Ro29

Xe/Dawn/Fae/Love/Vex/Tix | Random Fandom stuff | Writing/Rambling blog -> @rose-blooms-red icon by @aerykai

[themessofthecentury]

heyo! So I made this blog as a way to keep my writing and writing related stuff separate from the flood of other fandom things and signal boosts and such i reblog. This is just a dumping ground for anything non-writing related i enjoy! 

@rose-blooms-red is my writing-related blog, where i post writing stuff answer ask games and the like! 

(brought to you all by me realizing that having 2 blogs gets confusing XD)

[zzoupz]

I drew these emo cats

[zombiecowboy65]

How Jeremy was looking at rhemann after talking Jean up as the "best backliner in the NCAA" that would "help to get the Trojans to 1st place" when Jean started only saying "yes coach" and "I am Jean Moreau" on repeat and then handed Rhemann his racquet to hit him with

[catchymemes]

[everythingismadeofchaos]

We all do, buddy. We all do

[sunmimir]

The monsters going to class ✨

[mousegirlheart]

[storybookprincess]

so back when my little brother was in high school, my mom went as a chaperone for their senior year field trip to an amusement park. which, you know, brave move to volunteer to supervise a bunch of high school seniors let loose in a wonderland of rollercoasters and sugar

my brother and his friends in this field trip group were truly great kids. but they were not above run of the mill teenage boy shenanigans. it’s the end of senior year, you and all your buddies are at the amusement park, you’re naturally going to want to act like a complete moron

there was one kid in the group who was especially prone to goofing around. committed to the bit, some may say. my mom knew that if nonsense was going to break out, he’d likely be at the center of it

so she goes up to this kid at the very start of the trip and says “hey, i’m kinda worried about this chaperoning thing. this might be a lot to ask, but can you help me keep an eye on everyone? you wouldn’t have to do anything big, just be an extra set of eyes for me.”

friends, this kid proceeded to run their field trip group like the fucking us marines. everyone is at the meet up spots at the designated time. everyone waits in line for the rides like a bunch of boy scouts. the second the horseplay gets too out of hand, this kid is getting it back under control

it’s incredible how differently people act based on the expectations you set. instead of going to this kid and saying “hey, i know you’re trouble, so i’ve got my eye on you,” my mom went “hey, i know you have influence in your peer group, so i think you can help me.”

treat someone like a problem, they’ll act like a problem. but give people a chance to help, make them feel important, and they usually rise far above the occasion. it was a stroke of genius that i’m honestly still in awe of

[singlethread]

Y’all making women in their thirties feel old is my villain origin story actually

[lily-orchard]

ARE YOU AN ELF?!

[peachtea20]

Questionable math but thirty IS young.

[foxgirlmigraine]

[longingforthecosmos]

got so excited during launch that I painted this in two minutes

[animentality]

[diosapate]

the fundraiser for Renée Macklin Good’s family has well surpassed its goal and is now closed — if you want to help Minneapolis residents as the city is terrorized by ICE raids, please turn your attention toward this fundraiser for local families, as well as Adelina Olivarez Cardona and Arturo Sanchez Chinos, both of whom are currently being detained.

[hananono]

additionally, you can support the family of keith porter jr, who was shot and killed by an off duty ICE agent on new years

[aidashakur]

[velvetvexations]

[robertreich]

Donald Trump cannot be trusted to lead America into war. He is unaccountable to America. He is lawless. He only seeks conflict to cover up for his failures. Congress must step up and reassert its power. No more forever wars.

[tall]

[sioltach]

Today's high schoolers romanticizing 2016 as if there weren't the clown incidents

[wizardshark]

This isn't even a shit post that actually happened

[gayvampyr]

the generational gap between me and the people my age who use chat gpt

[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.

[datasnake]

Other examples of “blamed for things their copycats did” include Watchmen (blamed for the gritty antihero comics of the 90s) and Madoka Magica (blamed for excessively edgy and grimdark magical girl shows).

[fictionadventurer]

Four years on, and I think you might be the first person to add this type of comment to this post. After receiving so many comments that are like “THG is nowhere near on the level of LotR” or “THG didn’t invent YA dystopia”, it’s so refreshing to see someone understand exactly what I meant by framing THG as “a work blamed for its copycats”, and expand on it with examples that I didn’t know about.

It’s so rare to get an original comment on this post. Thank you so much.