#thg commentary

[wolfish-chan]

It’s all fun and games laughing about Haymitch over sharing and Katniss under sharing in comparison until you realize Haymitch is trying to remember all the fine details of everyone he will never see again and Katniss is trying to protect her remaining autonomy by keeping those details private

The difference in their trauma responses being shown from the very start of their narratives guts me

[nativekatniss]

This piece, paired with D11 having a very large Black population, is such vivid storytelling of how the Capitol just restored slavery outright huh.

[fdsfsource]

Gale Hawthorne haters are truly some of the stupidest people I have ever seen, and they are yelling on themselves that they have 0 reading comprehension skills or fiction literacy.

Especially when they compare him to Snow or Coin, or say he’s worse than them? Suzanne Collins, sweetie, I am so sorry!

Then they’ll just get gross and immature and start calling him ugly, which is calling Liam Hemsworth ugly. So, you’ve gone from hating the character to hating the actor now? Because you’re such a moron that you can no longer separate FICTION from REALITY?

“He makes my blood boil” What valid reason do you have, bitch? He had flaws? He was a teenager with the emotional maturity of a teenager? GOD FORBID!

These clowns will defend full-blown villains before extending some grace to a traumatized kid.

[fluffycakesistainted]

I know Sejanus was very heart-on-his-sleeve and everything, but I still cannot wrap my head around why he insisted on telling Coryo all the details of his rebel-enabling activities, when that clearly was something he wanted no part of. Even in the movie, after Coriolanus was almost flat-out like, I DON'T WANT TO HEAR THIS SHUT UP, he just barreled on with everything. Not to victim blame or anything but like...bruh, chill, maybe?

But I guess that's one of the points of Sejanus as a character—in a series/country where one of the core themes/goals is survival/"stay[ing] alive", he had like zero sense of self-preservation (honestly the way he was going, he was likely gonna end up dead—or at best, an Avox—sooner or later, probably sooner, even without Coriolanus's help).

Edit: "Peeta has a lot of tact. He seems very, very good at maneuvering the social elements of at least everything around the game. So he was always kind of playing the public. Sejanus just didn’t know how to not speak his mind." --Josh Andrés Rivera (all but saying, Yeah Sejanus just physically could not stfu)

"I don’t think Sejanus knows how to not stir the pot. [...] I just feel like regardless he would have ended with the same fate no matter what." (!!!) --J.A.R.

[rosaaeles]

i've seen a few people discussing how katniss should be drawn/not drawn and i wanted to add my two cents to the situation. 

let’s start with my initial thoughts on drawing katniss as Native American:

i think it’s great for artists to draw katniss as a poc and as native (esp seen as many readers perceive her as native-coded!) and i truly love seeing art where she is depicted as a woman of colour  - it feels true to my perception of her and the perception i know a lot of other non-white (and white!) readers had whilst reading the books! 

however, i also think that an effort should be made to portray her heritage accurately and respectfully if depicting her as native american is an aim the artist has. 

that is to say, by not hypersexualising her/her clothes, not reducing her clothing to a stereotype

it reminds me of an instagram post i saw a while ago by @soia-jpg​ regarding piper mclean (a Cherokee character from the Heroes Of Olympus series). in the second slide of the post it reads “there are more ways to portray a native character without using their heritage as a prop, or using it wrong and in an irrespecutful way”

this is true for piper, and I think it should be true for katniss too if the intention of an artist drawing her is to depict her as native american. 

okay, now lets move onto my thoughts regarding katniss being drawn as pocahontas;

whilst i do not think the artist who drew her as pocahontas had any harmful intentions, i do think that the piece was harmful/perpetuated a harmful idea. 

pocahontas is a movie which many people enjoy and love because of its nice animation and catchy songs and environmentalist message (I get it, it was one of my favourite movies too when i was younger!) but it is also a movie which romanticises the violent history of genocide and colonisation in North America and that isn’t something that can or should just be forgotten for the sake of how pretty it is visually. frankly, drawing any character as pocahontas - the main character from a disney movie which is largely deemed to be disrespectful and problematic due to the way it represents indigenous cultures and colonisation -  is harmful and ignores the damage that pocahontas as a movie did to how the history of colonisation in America is perceived, and the way it whitewashed the true story of Matoaka. 

like,, disney chose to make a movie vaguely based on the life of a Native American girl who actually existed, but didn’t have had any intention of making a historically accurate story when they could have. if Matoaka’s story was considered too gruesome, they could have chosen to retell a tale from Native American folk lore/mythology. rather than, you know, basing a movie off the life of someone who existed and underwent enormous pain but deciding to ignore that completely and change the narrative. 

basically, i think that it’s important to remember that the disney movie pocahontas does a great disservice to history and is harmful in its depiction of Native American societies and colonisation - largely whitewashing and romanticising history and the life of a young Native American girl who’s life was anything but the fairytale it is shown to be in the movie. pushing the entirely fabricated romantic relationship of pocahontas and john smith (who were in reality 10 and 27 years old when they first met) onto two characters is tone deaf and is unfortunately something ive seen it done time and time over, not only with everlark but also with zutara (zuko and katara from A;TLA).

here are some links to places where people have discussed why pocahontas as a piece of media is problematic;

poverty, alcoholism and suicide - but at least the natives can paint with all the colours of the wind

Disney’s Racist History of Native American Caricatures

Inside The True Story Of Pocahontas That Disney Didn’t Tell

Pocahontas: Separating Fact From Fiction About the Native American

[wolfish-chan]

How do you think it felt for Haymitch seeing his sister’s pin become the symbol of a rebellion? She wanted to be more than a pawn, more than a martyr, but in the end, the pin she cared so little for, not only outlived her, but became the symbol of the thing she sought so desperately for.

Did it break his heart to know?

[nativekatniss]

Literally 12 pages in and we're already getting into the commentary on how systemic racism is a key part of maintaining a classist status quo! Katniss discusses here in so many words that it is white people who cater towards and therefore benefit most from the system, while the brown people of the Seam are the ones who do the manual labour in the coal mines.

[wolfish-chan]

Thinking about Effie being the one to clothe Haymitch as he’s presented to the capital both as a tribute and victor and spending the rest of her life attached to district 12 for it. It’s the assignment people want the least. Effie didn’t help Haymitch with the same intentions as his mentors and Beetee, but she ultimately contributed to him getting sponsors and for that, Snow found a way of punishing her unique to a capital citizen — a lifetime associated with district 12 ‘dogs’