I can't stop thinking about just how emblematic everything in those conversations of Ashton being "a child" are of how, even at her most beaten down, triggered and traumatized, Laudna is not and will not be what Delilah wants her to be.
For Delilah, "they're still a child" is dismissive, a bit derisive, but doesn't even merit being truly hateful. She doesn't find Ashton worth the attention Laudna is giving them, not when there are such more interesting, important things to pull the attention of an adult. Children are only important when they are useful. She will indulge Laudna on the subject, because Laudna is useful, is her vehicle for action in the world, but she only cares about it in the context of getting Laudna to do what she wants. Calling someone a child is calling them unimportant. (Laudna is a child to her)
But for Laudna, who loves children and who understands intimately what it's like to have the helplessness of child, to be trapped under the authority of someone who will never treat you as a full person, even when they are being ostensibly kind, to be so confused and lost and powerless...a child deserves attention more than anyone else. Of course children lash out. Being a child IS in many ways quite awful because the world is so big around you and you don't know yet how to react to any of it, how to soothe yourself - and if you aren't given the attention, you never learn how. Ashton never learned how. Her instincts - instincts trained into her by manipulation and abuse from inside and the world around her - may say kill him, but she fights them the whole way because her heart is stronger and her heart says that the angriest, most volatile child needs care as much as any other. More, even.
Laudna hears Delilah call Ashton a child and agrees on the word, but they have diametrically opposed understandings of what that means, and diametrically opposed instincts on how to treat a child. Laudna doesn't want to hurt anyone, especially children. She loves children. She loves so much and so selflessly. And Delilah is so very very good at manipulating her but she has tried for 30 years to change the bedrock of Laudna's psyche, the truer thing that drives her beyond the base animal instincts of survival, and it hasn't worked.
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Mizuki and Date though like. Imagine being 8 and your parents are filthy rich and going through a bad divorce. Your mom treats you like shit, lashing out at you, hitting you, saying she wishes you were never born all because you were behaving like a child. Your dad is more comforting, but he doesn’t do anything to stop the abuse and he spends his time invested in a completely different family, a girl who you love and look up to but he loves her more than you and it fucking shows. Then your dads new friend, some fucking bachelor in his late 20s, is just like "wow you guys are the worst fucking parents ive ever seen" and next thing you know your dad is sending you off to live with him. And it’s just a massive kick in the head cuz you go from a rich lifestyle to living in some really shitty tiny ass apartment with this guy who’s clearly never been around a child in his entire life and he doesn’t know how to behave and does a really bad job of censoring himself like he has a bunch of dirty magazines that he can’t hide very well cuz it’s literally a studio apartment and also he talks to himself sometimes, it’s really weird. He doesn’t even have the slightest clue what he’s doing
And he’s the best parent you’ve ever had
Because fuck, it all really hurts. You have to cope with having never received any love from anyone, and with the fact that your parents clearly don’t want you and can’t even be bothered to send you with anyone even kinda responsible. And this guy has a scary job with crazy hours and you don’t know anything about him and neither does he. But still, he never once hits you or tells you you’re not allowed to cry. He just gives you space and doesn’t push you to feel any sort of way about him. And sometimes, he’s even kind. He makes you some stew, even though it’s a bit chunky. He lets you sleep in the bed and takes the couch for himself, even though he complains about the massive back pain he’d never trade his spot for a second. He pays attention to events at your school and gives you your favorite stuffed animal when you make good grades, even though you called it ugly. He gets worried sick when you come home with bruises and puts on a goofy voice and trains you to defend yourself and you develop some highly deadly skills and even though it’s really abnormal, he buys you a bench press so you can get stronger. There’s this distance there, and you feel really weird caring about someone who you aren’t related to, but you find yourself wishing it was meant to be like this all along, that maybe, he’s secretly your real dad and he loves you like his real daughter
And when you say "I’m back" he says "welcome home"
