wanderinginfantasy - Tumblr blog

[wanderinginfantasy]

" i’ll go " " and i’ll stay "

" and we’ll both be okay "

" what do we do? " " enjoy it "

" i love you " " it’ll pass "

oil on paper by ratsandlilies

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“the ending is always the same”

war of the foxes - richard silken / waterloo - ABBA / euripides’ medea - the little theatre / anne carson / the three fates - luca cambiaso / the oresteia - aeschylus / road to hell II - hadestown / when i met you - mira lightner / andersen’s fairy tale anthology

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The Divine Comedy is making a mess of me

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inferno

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Poet, I beg you by that God whom you did not know…

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A school project: book cover redesign for Heroes of Olympus

Basically is just me trying to make fanarts for pjo during classes

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Well after ten million years, I finally finished my entry for the PJO fanzine, being put together by the lovely Angela. The lady characters in this series are super rad so I knew I had to do something that gave me an excuse to draw them being their awesome selves. I tried to push myself compositionally with this piece but I’ve been looking at it for so long now that I’m not sure I can even properly see it anymore haha!

Will post close-ups separately! I had a lot of fun with their armor and I want to show it off! :)

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My sister asked me to draw a clearer reference for my Reyna design for cosplay purposes so I doodled one up real quick as a warm up whooo.

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Percy Jackson

From the first series…

From the second…

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Revisiting an old favorite. I don’t think you guys understand how angry I will be if she dies.

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Suddenly got really nostalgic for Tumblr, circa summer/fall 2013. Good times, man. Here’s a quick break drawing of my gurl, RARA.

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Tay doodles <3

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I can't stop thinking about the Mockingjay/The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes parallels, and the meanings of "The Hanging Tree". When she first sings the song, we get a long analysis of it from Katniss' POV, finishing with this:

"The phrase Where I told you to run, so we’d both be free is the most troubling because at first you think he’s talking about when he told her to flee, presumably to safety. But then you wonder if he meant for her to run to him. To death. In the final stanza, it’s clear that that’s what he was waiting for. His lover, with her rope necklace, hanging dead next to him in the tree.

I used to think the murderer was the creepiest guy imaginable. Now, with a couple of trips to the Hunger Games under my belt, I decide not to judge him without knowing more details. Maybe his lover was already sentenced to death and he was trying to make it easier. To let her know he’d be waiting. Or maybe he thought the place he was leaving her was really worse than death. Didn’t I want to kill Peeta with that syringe to save him from the Capitol? Was that really my only option? Probably not, but I couldn’t think of another at the time."

This was, of course, huge foreshadowing for what indeed does happen to Peeta when he is hijacked. Mockingjay was my favorite novel in the original trilogy (and Mockingjay part 1 my favorite THG film) and the hijacking storyline is one of the big reasons.

Peeta is indeed given a fate "worse than death" when he is turned into a "mutt". He is referred to as "mutt" many times in the book. We - and Katniss - were prepared to think something horrible was done to him, but did not expect that he would be turned into an unrecognizable psychological mutant-monster, who tries to kill the girl he loves and who loves him, a monster filled with violence and cynicism who believes her to be a monster trying to kill him, an absolutely ruthless killer, a heartless minx who just pretended to love him and toyed with him and another guy for her own amusement, and all the worst things you can imagine.

Which all now sounds incredibly familiar after reading TBOSAS. Hijacked Peeta is basically Coriolanus Snow hunting Lucy Gray in the woods. There's absolutely no doubt that Snow personally came up with the scenario for Peeta's hijacking.

During that scene in TBOSAS, Snow hears Lucy Gray singing that last verse of "The Hanging Tree". Among his not-very-coherent thoughts at the moment, since he is in the midst of completely losing it, he thinks it's her playing games with him, telling him she knows about Sejanus. But throughout the book or at least in Chapter 3, and especially towards the end, he has repeatedly misunderstood her and things she told him, over and over. He also thought she was trying to kill him with the snake she left with the shawl he had given her, but whether or not she even left the snake, it turns out she definitely was not trying to kill him, since the snake was not venomous. Playing some sort of a mind game really doesn't seem like something she would really do at such a moment, and if this was really her singing, then it's the last thing we ever heard Lucy Gray Baird say.

When I went back and re-read Katniss' quote, the line "maybe he thought the place he was leaving her was really worse than death" made it click for me.

There is a mention of what a fate worse than death would be in TBOSAS, too, at the beginning of Chapter 3, when Snow fears what Capitol may have done to Lucy Gray, rather than just send her to District 12, and he thinks she may have been "imprisoned, killed, or turned into an Avox. Or worse, sent to a life of experimentation in Dr Gaul's lab of horrors". Again, being turned into a mutt - mutant-monster is singled out as the worst fate possible.

At the end of Chapter 3, we find out that Snow's time in District 12 and so much of what happened had been intentionally set up by Dr. Gaul as a part of his "education". In a a way, he was a part of her experiment, which helped turn him from a pretty normal human (entitled, selfish, over-ambitious, but human and with some good impulses too) to a complete monster, utterly evil and emotionally dead inside. While the people who loved him died (or presumably died) because of him, he survived and became Dr. Gaul's favorite mutt.

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I love the ballad of songbirds and snakes bc Suzanne Collins really said “but what if I write a prequel that retrospectively makes katniss the most traumatizing, haunting and bittersweet ghost Coriolanus Snow never even saw coming” and she did and it’s GREAT

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I had a revelation about how the Hunger Games characters relate to the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes characters. Here’s a terrible chart to represent it.

Peeta = Snow’s image-crafting wisdom combined with Sejanus’ lofty ideals.

Katniss = Lucy Gray’s District 12 background, survival instincts, and love of family combined with Sejanus’ tendency to impulsively do what’s right without considering the consequences.

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SPOILERS!

Obviously the ballad of songbirds and snakes and Lucy gray’s fate is meant to be up in the air and for the reader to speculate on, but I really think snow killed Lucy gray and sunk her body to the bottom of the lake with the guns in the sack. That’s why he gets sick, that’s why he’s in such pain and disorientation and he blames it on the snake bite, which ends up not being venomous. He killed Lucy gray and hid her body and it’s so horrific to him that he makes up his own story in his head, he lies to himself and creates his own mystery like the song in order to keep going, because snow knows if he thinks about Lucy gray and what he actually did to her he will never forgive himself, and he won’t survive.

Suzanne Collins walks a fine line in writing Coriolanus snow in this book between deep, burning hatred and genuine sympathy, and I’m in awe of it. It’s interesting though, the fact that after he drowns the weapons (and Lucy grays body, but again that’s just me) in the lake, it’s like a baptism for his presidential life. His family photos and his mothers powder are unsalvageable, but his fathers compass survives. In killing Lucy gray, snow finally chose his ambition over his heart, and it rules his life for the rest of his days.