Quills On Parchment

Reader, writer, roleplayer

[quillsonparchment]

crash

[bluebxlle-writer]

Writing cynical characters

masterlist. main navigation.

@bluebxlle_writer on instagram

Cynical characters are one of my favorite types of characters to write about, because there's so much potential for their depth and backstory. However, these types of characters often get reduced to basic "evil" and "rude" characters whose only purpose in the story is to hurt other people, which is a waste of potential.

1. What cynical characters are

First off, let's understand what cynical characters are.

Cynical people believe that human beings are only motivated by self-interest and greed. They are distrustful of human sincerity or integrity, and are usually very negative.

2. Cynical vs selfish characters

Some often confuse cynicism with selfishness, so let's settle the main difference between cynical and selfish characters.

Selfish people are driven by self-interests, while cynical people believe that everyone are driven by self-interests. Cynical people aren't necessarily selfish, and vice versa.

3. Backstory

Like any type of character, the base for your character's depth is the backstory. You have to establish why and how your characters became cynical. Some possibilities are :

• They were taught from an early age that people are naturally selfish beings, and that nobody goes through all the trouble to do or give something without expecting another thing in return.

• They had a first-hand experience that lead them to believe that people were only driven by self-centered goals. Maybe they've been deceived, abandoned, or betrayed by someone they believed was kind.

4. Perception

Cynical characters judge people based on the assumption that they always have ulterior motives, so they're usually more perceptive than others. They'll be able to tell when someone's acting kind in order to use them.

But this isn't always the case, because it entirely depends on the character's other personalities. They might have a low perception level instead, because their mind immediately registers any action as a disguise for selfishness, causing them to never realize a person's true motives.

5. Refusing help

They might often refuse help from others, since they're convinced that everyone has motives for offering kindness. They wouldn't want to accept insincere actions.

BUT!! Again, it depends entirely on the character themself. Consider this. Someone buys you your favorite food. You're pretty cynical, so you know that this person is just doing it so you'll pay for their meal next time. Will you take the food? I don't know about y'all, but if someone offers me pizza, I'd take it even if I know it's not sincere. It's mf pizza. Just because someone is cynical and doesn't believe in true kindness, it doesn't mean they'll refuse help 24/7.

5. Relationships

Especially for cynical characters, I think it's important to give them meaningful relationships with other characters. In fiction, they're often portrayed as highly aloof and cold, never accepting kindness from anyone.

While those type of characters are complex and I love them so much (THE ANGST???), there are more approaches to handling their relationships :

• They might surround themselves with people, in hopes of finally finding someone who truly cares about them without any hidden motives.

• They have friends who they genuinely care about despite the fact that those friends might have ulterior motives, because they know that selfishness is a human nature that can't be changed, and thet decided to just accept it.

• They're cold and skeptical to everyone except one person, who they truly love because they know that the person is genuinely kind. GRUMPY X SUNSHINE???

[sharingneedles]

[quillsonparchment]

thanks, btw. you caused the worst argument i've ever had with my dad. i hate you.

...And? Perhaps some context, so I can understand?

[englishproblems]

[wirbelwindria]

a myriad of male authors can be rapists and worse, and we’re getting told to “separate the art from the artist”, how everything is still great and they were great people.

a woman says that biology is a material factor in human society, and not just a social construct - and she’s met with this kind of nonsense and people spewing vile shit, pretending she actually said something hateful

wonder why that might be…

[aphroditeslesbian]

Wow a man discrediting the work of a woman?? I’ve never seen such a hot take before!!! So surprising!

Especially this man who is okay with conversion therapy for homosexual women and who spreads rape-positive rhetoric like nobody’s business…

[deputy-shayy]

Lmao of course Rapey J. Dennis has something stupid to fucking say about this

[frigid666]

stephen king: is weird as fuck and every little girl character in his books is being molested by her dad .. so ..

h.p. lovecraft: known as The Racist Guy in a time where everybody was racist (infamously anti black and anti semantic)

dr. seuss: cheating pos who drove his sick with cancer wife to suicide and gave zero fucks

lewis carroll: an actual pedophile. the “alice” in his books was based on a little girl he was obsessed with

allen ginsberg: pedophile apologist, openly expressed support for NAMBLA.

