rubycafee

[rubycafee]

Evelyn and Celia had drastically different viewpoints on sex, and that’s another reason they clashed so much.

For Evelyn, a lot of the time sex is a means to an end. A way to accomplish her goals and get what she wants. She unfortunately learned from a very young age that men would sexualize her because of her beauty and because of her impoverished background, she saw it as one of the few things she could use to her advantage. She does enjoy sex when it’s with someone she actually cares about and is attracted to. (Celia and Don before he became abusive). But when she’s having sex with someone as part of a scheme, she’s able to separate her emotions from it. She has a quote where she says that true intimacy, in her eyes, is more emotion centered and is about allowing your guard down for someone. She has that emotional bond with Celia and that’s what she puts the most stock into, not sex. That’s why when she sleeps with Mick Riva to trick him into marrying her, she doesn’t see it as a big deal. It’s also why she doesn’t fully realize why Celia is so upset by it. She loves Celia and Celia is the person she allows to see her true self and lets her guard down around. So why does it matter that she had meaningless sex with Mick in order to keep their secret? She did it for them!

Celia, on the other hand, views sex as being more sacred. She came from a wealthy family and never had to rely on sex with men to accomplish her goals the way Evelyn felt like she had to. In contrast, she see’s sex as the one thing she’s allowed to only share with the woman she loves, since they can’t be public about their relationship. Men might be able to hold Evelyn on their arms during award shows and premieres, but they don’t get to see and have Evelyn the way Celia is able to. That’s why it hurts her when she finds out about the Mick thing and Evelyn filming that sex scene with Don. It was another reminder that not even sex can always only belong to them.

[rubycafee]

Jaime and Cersei’s romanticized idea of being one soul in two bodies is so fascinatingly destructive. So much of their relationship is based on this notion of fundamentally refusing to accept the other as a whole. Both of them want to shove the other inside of a box of their creation that is kind of antithetical to them as people. Cersei does use Jaime and her children as extensions of herself to achieve things that society keeps from her grasp due to her gender. It is a reaction to the brutal patriarchy she exists within that dehumanizes her and robs her of power. She locks Jaime inside this box where he functions as her sword, essentially. Then, the whole point of Jaime’s arc in ASoS is to establish that he is more than a sword, more than rituals of violence. To me, Jaime’s obsession with Cersei continuing past their childhood mainly stems from a tight clinging to the past. Following Jaime’s trauma, disillusionment, and increasing isolation due to his experience with Aerys, knighthood, and moral constructs, he views the relationship as the only concrete thing in his life and relies on it for affirmation and meaning. He also uses Cersei as a means of dissociation— filling his head with thoughts of her during the executions, “losing himself in her flesh”, hoping to prevent his nightmares through dreams of her— a way “to go away inside”. He also unconsciously never wants to move on from being that blissfully ignorant romantic boy that he was, so he desperately keeps the one thing that is constant (his twin sister - a constant from birth), and romanticizes a relationship that is not what he believes it is. He projects her onto a pedestal and obsesses over an ideal that does not exist, also putting her into the role of a perfect woman (“I thought she was The Maiden”), to turn the relationship into something pure that he can guard and revolve his life around. He puts himself in the position of a knightly protector figure to cope with his own identity crisis and the destruction of his self concept. He needs her in order to feel needed. They need each other for self-love. But, both of them also dehumanize the other in different ways, and to different extents. “You are my other half” is a twisted notion that prevents the autonomy and individualization of both parties. It treats the other as a half and not a whole. Not to mention the possible consent & communication issues it brings. “I am not whole without you.” You are, and should be. Truly dynamic of all time.

[rubycafee]

[rubycafee]

[rubycafee]

This is the funniest take on "what if Snow chose to be a good person" because instead of imagining young Snow being this sweet kind person, it's just Donald Sutherland playing a senile old uncle who constantly beefs with birds.

@boygeniustv on Tumblr

Plus my favorite comments

EDIT: OP is posting a fic to AO3 and it's amazing

[rubycafee]

I think it’s kind of funny how coin (who obviously wanted peeta rescued from the arena instead of katniss) doesn’t see what an absolute nightmare he would be for her to deal with if she left katniss in that arena

Like she thinks katniss was hard to deal with/manipulate/control after she left peeta behind? Peeta would’ve had her whole district eating out to the palm of his hand before she even realized who she was dealing with. She thought katniss was too single minded/stubborn about her focus on saving peeta over the revolution itself? He would have been her absolute nightmare (and I adore him for it)

[rubycafee]

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) + text posts

[rubycafee]

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.

