Tiny Spoons

[tinyspoonsworld]

[tinyspoonsworld]

Sleep deprived musings about two shows that I have never even seen full episodes of, but have the same vibes. What if Max from Two Broke Girls gets married and has three kids and becomes Katie in American Housewife?

[sadsongsandwaltzes]

There is a real physiological aspect to things like anxiety and depression, and to ignore that and suggest that simply believing in Christ is a guarantee to make those problems go away is a form of prosperity gospel.

[sadsongsandwaltzes]

Anxiety and depression aren’t inherently sinful. But even if they were, it takes a special kind of evil to see someone down in dumps and decide to kick them while they’re down even further into the depths instead of, oh i don’t know, sharing the true hope of the gospel with that person

[sadsongsandwaltzes]

[consoleyourself-deactivated2025]

“‘Fear not’ is an invitation to comfort, not a threat.”

Wow.

[daisybrekker]

Friendly Reminder of Snow's inner monologue in the book:

He thought of people putting a price on her. With her long, pointed nose and skinny body, Tigris was no great beauty, but she had a sweetness, a vulnerability that invited abuse.

What was Sejanus up to? Was he trying to outdo him and steal the day’s thunder? To take his idea of coming to the zoo and then dress it up in a way Coriolanus could never compete with, because he could never afford to?

His filly in a race, his dog in a fight. The more he had treated her as something special, the more she’d become human.

Lucy Gray was one thing belonging to Coriolanus that he would never, ever get.

The thought of blackmailing old Strabo Plinth had definite appeal.

Someone suggested that he cared for her like a sister, and although he’d done nothing of the sort, he allowed it. No need to disrespect the dead.

Even his encouragement to sing for sponsors was an attempt to prolong the attention she brought him.

His girl. His. Here in the Capitol, it was a given that Lucy Gray belonged to him, as if she’d had no life before her name was called out at the reaping.

Even if Lucy Gray was confused on the issue, in the eyes of the Capitol, she belonged to him. What point would there be in crediting a district tribute?

If no one else seemed to be bothered by her questionable past, why should he be? (Questionable past being the fact that she had a love life before him)

A second-class citizen. Human, but bestial. Smart, perhaps, but not evolved. Part of a shapeless mass of unfortunate, barbaric creatures that hovered on the periphery of his consciousness. (Thinking about Lucy Gray)

“Sejanus Plinth,” said Coriolanus. Not that they were actually friends, but that wasn’t any of Dean Highbottom’s business.

Mrs. Plinth shook her head. “No. No. Your cousin’s his only friend.” How sad, thought Coriolanus. To have no friends.

Coriolanus couldn’t help feeling embarrassed for her. If you ever needed proof of the districts’ backwardness, there you had it. Primitive people with their primitive customs.

“Oh, yes?” said Coriolanus, only to be polite. Honestly, who cared? His entire future was on the line because of her wayward son.

But playing on that might be the way to manipulate him.

Coryo was a nickname for old friends. For family. For people Coriolanus loved. And this was the moment Sejanus decided to try it out? If he’d had the energy, Coriolanus would have reached over and strangled him.

“Superb,” he said. “Like everything you cook, Mrs. Plinth.” It wasn’t an exaggeration. Ma might be pathetic, but she was something of an artist in the kitchen.

The conversation wasn’t going the way Coriolanus had imagined. Where was the talk of reward money?

...but the point was, he got to keep her. And he wanted to keep her. Safe and close at hand.

Perhaps there was a way out of his predicament after all? Another path to influence and power?

He’d been broke most of his life, but the Snows had always worked hard to maintain decency. These people had given up, and some part of him blamed them for their plight. (Thinking about District 12 people)

“No escaping that.” He leaned over and kissed her, flushed with happiness, because although he did not believe in celestial writings, she did, and that would be enough to guarantee her loyalty.

In some ways, it had been better to have her locked up in the Capitol, where he always had a general idea of what she was doing.

Oh, a ghost story. Ugh. Boo. So ridiculous. Well, he’d try hard to love it when he saw the Covey tomorrow.

