When I Catch You Suzanne Collin’s When I Catch You

Facts 😎

emotional neglect didnt even affect me that much. it was the being born inherently without value that did most of the work

I wasn’t crazy about this piece so I wasn’t intending on publicly posting it again, but it keeps getting stolen every five minutes so I figured I’d put it here so people at least know who to attribute the original thing to lmao

[Digital illustration, Procreate App, 2020]

figure skater Toga x wrestler Ochako

Comparing Haymitch and Katniss' narrative styles is so funny to me because he's a yapper and she's a gatekeeper. He drops more lore on D12 in the first two chapters of SOTR than she does in the entire trilogy.

Haymitch is like "Yeah, so this person is related to this person who's related to this person and things are this way because of this and this thing actually came from here and this person is actually my best friend and also here's this extra tidbit of random info cause all my lore dropping comes with it's own additional bonus content and all my unnecessary commentary."

And Katniss is over here like "Tf do I care for if y'all know all the lore of District 12? I'm talking about my beautiful husband's beautiful eyelashes."

here’s the closeted furries “hey man… can u bum me a cig” and “the one uncle nobody invites to the family reunion but SOMEONE keeps telling him where it is anyways”

if you want an idea of what john is like, imagine hau from pokemon sumo

ALSO the ppl who kept asking me for trans thomas art, HERE he’s trans in this au (; 

ft John:

i don’t think people who don’t read comics/mostly read wfa understand how much of a dweeb tim drake actually is because he was supposed to be a Good Role Model For Tween Boys in the 90s. one time he found out his roommate at boarding school was an alcoholic so he poured all his alcohol down the drain instead of just ignoring it like a normal person. his girlfriend wanted to have sex with him and instead of just saying “i’m not ready” he launched into a monologue about how “making love is like opening a door” and he “isn’t ready to open that door yet” because they “might have adult feelings for each other, but [they’re] still just kids.” 90s tim was the type of kid to remind the teacher to assign homework. he somehow got mad bitches even though everyone highkey thought he was weird. in one panel of one issue he randomly said he had to be “vewwy quiet” and never spoke like that again. he canonically plays dungeons and dragons (or the fictional dc equivalent). the money his dad left him after he died wasn’t even a lot because his dad went bankrupt shortly before his death. like it was a substantial amount but not enough to make him rich. i cannot stress enough that tim was SUCH a Regular Guy TM and constantly worried about not standing out. he purposefully did bad at sports and pretended to be winded in gym class so people wouldn’t suspect anything. like he wouldn’t even try and be average, he would purposefully almost fail. he is not a cool rich skater kid guys he’s such a dork

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.