f. scott fitzgerald: stole most, if not all, his ideas from his wife zelda. gave her 0 credit and stopped her from pursuing writing bc he didn’t want to get exposed for what was essentially plagiarism

leo tsolvstoy: stole many of his idea from his wife sophia’s diaries, treated her like a servant, made her bear 13 children (most of which she did not want and many of which she attempted to miscarry out of desperation). when he was acting like a baby bc his book was shit and no one wanted to publish it, she edited it to include significant changes that made it more engaging, and even borrowed money from her family to start a printing/publishing office for her husband. after his passing, it was revealed that he willed his fortunes to his business partner, not her.

george rr martin: just all around gross, includes dozens of rape scenes in his novels because of “historical realism”

george orwell: huge misogynist. his most famous novel includes graphic descriptions of the main characters rape fantasies and yet this book is still required reading for many high schools

and yet i don’t see any cancel parties for any of these authors 🤔

[josephinebalthazar]

David Foster Wallace: tried to push his girlfriend out of a moving car, broke a table in her house, started following her son home from school after they broke up

Hanif Kureishi: left his young children’s mother for another woman because he was bored with domestic life

Jack Kerouac: abandoned his daughter

Marion Zimmer Bradley: raped her daughter

William Golding: tried to rape 14/15 year-old girl, excused it by saying she was “already as sexy as an ape”

Oscar Wilde: groomed and assaulted boys as young as 15, threatened to get a servant boy fired if he told anyone, basically Dandy Bryan Singer of his day

Rousseau: forced his mistress to give up all five of her babies to an orphanage in an era when that meant almost certain death by neglect.

Charles Dickens: tried to commit his wife to insane asylum so he could bang a young actress

Lord Byron: where to fucking start

These are just top of my head there’s more. Lots of creative people are shit. This is why you’re not supposed to idolize actual humans they do fucked-up things.

[thedaddycomplex]

So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.

Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.

One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.

All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.

So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.

And Mr. Hargrove loved it.

It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.

Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”

And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.

Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.

One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.

That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.

And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.

And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)

So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.

Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.

[sleepcities-deactivated20230306]

no but the same way that phones and laptops are guilty of scheduled obsolescence, entertainment conglomerates, and to some extent even regular writers just trying to ‘make it big’, are treating stories as though they’re meant to have a built-in expiration date. it’s the obsession with plot twists that ultimately mean nothing, it’s shock for shock’s sake, it’s the way spoilers are treated as inherently experience-ruining. stories are written for the first viewing and the first viewing only, because after you’ve seen something once, why would you want to see it again? so it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up on a second viewing or if the entire plot is ruined if you go into it knowing a single detail. you’re only going to care once, aren’t you?

but like. is that really true? is it really true that an experience with a piece of art is only worth having once? is it really not worth it to create something that will be loved enough that its lovers come back to it? that’s so much

[guerrillatech]

[mothra-mcyt]

☾ Tips on making a fanfic blog from someone who has no clue what they're doing ☽

(This is only from my perspective and you can do whatever you want with your blog)

Masterlists:

Please make masterlists they help a lot of people who just see one of your works and think "Oh hey i like their writing i wanna read more of that!"

Put a link to your masterlist at the bottom of your works. This way people who finished reading one of your works they can immediately go to your masterlist

Organisation:

Make a set time on when you post your work. A good set time is when you go to sleep. That way you wake up to a lot of notifications which imma be honest seeing 400 tumblr notifications in the morning really makes my day

Of course requests rules are something everyone should have

Make a navigation post that you pin. On there you can have a link to your masterlist, request rules etc.

If you use different fonts in your works try to keep it to a small amount of fonts or else it can get messy

About the content:

If you're not comfortable with writing a request, can't get yourself to do it or have no idea for it just say it. It's alright. We're all humans.

Tagging! Find out how people tag he fanfiction in the fandom you're reading. It varies from fandom to fandom. Most of the time you can easily find it out through under what tags people post fanfiction regularly

Also please tag stuff right. Don't tag 'person x reader' when that person isn't in the fanfiction. Please don't do that.

If you write oneshots a lot of times people can't figure out on what it's about only from the title which leads to them not clicking on it. What can help here is a short summary of what happens in there.

Interaction:

Don't be scared to reblog other people's fanfiction on your blog. Especially when you don't have any motivation to post rn. It gives your readers content without you having to post.

Interact with your readers! Some readers might want to talk with you but they're too scared to. Make an Anon list maybe you'll even find some friends.

