Mother of all Careers Apologists

Went through this in 2012, back again 12 years later. 27 y.o THG fangirly, back on my unhinged bullshit. The OG clato girly, the OG careers girly Forever in my Clato (and careers) era

[clatoera]

Masterlist of Chapters: Always Remember We’re Burned For Better

hey guys! I just wanted to make a post with the links to each chapter of my Clato AU both here and on AO3 for convenience and easy tracking purposes.

I won’t be too verbose and will just get into it!

Chapter One: Crimson Clover    Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Two: Still, the Yearning Stays   Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Three: Checkmate, I Couldn’t Lose Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Four: I’ve Loved you three summers now honey, i want ‘em all Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Five: It’s Been a Long Time Coming Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Six: Everybody’s Watching to See the Fall Out  Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Seven: All These People Think Love’s For Show Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Eight: Would’ve. Could’ve. Should’ve. Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Nine: Everything was slipping right out of our hands Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Ten: Our Coming of Age Has Come and Gone Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Eleven: Baby, Let the Games Begin. Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Twelve: Meet Me At Midnight Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Thirteen: Don’t Blame Me (Love made me crazy) Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Fourteen: Who You Are Is Not What You Did Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Fifteen: If I’m on Fire, You’ll Be Made of Ashes Too Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Sixteen: I nearly lost you (I really though i’d lost you) Tumblr|AO3

Chapter Seventeen: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Want you More Tumblr|AO3

Chapter Eighteen: Not my homeland anymore...so what am I defending Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Nineteen: Always Remember We’re Burned For Better  Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Twenty: We Will Never Go Back to That Bloodshed Tumblr | AO3

Epilogue:  I Vow I Will Always Be Yours, For We Survived the Great War Tumblr | AO3

SEQUEL: Picket Fences, Sharp as Knives

Chapter One: At Dinner Parties, I Call You Out Tumblr | AO3

Chapter Two: Barefoot in the Wildest Winter, Catching my Death Tumblr| AO3

Chapter Three: All I Know, Is this could either break my heart (part 1) Tumblr| AO3

Chapter Four: ...Or bring me back to life (part 2) tumblr | AO3

Chapter Five: I once believed love would be black and white...but it’s golden. Like daylight. tumblr | AO3

Chapter Six: Not Trying to Fall in Love, but we did like Children running tumblr | AO3

Chapter Seven: They Got No Idea About Me and You tumblr | AO3

Chapter Eight: You Knew What You Wanted, and Boy You Got Her tumblr | AO3

Chapter Nine: I am what I am cause you trained me tumblr | AO3

Chapter Ten: The best thing that’s ever been mine tumblr | AO3

Chapter Eleven: When you can’t sleep at night, you’ll hear my stolen lullabies tumblr | AO3

Chapter Twelve: Proof of Life tumblr | AO3

Prequel: You Don’t Feel Pretty, You Just Feel Used Tumblr| AO3

Associated works: because friends who write together stay together (or me being really thankful for my loves who share this with me)

1.  Dust Collected on my Pinned up hair: au of an au from @crookedlyniceperson for my girl glimmer

2. Enobaria and Cashmere being cuties talking shit drunk in bed from @bodyelectric77

3. Honeymoon: Cash and Enobaria in D1 post war  @bodyelectric77

4. In a world of boys he’s a gentleman: glimmer and marvel get together THE fic i dream of sometimes @kentwells

[clatoera]

What do you mean I’m watching the Pitt in peace and see mf enobaria

[clatoera]

I once again wrote 100k words of fanfic in a year where I worked 80 hours a week every week lmao

[clatoera]

What the fuck do you mean we got the hunger games irl

[clatoera]

We’ve reached psychosis

[ohhowwehavefallen]

this account is literally a Ilya Rosanov workship account like YES bisexual Slavic KING YES

[ohhowwehavefallen]

Life could be worse!

[clatoera]

We’ve never changed a day in our lives

[ohhowwehavefallen]

hey so life couldn’t be worse

[clatoera]

Shut the fuck up we have ilya rozanov

[clatoera]

The girls found a blonde man to lust over pretend to be shocked @ohhowwehavefallen

[clatoera]

hi i am a HUGE fan of your fanfics and can i do a fanfic binding on always remember we’re burned for better, just to keep for myself?

Sure! That is very kind and very sweet and I'd be honored!

[clatoera]

Taylor swift is getting married if this is how you found out be honest!!!

[clatoera]

I am afraid to say I think me and @ohhowwehavefallen manifested too close to the sun for YEARS guys we really did it this time

[ohhowwehavefallen]

you do not wanna know what happened to me this weekend

[clatoera]

Oh we KNOW

[clatoera]

Lets share the worst thing men have ever said to us, @ohhowwehavefallen can go first!!

[clatoera]

I am afraid to say I think me and @ohhowwehavefallen manifested too close to the sun for YEARS guys we really did it this time

[clovesknives2]

Peeta: What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done?

Marvel: One time I sneezed so hard I headbutted a wall and knocked myself out.

Clove: How the fuck—

Glimmer: One time I accidentally microwaved a fork and just watched it spark because I thought it was pretty.

Cato: One time I agreed to lead this fucking team.