“Guns? Not that I know of. How would he get guns?” Coriolanus was beginning to enjoy himself a bit. (During the interrogation after Sejanus' execution)

She wouldn’t be thrilled, obviously, when he told her there’d been a change of plans. That he was returning to the Peacekeepers and heading to District 2 tomorrow at dawn, essentially leaving her to her fate. (As soon as he realised that he wouldn't get caught, he immediately thought of going back to District 2 with no concern for Lucy Gray)

As good as the movie was, I do think that it's at fault for so many people falling for the idea that Snow wasn't always bad. He was, but it wasn't so obvious at first. As you can see, he always thought of himself and how things would benefit him. He looked down on Sejanus and his ma even though they were nothing but kind to him. He saw Lucy Gray as his possession. He was greedy and selfish, always trying to come up with ways to manipulate whatever situation he was in to his advantage. I really wish the movie showed that more.

[tinyspoonsworld]

COULD SOMEONE SHOW THIS TO THE “I CAN FIX HIM” GIRLS???

[nunyabznsbabes]

Katniss is like Lucy Gray this, Katniss is like Sejanus that, and yes fine that's all good and true and lovely but Katniss Everdeen is also a direct parallel to Coriolanus Snow and people NEED to start talking about this because it's driving me crazy.

Think about it: they both grew up poor and deeply vulnerable, losing parents at a very young age, with a matriarchal adult (Katniss' mother and Coriolanus' Grandma'am) who fails to provide for them emotionally and physically. They intimately understand the threat of starvation, even developing with stunted growth because of it, and their narrations in the books share a fixation on food. Throughout their childhoods, both experienced constant fear and suffered a fundamental lack of control over their circumstances. Because of this, they're inherently suspicious of the people around them. They resent feeling indebted to others, especially those who have saved their lives. They're motivated almost entirely by family and deeply connected to their communities. Both are used and manipulated by the Capitol, both are forced to perform to survive and despise every inch of it, both are thrown into the Arena and made to kill. Both have a self-sacrificial, genuinely sweet sister figure acting as their conscience. Peeta and Lucy Gray - performers and love interests with a fundamental kindness and sense of hope about them - fulfill markedly similar roles in their narrative. Both contribute to the development of the future Hunger Games, Snow throughout tbosas and Katniss towards the end of Mockingjay.

It's easy to ignore these similarities because, as mirrors of each other, they are exact opposites. Katniss is from District 12, viewed and treated as less than human; Snow is the cream of the Capitol crop, given the privilege of a name with social weight, an ancestral home, and the opportunity of the Academy despite having no more money than a miner from 12. Katniss has no agency over her life, and responds by being kind whenever she's able, while Snow justifies horrendous evils in order to continue his quest for complete control. Katniss does everything she can to protect her family; Snow does everything he can to protect his family's image as an extension of his own ego. Katniss loves her District and connects with its inhabitants on a meaningful level, but Snow is indifferent at best to his peers - the apparent "superior people" - and only engages with his community for personal gain. Katniss emerges from the Arena horrified at herself and the system, but Snow takes his trauma and turns it into an excuse to perpetuate the violence with himself at the top. Katniss cares for Prim until her death and then snaps at the loss of her little sister, while Snow survives on Tigris' blood, sweat, and tears and then torments and abandons her, presumably because she calls him out on his insanity. Snow actively adds to and popularizes the Hunger Games because of his vendetta against the Districts following his childhood wartime trauma - Katniss briefly agrees to a new Hunger Games in the pursuit of vengeance, but later stops them from happening by killing Coin and choosing a life of peace and privacy. Snow is obsessed with revenge, but Katniss empathizes with the Capitolites and does what she can to keep them from suffering. He exists in a cruel system and selfishly upholds it; she exists in a cruel system and works to dismantle it for the good of her family and community, at great personal cost. And Peeta and Lucy Gray are incredibly similar, but Katniss and Peeta forge a relationship of genuine love and understanding that shines in comparison to Coriolanus' obsessive projection onto Lucy Gray.

So, yeah, Katniss is Lucy Gray haunting Coriolanus. But I bet you anything that eighty-something year old President Snow looks at her, the girl on fire, bright and young and brilliant, emerging from a childhood of starvation with a relentless hunger for success, a talented and charming performer helping her win the Games, and he sees the ghost of his own past. And that's why he's so afraid of her! Because if he sees himself in her, then he's up against his own cunning, his own talent for manipulation, his own charisma, his own genius. He's up against the version of himself that he once wished to be, with the nightmare army of his childhood at her back and her star-crossed lover at her side, spewing Sejanus' truths in his own voice. This isn't to say that Katniss ever achieved the level of power and agency that Coriolanus did during her time with the rebellion, but it is to say that Snow was taken down by what truly terrified him - his own morality, come to finish the job.

