coryo-snows

[coryo-snows]

THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES

[coryo-snows]

You'll see my face in every place But you can't catch me now

[coryo-snows]

thinking about how the hunger games were designed to prove that without society, order, government, someone to rule, we devolve into little more than animals, and how the games themselves prove over and over again that this is not true. We see it in every single game we witness.

Katniss placing flowers around Rue's body in the arena. Thresh sparing Katniss because she was kind to Rue, even though he was making it that much harder for himself to win.

Haymitch going back for Maysilee after hearing her scream even though their alliance had been broken. Haymitch holding her as she dies the same way Katniss did Rue.

Coral's "I can't have killed them all for nothing" when she realizes she's not going home. Lamina cutting down Marcus at great personal risk. And, my favorite moment in tbosas, Reaper collecting the bodies of his fellow tributes, his peers, even the ones who tried to kill him, into a pile. Taking the weapons from their hands. Closing their eyes and crossing their arms in the best approximation of a proper burial he can manage, covering them with the Capitol flag as a makeshift shroud.

The Games bring out the worst in people, yes. But despite the extreme circumstances, despite the exterior pressure of the Capitol, despite the fact that it could mean pain and heartbreak and death, it also shows that people have an enormous capacity for goodness. That even in a situation purposefully designed to make empathy impossible, people can't help but have it anyway.

Snow looks at the Games and all he can see is what's inside himself-- this pure animalistic drive to conquer and defeat. He kills and it feels good and he thinks that everyone else must feel that way too. He doesn't realize (maybe can't realize) that he is the exception, not the rule. He cannot see outside himself, outside his own warped perspective, to realize that the fact that people do show humanity in the games proves his entire worldview wrong.

[coryo-snows]

The moment Tigris tells Snow he looks like his father, my heart broke.

That's her Prim.

That's the child she took care of while being a child herself, stuck with an adult who couldn't care for them all that well. She tried so hard and sacrificed so much for the boy that despite all her love still turns into a monster.

Katniss's Prim dies, but Tigris' Prim destroys every part of the boy she raised, to the point she wants him dead and has nothing in her heart for him except absolute loathing.

[coryo-snows]

I’m sure someone has talked about this before but one thing I absolutely love about tbosas is how Snow’s descent into villainy is never once presented as something that was inevitable

So many villain origin stories portray this idea of a person who tries incredibly hard to be a good person, who takes every opportunity to be kind and to better themselves, but are ultimately doomed to fail by the narrative. Their environment and their circumstances make it impossible for them to be a good person, and while this is effective from a storytelling point of view it’s not exactly accurate to real life

In real life there is always a point where a bad person makes the decision to do something bad, they make the decision to prioritise themselves, their own power, money or desires over someone else. That’s how real life dictators are made, they are presented with every opportunity to be good, and they purposefully choose to not take it

This makes Snow’s storyline so effective because he is given so many opportunities to do the right thing and yet, at every single turn, he chooses to serve himself instead, exactly like how real dictators are made

Snow, unlike most people we see in the capitol, is in a unique position where he could genuinely have the chance to understand and relate to the people from the districts. He, unlike his classmates, is poor and spends most nights going hungry, he witnessed firsthand the cruelty of the capitol when Clemensia was bitten by the snakes for nothing more than lying about doing her homework, when his sister was forced to sell herself on the streets in order to feed the both of them

Throughout his book, the three people he is closest to are Tigris (who dislikes the hunger games, is a rebel, and a victim of the capitol forced to turn to prostitution), Sejanus (who is originally from district 2, dislikes the capitol and knows he will never be accepted there, and also a rebel) and Lucy Gray (who is a victim of the hunger games, from district 12, and is also treated horribly by the capitol). These are all people who gave him an opportunity to realise the cruelty of the system he was in, a chance to directly confront his prejudices and see that people from the districts are just the same as him, and yet he still refuses to take the chance to change

He is given every opportunity, he’s sent away from the capitol to be a peacekeeper in the districts, he forms personal connections with people from the districts, he helps Sejanus perform funeral rites, and yet at every moral crossroads he comes to he makes the wrong decision. He didn’t have to become a villain, and yet he made the choice to do so anyway, despite every chance he was given