[ashbur-deactivated20250915]

Writers when they uploaded their chapter two whole minutes ago and haven't gotten any validating comments yet

[larkfeather1153]

If you have epilepsy/photosensitivity, you may want to avoid the Quick Reblog thing on mobile for the time being. For some reason the green confirmation bar at the bottom of the screen is now flashing rapidly (basically strobing) whenever I Quick Reblog a post, and Tumblr Support hasn't gotten back to me about it besides the standard list of basic troubleshooting.

[matthewonart]

Non-Boring Environments that need Fantasy Representation

Tropical Rainforests

Scrubland/Dry Forests. For extra effect make them the sort that burn very often; some native plants never germinate until after a fire, and some animals not only rely on fire to smoke out prey, but may even start them themselves.

Savannas/Tropical Grasslands

Temperate Rainforests. I almost didn’t include this bc New Zealand is covered in them, and that’s where they filmed Lord of the Rings. But tbh, no one really knows about them, so it belongs here

Taiga Forests

Barren Tundra, perfect for some extreme seasonal dichotomy

Polar Ice Sheets

Desert-Grasslands (arguably the same as Scrubland but Australia’s good at adding its own twists)

Barren Desert

If you like Cacti, look at American Deserts like the Sonoran

Salt Flats

Soda Lakes and Alkaline Lakes

Madagascar’s Karst Limestone Formations

Madagascar’s Spiny Forests

Madagascar’s Baobab Forests

Madagascar’s Subhumid Forests (Madagascar is cool as hell ok)

Danxia Landforms

Badlands/Mountainous Deserts

Steppes and Highland Prairies

Flood Basalts

Newly-Formed Islands, still rife with Volcanic activity

Now for Underwater Environments, sure Coral Reefs are cool.

But there are SO MANY other kinds of environments for aquatic settings, it’s unbelievable:

Seaside Cliffs

Archipelagos. Not just Tropical Island chains like Polynesia (Moana anyone?) but also Coldwater Archipelagos like the Aleutians.

Tidal Flats

Bayous/Cypress Swamps

Tropical River Basins, AKA Seasonally Flooded Rainforests

Mangrove Swamps/Deltas/Beaches

Kelp Forests

The Open Ocean

Coastal Seabeds

Rocky Beaches with Tidepools

And there are a LOT more I could name but this post is already obscenely long as is, if you’d like to toss in your own go right ahead, but my point is if you limit yourself to European Deciduous Forests you’re a wimp.

[brynwrites]

I stumbled across your blog while looking for some writing tips. I was wondering, how do you portray emotions through actions without using the emotion itself? I mean something like, "she angrily shut the door" when I say that. Basically, how do you portray emotions subtly through actions?

Showing emotion through action.

That’s actually a great example sentence because you make one easy change to turn it from an expository adverb to a emotion portraying action like this:

she angrily shut the door -> she slammed the door

You can come up with actions like these in a variety of ways. One tried and true method is to take an adverb-verb pair and find a stronger verb. Examples:

angrily shut/placed/moved -> slammed

sadly leaned -> slumped

nervously moved -> fidgeted

hungrily ate -> gobbled

grumpily walked -> trudged

Another great thing to do, especially as a writing exercise, is to simply consider things people commonly do what they feel certain emotions. Examples:

Sadness: People might draw into corners or under blankets, let down their hair, forget things like meals, gravitate toward pets, slump or curl up, set their head in their hands or on their knees, wipe their eyes, move more sluggishly, etc.

Happiness: People might move more energetically, dance or hum or whistle, twirl things around their fingers, make larger hand gestures or take up more room when they lounge, etc.

Nerves/fear: People might fidget, tap their fingers or chew their nails, fix their outfit even when there’s nothing wrong, pace, start doing something and then forget to finish, etc. 

Remember that individual characters will have their own unique ways of dealing with emotion though! One character may slam a door, while another may focus so hard on closing it softly that their shoulders shake, while another may leave the door open specifically because they know the person they’re angry with will have to come close it afterward.

Because people (and characters) aren’t carbon copies, we usually have to use a variety of means to show emotion. Well chosen actions alone are great, but facial expressions, tone of voice, dialogue structure, and (for point of view characters) internal thoughts can go a long way in helping round out the emotion in a scene.

Ye Good Old Footnote: I wrote a book about a silly siren and a sillier pirate being idiots together and you can read it if you search for Our Bloody Pearl at your favorite book distributor!

