Hi I'd Like To Cause Damage Today :3

rip Percy crashing the bus, rip Annabeth hyperventilating after Luke hugged her, rip Argus, rip the trio playing hacky sack, rip dumbass Percy and dumbass Annabeth ignoring Grover and walking straight into Medusa's emporium just cause they were hungry...

how do i talk about my loneliness? do i say it’s more a sense of alienation than anything else? do i want to risk naming the thing, to excavate the ruins of my old self? she is still here; a ghost, a haunting. maybe i am just made of echoes, never a real voice or an authentic sound but the remains of something. i am leaning towards the horizon like a flower towards sunlight but i am rooted. do i say that i have even forgotten how to write? words used to bubble out of me when i looked at a blank page, like freed prisoners or escape artists. now the words die on my tongue, like a betrayal. maybe i’m just tired. maybe it’s just weariness, a profound fatigue that precludes everything. i am a smudge. negative space. defined by things unspoken. wordlessness, a loaded silence. a loaded gun. how do i talk about the reasons why i cry myself to sleep at night without turning it into a cliché? how do i talk about the mood swings, the anger, the roiling mess of god-knows-what in my chest and in the pit of my stomach that i am no longer empowered by? where do i put the anger, the mourning? if not released by expression, then can i find a way to be a good cage for my restlessness? can i be a good ruler so melancholy doesn’t curdle into rage? now even the words on the page look hollow, lifeless. i realise i have been giving up for quite some time. it does not feel like relief. this whole time, i have been nursing a revolution inside me. i feel mutinous—against the world, against myself. if i cannot put my insecurities into poetry, if i cannot make my ugliness poetic, then i’m afraid there’s nothing left. do i say that sometimes i am seized by episodes of grief, facing the emptiness and silence pressing in around me, pulsing from within me, until i either suffocate from the claustrophobia or implode like a star? do i say that i am sick of trying, sick of feeling like i should give up, sick of needing to let go when holding on is the only thing i’m good at? do i say that i am a fundamentally hopeless person, oscillating between cynicism and optimism every day until i give myself whiplash? do i say that a scream has been building inside of me, drowning out the silence, perhaps even replacing it, but i do not have the freedom to voice it? do i say that my existence has been lined with incompleteness? do i say that i confuse solitude with agency, anger with redemption, and numbness with respite? do i say what i have never allowed myself to say before—that i am tension yet i persuade myself into thinking i am at peace; that i am always trapped in the push and pull of opposing inner forces, the old coward and the new fool; that i am a contradiction, egoistic yet self-effacing? my life is a perpetual attempt at reconciliation. i crave attention, recognition, care, clout—i know some part of me believes i am owed these things—yet every material accomplishment i am forced to call my own exists to negate this vision of myself, which is a delusion, at the end of the day. i think i am going insane. when push comes to shove, i stumble and fall. there is no rationalising my way out of this labyrinth of desires and dreams and disappointments. i am outlined in discrepancies, built up by expectations and then torn down by reality. is this loneliness? is keeping yourself to yourself strength or denial? the inarticulable parts of me i hate the most, yet they are a spectre that haunts me, a shadow self that i want to fistfight but am too jaded to. i am alienated from myself. i am fragmented, compartmentalised to the point of no return. i never bring my whole self towards anything; i don’t even know what wholeness is. everything matters, then none of it does. i am in limbo, neither heaven nor hell but a kind of purgatory, a small place where only i exist. it’s the solipsism of the depressed that i take refuge in, and at the same time want to disavow. is this loneliness, then? being too ashamed of these unflattering details of yourself to voice them out, so you have to carry them like a burden, and it ends up defining who you are anyway?

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.

John Boyega at Hyde Park demonstration #BlackLivesMattter

If you're feeling like writing some percabeth, I would love to see the “Are you really going to leave without asking me the question you’ve been dying to ask me?”. Thank you in advance, love your writing!!

“I’ve missed you,” Annabeth murmurs, burying her head into Percy’s soft sweatshirt, trying to reconcile this warm feeling with what’s left of a memory from months ago. It’s been too long. 

“Me too, Wise Girl. Me too,” Percy says back to her, “I’ve missed you more.”

“I missed you most!” Annabeth leans back from the embrace, smirking at him and sniping at him competitively.

They laugh together. 

I can get used to this, Annabeth thinks. 

Even as they sail towards their next challenge on the Argo II, she feels fortunate. After not seeing him for so many months -- months of crying to Sally and torturing herself with what-ifs -- Annabeth can finally hold him in her arms. 

The only thing she has to do is to try her best on ignoring the voice in the back of her head, taunting her about her solo quest and the eventuality of what other horrors that can bring.

“Hey,” Percy says, drawing her back to the present, “we can talk more tonight. I know you wanted to check with Piper, Jason, and Leo to see how they are getting along with Frank and Hazel. Go ahead, I know we don’t have too much time before dinner. Frank wanted to run something by me, too.”

Annabeth nods, and looks wistfully at Percy as she moves to leave. When she glances back by the door, he is staring at her, smiling weakly. 

“What?” she asks, suddenly self conscious. Did she have something on her face?

“Nothing,” he says.

Just when she was about to turn back, Percy blurts, “are you really going to leave without asking me the question you’ve been dying to ask me?”

Annabeth is taken aback, briefly. She wonders if he knows which specific question she really is dying to ask, because there are so many. 

Did he really remember her all along? 

If he did, did he try his best to find her (as she did to find him) in all those months?

Did he get a chance to talk to his mom yet? Does he know how she and Sally had cried into each other’s arms for months when he disappeared?

Is he resentful for this world and all that it’s brought them?

So many questions flitted through her brain, but the one that makes it to him is, “you nicked your chin when you shaved.” 

“Oh,” Percy says, touching a hand to his chin, certainly not expecting this observation. 

Annabeth wants to scream into the heavens, on how unfair it is that they missed so much time together. Percy didn’t even used to shave regularly the last time they saw each other, the fall after they defeated Kronos. 

“Your invincibility -- it’s gone,” Annabeth explains, patiently waiting for Percy to tell her what happened. It hurts, more than a little, to know that the link between Percy’s mortality and her was severed.

He sighs and tells her about The Little Tiber. 

Annabeth swears that after all this (if there is an “after,” she isn’t quite sure), she will do whatever possible to leave the world of the gods behind.

guys we’re gonna have new content we can make GIFSETS we get to hear “look I didn’t want to be a half-blood” brb im crying 

the “lgbt community” isn’t based on “love and acceptance” it was forged out of necessity for survival. it’s not a club you join for funzies. we are not required to be nice people on account of us being lesbian gay bisexual and transgender.

community is about resources and solidarity. there is power in numbers. we’re meant to support each other in the wake of material oppression we face because we are lesbian gay bisexual and transgender.

y’all don’t fucking get that which is why most of our “communities” are disintegrating under the weight of these weird “actually EVERYONE is lgbt if you squint a little” arguments they deny any autonomy or agency to lgbt ppl who are anything but deferential about it, and all you have to show for it are like. flags that are impossible to print and seven thousand labels to labor over every time you have an existential crisis.

it’s so infuriating.

One of these is accurate for me, plz tell me I'm not alone

Penumbra, a small self-indulgent personal project

It was all painted in Photoshop, for anyone curious :)