The Real Unsung Hero In AFTG Was Nickys High School Teacher Who Saw How Depressed He Was Becoming And

GOD why do people always overlook the way Kevin cared for Neil and Andrew like yes he had ONE obsession and ONE goal in the world but ???? He still had space in his heart for more!!!

Need I remind you that Kevin was willing to teach Neil every single night even though he knew Neil planned to die at the end of the year? That he told Neil he’d watch him if he wanted to drink so that he could let go for a while? That he believed in Neil’s talent 100% and wanted him to have a bright future?

Need I remind you how it was Kevin who first showed Andrew he was good for something? Who made him have the tiniest bit of hope that life wasn’t going to be a never-ending cycle of “waking up, wanting to die, going to sleep, waking up again”? That it was Kevin who put his life, his career, his survival on Andrew’s hand with almost-blind trust? Who gave Andrew purpose?

Kevin day cares SO. MUCH. And yes, Exy was going to be his #1 priority always, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t care about anything or anyone else. He cared about Andrew and he cared about Neil and they cared about him too. STOP OVERLOOKING THAT.

I’ve talked about muslim!renee before ? yes. I have. have more.

renee loves islam. she loves feeling close to Allah. He helped her get back up her feet and gave her something to fight for. a life. a future.

she’s a lesbian. a feminist. and a muslim. she’s all these things and more and she knows, she knows He listens and understands.

she’s not haram. she’s not haram. she’s not and never will be.

most of the money she makes with the foxes go to charity. she works hard and try, try to remain kind, no matter the hardships she has to go through. she’s not afraid. she has faith.

her hijab is colorful and moves in the wind and she laughs and laughs and laughs. she is happy. she is peaceful.

her ghosts are there and it’s hard, so hard but she became an expert at repelling them off. no more knives. no more dark.

there are days in which she makes salah five times a day and her smile is never as bright. sometimes she can only make dua. sometimes neither. sometimes, her past is too heavy on her frail shoulders and she can’t get up. it’s okay. her relationship with islam is her own. it’s all okay.

she gets comments in the street for everything she is. for allison’s hand in her own. for the color of her skin. for her devotion to a religion they’re not willing to understand and accept.

she doesn’t hear any of their hateful word

she holds on tight.

there’s the wind again and she smiles.

I want to put focus on how significant parents are in the Hunger Games franchise, most especially on the role a parent has in shaping their child’s psyche and I want to do this by using Katniss, Peeta and Snow as reference. 

In the books and the movies, parents are more or less background characters. We truly only see glimpses of them. Both of Peeta’s parents are alive yet we rarely see them featured prominently in the books/movies. Both of Snow’s parents are dead and we only get to hear of them in passing and while Mrs. Everdeen is alive, she’s often relegated to the background because of how dismissive Katniss is towards her mother. 

Yet these characters and the very essence of their beings are shaped by their parents. 

Beginning with Katniss, we saw how deeply her father’s death wounded her. He was their provider, the sole person responsible for bringing food onto their table. We know how deeply he was loved by his children and his wife and how beloved he was by the other citizens of 12 by Katniss’ stories. Mr. Everdeen was a well known figure in the Hobb and Katniss firmly believed that it was because of him that people took pity on her and allowed her to bargain with them. It was his death that served as a catalyst to Katniss’ journey to becoming a Victor. Without his death, without Katniss being forced to hunt to serve her family, she wouldn’t have made it out of the arena. To Katniss, her father was the hero deserving of being placed on a pedestal and it was his values and actions that she tried desperately to emulate to protect her family. 

On the other hand, Katniss scorned her mother. She hated Mrs. Everdeen’s inaction when she spiraled into a deep depression after her husband died. And though it wasn’t Mrs. Everdeen’s fault, I can’t blame Katniss for feeling this way about her mother. She and her sister were near the brink of death by starvation on the day she met Peeta. Even when Mr. Everdeen was alive, Katniss was partial to her father because he stoked the rebellion in Katniss’ heart while it was her mother who tried to stop it. Katniss perceived her mother’s depression as a weakness and even after she got better, Katniss was determined to keep her at arms length. The love she felt for her mother may have been unconditional but she constantly put her mother under the test. Waiting to see if she would disappoint her, fail her by abandoning her once again. And when Prim died and Mrs. Everdeen left for District 4, Katniss’s unconscious bias against her mother was once again reaffirmed. 

It’s why Katniss struggles to form a good bond with motherly characters like Effie but maintains relatively good relationships with fatherly figures like Haymitch and Cinna. Katniss openly admits that of the two people who guided them throughout the Hunger Games, it was Haymitch she was most alike. They grew up at the Seam, and shared similar features and she was adamant that should she have been forced into becoming a mentor like Haymitch was, she was looking at what her future would have looked like. Drunk and continuously intoxicated like Haymitch was. 

On the other hand, we have Peeta. 