[honourablejester]

Random, but a really handy way to make things seem creepy or wrong in horror is to make them incongruously neat or clean:

In the middle of a horrific battlefield, you find one corpse laid aside neatly, straightened and arranged, its arms crossed neatly across its chest

As you walk through the garden, you gradually realise that the oddness you’ve been noticing about the trees is that they are all perfectly symmetrical

As you move through the abandoned house, you realise that suddenly that there’s no dust in this room, no dirt or cobwebs

You hear hideous noises coming from behind a locked door, screams and pleas, and visceral sounds of violence. When you manage to break down the door, there is no one there, and the room is perfectly spotless

In the middle of a horrific battlefield, a hollow full of churned mud and blood, you find five corpses cleanly dismembered, each set of limbs or parts neatly laid out in their own little row

You witness a murder, a brutal, grisly killing that carpets the area in blood. When you return in a blind panic with the authorities, the scene is completely clean, and no amount of examination can find even a drop of blood

You run through the night and the woods with a comrade, pulling each other through leaves and twigs and mud as you scramble desperately towards freedom. When you finally emerge from the forest, in the grey light of dawn, you turn to your companion in relief, and notice that their clothes are somehow perfectly clean

You hand a glass of water to your suspect, talking casually the whole while, and watch with satisfaction as they take it in their bare hand and take a drink. There’ll be a decent set of prints to run from that later. Except there isn’t. There are no prints at all. As if nothing ever touched the glass

You browse idly through your host’s catalogue, and stop, and pay much more attention, when you realise that several items on a dry list of acquisitions are ones you’ve seen before, and it slowly dawns on you that each neat little object and number in this neat little book are things that belong (belonged?) to people you know

Neatness, particularly incongruous neatness, neatness where you expect violence or imperfection or abandonment, or neatness that you belatedly realise was hiding violence, or neatness that is imposed over violence, is incredibly scary. Because neatness is not a natural thing. Neatness requires some active force to have come through and made it so. Neatness implies that the world around you is being arranged, maybe to hide things, to disguise things, to make you doubt your senses, or else simply according to something else’s desires. Neatness is active and artificial. Neatness puts things, maybe even people, into neat little boxes according to something else’s ideals, and that’s terrifying as well. Being objectified. Being asked to fit categories that you’re not sure you can fit, and wondering what will happen to the bits of you that don’t.

Neatness, essentially, says that something else is here. Neatness where there should be chaos says that either something came and changed things, or that what you’re seeing now or what you saw then is not real. Neatness alongside violence says that something came through here for whom violence did not mean the same thing as it does to you.

Neatness, in the right context, in the right place, can be very, very scary

And fun

[musashigouda-deactivated2019032]

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

[blooming-wilting]

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

[fangasmagorical]

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

[macbcth]

actually, yes, i do think it’s time to stop putting sexism and racism in your high fantasy books

[officialleehadan]

Okay, complicated opinion here.

One of the most important things in high fantasyis the presence of monsters. Sometimes those monsters are of the mind, and others are able to stand before a hero and threaten all they love, but the monsters are real in either case.

One reason we put monsters into our stories is to warn about them.

“Don’t go that way. There’s danger.”

“Don’t be that person.”

“Don’t chose the path of harm to others.”

The other reason we put monsters into our stories is to show that they can be defeated. To teach that you can face a monster and tear it down.

Should we stop putting sexism and racism in high fantasy? I say both yes and no.

Yes, we should stop having sexism that makes body-pillow female leads, who contribute nothing to the story. Yes, we should stop associating masculinity with toxic masculinity.

Yes, we should stop murdering characters of color. Yes, we should stop treating beautiful, ornate cultures as merely exotic novelties. Yes, we should let POC characters shine.

But here’s the other side.

Showing that these things exist, and they do, is important, because showing that they exist, and showing that these things are wrong will teach future readers. Fiction shapes minds. It shapes beliefs. One of the most valuable things that fiction can do is teach that sexism and racism are monsters to be crushed beneath our feet.

Remember, the two reasons we put monsters into fantasy is to warn of them, and to show they can be defeated.

Let Sexism and Racism be monsters that fling themselves on the blades of our characters, and let them be cut down.

[eve-made-the-right-choice]

In other words, if your characters aren’t gonna specifically fight and KILL the racism and sexism in your fantasy world, don’t bother putting it in. I can get behind that.

Racism and sexism as set dressing? BROKE

Racism and sexism as sworn enemies? WOKE

[actualteenadultteen]

The Hunger Games, Actual Teen style!

On the left, 15-year-old Josh Hutcherson.

