way to become the arrogant alcoholic we know and love. He was already unhappy with his life but was trying to claw his way out of the arena. And then Haymitch did it, he got out alive, but Snow disliked the way he won and killed everybody Haymitch loved and cared about. This read as the thing that broke Haymitch and drove him to alcoholism (and the other 46 children dying not help). Yet in SOTR, we get this dumb but well-meaning kid who keeps trying to die, so somebody "more deserving" could win.

The Newcomers Alliance in general seems to be a result of Collins thinking, "Hm, the readers liked how Katniss befriended Rue and cared for her. Let me juuuust CntrlC and CntrlV, CntrlV, CntrlV...."

The book also has a sentiment of "the charming persona Katniss (and the readers) saw in CF was propaganda, created by Capitol" which I kinda despise. The audience liked Haymitch for being a mean drunk, so we wanted to read a book about that guy, not a loverboy who is painfully nice and "only pretends to be a rasca"l.

And the part that made want to throw the book across the room was the "sweetheart" retcon. Seriously, I started to growl in annoyance.

The way Haymitch treats Katniss in the books (especially at the beginning) is supposed to be condescending and unpleasant. It's like when John Constantine (the comics version, not the one from stupid American adaptation that made him stoic and straight) calls people around "love" or "pet", it was written, so the readers, especially young girls could relate and get annoyed. And SOTR tells us that it "slipped out because Katniss reminded him of another dead child". Suzanne took the most interesting relationship in the book (disenchanted older mentor - angry young student) and turned it into a weird nostalgia bait both inside and outside the story. Why, why did we need to change and retcon the stuff that clearly didn't need it?

In conclusion, now I don't want a book about Finnick because we're going to learn that he was reciting Albatross by Baudelaire every time he killed a tribute or something.

Today is the anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster and I have found this short, but insightful article by Oksana Semenik on how this disaster is depicted in Ukrainian art.

https://artslooker.com/en/five-minutes-for-the-chornobyl-disaster-2/