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this is somewhat of a vent post & something i said i would not do again but has been plaguing me enough that i think getting it out might feel better. so. has anydoggy else been. Baffled and upset by nora sakavic’s refusal to speak on how terribly aftg has treated its characters of color? with the author of the series coming back with a new book and starting up on her online activity again, and questions of what she’d change about aftg bubbling up, it’s particularly glaring to me that we are all playing this very long game of pretend where we ignore how badly the non-white cast has been treated & her lack of thoughts on it
and i understand not wanting to bring up nicky and thea because people pick on her for it. i’m not trying to discredit nora sakavic’s terrible history of getting harrassed online by aftg fans. but i think it is very cynical, and it is very juvenile, and most of all very cruel, that she gets to ignore the very real ways the books have set up these characters to be hated. i think it’s obvious why the characters who get the most hate are the only canonical characters of color, and i think we do not get to treat this like a deliberate decision on the fandom’s part when the books have put these same characters in degrading and embarrassing and terrible positions in the first place. aftg is not a story about nice characters with clean pasts, but there is a very specific nastiness to the only characters of color being a brown man who sexually harasses and later assaults the main character, a black woman whose only scene is her lashing out at her love interest after being ignored for the first two books, and the japanese villain who gets maybe two lines of complexity before he goes back to being a terrible person. the white cast, in comparison, while not at all free from flaws, are never shown to commit mindless evil; all of their actions are ultimately justified. the book goes out of its way to give them concession after concession. we know exactly who to side with, because aftg tells us who these people are. does nicky’s assault ever get addressed in the books? does riko’s reasoning to be the way that he is ever gets more than briefly aluded to? is thea reserved even a shred of humanity or grace in her one scene?
anyway. it’s been years of talking about this and the fandom has been constantly hostile to criticism in this regard, and more recently any criticism at all, and it’s Grating to be on the other side of this discussion. it’s exhausting to know that in ten years we do not get even an acknowledgment besides the author saying she will not answer questions about nicky and thea anymore. it’s upsetting and it’s ugly and i wish no one had to talk about this again, but we do because what i thought was common sense has been washed away by a sudden influx of no-nuance adoration for the trilogy. basically i hope we all explode
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“I had a dream, though,” I say, thinking back. “I was following a mockingjay through the woods. For a long time. It was Rue, really. I mean, when it sang, it had her voice.”
“Where did she take you?” he says, brushing my hair off my forehead.
“I don’t know. We never arrived.” I say. “But I felt happy.”
...
Peeta pulls the chain with the gold disk from around his neck. He holds it in the moonlight so I can clearly see the mockingjay. Then his thumb slides along a catch I didn’t notice before and the disc pops open. It’s not solid, as I had thought, but a locket. And within the locket are photos. […]
“Your family needs you, Katniss,” Peeta says.
My family. My mother. My sister. And my pretend cousin Gale. But Peeta’s intention is clear. That Gale really is my family, or will be one day, if I live. That I’ll marry him. So Peeta’s giving me his life and Gale at the same time. To let me know I shouldn’t ever have doubts about it. Everything. That’s what Peeta wants me to take from him.
...
He puts the chain with the locket around my neck, then rests his hand over the spot where our baby would be. “You’re going to make a great mother, you know,” he says.
...
As I drift off, I try to imagine that world, somewhere in the future, with no Games, no Captiol. A place like the meadow in the song I sang to Rue as she died. Where Peeta’s child could be safe.
....
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According to Rise of Red, defintion of girl power is uh, shaming a girl, aka Chloe Charming, for uh...being a princess??? For being kind??? For being a rule obeyer??? For not liking getting dirty when there's literally nothing wrong with characters who don't like getting dirty-
Seriously, this movie's odd love for shaming a female character can kinda go up there with D1's whole Mal shames Audrey scene to cheer up Evie....and maybe overtake it as worst time Descendants did this because at least that was one scene, this was a whole ass sub plot in Rise of Red for some reason.
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