Rashists Hit Kryvyi Rih

Maybe I'm just a dumb and bitter atheist but I don't really want to hear all the takes about how "good" and "woke pope" Francis was, and the retrospectives on his time as pope are going to be insufferable. He was another one who perpetuated the horrors of the church, and covered it with a thin layer of paint that made him slightly more sensible to a mid-2010s brain. He still covered for abusive priests, he still hated queer people and thought we were disfiguring ourselves, he still contributed to the modern right wing wave we're in.

I have a lot of complaints about THG, even more about SOTR. But I really, really appreciate Suzanne Collins making orange the colour of the revolution.

It is totally unintentional, but a sad implication that Suzanne Collins established is that Haymitch was never too present, nor cared a lot about the other tributes. The tributes he mentored before Katniss and Peeta, so wholly unconnected to his personhood, who didn't remind him at all about the people he cared for, didn't get the Haymitch we see in the og trilogy. The implication, in the end, is that they get a mentor who's constantly drunk blubbering about his 16 year old dead girlfriend.

Maybe that's why I can never forgive Suzanne Collins when it comes to the retconning of his characterisation. The narrative gives him no chance but to love Katniss and Peeta, but the fact that virtually all of his problems lead to Lenore Dove and not to the kids he had to see die... not only does it take so much of his depth, but tells you that the other kids never had a chance in the first place. Haymitch losing hope on getting his tributes home year by year is one thing, but never having cared in the first place makes his character so one dimensional, and takes away so much about the importance of every tribute despite their loss in the Games.

fucking seriously???

I've been genuinely worried for this woman, and now you're telling me that she's a tolstoevsky lover?

urgh

and yes, I have a right to be angry about this, I was watching this episode while listening to the russian drones being shot down near my home

What gets me is the implication that none of the previous children on their way to die never reminded Haymitch of the people he used to know strongly enough to care about them.

Like, was he waiting for a specific combination of features?

"This kid is from the Seam, she's got pigtails but no pin, whoops, gonna go do shots with Chaff, then!"

It is totally unintentional, but a sad implication that Suzanne Collins established is that Haymitch was never too present, nor cared a lot about the other tributes. The tributes he mentored before Katniss and Peeta, so wholly unconnected to his personhood, who didn't remind him at all about the people he cared for, didn't get the Haymitch we see in the og trilogy. The implication, in the end, is that they get a mentor who's constantly drunk blubbering about his 16 year old dead girlfriend.

Maybe that's why I can never forgive Suzanne Collins when it comes to the retconning of his characterisation. The narrative gives him no chance but to love Katniss and Peeta, but the fact that virtually all of his problems lead to Lenore Dove and not to the kids he had to see die... not only does it take so much of his depth, but tells you that the other kids never had a chance in the first place. Haymitch losing hope on getting his tributes home year by year is one thing, but never having cared in the first place makes his character so one dimensional, and takes away so much about the importance of every tribute despite their loss in the Games.

Was curious how far Ithaca was from troy today while listening to epic the musical and rereading the illiad and I found this map

I think odysseus would have been better just to walk😭

Today is the anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster and I have found this short, but insightful article by Oksana Semenik on how this disaster is depicted in Ukrainian art.

https://artslooker.com/en/five-minutes-for-the-chornobyl-disaster-2/

I keep rereading this paragraph, and it keeps hurting my brain. So, who is supposed to be homophobic in this society, Suzanne?

We are definitely meant to read it as "peacekeepers will harass you, but the D12 citizens are fine with you being gay."

Why, though?

Peacekeepers come from Capitol (or D2 that aspires to be as similar to the Capitol as possible), and we know from MJ that in order to shock the Capitol citizens you need to engage in something really scandalous, like incest.

(Meanwhile, Finnick's "clients" (i.e., rapists) are never specified to be exclusively women. Even Katniss, who is somewhat prudish, is bothered by the quick turnover of his "partners", not their genders.)

Do the peacekeepers go through an insensitivity training of some sorts? Does President Snow personally come to the training centres and explain what kind of bigots they need to be? How are those peacekeepers supposed to act if they later return to the Capitol?

I'm pretty sure Collins just aimed for the "police & authoritative state are homophobic" narrative, but it makes no sense if the Capitol itself is a sex-positive environment. Like, ussr (which is usually a template for the secular YA dystopias) outlawed homosexuality, but they used the "male homosexuality is a sickness, female homosexuality doesn't exist" explanation. Is that something Capitol tells the districts?

Homophobia might have developed under the guise of "replenishing the population after the war", which would make a lot of sense in a post-war Panem, but despite the excessive talks about propaganda and posters we see nothimg about "needing more people" or "having more kids" (as kids would later potentially become tributes). Also, that would surely affect the districts more than the Capitol.

"Fired from jobs" is even weirder. I would understand if D12 was a small and traditional community that persecuted queer people, especially if queerness was something associated with the Capitol and its decadence. But no, we are apparently meant to think that the D12 folk are not homophobic at all, even though there is a pretty clear social divide between the merchants and the Seam miners. Also, who is supposed to do the said firing? Peacekeepers function like an army, so they answer to their higher-ups in the Capitol. I can believe that D12's coal mines are also under the total control of the Capitol, but who is going to fire the window-maker (especially since D12 is very small, so it's unlikely they have more window-makers)? The sellers from the black market? The "goat man"? Are the merchants not in control of the employees in their stores? What about the family-owned businesses, like the Mellarks or the Donners?

"Arrested" finishes me. So, say, you get arrested for being queer. Then what? Are you going to be executed? That was never mentioned as a motivation to shoot / whip / detain someone, even though in CF we see a lot of peacekeepers' crackdowns on D12. Are you going to stay in jail? That's gonna cost Capitol a lot of money. Does D12 even have a jail (Lenore Dove was kept on a "peacekeepers' base" in SOTR)? Are you going to continue working in the mines, but without salary, if we are continuing the ussr metaphor?

More importantly, are gay teenagers more likely to be reaped?

Make it make sense///

Yes, it's a book for kids. But if my kid is old enough to read about war, rebelion, and teenagers killing each other with melee weapons, they are totally old enough to read about gay people.

The way Haymitch constantly had to reassure us that he "only liked Maysilee as a sister" was kinda annoying. Can you tell Suzanne doesn't want them to be shipped together?

Isttfg, it's like when Nina Dobrev left The Vampire Diaries, and Bonnie and Damon had to refer to each other as "my best friend" every fucking time they shared a frame.

I have just experienced reason #3847474 as to why supernatural and everything connected to it should go to superturbohell.

my mom, who is a pretty open-minded person (especially for an Eastern European woman in her late 50s), works for an edition house. they've been dealing with YA and LGBTQIA+ fiction for quite some time, so books like that can often be spotted on our shelves at home.

however, nothing could prepare me for my mom casually retelling an omegaverse story at dinner and then asking if it was a whole genre. I chocked on my fucking broccoli and had to improvise a PG explanation à la "y'know, it's a world with castes, where everyone can get pregnant".

Isttfg, if she comes to me for explanation of knotting or scenting, I'm gonna explode of embarrassment, and that'll be on you, Kripke.