#anti lionsgate

[tiffyrina]

shawnee pourier as katniss... wistful sigh

[becauseimamastermind]

REMINDER: if you support the sotr movie, you are supporting the erasure of Indigenous Americans, zionism, transphobia, sexism, the sexualisation of teenage girls, racism against Latin Americans, African Americans, and East Asians

[tiffyrina]

a beautiful young black girl becomes martyred/a sacrificial lamb for the cause of canon. her death will not save her from the hatred of her race. her canonical appearance — a darker skinned, youthful rural teen is erased from reader's view of how she will go out. they think her white and pristine — they believe that she is the crux of man's innocence, the ivory that has been held up as sacred for years and years.

and then she is bought to life on screen. lighter than she should be, but overwhelmingly black. and again, her death does not save her from her race. people retract their pity of this young girl: they see nothing sacred. she is barely worthy of a statistic. she cannot be held as reverential when she is too dark to fit the bill, too dark, therefore, uninnocent and unpure. dreams of whiteness shatter at the possibility of a black girl falling in place for a native girl, now turned white — to mourn. she is a subspecies where this new white protagonist is high above it. in every iteration, this girl will mourn her anyway.

and the statement that stands past that is whiteness will protect you from all. if primrose, a equally youthful but white-passing melungeon girl had the exact same complexion as her darker sister, would there still be mourning room? if pale skin and blue eyes and blonde hair transformed into dark hair, grey eyes and olive skin, would her death be as impactful as? would her whitewashing be pushed also in order to maintain the sanctity of her death?

amandla steinberg was not white enough for viewers in 2012 despite being a light-skinned black girl. how worse would it have been, if rue was truly depicted as any darker? how corrupt would viewer opinion be? will there ever be room where people of colour are seen and understood as victims, much more than their white counterparts, who oppress them into those roles?

[tiffyrina]

The SOTR movie marketing is ridiculous. It's literally just a bunch of white blonde kids dancing about before they play whitewashed victims of an oppressive regime. Guess just the one wasn't enough for Hollywood. Can't have our audiences making parallels with real life.

We are seeing brown and black children massacred by real life imperial genocidal regimes every day. If Suzanne Collins really had something to say, she would have cast these children as their original ethnicities to emphasise the realities of the world she wrote.

there's two truths you have to confront with this casting, anon. and they're very unfortunate, and downright disgusting, if you will.

the first truth, is that the hunger games was written by a white woman, for a white liberal and conservative audience. which is her alignment. her takes on poc characters are half-baked with locations filling the rest of the worldbuilding in. her idea of minorities are sepulchred by stereotypes and underlying racism. but as long as the white crowd approves of what they think they know of poc, the trilogy will always be a hit with no issues, because they know nothing of racism.

the second truth is this — we're in a time where white people have decided that open racism is okay now. because of a certain president, and because of the slow painful death of "being woke," several white kids playing black and brown ones are okay to them — it gives more white people representation, and the white plight makes more money in the box office.

what's more, is that i believe that we expand far too much grace to collins. if she was willing to defend whitewashing katniss & then refuse (not publically, but through action) to never defend amandla sternberg when it came to the torrents of abuse and hatred she received for playing the (canonically) martyred little black girl of the first novel, why on earth would she aid in casting poc in power? why would she allow her story to be sullied by anyone who isn't fair like her?

and MOREOVER, everyone partaking in these movies are mainly white. with no poc input, they could never allow anyone of colour who isn't a tragedy kill or humiliation ritual within a character. it's a shame, a damn fucking shame, but we need to think of why.

when we've thought about the why, we move on to what we'll do, about a white author making money off of people of colour in poverty rising to power in the novels, and then changing it to fit the endless white and oppressive narrative. and what we'll do is keep talking about it. what we'll do, is boycott the white kids prancing around playing a role that isn't theirs. they've stolen too much from us and the culture, they've stolen too much from this series. and now we need to fight in order to stop giving them that light of day they crave.

[tiffyrina]

🔥?

the hunger games is very much a racist piece of media, which has been peddled by both book and book adaptations.

the black characters are confined to one district, deal with slavery-esque punishments and executions, PICK COTTON, as well as produce the "tragedy deaths" to garner sympathy for the main character. cinna's also a part of this, despite being capitol. many examples (and a good one would be ampert as well.)

there are no asian characters mentioned in any of the four books, which leads me to think that suzanne.... purposely.... bred them out or something. i mean, there's clemmie who seems to be at the very least south asian, but there's no insinuation of proper races throughout the entire series. and it's accepted under the guise of "it's xyz years in the future!" suck my hog? why would that breed out ethnicities and races?

the historically implied native characters are consistently whitewashed on the basis of people not taking their descriptions seriously DESPITE the seam appearances being a dead ringer/implication of that part of twelve being indigenous. suzanne collins was able to provide a white katniss, gale & haymitch DESPITE creating an obvious racial disparity when pit against their white counterparts, who are less likely to suffer from discrimination in comparison (which is why maysilee getting whipped is fucking odd!)

all of suzanne's white characters are somehow infallible and void of criticism (e.g. young snow, peeta, maysilee, plutarch etc etc) and often put on a pedestal for being white. which is weird.

rue was also whitewashed. she was a dark skinned little black girl and they got the "token" light skin to play her. (bless am sternberg for what she went through, i'm sure a darker girl would've gotten much more flack.) and i mean, i never see people bring that up. thresh is also portrayed in a racist way via book and adaptation (primitive-sounding grammar, the fact that he has no weapon BUT a rock?) and then looking older than everyone else just because he's stronger?

the general adultification and sexualization of characters such as gale, katniss and younger haymitch by author and fandom.

the phenomenon of "district piglets" "savages" "barbarism of your district" and "itchy itchy haymitchy" + "she asked if my sister washes her face with coal dust!"

these are all racist facets of the series, and people aren't holding suzanne to account enough for my liking.

[tiffyrina]

the fact that haymitch AND his family and fellow seamfolk were all whitewashed makes me so unfathomably angry. lionsgate, i hope you know how disgusting you are for whitewashing his story

[tiffyrina]

i will never ride hard for actors in any way. so if you come into my ask box trying to misconstrue my opinions on zada using his white-passing appearance to whitewash haymitch, who is clearly written with an olive-skinned appearance….i’m very likely to just ignore you.

collins evades accountability regarding her character’s races because she tries to utilize a ‘post-race world.’ unfortunately, that’s not realistic. racial minorities will always be attached to their histories, whether they know it in-world or not. her ability to make allusions to black and indigenous oppression whilst claiming that panem has no races, is redundant. you cannot use racial stereotypes or racial struggles taken from minorities in real life, and then deny that. it’s a form of erasure. her defending white katniss when she used characterization techniques such as indigenous traits and terms of oppression such as ‘savages’ does not make sense. her being able to call rue and thresh african-american in an interview whilst disregarding all other races does not make sense. she can’t pick and choose. and the fact that so many white fans take issue with people of color attempting to breathe ethnicity into these characters because the white author erased them entirely is odd.

[tiffyrina]

suzanne after showing off everyone's grief between late catching fire/mockingjay but haymitch's own surrounding chaff... groans