BREATH IN

Helena . 23 . Portugal

[emilysblunt]

You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner… you’re in one! Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

[gentlekirk]

uterus culture is forgetting all the weird symptoms that come along with your period every month and wondering why you’re feeling some kind of way until you Realize

[badfey]

I'm expecting all of u to use this time to get weirder. if ur not at least a lil bit batshit by the end of it Whats the fucking point

[tomhordy]

Sam Claflin as Finnick Odair THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013)

[laurens-german]

If he asked me again, I think I would say yes. Do you think he’ll ask me again? But do you love him? Little Women (2019) dir. Greta Gerwig

[akaashikeji-archive]

SPIRITED AWAY (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

[bimorgana]

I can see in you the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage, a vivid, restless captive. Were it but free, it would soar, cloud-high.

Jane Eyre (2011) dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga

[kyloren]

You must know, surely you must know, it was all for you. You are too generous to trifle with me. I believe you spoke with my aunt last night and it has taught me to hope as I had scarcely allowed myself before. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes have not changed, but one word from you will silence me forever. If, however, your feelings had changed, I will have to tell you, you have bewitched me body and soul and I love… I love… I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on.

                                                       We misjudged him, Papa. Me more than anyone in every way. Not just in this matter. I’ve been nonsensical. But he’s been a fool about, about Jane, about so many other things. But then, so have I. You see, he and I are… he and I are so similar. We’re both so stubborn.

PRIDE & PREJUDICE 2005 | dir. Joe Wright

[jeanqrey]

You will be bored of him in two years, and we will be interesting forever!

Saoirse Ronan as Jo March in Little Women (2019)

[desirableendings]

Ten stills in honor of the ten year release of Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

[tenroseponds]

#wow i love crying

[niggazinmoscow]

The women all reply with “Actually enjoy my fucking life in safety for ONE day.”

[varacai]

would y’all please jUST LOOK AT THIS

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[fanonical]

to be fair snape never really got a redemption arc, because it wasn’t an arc. it was a last minute ‘oh but actually’

[accio-hogwarts-bullshit]

That’s EXACTLY what I’ve been saying

[shesnake]

The Handmaiden (2016) dir. Park Chan-wook

[fictionadventurer]

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

[kyloren]

Pride & Prejudice (2005) dir. Joe Wright