[rubycafee]

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

[rubycafee]

what makes Snow such a formidable villain within THG universe is that nothing he does was set in stone. there was no sense of inevitability about his actions and his brutality. Snow had enough perspective of poverty, capital cruelty, district hunger and not to mention his own arena experience’ and yet he actively chose at every moment to stray from natural goodness. its even more terrifying in the sense that he had the ability to care. Snow is not a mindless sociopath, he displays feelings to others such as sejanus, lucy grey and tigris but ultimately he will always choose himself. his ability to betray those he cared about in order yo advance himself makes him so much more than the stereotypical villain who is forced into his actions.

[rubycafee]

The moment Tigris tells Snow he looks like his father, my heart broke.

That's her Prim.

That's the child she took care of while being a child herself, stuck with an adult who couldn't care for them all that well. She tried so hard and sacrificed so much for the boy that despite all her love still turns into a monster.

Katniss's Prim dies, but Tigris' Prim destroys every part of the boy she raised, to the point she wants him dead and has nothing in her heart for him except absolute loathing.

[rubycafee]

Snow always comes across as cold and unbothered when he’s dealing with Katniss and the rebellion- but knowing how actually delusional and unhinged that man’s inner monologue is and with all the Katniss/Lucy Gray parallels I know when he was alone that man was probably ripping his hair out and screaming trying to figure out how the two are connected and assuming all of Katniss’ actions had ulterior motives that were directed at him. Just raving in his room alone like:

[rubycafee]

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*:･ﾟ✧*:･⁰: *:･ﾟ✧*:･°

[rubycafee]

Jaime and Cersei’s romanticized idea of being one soul in two bodies is so fascinatingly destructive. So much of their relationship is based on this notion of fundamentally refusing to accept the other as a whole. Both of them want to shove the other inside of a box of their creation that is kind of antithetical to them as people. Cersei uses Jaime and her children as extensions of herself to achieve things that society keeps from her grasp due to her gender. She locks Jaime inside this box where he functions as her sword, essentially. Then the whole point of Jaime’s arc in ASoS is to establish that he is more than a sword. To me, Jaime’s obsession with Cersei continuing past their childhood mainly stems from a tight clinging to the past. Following Jaime’s trauma, disillusionment, and increasing isolation due to his experience with Aerys and knighthood, he views the relationship as the only concrete thing in his life and relies on it for affirmation and meaning. He also uses Cersei as a means of dissociation. He unconsciously never wants to move on from being that blissfully ignorant romantic boy that he was, so he desperately keeps the one thing that is constant (his twin sister - a constant from birth). He projects her onto a pedestal and obsesses over an ideal that does not exist, putting her into the role of a traditional woman (“I thought she was The Maiden”), just like the rest of society, that she does not actually fit. He puts himself in the position of a knightly protector figure to cope with his own identity crisis and the destruction of his self concept. Both of them in turn dehumanize the other. “You are my other half” is a twisted notion that prevents the autonomy and individualization of both parties, not to mention the possible consent & communication issues it brings. “I am not whole without you.” You are, and should be. Truly the dynamic of all time.

[rubycafee]

Levi is a nice guy once you get to know him.

He praises his soldiers.

He admits when he’s being a dick.

He sympathizes with Erwin. And he knows how exhausted Erwin is.

He was deeply troubled after learning that he’s been killing humans all this time.

He’s helping Histora with the oprhans.

And this

He’s violent, rude, unapproachable, irritable…But he has a huge heart. And I love him.

[rubycafee]

why did he have to grow a beard, like he was so fine without it ??

[rubycafee]

⌗𝐎𝟏 — 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐃𝐈𝐕𝐄 ; 𝐈𝐕𝐄

ꕤ. 🥝 = 🌻 + 🍁 × 🍀 ! ⺌

꒷ ͝͝͝ ꒦ ͝ ꒷꒷ ͝͝͝ ꒦ ͝ ꒷꒷ ͝͝͝ ꒦ ͝ ꒷

𓇗. ꗃ : !! ☁️