[tinyspoonsworld]

🔥🔥🔥

[daydreamer-in-reverie]

Started rereading the Hunger Games series and I feel like it’s so overlooked how in 74th and 75th Hunger Games, we don’t know every Tribute’s names, with Katniss only referring to them by their District numbers but in TBOSAS, we knew every single Tribute by name. We associated them with the clothes they wore on the Reaping Day and Suzanne even goes so far as to describe how they looked, however briefly. We see these Tributes and we’re familiarized with them by the little tidbits provided to the mentors and to Snow and Lucy Gray. But we never get this in the original trilogy.

In two generations, President Snow alienated the Districts from each other so much that Katniss didn’t even care to know all the names of the Tributes sent into the Arena with her, with the exception being those who posed great risk against her safety and those she felt great compassion for (e.g. Cato, Thresh, Rue, Mags, Betee, Wiress etc.). Katniss even went so far as to call the D6 Tributes in the 75th Hunger Games morphlings, for their affinity to imbibe in the drugs that help them forget their own traumas (an incredibly hurtful description, in my own opinion, to be known by the qualities you hate the most about yourself). We never know the real name of the 74th D5 girl, with Katniss only referring to her as Foxface and we don’t even know Marvel’s name until we get to the second book and he was Katniss’ first personal kill. Katniss even kills the D4 girl in the books with the same tracker jacker venom that killed Glimmer and yet still, we don’t know her name. We are so removed from the identity of the other Tributes that we don’t even know what some of them looked like beyond brief descriptions of mangled bodies and dead Tributes in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia.

And, the thing is, Suzanne established the importance of names in the series. Even in real life, we recognize the importance of being named. It is a fundamental aspect of being human. If you’re ever in a perilous situation where a person might be placing your life in danger, we’re told to remind the person that you’re human. “Keep saying your name, how old you are, where you came from. Remind them you are a human being just like them.” Before any propaganda can work against a group of people, refusing to recognize a person’s name is the first step to dehumanization. And just like the people of the Districts, we don’t care enough about the other Tributes to even want to know their names. Their propaganda worked on us, the readers.

In two generations, President Snow completely wiped out any sense of familiarity and camaraderie the Districts may have shared with the other. In two generations, Snow sowed the seeds of distrust and division into the Districts so deeply that even we, the readers, were affected by the effects of Capitol propaganda. In two generations, the Districts ceased to genuinely care about the others beyond the vague sense of injustice they feel for their shared plight. It’s why Career Districts don’t seem to care about killing the other Tributes. How can you care, to show your compassion and humanity, when you can barely see them as people? Yes, they may have been in the Arena with you. Yes, they may have been starved and beaten and forced into labor like you were. Yes, they might be children just like you. Yes, they might be subjected to the same deplorable system that turned you into virtual slaves. But they are not your friends. They are not your allies. They are strange, with different customs and traditions that you have. You do not share the same values. They do not care about you. At the first chance they get, they will kill you with your bare hands and they will do it with alacrity if it meant their survival. There can only be one Victor and it can’t be them. It has to be you.

[tinyspoonsworld]

This is excellent. I love Suzanne Collins’s emphasis on the importance of names. Like for Lucy Gray, it’s part of her identity.

[simoneashley]

You'll see my face in every place But you can't catch me now

[tinyspoonsworld]

🫡

[nunyabznsbabes]

Katniss is like Lucy Gray this, Katniss is like Sejanus that, and yes fine that's all good and true and lovely but Katniss Everdeen is also a direct parallel to Coriolanus Snow and people NEED to start talking about this because it's driving me crazy.

Think about it: they both grew up poor and deeply vulnerable, losing parents at a very young age, with a matriarchal adult (Katniss' mother and Coriolanus' Grandma'am) who fails to provide for them emotionally and physically. They intimately understand the threat of starvation, even developing with stunted growth because of it, and their narrations in the books share a fixation on food. Throughout their childhoods, both experienced constant fear and suffered a fundamental lack of control over their circumstances. Because of this, they're inherently suspicious of the people around them. They resent feeling indebted to others, especially those who have saved their lives. They're motivated almost entirely by family and deeply connected to their communities. Both are used and manipulated by the Capitol, both are forced to perform to survive and despise every inch of it, both are thrown into the Arena and made to kill. Both have a self-sacrificial, genuinely sweet sister figure acting as their conscience. Peeta and Lucy Gray - performers and love interests with a fundamental kindness and sense of hope about them - fulfill markedly similar roles in their narrative. Both contribute to the development of the future Hunger Games, Snow throughout tbosas and Katniss towards the end of Mockingjay.