[rosegardeninwinter]

“I hate the way The Hunger Games ended with Katniss forced into a typical domestic life … she shouldn’t have ended up with Peeta … it would have been more feminist if she didn’t end up with anybody”

like okay President Snow I didn’t know you were active on social media

[x-i-l-verify]

#i have personally met 2 separate people who said they hated how the last book “took all the fight out of her” #“she used to be so brave and courageous and then she just... wasn't” #“idk she just seemed so sad and broken by the end”#“she lost the will to fight along the way and that just made me lose interest” #← actual takes from these people #and it left me SPEECHLESS #honestly i think they figured Katniss would kill snow in some epic battle and then take over as president of panem #like tell me you don't understand ANYTHING about Katniss without telling me you don't understand anything about Katniss lol

[secretwriter-studentjaune]

[cardassiangoodreads]

I mean I’ve heard media studies professors who couldn’t care less about online shipping and Tumblr’s reductive feminism discussions who thought the ending was overly heteronormative and didn’t quite fit those characters. I think you can, in fact, criticize how YA that sets out specifically to critique heteronormativity in the way that series does still needs to end by propping it up as the ideal ending, especially when we look at these as patterns in media. I think you guys are doing someone serious strawmanning.

Additionally a) I am tired for the need to constantly do “normalize good fathers posting” (or whatever it’s called) with women choosing the life choices patriarchy prefers for us rather than the opposite, and the idea that feminism “needs to” constantly affirm something the rest of society not only affirms but forces, b) yall need to stop fucking talking about fictional characters like they are real people who make their own choices. Katniss and Peeta did not decide anything, author Suzanne Collins did in a genre and with publishers who had certain expectations. Of fucking course we can critique this as a statement and a message like we do anything else in media, because that’s what it is!

[rosegardeninwinter]

This take has far less to do with shipping and everything to do with the fact that I genuinely, in my heart of hearts, do believe these media studies professors are flat out missing the point in the name of being contrarian academics (charitably, they’re coming up against the real issue of shoehorned domesticity for female characters; it’s just that they’ve misapplied that reading here). Of course literature is meant to be interpreted, but I do not buy that all takes are equally compelling or correct. I think it’s a poorly founded critique. I have yet to hear an argument (maybe there is one but it’s not crossed my radar in a decade) for a more coherent conclusion to the story that doesn’t come across as misinterpreting of Katniss’s character, unclear on the overarching themes and motifs of all five books, or (and this is one I see way more than I should) tacitly ableist. I am convinced this series earns this ending, perhaps more so than the majority of other “protagonist as mother” endings out there. Of course we need stories with other messages, statements, endings, of course! Please! But from the jump, that is not the story this series sets out to tell.

[cardassiangoodreads]

Setting aside the anti-intellectualism which I’ll deal with in more detail in an edit/second reblog since I think that requires more about what’s wrongheaded about that, I think you are missing the point that it’s not that people are taking issue with the idea that Katniss wanted a quiet life or wanted to be with Peeta, which I agree is accurate to her characterization. It’s the particular shape that that “quiet life” takes. But also, sorry, you can’t really just ignore the broader context that these stories live in, what it means that that is such a pattern in the genre and what seeing that over and over again reinforces (one such thing media studies classes and texts are much better at examining and informing you on that online fandom). I don’t think anyone who is truly honest with themselves and is also at all competent at media analysis can say that ending would play out the exact same way if it were not a YA book from a time when YA with romance elements was expected to have a very particular conclusion. Also even in the broader story, it exists in a broader context that repeatedly posits heteronormative F/M relationships as people’s true desire and as the fighting-the-power option compared to other kinds of relationships (everything about Finnick’s arc) (and please don’t give me the lazy “but the Capitol forced him!” yeah, it did. Still an author’s choice what kinds of relationships and sex it forced him into vs which one he genuinely wanted) Which is, zooming out a moment, also a thing in YA and especially dystopian YA from the time: here is why the most normative type of cis Western heterosexuality is secretly revolutionary in this contrived future society. What do you think it means for queer kids to read this repeatedly?

I’ll also add these tags from my mutual @maddie-grove that get more to the point:

[rosegardeninwinter]

I hear you, but I am both honest with myself and consider myself decently competent at media analysis (and not just because of online fandom), and I cannot say with any degree of certainty that the ending would have played out differently were Collins not writing for a young adult audience.

I understand that at the time, many a book did have that kind of domestic ending, but many a book at the time had the “dystopian game” element too. In a lot of cases, those books were highly derivative, trying to capture what The Hunger Games had, and failing. All that to say, just because similar endings were popular at the time doesn’t mean Mockingjay’s ending was as thinly conceived as the endings of some of its contemporaries. I don’t think that follows. Even if it is a product of its time, does that make it a bad ending? Actually curious.

I also understand that not everyone likes it, or resonates with it (though I don’t think books exist to resonate with everyone), which is absolutely their prerogative, but my main critique with the original post, in a lighthearted manner, was to point out that it is internally consistent with Katniss’s character in the text to have that ending, and that slapping the label “anti-feminist” onto an ending that the reader did not particularly resonate with is lazy feminist criticism. I think there’s more nuanced ways to go about it, more good faith discussions about what we’d like to see in media. The bad faith takes invalidate the ways in which many people do resonate with the ending by trying to make it a kind of moral/social/academic failure of the text that Katniss’s life is the way it is. I just don’t think that’s fair at all. 🤷🏼‍♀️

[rosegardeninwinter]

I want to add one thing. Nowhere do I state that this ending is the only possible meaningful ending for Katniss’s story. It is the shape that the story takes and I happen to think it is a rich and beautiful one. I am not going out of my way to mount a case for all stories having “babies ever after” endings or heteronormative romances. What I am saying is that to dismiss this ending purely on the grounds of it containing those elements feels reductive to me. If those things were sudden character shifts for Katniss, I’d be the first to give it the side eye, but they’re not. It’s not a sudden gear shift into compulsory marriage and motherhood. It’s not out of character.

[clovesknives2]

Marvel: I feel like hugging someone right now.

Cato: I could kill you in 8 different ways.

Marvel: Yes, sir.