I think it’s a really effective portrayal of Snow as a character, and it’s a very effective villain origin story for the type of villain that Snow is. It never once excuses him from his actions because it highlights just how accountable he was for his actions

[coryo-snows]

The ending of the Hunger Games movie with Snow reluctantly crowing Katniss a winner and brushing aside her hair only to see a mockingjay pin is so fucking funny after reading tbosas and knowing exactly who and what is haunting him at this moment and Katniss explains “it’s from my District” yeah lmao he knows babe he’s been

They were the first things he could never control and they’ve absolutely haunted him to think about ever since

[coryo-snows]

thinking about how the hunger games were designed to prove that without society, order, government, someone to rule, we devolve into little more than animals, and how the games themselves prove over and over again that this is not true. We see it in every single game we witness.

Katniss placing flowers around Rue's body in the arena. Thresh sparing Katniss because she was kind to Rue, even though he was making it that much harder for himself to win.

Haymitch going back for Maysilee after hearing her scream even though their alliance had been broken. Haymitch holding her as she dies the same way Katniss did Rue.

Coral's "I can't have killed them all for nothing" when she realizes she's not going home. Lamina cutting down Marcus at great personal risk. And, my favorite moment in tbosas, Reaper collecting the bodies of his fellow tributes, his peers, even the ones who tried to kill him, into a pile. Taking the weapons from their hands. Closing their eyes and crossing their arms in the best approximation of a proper burial he can manage, covering them with the Capitol flag as a makeshift shroud.

The Games bring out the worst in people, yes. But despite the extreme circumstances, despite the exterior pressure of the Capitol, despite the fact that it could mean pain and heartbreak and death, it also shows that people have an enormous capacity for goodness. That even in a situation purposefully designed to make empathy impossible, people can't help but have it anyway.

Snow looks at the Games and all he can see is what's inside himself-- this pure animalistic drive to conquer and defeat. He kills and it feels good and he thinks that everyone else must feel that way too. He doesn't realize (maybe can't realize) that he is the exception, not the rule. He cannot see outside himself, outside his own warped perspective, to realize that the fact that people do show humanity in the games proves his entire worldview wrong.

[coryo-snows]

Sejanus hcs:

- every year for new year's (which is when i'm assuming capitol people conventionally give gifts), he gives each of his classmates a little candy. he *might* give snow two candies. we can neither confirm nor deny this - as a kid, he spent a lot of time in the school library. the librarian would always cheer him up and give him book recommendations - he likes having long hair, especially because it very much goes against the military standards in 2

SEJANUS MY BELOVED. the candy one is so sweet ☹️ he so would.

[coryo-snows]

tbosas characters as tumblr posts that i love:

Coriolanus Snow

Sejanus Plinth

Lucy Gray Baird

Dr. Gaul

[coryo-snows]

coryo singing panem‘s anthem at arachne‘s funeral:

please listen till the end....

#you don't understand i actually snORTED #memes

[coryo-snows]

THG - Reaping of the Third Quarter Quell

Effie, shining in a wig of metallic gold, lacks her usual verve. She has to claw around the girls’ reaping ball for quite a while to snag the one piece of paper that everyone already knows has my name on it.

Then she catches Haymitch’s name.

- Catching Fire, chapter 13.

[coryo-snows]

Do you have any Everlark to share tonight? I'm really sad.

Oh, no - I’m so sorry you’re sad, my dear! Here’s a little something to warm your evening just a bit! 

She thrums her pencil against the sketchbook in front of her, the rhythm of a half-remembered tune they leaned in music assembly. She knocks her foot absently against the base of the kitchen table, reaches for her tea, and takes a hot sip, then rereads her last sentence, frowning as she does.

“Peeta,” she calls. “Can you come take a look at this?”

“Course.” Her husband sets down the plate he’s washing and shuts off the sink. He pulls up a chair beside her and hoists her easily into his lap.

“I can’t get this last paragraph right.” She points to it and slumps back against his chest as he skims what she’s written. 

“‘But his arms are there to comfort me…’ ‘On the night I feel that thing again…’ Is this how you’re ending it?”