Peeta was routinely abused by his mother. While we don’t know the full extent of what it was he had to endure, we know that it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Peeta’s mother took pride in the knowledge that District 12 would finally have another Victor, and she wasn’t referring to Peeta. We saw him take a beating to feed Katniss and whatever relationship Peeta had with his father was practically nonexistent. It was his mother that served to be the looming presence in his life the same way Katniss’ father haunted her. It’s why I believe Peeta got along so well with Effie and why Effie likely preferred Peeta over Katniss. Aside from the fact that Peeta was so much more civil to Effie than Katniss was to Effie, Peeta always deferred to Effie. He and Effie are similar in the same way Katniss and Haymitch are similar. 

Peeta was characterized to be of the merchant class, the “upper” class of District 12. As a given, Effie is from the Capitol, the upper crust of Panem. It was Effie who provided Katniss and Peeta with the script necessary to ensure their survival after the 74th Games and in return, Effie knew how effectively a person’s image and reputation could mean life and death in the arena and in this, Peeta is in agreement. While Katniss may have used a bow as a weapon, Peeta used his words. He always knew the right things to say and do to get people to side with him, so much so that he managed to convince the careers of the 74th Games, his biggest enemies in the arena, to ally with him. Had anyone else been in his situation, they would have been killed. Peeta craved Effie’s maternalism the same way Katniss craved Haymitch’s paternalism because these were the things they lacked growing up.

And then there’s Coriolanus, who lost both his parents and it is both of these parents who haunt him. His mother, described to be beautiful and kind, was represented by the powder compact he kept with him constantly. His father, harsh and cruel, represented by the handkerchief that Snow kept with him.

In TBOSAS, Snow has two mentors himself. 

Dean Highbottom and Dr. Gaul.

It’s not lost on me that in them, the characterization of the two are reversed from Snow’s parents. Highbottom, like Snow’s father is stern and harsh. He is Snow’s biggest critic and while I doubt Mr. Snow would go so far as to hate his own child, he would not have been kind to Coriolanus had he lived past the war. Yet Highbottom and Mr. Snow’s similarities end there. Because of Highbottom’s remorse and the kindness that he showed Lucy Gray after she won the Games, he takes after Snow’s mother in that regard. He is compassionate and filled with horror at the abomination he created.

On the other hand, Gaul treats Snow with a gentleness that Highbottom never had for him. Though Snow finds Gaul creepy, it is Gaul that takes him under his wing. It is Gaul who stitches up his wounds after he is attacked in the arena and retrieves Sejanus and Gaul who praises him for his ingenuity at suggesting the sponsoring system. Gaul genuinely likes Snow and begins grooming him to become her replacement in the event that she dies. But while Gaul may have been a woman with the capacity for gentleness, she is a terrible human being who threw children into the arena to fight for their survival. She is the same woman who hung a child for running away from the games and paraded the corpses of children on the streets of the Capitol. She is pure evil. She is exactly like Snow’s father. 

It isn’t loss on me that Snow, who has an abundance of maternal figures in his grandmother and Tigris, chooses to take after Gaul, who is externally like his mother but internally like his father, rather than Highbottom, who is the opposite. 

At every instance Snow had to do good, to choose to do the right thing and be like his mother, he intentionally continued to do the evil thing for the sake of his selfishness and be like his father. 

“You look just like your father, Coriolanus.” Were the words Tigris used to describe him at the end of the movie because that is precisely who he chose to become. 

And as Snow poisons Highbottom and becomes a gamemaker under Gaul’s tutelage, he kills whatever remnant of his mother he had left in him, fully embodying his cruel father’s ideals.

Nicholas Esteban Hemmick is dyslexic.

i like this so much ohhhhh my god oh my GOD oh my godgod considering who he is and where he’s from he probably didn’t get diagnosed or helped at all and just, imagine him going to palmetto and he doesn’t talk about it to Bee (therapy is difficult for him) but maybe Dan or Matt mentions something about it when Nicky complains about being bad at reading and Nicky’s like….o h. Oh I’m okay?I’m okay,

kerry a kicked dog on the ground a disgrace to the family kerry shamed and humiliated for actually loving logan kerry hunched on the floor kerry laid bare all her laundry aired all the contents of her life spilling onto the floor kerry weak and sobbing as everyone stands tall above her with curled lips kerry being shunned for her blatant display of caring kerry getting kicked out and sent away kerry the weak link kerry the no real person involved kerry the only one crying out of everyone kerry whose weakness and emotion and god forbid love for logan earns the disgust of every roy in the building….. is it any wonder roman spurred to action

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.

☕️during the series I felt like Kevin didn’t have a person, who he was like priority to. Someone who he could talk to, lay in their arms, or just someone who wouldn’t let him alone during his panic attacks. Among the foxes, Andrew and Neil, Dan and Matt, Allison and Renee, Nicky and Erik, Aaron and Katelyn, he must have felt so alone:(

GOD I KNOW, RIGHT? My poor boy, he didn’t have the courage to tell Wymack he was his son, so he had to watch his dad treat him like any other student.

Neil is clearly every Fox’s favourite (save for Aaron’s), too, and Kevin was just treated like a burden all of the time.

Fuck, no, I’m fucking crying, again, my sweet angel, I love him so dearly.

Tea☕☕☕☕

Praying to the minor god, Adam Parrish for a smooth school year.