because i obviously haven't said enough already, the main reason the og movies don't work for me but ballad does isn't because it's perfect, or exactly how i imagined it, but that it doesn't work against the book. i can watch that movie, enjoy it, love it and move on with my life. there is a depth that's lost but, at least to me, you can get it back by reading the book. or filling the holes yourself because you know what actually happened. and ballad has more significant changes, especially in how the games happen and the entertainment factor is amped up but 1) it's a movie and 2) it's sort of meta and while always preferring the book, if i want to quickly immerse myself in the story i can watch the movie and enjoy the experience.
however with the og movies there is no way for me to enjoy them because, well, the nostalgia factor is not big for me. i watched them only twice. the first time being in 2017, about three years after finishing the trilogy (in fact while shipping joshifer and watching the beach kiss on youtube on repeat, for those three years i was explicitly avoiding watching the movies cause i was convinced they would be bad. lol.) so i remembered only the basic plot but still felt emotionally connected to the story. they produced a very very short thg tumblr phase of reposting gifs and that was it. they didn't make me mad but they also didn't excite me much. the movies were never truly a thing for me and i sort of moved on from the universe.
then during lockdown in 2021 and spending a lot more time in my childhood bedroom than i thought i would at 20 and basically only hanging out with my then 13 year old sister while resorting to my 13 years old self's interestes and making a tumblr page and stumbling upon someone's beach kiss meta post i forced her to watch the movies with me.
what happened is she ended up becoming a peeta obsessed mad woman but me, well i was honestly so confused. because i still held all my tween opinions of everlark being soulmates and being in love in my heart but for the life of me i couldn't figure out why. like why was i so obsessed with this story? and then i went on the everlark side of tumblr, just to see what you lovely people are talking about, just to try and taste what made young me stay up all night at 13 just so she could finish the book and go to the library in the morning to pick catching fire only for the book to not be available, not just that day but any other time i asked (i'm from a town smaller than district 12, so our library is also small and poor and only has one copy of each book) which ultimately made her save her lunch money and buy the copies herself. i had to figure out just why was that girl screaming every time peeta mellark showed on page? why did this world mean so much to her. why were these the first books she bought for herself.
and then i started reading all your wonderful analysis and figured out things i've never even though of before. like the connection between katniss's mom depression and her difficulty with admitting love. never even crossed my innocent child mind once. and all these new question opened up and just how many significant points did i miss?
curiosity was killing me and i went and reread the cave scene in its entirety. and there was no way to connect what i've just seen on screen to what i was reading on page. and it's not just romance, but katniss and peeta individually too, their tenderness with each other and the world around them. how young they sounded now that i was older. i couldn't believe just how much it seemed like the movies were trying so hard to break everything the books established. and then eventually, in august of that year, when i reread it all i realized immediately that there was no way i could ever watch those movies again. because i ended up understanding and loving this universe way more than i ever have. and these movies, to me, went against everything the book was trying to say.
for me, they are not in a conversation with the book and they don't compliment it. they break it. and i can't handle that.