On the right, 16-year-old Jennifer Lawrence.

Think how much creepier it would be to see them killing other kids when they look so squishy-cheeked and little.

[antauri-the-hadozee]

“Think how much creepier it would be to see them killing other kids when they look so squishy-cheeked and little.”

THAT’S THE POINT SUZANNE COLLINS WAS TRYING TO MAKE

[lumos-of-my-life]

Think about these cute squishy kids being forced into a romance in order to survive

[impuretale]

And the threat of these cute squishy kids being forced into prostitution after the games are over. 

[my-graceless-heart]

REBLOGGING THIS AGAIN WITH A REMINDER THAT FINNICK WAS 14 WHEN HE WAS REAPED/WON THE GAMES AND WAS FORCED INTO PROSTITUTION SOON AFTERWARD

[venusdryad]

wait the kids were forced into prostitution after they won???

[a-terf]

Some of the Victors were, especially if they were attractive to lots of rich people during the games. How do you think you pay off the parachute things people send you to help you win the game? Those books were so fucked up

[berrygoodindeed-deactivated2022]

That’s why I feel like actual teens should have been cast in the movie. It would have hammered in the message of the books so much more.

[lvlnarrative]

And if they had cast actual teenages, I’m sure they wouldn’t have focus so much on romance in the films. They would have focus on the horror of the hunger games, like they damn well should have.

[moved--306389]

The hunger game movies are the exact thing the hunger game books was trying to warn us about

[binaominagata]

Just going to add in a few other things that a lot of people seem to miss because it was either de-emphasized or cut entirely from the movies:

-Haymitch Abernathy was 16 when he won the Hunger Games, and the Capitol attempted to force him into prostitution as they did with Finnick and many other popular victors. He refused, and in retaliation, they gradually killed off everyone he loved one by one—his friends from home, his family, his girlfriend. He began drinking heavily at a young age to deal with the trauma of the Games, the loss of everyone he’d ever cared about, and subsequently having to continually relive the trauma of the Games in mentoring roughly 50 children, two each year, whom he’d then have to send to their deaths in the Arena. 

-The Capitol also attempted to force Joanna Mason into prostitution. She, too, refused, and like with Haymitch, the Capitol retaliated by killing off everyone she loved one by one. She alludes to this in both the book and the movie version of Catching Fire, not flinching when she enters the Jabberjay area of the arena because there’s “no one left” that she loves. The movies don’t really explore this, though, while the books do more exploration both with everything the Capitol has taken from her and the lingering effects of her PTSD from her imprisonment by the Capitol. 

-The only reason Peeta and Katniss weren’t forced into prostitution was because the Capitol was too invested in the “Star-Crossed Lovers from District 12″ narrative. 

-Also, Katniss spent the latter half of her first Hunger Games deaf in one ear and had to have her middle and inner ear reconstructed after the Games—the explosion at the Cornucopia permanently fucked up her hearing in that ear. She’s able to hear again after the surgeries but never quite the same. 

-And Peeta had a prosthetic leg! He was severely injured while fleeing the “Mutts” at the end of the Games and was bleeding out from his leg by the time he and Katniss reached the Cornucopia. Katniss gave him a tourniquet using one of her last two arrows to tighten it. Doing so saved his life, but by the time the Capitol doctors took them out of the arena, the leg was beyond saving and had to be amputated. Katniss finds this out in their “post-Games” interview with Cesar Flickerman. 

-Just generally the movies glossed over or completely cut a lot of characters whose experiences in the games left them physically disabled (Katniss’s partial deafness and Peeta’s lost leg being cut entirely, Beetee’s spinal damage from the forcefield leaving him wheelchair-bound being largely kinda glossed over) or with PTSD (Katniss and Peeta’s PTSD isn’t really explored that much, Joanna’s PTSD is pretty much skipped over entirely, Annie’s barely in the movies at all, Haymitch’s entire backstory is cut, the fact that Finnick is basically just constantly putting on a show and barely holding it together under the surface isn’t ever really explored, pretty much all of the addiction subplots including Haymitch attempting to quit drinking and Katniss starting to drink at one point and everything related to morphling are cut…). 

-Basically as “rough” as the movies are they sanitized the FUCK out of the Hunger Games and the world surrounding them, and that’s…not a good thing.

TL;DR: @isashi-nigami is completely correct, The hunger game movies are the exact thing the hunger game books was trying to warn us about.

