MIDNIGHT MUSINGS

Lucy Gray, Haymitch, and Katniss all being reaped in unconventional ways and each being the 'Mockingjays' of their generation is everything to me because they were never supposed to be tributes - let alone victors - just like mockingjays were never supposed to exist.

Peeta - the only one of the four to be reaped conventionally - is their jabberjay. Not just because of his way with words, but because the Capitol tried to make him into their weapon just like they did with the birds, and they failed.

What do you mean wiress came out of the arena without a scratch on her? What do you mean she didn't get into a single fight? What do you mean she sat in that blindspot for an hour letting the hovercraft try to find her? My girl single handedly dealt out one of the biggest 'fuck you's to the games and the Capitol and im too scared to imagine how she was punished for it.

Suzanne Collins number one Maysilee Donner defender

Implying that she knows pretty tributes like Maysilee get prostituted by Snow if they win, and then actively wishing it happens to a tribute she reaped is so evil and insidious.

Real exhibition of the contempt capitolites have for the districts.

somehow instead of saying "as a treat", I've started using the phrase "for morale", as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

I'm not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me

We often eat pie at work...for morale.

"As a treat" implies a special occasion, a temporary state. "For morale" makes the joy essential, because you have to have good morale to keep going.

iconic things suzanne collins did in sunrise on the reaping:

so my siblings look like twins (they are not) and once again my bullshit brain was like hmmmm batfam. So here. Have some Cass and Tim twin content. Featuring my siblings’ and I’s answers to:

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haymitch sending katniss the bread from 11 in the aftermath of rue’s death hits so much harder with the knowledge that mags sent him the coffee and strawberry ice cream after maysilee died

he was inviting her to cry to him the same way that mags had for him, the same way katniss does in mockingjay

he turned out to be so much more emotionally cognizant with katniss than we gave him credit for

My favourite harmless prank I've heard of was done by this girl whose dad was a geologist, and they'd go on day hikes with his geologist friends/co-workers and when she got bored on them she'd habitually pick up a random rock and go ask him what it is, and one of them would explain what kind of a rock that is, how it probably got here, and usually some notions of the more unusual features the rock had, if any.

And she had a friend who had once gone on a tourist trip to Iceland and brought back a volcanic rock. So she borrowed the rock and took it with her on the hike, and after two randomly picked up "hey dad what rock is this", she presented the volcanic rock, in the same fashion as all the others.

3 minutes later there are five middle-aged and older men circled around this mysterious rock, all agreeing on what it is, but not why it is. They keep asking her questions, where did she find it? Were there any other rocks around there that looked like it? Was it like this on the ground? People walking past the group try to stretch their necks to see over the geologists' shoulders to see what's the source of such amazement.

And in the end she couldn't take it anymore, burst into laughter and confessed. The geologists agree that it was pretty clever.

Geologist enrichment

‪a few chapters into sunrise on the reaping and the conclusion I’m coming to is that while katniss keeps *a lot* to herself, 16 year-old haymitch was a chronic oversharer. he dropped in ONE chapter more of the entire district’s lore than she did in 3 books

Effie is actually not fanservice because she is important to the theme of propaganda in SOTR

Effie is 100% brainwashed AND YET she still hasn't lost her humanity. She believes propaganda completely AND YET she doesn't use it as an excuse to abuse people. Throughout the book, the tributes are constantly dehumanised. But Effie doesn't treat Haymitch that way. She helps the team. She's there for him in the launch room- which Drusilla and so many Capitol citizens would never do.

So there really is no excuse for abusing people, not even "I was lied to" or "i thought i was in the right" or "I was fed propaganda"

You still choose how you interact with people around you and how you treat them.

Thanks for coming 2 my TED talk.

anyone else thinking about effie spending 24 years watching haymitch completely fall apart. effie, who met haymitch by accident, who knows exactly what kind of person he is, who sees him every year on his birthday for 24 years and each year he’s drunker, each year he’s angrier, each year he’s faster to give up. and then they get katniss and peeta. peeta, who is kind and open and understanding, who refuses to give up on haymitch. and katniss, who is so much like haymitch at 16 that it hurts. and over the few days they’re together, effie watches haymitch come back to life. watches him try. watches him have hope. and then they get to keep not one but both of those kids. they get to come home. and then, less then a year later, effie pulls haymitch’s name at the reaping.

Thinking again about how Suzanne esentially subverted the "beloved famous man that is actually a horrible person in real life" with Finnick, who is the complete opposite of that.

Finnick has this whole image costructed around him by the people that abused him for years: the Capitol's darling, their golden boy, the sex symbol of Panem, the man that has countless lovers but leaves them constantly and doesn't look back etc. And you would expect, initially, to meet a man that retains at least a part of that persona in his day to day life. But Finnick doesn't, not even one bit.

You see instead a man that is deeply in love and completely devoted to the one woman he quite literally adores, a man that protects Mags, his old mentor and his mother figure, as much as he can, a man that wouldn't leave Johanna behind, a man that gathers whatever strenght he has left to speak publicly about the abuse inflicted upon him at the government's hands; the opposite of what the Capitol's media and reputation made him out to be.

everyone’s trying to stump the akinator so i’m gonna try and see if he’ll know that i’m thinking of the little symbol on the front of his turban

come on it hasn’t even been 10 fucking seconds

GOD DAMN IT

i fucking hate this stupid piece of shit genie fuck him i hate him so fucking much

there is something just so funny about the fact that beetee had one (1) plan to disrupt the games and then it didn't work. but 25 years later he rocks up to the hunger games like "okay. so. we have to break the arena. but THIS TIME it's gonna WORK." and then it did. icon.

Okay but it’s fucking brilliant that one of the themes of the book was about the distortion of history.

Usually prequels are a dangerous thing to write because unless they’re planned out well in advance, they risk contradicting lore in the main series. Even still, we knew barely anything about Haymitch’s games. They were the perfect stomping ground for new information, with a rough series of events but without a close temporal connection to the main books.

But though she had this freedom and safety net, while she could have just written a story that aligned with what we knew, Collins leaned into the idea of contradicting past lore head on and made it the damn thesis of the book; that yeah, actually, it did play out entirely differently from how the characters saw it, and yes that contradicts what you were told, that’s the point.

We didn’t really know what happened in the 50th games until we read it from Haymitch’s perspective, because what little information we did have was spliced up and edited. The video evidence was processed through the Capital, and twisted to serve their purposes.

Tackling that idea of history being written by those in power with a notoriously inconsistent medium? Goddamn, writer that you are, Suzanne Collins.