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no one has ever described girlhood like elena ferrante. the expectations. the inherent dissatisfaction, with your body, with who you are, or rather who you’re becoming. the competition. being the centre of your universe, viewing everyone pretty much exclusively in relation to yourself. learning not to. beautiful and in sparkling prose and not overly romanticised. i am so emo abt my brilliant friend rn. Elena Ferrante the woman you are.

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James Baldwin.

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Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

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snoopy read a little life... thoughts and prayers

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once again being reminded of how weird being a taylor swift fan on this website is because the people who claim to hate her just clearly do not listen to her. I saw someone say "does taylor swift even know she's been turned into a brand and stripped of her humanity? is she aware of the fact she lives in a gilded cage where she can't be imperfect?" like my sibling in christ that's what her past two albums have been about about. what exactly did you guys think anti-hero was?

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NEW HUNGER GAMES BOOK COMING OUT IN MARCH OF 2025 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS… new gigantic paragraphs from me analyzing the characters and the hunger games universe. life is sooooo good sometimes !!!!!

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It’s not been anywhere near close to long enough. How could it ever be?

Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult // All Of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh, Searchlight Pictures // Mary Oliver // Aristotle And Dante Discover The Secrets Of The Universe, Benjamin Alire Sáen // Unknown // In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive, Clementine von Radics // The Haunting Of Bly Manor

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“When I went on the expedition with Numa Turcatti and Daniel Maspons, climbing up the mountain, I took the necklaces and chains of each dead person we found. I took every watch, every ID card, all the papers they may have had in their bags: letters, notes, messages, lists, directions, desires, names, loves. I did the same for all of them. I found Carlos Valeta’s chain, which I gave to his parents. I found the letter Gustavo Nicolich wrote to his girlfriend Rosina, the letter from Arturo Nogueira to his parents, his brothers, and his girlfriend. All that history, all those lives which were cut short on the mountain, I carried in a bag. With time that little bag was getting bulky. I had to organise it – here are all the watches and medals, there the letters and documents, the more intimate and personal papers. When that little bag was too full I transferred it to a larger bag, containing the belongings of twenty-nine amputated lives … After [we left], nobody remained up on that icy mountain, nobody at all, because I carried them all away with me.” – “The Dented Cross with the Broken Arm: Gustavo Zerbino” from Society of the Snow: The Definitive Account of the World’s Greatest Survival Story by Pablo Vierci

LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE | SOCIETY OF THE SNOW (2023) dir. J. A. Bayona

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At its core, every piece of media we ever have consumed and ever will consume — whether it’s art, music, books, movies — is fundamentally about love, or the lack of it.

it’s an inescapable facet of human life. it could be about the love you have for people in your life, or how much you hate your job, or love your city, but the love is always there.

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The Farewell (2019)

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I clench his hands to the point of pain. "Stay with me." His pupils contract to pinpoints, dilate again rapidly, and then return to something resembling normalcy. "Always," he murmurs. [insp]

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Katniss is like Lucy Gray this, Katniss is like Sejanus that, and yes find 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.

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Here’s the thing for me: the prequel does not make Katniss “the chosen one” (and believe me, I had such hatred for this book when it came out for thinking it did make her this fated hero). Snow himself may perceive her as “the chosen one” because he’s self-absorbed, and that is something the prequel shines light on: why Snow is so myopic about hurting Katniss specifically, instead of being effective in crushing the rebellion. He sees the narrative as revolving around him exclusively.

In reality, however, Katniss is still just a good and brave oppressed young woman who said “enough” — what is “fated” comes from the folkloric, interconnected nature of Appalachian culture, a culture rich with music, story, and supernatural goings on, a place that stands as the antithesis of elite society. Once Lucy Gray’s music and memory were in the wind and water, they weren’t going away, no matter who picked them up.

Also, I think we sometimes forget that these books have a lot of very subtly supernatural elements: off the top of my head, we have the birds stopping singing to listen to little Katniss, the fact that OF ALL PEOPLE the boy who loves her is reaped alongside her (I mean, that’s the plot, but still, and it kind of proves my point), all the eerily prescient connections to The Hanging Tree (“midnight”), Katniss inhabiting Finnick’s mind in his last moments, kissing Peeta to break the “spell” Snow has on him, Prim’s spirit seemingly trying to stop Katniss dying after the parachute bombs go off, not to mention the parade of “ghosts” Katniss sees in her rehab. That’s not all realism. No, the reaping wasn’t rigged. No, no one planned for Katniss to lead the rebellion because she maybe possibly was related to the Covey. It’s just one of those strange things that did happen here.

A ghost girl left some songs echoing in the coal-dusted streets, and one day a little girl sang one in a Kindergarten classroom, and a little boy heard her, and Snow’s days were numbered from that moment on. That, to me, is the most fated moment of the whole series: Katniss and Peeta, and the Valley Song: a real song, an American folk song, once sung by Lucy Gray. From that point on, the chips fall where they will.

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Katniss is so reluctant to let herself love things (and people!) she closes herself off because she knows when she DOES love it’s with her WHOLE HEART she holds nothing back!!!! She goes from 0-100, she never goes by halves.

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to my knowledge (someone correct me) Snow never hears Katniss sing The Hanging Tree (that’s a movie invention, and it’s not even confirmed in the movies that he’s hearing it), but those are not the only songs Lucy Gray sings … and can you imagine the slow creeping paranoia beginning to crawl back up his spine when Katniss honors Rue in much the way Sejanus honored Marcus … when she then begins to sing Deep in the Meadow, Maude Ivory’s song … when Peeta tells the story of how he fell for his girl, when she was singing, of all things, the Valley Song … not to mention all the references to mockingjays throughout the first arena (whose idea was that?) … oh, it’s delicious … the first similarity Snow could dismiss as mere coincidence (it’s not uncommon, we know, for tributes to stay with a dying peer), the second, as a product of an insular backwoods culture (right? RIGHT?) but by the third … he must have felt a ghost-chill on the back of his neck … and I LOVE it … Snow lands on top, but as soon as that burning chariot burst out of the night, he should have known … his time was up

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girl before watching a movie: -_-

girl after watching a movie: o_O omg

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the hunger games x taylor swift <3

“i'd kiss you as the lights went out

swaying as the room burned down

i'd hold you as the water rushes in

if I could dance with you again”

- dancing with our hands tied

“your braids like a pattern

love you to the moon and to Saturn

passed down like folk songs

the love lasts so long”

- seven

“I spy with my little tired eye

tiny as a firefly

a pebble that we picked up last July

down deep inside your pocket

we almost forgot it

does it ever miss Wicklow sometimes?”

- sweet nothing

“I'd fall to pieces on the floor

if you weren't around

too young to know it gets better

I'll be summer sun for you forever

forever winter if you go”

- forever winter

“we can plant a memory garden

say a solemn prayer, place a poppy in my hair

there's no morning glory, it was war, it wasn't fair”

- the great war

“and you know that I'd swing with you for the fences

sit with you in the trenches

give you my wild, give you a child”

- peace