no bcs district 12 tributes for the 50th hunger games are iconic af.... lucy gray, jessup, katniss and peeta are cool and i love them but they are mostly pure angst... while these... louella and her "i don't want these idiots as my allies," maysilee and insulting everyone's fashion sense, wyatt and his betting on everyone's deaths, haymitch drinking snow's milk.... hilarious af, they're so bratty and insane i love them
No because Ampert being named after amperes/amps when Beetee used lighting to win in his games. Like everyone thinks high voltage is what makes electricity dangerous but high amps is the real danger. Beetee really named his son not only after the thing that saved his life, but after the most dangerous force he knew. And he still couldn’t make his boy dangerous enough to survive I’m physically fucking ill
Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher on the set of Star Wars in 1976
in the first Games, the shift from "oh, I don't care if you see me" when peeta is teasing about being comfortable naked in front of katniss to the soft, whispery "all right" when she kisses him is so... peeta.
because on the one hand, peeta is the kind of boy who finds katniss’s discomfort with overt sexualness funny and wants to egg her on. especially if it might be entertaining for the cameras.
but on the other hand, he’s also the kind of boy who finds genuine connection (and what seems like some sort of desire from his crush) scary. and unfamiliar.
because when he’s joking around, he doesn’t have to think about the reality of his feelings. it’s all a show. all for the cameras. and he’s a practiced performer.
but now that she’s kissed him… now it almost seems real.
it makes this boy, who’s always ready with a comeback, suddenly at a loss for words.
@mage-chocolate omg your tags
katniss: how do you think haymitch won the games?
peeta: he outsmarted the others
haymitch in his games: drinks poison water, falls asleep in a blueberry patch without attempting to cover his tracks, tries to pet a bunny during the countdown, makes an alarming number of bunny-related decisions in general
Thinking about how Wyatt Callow is proof that Dr. Gaul’s and Snow’s assertion that humanity’s essential nature is violent (which is part of their argument for the Capitol’s control being necessary) is false. That “What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed… A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.” is false.
I’m sure he had it all calculated. He knew exactly what choices would give him the best odds of survival. He knew that the faster he got out of the initial bloodshed the better his chances would be. He knew that letting other kids die would benefit his odds of survival. He knew exactly what he should’ve done to preserve himself.
And yet, he threw all those statistics and odds, all that reason and logic out the window in the name of protecting Lou Lou, a girl that wasn’t even from his district. He threw it all out the window in the name of helping another human being that was in an unfair situation and had worse odds than him. He knew who the real enemy was; he knew it wasn’t the other kids being taken advantage of by the Capitol just like him.
That is humanity.
thinking about how Wyatt's death was different, how it's the first time we've gotten to know a character who dies in the bloodbath, how he knew the odds of Lou Lou's survival and how he chose to die protecting her, cutting his own time short even though he knew he was only giving her a few more hours
okay! so I saw this on twitter and omg does it resonate with me. this is where I struggle with sunrise on the reaping haymitch versus the original trilogy haymitch. not because it’s so unbelievable that haymitch becomes mean and cruel, it’s actually very realistic, but it saddens me so much because after reading how kind and wonderful he was as a teen, the fact that katniss and peeta will never ever experience this side of him is heartbreaking. like he loves them more than anything, he’s only alive because of them by the end, they’re his entire family, and yet he’ll still never be the sweet boy who wanted to protect all the little kids in the arena, bought his girlfriend a book of old poems because he knew she’d love them and a million other things. like this is what I’ve struggled to reconcile since reading sunrise. haymitch was so genuinely wonderful as a person but his trauma did not make him kind, it made him borderline abusive, and that is just who he is now.
and yes, the films sure did soften him up. but i’m talking about book haymitch only, who said cruel things, made fun of katniss at the worst times in her life, told her she didn’t deserve peeta because she took less than an hour to plead for his life over hers, threatened to implant a device in her brain like lou lou’s and punched peeta in the jaw so hard he fell out of his chair. like i adore haymitch, now more than ever, but it actually depresses me so much that katniss and peeta will never know the man he could have been, and the person he was, even though he loves them with all his heart.
also if these twitter users who I screenshot see this, credit to y’all, I totally agree.
lenore dove resenting maysilee for keeping a canary in a cage, only for the capitol to literally lock haymitch in a gilded cage after his games. he is truly a canary in a coal mine, trying to warn the districts about what really happened to him.
Someone on Tumblr was bringing up the whole Coriolanus Snow sounds like a covey name, and then they said they think Snow's mom could have been covey (cause she sang him songs and the scarf thing, and we never learn her name). And then I had an unhinged mental image of Coriolanus Snow whose dad still died and he was raised fully covey by his covey mom and what that would like that....
gale hawthorne is a stronger person than me.
because if i even had an *inkling* of an idea that my girl was out here thinking classic bangers like "i can't handle the nightmares. not without you" (cf 55) and "i thought i was something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind" (cf 100)... all about another guy?
yeah. i think i would give up right then. like, no amount of 'i'm the guy that protects your family' could ever compete with someone who is so set on 'i will literally ruin myself to keep you from getting hurt.'