It's easy to ignore these similarities because, as mirrors of each other, they are exact opposites. Katniss is from District 12, viewed and treated as less than human; Snow is the cream of the Capitol crop, given the privilege of a name with social weight, an ancestral home, and the opportunity of the Academy despite having no more money than a miner from 12. Katniss has no agency over her life, and responds by being kind whenever she's able, while Snow justifies horrendous evils in order to continue his quest for complete control. Katniss does everything she can to protect her family; Snow does everything he can to protect his family's image as an extension of his own ego. Katniss loves her District and connects with its inhabitants on a meaningful level, but Snow is indifferent at best to his peers - the apparent "superior people" - and only engages with his community for personal gain. Katniss emerges from the Arena horrified at herself and the system, but Snow takes his trauma and turns it into an excuse to perpetuate the violence with himself at the top. Katniss cares for Prim until her death and then snaps at the loss of her little sister, while Snow survives on Tigris' blood, sweat, and tears and then torments and abandons her, presumably because she calls him out on his insanity. Snow actively adds to and popularizes the Hunger Games because of his vendetta against the Districts following his childhood wartime trauma - Katniss briefly agrees to a new Hunger Games in the pursuit of vengeance, but later stops them from happening by killing Coin and choosing a life of peace and privacy. Snow is obsessed with revenge, but Katniss empathizes with the Capitolites and does what she can to keep them from suffering. He exists in a cruel system and selfishly upholds it; she exists in a cruel system and works to dismantle it for the good of her family and community, at great personal cost. And Peeta and Lucy Gray are incredibly similar, but Katniss and Peeta forge a relationship of genuine love and understanding that shines in comparison to Coriolanus' obsessive projection onto Lucy Gray.

So, yeah, Katniss is Lucy Gray haunting Coriolanus. But I bet you anything that eighty-something year old President Snow looks at her, the girl on fire, bright and young and brilliant, emerging from a childhood of starvation with a relentless hunger for success, a talented and charming performer helping her win the Games, and he sees the ghost of his own past. And that's why he's so afraid of her! Because if he sees himself in her, then he's up against his own cunning, his own talent for manipulation, his own charisma, his own genius. He's up against the version of himself that he once wished to be, with the nightmare army of his childhood at her back and her star-crossed lover at her side, spewing Sejanus' truths in his own voice. This isn't to say that Katniss ever achieved the level of power and agency that Coriolanus did during her time with the rebellion, but it is to say that Snow was taken down by what truly terrified him - his own morality, come to finish the job.

[agoddamnrayofsunshine]

I’m sure someone has talked about this before but one thing I absolutely love about tbosas is how Snow’s descent into villainy is never once presented as something that was inevitable

So many villain origin stories portray this idea of a person who tries incredibly hard to be a good person, who takes every opportunity to be kind and to better themselves, but are ultimately doomed to fail by the narrative. Their environment and their circumstances make it impossible for them to be a good person, and while this is effective from a storytelling point of view it’s not exactly accurate to real life

In real life there is always a point where a bad person makes the decision to do something bad, they make the decision to prioritise themselves, their own power, money or desires over someone else. That’s how real life dictators are made, they are presented with every opportunity to be good, and they purposefully choose to not take it

This makes Snow’s storyline so effective because he is given so many opportunities to do the right thing and yet, at every single turn, he chooses to serve himself instead, exactly like how real dictators are made

Snow, unlike most people we see in the capitol, is in a unique position where he could genuinely have the chance to understand and relate to the people from the districts. He, unlike his classmates, is poor and spends most nights going hungry, he witnessed firsthand the cruelty of the capitol when Clemensia was bitten by the snakes for nothing more than lying about doing her homework, when his sister was forced to sell herself on the streets in order to feed the both of them

Throughout his book, the three people he is closest to are Tigris (who dislikes the hunger games, is a rebel, and a victim of the capitol forced to turn to prostitution), Sejanus (who is originally from district 2, dislikes the capitol and knows he will never be accepted there, and also a rebel) and Lucy Gray (who is a victim of the hunger games, from district 12, and is also treated horribly by the capitol). These are all people who gave him an opportunity to realise the cruelty of the system he was in, a chance to directly confront his prejudices and see that people from the districts are just the same as him, and yet he still refuses to take the chance to change

