Don’t You Dare Hate Watch That Harry Potter TV Series

I love the irony of an author making a cautionary tale like "don't you think it's fucked up when society do thing" and then society goes anf just proves their point

Like when Nabokov wrote a book about how a criminal used flowery language to romanticize his crime trying to justify the monstrosity he committed then society went like actually a younger girl being loved so much by an older men is both hot and aesthetic pleasing

Or how Susanne Collins wrote about the horrors of making a spectacle of the murder of children and how Hollywood exploits the young only for people online to be begging for her to write more books about the children getting slaughtered

It's so tragic and so telling I just love it

The first real conversation Katniss has with Peeta is when he tells her that he wants to die as himself, that he doesn't want the games to change him into something he's not, and that he wants to keep his identity and prove he's more than just a piece in their games because that's the only thing he has left to care about.

The first time we see Lucy Gray she sings a song that basically says that nothing they could take from her was worth keeping. "Can't take my past. Can't take my history... You can't take my charm. You can't take my health."

The capitol has taken everything from them both, but at the same time, they could never take away who they are.

They are both likeable charismatic and funny, with the kindest hearts, and incredibly loyal to the people they care about.

At the same time, everything they do before the games, and during is calculated. Lucy Gray singing a love song and winning the hearts of the capitol. Peeta confesses he's in love with his district partner, therefore cementing her identity as desirable. Both of them know how to sway people with words, how to charm people, and how to manipulate crowds. Neither of them has any problem doing so to keep themselves, and the people they love safe.

Lucy Gray's song The Old Therebefore, about learning how to love and live her life to the fullest before death, a final and calculated stroke in a last-ditch effort to save herself from the arena. This evokes enough emotion in the watchers to get them to rise to their feet and plead for her life alongside Snow.

Snow, watching the 74th and preparing for the 75th Hunger Games sees Lucy Gray in Katniss. A young girl, from the 12th district. Unafraid at the reaping. Selling a false love story, manipulating a boy who loves her in order to get out and supporting the revolution with the mockingjay as her symbol.

He threatens her family to get her to sell that she and Peeta are in love, to prevent the revolution, because obviously, she's pretending. He's had experience with a girl just like her before. He has no doubt that she has the acting ability to sell this story because clearly, she manipulated the first Hunger Games in her favor, the same way Lucy Gray manipulated him.

Watching the interviews for the 75th Hunger Games he realizes-

Katniss is just an impulsive girl, in a Mockingjay dress she didn't know about, made by someone who supports the revolution.

Peeta is a boy who has the ability to move people with just his words. He made Katniss desirable, he was the one who sold the love story, and he was the one to make their romance seem real. Katniss only started the revolution because she would rather risk dying with him than live without him. A concept President Snow was completely unfamiliar with. And it is with all these realizations crashing around him Peeta drops the baby bomb. He knows the baby's not real, and so does Snow. But it evokes enough emotion in the watchers to get them to rise to their feet and plead for the lives of the tributes.

Is it Lucy Gray or Peeta?

By the time Snow realizes he's made a mistake, it's too late.

Peeta is still charming and manipulating the capitol. Katniss is in love.

He goes up against a kindhearted boy expecting to beat Sejanus again, only to find out that it's Lucy Gray he's fighting; knowing he will never be able to escape their ghosts.

-from a conversation i had with @grandtyphoonpoetry breaking down every character in the hunger games.

I think what I found most fascinating about Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is the brilliant exploration it makes on empathy.

Capitol citicents have been programed to ignore their empathy towards the people on the districts. We see that on Coriolanus and Tigris's grandma, she is incapable of feeling it and feels entitled to despise them as creatures naturally inferior to her.

Generational thinking is vital to the prevalence of long term propaganda.

Snow and Tigris on the other hand, are orphan, their parents didn't have enough time to teach them to ignore that empathy.

And they have lived much more precarization as kids than their grandmother, and therefore have more in common with the people of the districts than with the adults in the capitol. Is easier fot them to feel empathy towards the tributes.

If Snow and Tigris had allowed themselves to dive into that empathy, to let it drive them, their children would have been even more empathetic then them. Their generation was already different, already putting in question all the propaganda, we see that in many instances with Coriolanus's classmates.

But all it took was one of them with the determination to think like the adults, one of them with the determination to perpetuate the order, one of them choosing to be driven by pride instead of empathy, for the chain of empathy to be broken.

And the system endulged him, impulse him to power. Because he could feed into it, help it evolve and survive. Because that's what systems like those do. They scratch and kill and make bloodbaths to keep themselves alive. They create their own keepers.

Coriolanus Snow knew exactly what he was doing. He knew the people from the districs were human like him, he knew on some level they were deserving of his empathy. He chose not to have any for them. The perpetuators of the propaganda are hardly belivers of it themselves. They pull the strings because they know what they are made of, what would happen if someone broke them.

They want the power because are able to recognize everyone else is blind to it.

It was honestly bone chilling to read.

listen, listen. A few things:

Jennifer Lawrence did an outstanding job portraying Katniss in the movies. I cannot really imagine any other actress in her place.

THAT BEING SAID

it pisses me off that people conveniently forget that Katniss is a colored girl.

That's right, folks!

People from the Seam are described as dark skinned, with grey eyes. Katniss is personally described to have 'olive skin' in the books. I know that there's not much compensation that could have been done in the casting, since Jenn was such a perfect choice- but at least depict her as colored in fanart. Same as Haymitch. Haymitch is also from the Seam.

I also find it so beautiful that Suzanne Collins had a teenage colored girl to be the one to dismantle an oppressive and tyrannical government, acting as a huge symbol of rebillion.

And keep in mind, while the series is marketed as a 'dystopia' it has an alarming number of similarities to the current real-world.

He’s asking him to close the door behind him

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.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes p344 / p504

Edit: I love how ‘clever, devious, deadly’ perfectly applies to Coryo as well. Birds of a feather, for lack of better words.

time and time again i am reminded that resistance is and will always be a team effort.

no matter how much capitalism tries to push us away and shove individualistic competitive culture down out throats, we band together and wield our strongest weapon. we love and thats our greatest strength.

au where everything is the same except they come back with astral plane white hair

peeta after saying “if it werent for the baby”