[bundibird]

Two things:

The only reason Katniss and Peeta were saved from prostitution was timing. After their own Games, the rumblings of rebellion had really started to gain traction. All victors have to do a celebratory circuit of all the Districts, but Peeta and Katniss’s celebration circuit was being used by Snow as a “everything’s fine, please don’t rebel, we’re just a pair of teenagers in live” prop tool for Snow to try and supress the rebellion. Peeta and Katniss were much more useful to him as teens in love than they were as prostitutes. Then we went straight from there to the 75th Games, in which Peeta and Katniss were fighters. Between being used to quell a revolution and having the Quarter Quell go the way it did, there was no time for Snow to loan them out to people. But had the timing been different – had there been no rebellion or had Peeta and Katniss not been central to it or had it all been delayed long enough for the post-games celebrations to die out, then yeah, they would have been sold to the highest bidder just like Finnick was.

I actually thibk that the fact that the film’s focussed on the romance and the glitz and glamour and etc was… accidentally clever, on Hollywood’s part. They certainly didn’t mean to do this, but they 100% replicated the Capitol’s attitude to the Games. They made it all about the entertainment, all about the story and the romance and the drama. So many people would have watched those movies and been taken in by the romance plot, and the revolutionary plot would have been secondary. The social commentary wouldn’t have even registered. Even the fact that they used older actors for the teens – in the books, Katniss and Peeta are never seen in public without a full face of make up once they’re Reaped. Katniss undergoes a full beauty treatment and not only is she wearing make up that makes her look older and more mature, but so is Peeta. The Capitol didn’t want them looking like fresh faced babies, and neither did Hollywood. If you watch those films merely for the entertainment they provide, then congrats. You’re the canon target audience of the Hunger Games. Hollywood was never going to make a movie that focuses on the true horrors of such a story, the way it should. Especially when the social commentary in the Hunger Games is terrifyingly similar to a social commentary on our society as a whole. No, no - they were always going to focus on the romance and the glitz and the glamour and the heroism. Which is……. kind of poetic, really. That they went and did the exact same thing that the villains did.

[dressedindustandshadows]

THIS MAN ^^^ I wrote an essay about the lack of humanity in this book and man I should’ve read this first

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

The whole youthful and innocent vs older and sexy thing actually gets brought up at the end of the first book.

Cinna puts Katniss in a dress that is consciously designed to make her look much younger than she actually is, so as to play up the ‘teens in love’ angle they’re trying to sell the Capitol.

But the dress also has padding, so as to make her breasts and hips seem larger than they are, since she’s been literally on the verge of starvation for weeks, and wasn’t eating that much before that, and as a result she isn’t that curvy. Katniss is shocked by this, but Cinna explains that the dress was actually a compromise, because the original Capitol plan had been to give her plastic surgery.

Katniss then realises that none of the male tributes grew facial hair in the arena, even though several of them were old enough (note: she doesn’t say that all of them were old enough. Though Rue was the youngest, this suggests that there were other tributes who were young teenagers) and that something must have been done to them to prevent that from happening.

Also, it’s worth considering that Katniss and Peeta probably looked even younger than your typical sixteen year olds.

Katniss makes a big deal about how much they both get to eat at home, but if you read between the lines, Peeta lives off stale bread from the bakery and the odd bit of meat, and Katniss is essentially living the hunter gatherer lifestyle, supplemented by what they can buy from the baker and what they can get from Prim’s goat.

They’re much more well-nourished than the bulk of District Twelve, but Katniss can still easily spot the Career Tributes, because they’re the ones who have always had enough to eat. She’s one of the older (and therefore almost certainly heavier) tributes, but she still gets to hide in trees to get away from the Careers, because she’s significantly lighter than all of them.

Malnutrition tends to push back puberty. Katniss would probably be less well-developed than a modern teenager of the same age.

Notably, we don’t hear about her getting her period— or even wondering about that like she does with the facial hair— in the arena. Which, yeah, could be because of our culture’s habit of viewing menstruation as less kid-friendly than graphic child murder and mentions of prostitution, but it’s worth considering that in real life she might well have not started it yet.

While wearing the final interview dress, even with the padding to give her bigger breasts and wider hips, she says she looks about “fourteen at most”, which even accounting for Cinna’s borderline magical design skills, suggests that she probably tends to look like a younger teen even without it.

The Hunger Games would have been almost unbearably disturbing, if they hadn’t decided to cast almost all the characters as incredibly fit twenty somethings.