Peeta After Saying “if It Werent For The Baby”

jane austen was right!!!!! i AM half agony half hope!!!!! if i loved you less i COULD talk about it more!!!!!!!! i WAS in the middle before i knew i had begun!!!!!!!

Katniss described Peeta as a dandelion in the spring. Lucy Gray described Coriolanus as pure as the driven snow.

I literally hate every job in the world. I don’t want them. I don’t want ANY of them!

pure as the driven snow is such a cunty song cause imo lucygray did not in fact need, love or trust snow and the whole song is a way for her to kinda assure the readers that she will be completely fine on her own.

I still can't believe they got rid of emo boy klaus after season 1?? like you couldn't have let me enjoy the heavy eyeliner a lil longer at least

i dont think my mental state can handle "class of 2013" by mitski right now

so tbosas

she entertained because thats the only way she knew how to survive

Hmm actually Lucy Gray is different from Haymitch and Katniss and Peeta because her tragedy is she caused the games to continue. If the games hadn't become entertaining, they wouldn't have continued and she made it entertaining because she was an entertainer - she saved herself but she doomed dozens more because she performed too well and it allowed the Capitol to make the games a performance in the later years. Haymitch's tragedy is that he couldn't end the games, Lucy Gray's is that she continued them.

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.

I want to talk about Gaul and her view of the Games as a representation of human nature, which for her is that human beings are bad at their core, so when they are stripped of civility (even if you can argue the tributes were never treated with any civility at all anyway), they are violent and will do anything to "fall on top".

And that's very interesting to me because as much as Gaul thinks the Games are a representation of that, Leftie (on TikTok) explained very well that the 10th Games are filled with people proving her wrong again and again by showing mercy and compassion in their own ways - case in point, Reaper giving the fallen tributes a proper homage in their deaths, Lucy caring for Jessup, and even Lamina killing Marcus out of mercy.

More than that though, I think it's so ironically dry of Suzanne Collins to put Snow - civil, educated, polite, well-bred young Coriolanus Snow - as the one who actually has those instincts to be violent and do anything he can to win ("Snow always falls on top") in situations which are nothing like the desperate environment of the Games, but in the society they deem so superior - the Capital.

But even more than that, the more I think about the true State of Nature, the more I see Doctor Gaul's beliefs as extremely frail from a biological point of view: when we talk about human's state of nature, the closest we can get to observe that today are native tribal communities, as some scientists do to understand better how our ancestors lived.

But what we can observe from this too is that (and we all learned that before) human beings are social beings - we need a community (or a support net, as we can call them) in order to thrive, but community only forms with connection. If we were selfish, individualist, and violently prone to survive (bad, in fewer words) in our cores, then it'd make no sense for us to be social creatures because we wouldn't be able to form connections deep enough to live in communities.

Not ones that thrived as much as we did, anyway. We'd most likely be lone creatures. Instead, our understanding of community is directly linked to safety, both emotional and physical, to the point where our own language reflects that: the found family trope being so popular in books, poor families being more likely to stick together as an act of self-defense, the fact we love so much to consume friendships in artistic works, the instinctual need to find protection on other people when we feel threatened, and so on and so on.

"A child rejected by the village will burn it to feel its warmth", meaning not only that we need a community to thrive, but its lack leaves deep scarring in a person's character.

So when it comes to the state of nature of men, I'd say I believe much more in societal corruption - like Frankenstein - rather than a violent or bad nature by itself, unless of course, there's a natural precedent for such (like a biological inability to form deep emotional connections).