kaybaeisgay

vomiting into the void (she/her) —just go ahead and assume that i stan the women of whatever fandom i’m currently hyperfixating on

[kaybaeisgay]

i finally finished these sketches that i was using to practice finding my art style… also happened to coincide with nami’s bday (two days late oops), so happy bday to the people’s princess 🫡

close ups below:

[abreca]

they lost zoro (again)

[alesshi]

University AU part 2, looking for excuses to spend time together

[noitsnotacookiee]

my piece for the @rdtriozine 💖✨

[k3bchu]

Romance dawn 🌅

[kaybaeisgay]

if i had a nickel for every time an author made their character—whose core trait is thriving off of rebelling against their occupying military force—a fucking cop, i’d have two nickels.

well, i’d at the very least have one nickel and a penny: the nickel for toph beifong and the penny for roronoa zoro….

[kaybaeisgay]

my take on what zelda would look like if at least some parts of the dragon tear transformation were permanent… (expand pic to get better quality)

[kaybaeisgay]

holy shit. i just realized i unintentionally did the background the same color as all those shitty ai pictures ☹️ just for that, here’s my obligatory oath that (on my honor, on my momma, and on my pride as a fucking amateur artist) no part of this utilized ai!!!!!! bc fuck ai!!!!!!!!!!

[kaybaeisgay]

my take on what zelda would look like if at least some parts of the dragon tear transformation were permanent… (expand pic to get better quality)

[dannymans66]

Strawhat summer ☀️

[kaybaeisgay]

……which one of you bitches told me to watch “yona of the dawn” since i liked “apothecary diaries” while conveniently leaving out the small—TINY—detail that it never got a season 2.

[kaybaeisgay]

would you believe me if i said i spent over eight hours on this gag gift for my brother?

[soaked-doors]

shut my eyes and count to ten

[kaybaeisgay]

biblically accurate revenant doodle

[blueskittlesart]

knowledge long forgotten

got really into reading item descriptions on this playthrough. anyway did you know the silent princess is one of the only raw materials with a cooking effect to not explicitly list that effect in its description

[kaybaeisgay]

“haymitch said katniss reminded him of louella, so it makes sense they would cast a girl who looks like her for the role!”

okay, disclaimer that no one should be hating on a little kid for getting the dream role of their life, and obviously i trust that they cast her based off of her acting chops….

but also, please free us from the idea that people can only resemble each other physically and literally lol. like i sometimes am struck by how much characters or irl people resemble those in my life based purely off their similar personalities/mannerisms/vibes/etc… doesn’t always have to mean they literally look like each other 💀

[themetalhiro]

[kaybaeisgay]

the longer i sit with it, the more i think that the saddest (not without some tough fucking competition, obviously) realization about sotr to me is that almost all the tributes really, truly, did not treat the games like they had a chance.

in the original trilogy—and even in The Ballad—the tributes felt like they were genuinely scheming and training and vying to win. with every other games, it seemed like the kids held onto this hope that they would be The One to make it, the one to become victor, even if they didn’t always say it aloud. despite the odds, they clawed as close as they could to victory, even if it meant playing into the capitol’s game and sacrificing their honor or morality.

but in this one? they come into the training rooms expecting to die. even the careers, though they swagger about and act like hot shit, feel younger than the careers have ever felt to me before. they collectively seem more resigned and bitter than in past/future tributes. their motives were all so unified against the capitol in a way that was reminiscent of the 75th games—where half the tributes were already a part of an organized rebellion to begin with.

while the theme of ‘i want to choose how i die, i don’t want the capitol to use me’ is prevalent in every book, this quell felt especially grim and determined. i kept expecting suzanne collins to undermine the camaraderie she gave the Newcomers. i kept expecting someone to decide ‘fuck it, i’m going for it on my own and i’ll backstab whoever i need to to do it.’ i kept expecting betrayal and desperation and a true competition.

but no—like wyatt, knowing his odds and choosing to protect the weaker—like ampert, knowing he’s charming and smart enough to make a decent bid for victor, yet rebelling anyways—like maysilee, knowing she’s near powerless, but spitting in the capitol’s face anytime she can—like all the newcomers, knowing they hardly have a shot, but absolutely refusing to betray one another—

they remained steadfast in their hope to die dignified and honorable, to die fighting against the true enemy, and that makes it so much more heartbreaking.

[derangedchameleon]

I think it was a mixture of people in the outer districts still being more willing to ally up back then, and the fact that there were just… so many kids. If you are an average tribute your odds are 48:1. That‘s a 2% chance of survival. (and average is pretty good considering the 12 careers pull up the average considerably).

I think Snow learned from this allying up business here. We can‘t have the outer districts act like that. Afterall, the whole games structure is meant to be a metaphor for panem, the careers representing the capitol and the outer districts representing… well… the districts. All of Ampert‘s talk of „They may have training and better weapons, but we have the numbers!“ was dangerous.

The capitol must have done something since these games to discourage outer districts from from forming alliances (we know from Katniss that this is not common in her time, and the idea of teaming up with Peeta never once crosses her mind before the rule change)

And people are angry. It only took Haymitch getting a 1 in training for 12 to start rebelliously singing forbidden songs in the square. The tributes were not exempt from this.

I think, ironically, the 50th fostered district solidarity. By this time the Hunger Games had become the new normal, as horrifying as that is. It just became taken for granted, just as the sun rose every morning. But this year was different. This year made the horrors fresh and real. And everyone remembered that their district wasn‘t the only one losing double the amount of kids this year. Everyone was.

[kaybaeisgay]

yes, i agree with all of this.

the sheer number of tributes combined with the not-quite polished system of the Games definitely contributed to why the tributes of haymitch’s games were more willing to ally up. and as some pointed out in the comments of my original post, yes, katniss was not a reliable narrator at all lol, so her paranoia definitely skewed how we viewed the competition of her games.

with all of those factors, i almost find it more moving that there was such companionship and solidarity in these games. i think what gets me is that people have argued for centuries over whether human nature is inherently selfish—whether the general populace is more willing to serve ourselves rather than others when put in extreme situations. and here, suzanne collins just seemed to be pushing back against that idea of “survival of the fittest at any means necessary” by subverting the very idea of the Hunger Games both as a function in her narrative and as a literary device for her series.

back when i was a youngin first reading the original trilogy, i was hooked by the idea of such a cutthroat, dystopian world. in a time where post apocalyptic stories were at the forefront of media, and many fictional universes were centered on that same notion of brutality in the name of survival, i was intrigued and even excited by the thought of a bunch of kids like me duking it out to the death in hopes of “winning.” and now, as an adult who has had over a decade to sit with that premise—who has seen what surviving costs humanity in real life—who has read the follow up novels that collins’ has published as a direct result of real life circumstances…

i just really appreciate how this novel went in on the idea that rebellions are founded on compassion and empathy. in this book, the core theme to me is less so about the survival of any individual or group of people, but about the survival of human nature itself. it is about the fight to preserve the goodness of people and fight against selfishness and pure self-preservation. it would have been easy for any of those kids to come to terms with their inevitable deaths and skew to the side of “fuck it, i’ll do anything to survive.” instead, most of them actually landed firmly on the side of, “i am doomed and you are doomed; yet, i care about you.”