As i am rereading tbosas i had a thought that Maysilee and Wyatt were doomed in every narrative. Had they lived during the First Quarter Quell timeline, when district citizens chose their own tributes, they would have been reaped as well.
So we're supposed to choose our own tributes, huh? How about that meanest girl in town, Maysilee Donner, who moves around the town looking down at us, flaunting her jewellery and money? Well, you're in for a surprise Miss Donner, all the money cant buy you power over us. Who's the superior one now, Miss Donner? Good luck in the games.
And how about we teach that old Jethro Callow a thing or two about betting on seam kids? Lets see how willing he is to bet when it's his own son that is in the game. The son is likely involved in the betting as well, so no innocent life is being sacrificed in the process.
Meanwhile as soon as they were given a chance, both Maysilee and Wyatt reverted the expectations. The "meanest girl in town" taking care of all the underdogs in the games, being an older sister and showing great care for them when nobody else would, and the "heartless" booker boy sacrificing his chances for a person he barely knew. A true don't judge a book by its cover.
imagine being haymitch though. imagine being in 13, forced sober for the first time in years, and suddenly, you’re getting your boy back. the one you were so sure snow had stolen from you, like he’d stolen everyone else you’d ever loved. but somehow, by some miracle, your kid is here and he’s breathing and in one piece. imagine how excited you’d be.
imagine how excited you’d be for your (little) girl, your sweetheart of new, who’s about to get her love back. who’s about to experience that same joy you felt for those five minutes you had lenore dove in your arms, before the gumdrops and the poison and everything else came crashing down. only katniss’ joy isn’t going to be for five minutes.
imagine watching as your golden boy runs towards your sweetheart and you’re watching as her arms are outstretched, reaching for him like it appears he’s reaching for her.
now imagine how it must have felt for haymitch to realize the boy’s hands are locking around your girl’s neck and he’s not peeta anymore and this hijacked boy, this lou lou peeta is now strangling katniss. and you’re frozen in place.
just like you were frozen in place decades ago, when the peacekeepers were manhandling lenore dove. you have no choice but to hesitate because you’ve hesitated all your life, and that’s what you do, and once again it almost cost you everything.
once again, hesitating almost cost you your entire family.
no wonder haymitch is so angry all the time.
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."
literally why are we still discussing whether a victim of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of his mother whose father never protected him, and a girl who lived in perpetual terror of people she cared for dying in various horrible ways, finding a quiet moment to consider what they, themselves, actually want, and ending up chosing to have children---two fat, happy children who will learn the easy way to be brave, who will never know the fear and pain their parents used to live with---is a good or bad ending? obviously this is a positive thing. obviously.
I agree that it's meant to be a happy ending (and as far as I'm concerned, it is) but I don't think it's that crazy that some people disagree.
the way the epilogue is written, it does very much sound like peeta insisted (dare I say badgered) until katniss gave in, and she only gave in the first time because he wanted children. no amount of katniss imagining cute children (never hers) in some far-off vague happy future can change that, especially when it's one of the last things in the books.
but even that wouldn't be as much of an issue, I think, if suzanne collins wasn't so hellbent on pretending sexism is either nonexistent or irrelevant in panem, when it's so clearly not. it invites closer reading and harsher criticism, which seems fair to me. suzanne collins definitely meant it as a wholly positive thing, but she has a giant blind post when it comes to misogyny (among other things) in her writing, so that's not saying much, and the way she actually wrote the epilogue leaves some room to disagree on how good it really is.
I know that people can choose to read it in a negative light, really latching onto the phrasing, but I just can’t … square? … where they’re getting Peeta badgering Katniss into children when he doesn’t badger her into … anything??? in the whole rest of the series. I just think reading it that way requires you to jettison the character dynamics as previously established. It requires you to read the epilogue in a humungous vacuum.
I’d have to think about Panem, sexism, etc. But at least on the “Peeta badgering, Katniss capitulating to something she didn’t want” point, I just don’t buy it.
And, more to the point, Katniss even gives us a scenario where she thinks Peeta wants something (the Capitol marriage) only to find out that he doesn’t want it unless it’s real (meaning she wants it too, meaning it’s not being coerced). And this isn’t even a scenario where Peeta is at fault for what Katniss is being forced into: he’s just as much a victim as she is. To think that he would turn around and become the instigator of a forced choice just because he wanted it (and she didn’t) beggars belief.
I’ll say it more bluntly: if Peeta ends the series controlling or coercing Katniss in this way, Snow wins.
