lillilgirl

[lillilgirl]

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

[lillilgirl]

what makes Snow such a formidable villain within THG universe is that nothing he does was set in stone. there was no sense of inevitability about his actions and his brutality. Snow had enough perspective of poverty, capital cruelty, district hunger and not to mention his own arena experience’ and yet he actively chose at every moment to stray from natural goodness. its even more terrifying in the sense that he had the ability to care. Snow is not a mindless sociopath, he displays feelings to others such as sejanus, lucy grey and tigris but ultimately he will always choose himself. his ability to betray those he cared about in order yo advance himself makes him so much more than the stereotypical villain who is forced into his actions.

[lillilgirl]

look i know the hunger games fandom is entrenched in songbirds and snakes brainrot right now but i just wanna mention how horribly genius the tesserae system is

like. it's designed to keep the poorest districts from ever winning the games, by keeping the population of those districts on the verge of starvation without ever tipping the line too far. the poorer you are, the more you need your children to take tesserae. the more tesserae your children take, the more times their name is added to the reaping pool. the more times a name appears in the reaping pool, the more likely they are to be drawn over a person who doesn't need to take tesserae. a kid who's been surviving off of tesserae grain and oil is exponentially more likely to die early on in the games due to the effects of malnutrition (low muscle mass and body fat, not to mention the mental consequences).

pretty much the only reason katniss was physically capable of surviving the games was because she'd been able to catch meat in the forest. surviving on just the tesserae she was taking for her mother and prim, there's no way she would've had the physical strength to make it out alive.

say what you want about the realism of the hunger games but the tesserae system is horrifyingly well-designed to do exactly what it's supposed to do.

Edit: guys I wrote a fic that's meant to dissect all these horribly genius systems involved in the functioning of Panem, check it out

[lillilgirl]

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.

[lillilgirl]

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) + tweets

[lillilgirl]

Suzanne collins wrote a trilogy where a main media propaganda strategy was to market a horrific act of violence as a love story to distract ppl and then it got adapted into a box office breaking movie and ppl made it all about the love triangle. so then since they didn’t get the point the first time Suzanne collins wrote a prequel story about the main dictator and she makes it so that you as a reader want it to be a genuine love story so badly even tho it’s so very clearly not and instead feels extremely unsettling to make her point even more meta which then gets adapted into another box office breaking film and now ppl are making romantic snowbaird tik toks. do u think she’s gonna write another book that’s somehow even more blatant or just give up and start executing ppl? hard to say but I wouldn’t blame her for the second one

[lillilgirl]

oh my favorite trope? two people who go through something so unique and agonizing and entirely beyond words that they have no choice but to create a bond that transcends all other types of love, thus acting as the sole point of understanding for the other person in a world that cannot fathom what they’ve been through

[lillilgirl]

Somthing about the way Snow always despised chaos above all else and was killed not in a clean, controlled execution but in the very definition of chaos: a wild, violent rush of an unnamed crowd. Poetic justice.

[lillilgirl]

Making this post because I need more ppl to see my theories: you know how Peeta doesn’t speak Katniss-Haymitch speak? I truly believe that after several years of close proximity with both of them Peeta starts to pick up on it, the same way you see the non-Latino husbands of the nice Latina lady you know from work sorta knows Spanish. Like, just enough to not be absolutely drowning in the barrage of foreign words he’s hearing, but also not enough to actually get by without her there to translate at least a little. So sometimes Katniss, Haymitch and Peeta might be somewhere and Haymitch might grunt or be like “well I’ll be,” and Katniss will nod and Peeta will go “… are we talking about that guy over there? In the green?” And Katniss will be like “yep, Haymitch thinks he’s an idiot” and Peeta will go “ohhh. Heh, yeah he is.”

[lillilgirl]

incorrect snowbairdplinth quotes ❄️ [ 3 / ? ]

[lillilgirl]

The idea of Peeta and Katniss slowly becoming more socially disconnected with the people they had to pretend to be before and during the war.

A new generation of kids are born, and maybe they’re taught something of what happened before their time, but maybe they’re too young to have learned about it in school. Or maybe, they just didn’t care too much to remember, maybe they’ve just never seen pictures of The Mockingjay. Or maybe Katniss has outgrown the image of that scared 17-year-old girl.

Whichever way it is, the kids don’t know, and don’t really care. When people come in from across the country, asking where they could meet “The Mockingjay”, the adults ignore them.

When they ask a kid, they just blink. “Who?”

“Katniss Everdeen.” They might try.

These kids have never heard of a Katniss Everdeen. And besides, their parents told them never to talk to weird strangers!! They run away, and go to tell Mrs. Mellark about the weird person they met.

[lillilgirl]

hater of socks

[lillilgirl]

what if thistle had confronted senshi before the story started?

[lillilgirl]

Ryoko Kui please return my calls

[lillilgirl]

[lillilgirl]

they just wanted to do the london marathon :-(

[lillilgirl]