He is given every opportunity, he’s sent away from the capitol to be a peacekeeper in the districts, he forms personal connections with people from the districts, he helps Sejanus perform funeral rites, and yet at every moral crossroads he comes to he makes the wrong decision. He didn’t have to become a villain, and yet he made the choice to do so anyway, despite every chance he was given

I think it’s a really effective portrayal of Snow as a character, and it’s a very effective villain origin story for the type of villain that Snow is. It never once excuses him from his actions because it highlights just how accountable he was for his actions

[madame-helen]

[such-justice-wow]

I once saw someone say "back then we didn't know enough to cut corners" which fascinates me

[that-catholic-shinobi]

Can we stop comparing everything to nazism. Trump isn’t a nazi. Conservatives aren’t nazis. People who disagree with you aren’t fucking nazis. Nazis are the human beings, who during WW2 sent members of my family to concentration camps and were apart of the nationalist socialist party. Who carried out hitlers orders.

Nazis exist today. That’s true. But if we water down or start accusing everyone of being a nazi, people are gonna start forgetting what a real nazi looks like.

[apilgrimpassingby]

... I hate comparisons to Hitler; they don't the person more evil, they just make Hitler less evil. If everybody's Hitler, then Hitler must not have been that bad of a person.

Trent Horn, "Destiny's Evil Consistency"

[tinyspoonsworld]

“If everybody’s Hitler…”

[tinyspoonsworld]

My thoughts on the whole Olympics people-at-the-table. I don’t know what the intended message was. To be honest, I don’t really care. Were they mocking The Last Supper? Maybe. Were they imitating bacchanalia? Maybe. What do we expect of a secular world? The Greeks weren’t Christians, we don’t even know if the original artist of the Last Supper was a follower of Christ or merely a follower of Catholicism. So, let the world have its table. I’m not offended by something I can’t expect them to understand. But the true table of Christ is open to those who believe. (And they’re not all sitting on one side, that always bugged me about the painting.)

[modern-tradwife-deactivated2024]

I think raising boys with a disgust for their own maleness is a really, really terrible idea.

So many women say they can't find a good guy, and it's like ?? Are we surprised. We made them hate themselves, destroyed their role models, and told them pretty much everything that makes them distinctly male is actually a huge problem.

How gross are we that we allowed this to happen? How detestable and disdainful a thing. Shame on us.

[miss-nerd-alert]

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

[blade-liger-4ever]

Holy crap, Lewis went for the jugular.

[disgruntled-foreign-patriarch]

he usually does

[cherokeefrank]

He do be doing that.

[queenlucythevaliant]

Pauline? Pauliiiine?

Why does Drinian have a globe? 🌍

Isn't Narnia canonically flat? 🗺️

Isn't that definitively established in This Very Book? 🤔

(Round Narnia conspiracy theory when?)

[justenoughfortoday]

#roundnarnia #flatearther #butopposite

[runawaymarbles]

Reading Mockingjay as an adult is extra devastating because. Of course the plucky teenager and her ragtag friends aren't going to sneak into a government building to kill the president with a bow and arrow. That's absolutely ridiculous. It's the kind of thing that's only possible in the kind of propaganda that Coin developed. But she's so good at it that in some ways she tricks the reader into thinking that's the kind of story this is, too--even after 3 books reminding us that pretty much everything that Katniss does the second she volunteers is manipulated by adults pulling strings to make propaganda in some form or another.

[runawaymarbles]

I'm sorry I keep thinking about this. Madge gave her the pin. Haymitch told her and Peeta to act like friends. Peeta and Haymitch worked out the star-crossed lovers angle. Rue decided she trusted Katniss (because of the pin Katniss didn't choose) and saved her from the tracker jackers. Snow made her get engaged to Peeta. Cinna made her the mockingjay dress, and the mockingjay suit. Haymitch made Finnick&Co her allies. The rebels broke her out of the arena. She didn't know most of this was even happening!! Makes me insane.

I feel like a case could be made that the only real choice she made without someone's life immediately under threat was to cover Rue in flowers. And maybe that's the only one that mattered.

[tinyspoonsworld]

Pardon me while I go cry a bit.

[tinyspoonsworld]

I just realized the irony of the whole thing… Harry is not allowed to go to Hogsmeade largely because of Sirius Black. But then he’s allowed to go when his permission slip is signed by that very person. 😂

[bamsara]

"the 'power of love' trope is such an overused and cliche gimmick" i do not care i will love it always and forever. love prevails and explodes the enemy