“For now,” she says. “I think. I think it would be a good place to end. Tell whoever—whoever ends up reading it ten, fifty, a hundred years from now—that we made it.”

“I like that,” he agrees. “That’s beautiful, Katniss. Told you you were a poet.”

“No, but that’s the problem,” she laments. “I can’t — I can’t figure out how to phrase it.” 

“Phrase what?” Even with her back to him, she can tell he’s being purposefully dense. She can feel his smile.

She sighs and tosses her hands in the air. “You know what.”

“Oh, you mean this?” His mouth at her throat. “Or this?” He toys with the delicate amber pendant at her collarbone. “Or this?” His fingers start to wander further south, skate along the front buttons of her dress. “You’re not going to tell them about that?” He says it with the slightly dark humor of someone whose every move was once catalogued for anyone to see.

“Obviously not,” she says, leaning her head back against his shoulder to look at him. “That’s private.” Softer. “That’s ours. Just ours.”

His hand stops teasing and comes up to touch her face, lightly tracing her lips and her cheek. She closes her eyes and takes a deep, contented breath. “I know.”

“But I’m still at a loss.”

“Well,” he suggests, “When I can’t decide what to sketch I just start drawing whatever comes to mind, even if it’s just spirals and lines. I’ll come back to it later and start to see patterns. This spiral could be a blackberry bramble or that line could be the beginnings of a damselfly. Could you do that with words?”

She nods and sits up. “Maybe. Let me try.”

She turns a page and jots down the words that come to her. Some cramped neatly in a list, some splashing across the page in wide letters. Peeta watches with interest, rubbing the small of her back.

Hunger. Overtaken. Inevitable.

Survival. Rage. Fire.

Hope. Rebirth. Spring.

She taps her pencil against her mouth. “I think … I think I may have something.”

She scribbles it down in a messy frenzy, to get the images to paper before she loses them. It’s a shorter paragraph than she thought it would be, but it seems right.

“How about that?”

She watches his face as he reads it, mouthing some of the words. A flush of pink colors his features.

“What? What is it?”

“It’s — uh,” he says, sounding choked. “It’s just … the way you talk about me sometimes, Katniss.”

She caresses his curls. “Don’t worry, I say plenty of negative things about you in earlier chapters.”

He laughs and pinches her hip. “Minx.”

She kisses his temple. “I love you,” she says.

“You’re still a minx.”

“It’s a good ending,” she whispers. “Real or not real?”

He takes her hand over the book, fingers brushing against the word that is his answer.

“Real.” 

#oh. oh fuck. #i love this.

[coryo-snows]

Happy birthday to the Snicket Twins

[coryo-snows]

Happy birthday Jacques and Kit Snicket

#i have nothing to add I'm just wishing them happy birthday #asoue #a series of unfortunate events #lemony snicket #january 12th #jacques snicket #kit snicket

[coryo-snows]

they'll have to pry my jacques-and-kit-named-lemony headcanon out of my cold dead hands

[coryo-snows]

I think the year the Baudelaires spend on the island is a metaphor for getting therapy and spending some time away from the world to heal and that's beautiful

[coryo-snows]

Concept: Lemony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Snicket~

Hi my name is Lemony Dark'ness Haniel Dandler Snicket and I have medium lemony yellow hair (that’s how I got my name) with an old hat and burnt tips that reaches my shoulders and inky black eyes like the insignia on my ankle and a lot of people tell me I look like Kenneth Grahame (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to Beatrice Baudelaire but I wish I was because then we wouldn’t be doomed to have a tragic romance. I’m an author but I lost my typewriter in a bet. I have pale white skin. I’m also a firefighter, and I work in a town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea outside the city where I’m an apprentice (I’m almost thirteen). I’m a volunteer (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly disguises. I love my disguise kit and I get all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a cape (scarlet, silk) with matching overalls and a suit (salmon), a detective badge and shoes (running). I was wearing a veiled facial disguise, a wig (gray, judicial), charcoal and red eye shadow. I was walking outside Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. Hangfire stared at me. I fed him to the Bombinating Beast.