picnic-at-dreaming-rock

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

for 2024 can we finally abandon the word "problematic" in online arguments and just say what we mean. its such a nothing word nowadays

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

“we need to teach media literacy in schools” guys was i really the only person paying attention in english class bffr

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

it's hilarious how if you do any amount of research into life or death melee combat the prevailing themes that emerge are that

you're gonna get tired very quickly

tired leads to injured, injured leads to tired, tired leads to—

you're not gonna be as composed as you expect

humans are more fragile than you think and also more durable than you think. both are true and neither stop them from dying of an infection later (DO NOT GET BITTEN)

DO NOT GET STABBED (generally good life advice)

DO GET A SPEAR

knights are faster than you think

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

one of those false etymology posts but with the actual etymology of the word

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

hot girls are obsessed with etymology

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

Katniss isn’t the mockingjay… but her children are

I don’t mean to insinuate that Katniss isn’t the central character of The Hunger Games series or that she isn’t the catalyst for a revolution or the symbol of rebellion to her people. She is all of those things and more. She is cast by the rebellion as the Mockingjay, and she comes to identify as that role, albeit reluctantly. I would argue, though, that she just isn’t the mockingjay. There’s a qualitative difference between the two. One capital letter can make a world of difference. So let’s talk more about that little “m.”

The Hunger Games is, among other things, a treatise on how we, as a society, care (or don’t) for our children. It’s a pacifist call to stop using our children in the theater of war. This is corroborated when Katniss thinks, “[S]omething is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children to settle its differences.” She even comes to embrace what Peeta cautioned against in his first Capitol interview, that humans as she knows them ought to die off so that “some decent species [can] take over.” (MJ 377)

This new species of human is the mockingjay.

Suzanne Collins goes through great pains to relay a few basic truths to the reader from the outset of The Hunger Games:

Katniss is a “mini me” version of her deceased father. Whereas her mother and sister are delicate and fair like the merchant class, Katniss is Seam Strong: she’s not only darkly complected like her father, but she shares his rebellious and free spirit. There is nothing merchant class about Katniss. She is, to her core, Seam.

Katniss can’t bear the thought of having children in the world she knows. If it strikes you as odd that Suzanne Collins would have a 16-year-old girl talking about having (or not having) children within the first several pages of the series, then you’re onto something. This is an overarching theme and preoccupation, and it’s perhaps the most important one to Katniss as a character. Having, or not having children, is representative of Katniss’ future. By not wanting to have children, she is resisting the system in the only way she can as a disenfranchised person. It’s her way of opting out of the future altogether.

There is a specific mythology behind the mockingjay as a species, and Suzanne Collins wants us to get it exactly right. (we’ll talk about that more in a sec).     

Why do these three points matter?

Let’s start with the mythology behind the mockingjay. Here’s what Collins tells us:

“They’re… something of a slap in the face to the Capitol. During the rebellion, the Capitol bred a series of genetically altered animals as weapons. The common term for them was muttations, or sometimes mutts for short. One was a special bird called a jabberjay that had the ability to memorize and repeat whole human conversations. They were homing birds, exclusively male, that were released into regions where the Capitol’s enemies were known to be hiding. After the birds gathered words, they’d fly back to centers to be recorded. It took people awhile to realize what was going on…Then, of course, the rebels fed the Capitol endless lies, and the joke was on it. So the centers were shut down and the birds were abandoned to die off in the wild.

Only they didn’t die off. Instead, the jabberjays mated with female mockingbirds, creating a whole new species that could replicate both bird whistles and human melodies.” (THG 42-43)

Apologies for the extended quote! But this is some heavy stuff… it’s the heart and soul of the series. The Capitol creates a weapon against its people, the male jabberjay, a bird excellent with words. Ultimately the jabberjay proves useless to the Capitol- worse than useless, even. Destructive. The rebels use it for their own cause. And then the jabberjay mates with the female mockingbird and creates a new species that should never have existed. Suzanne Collins might as well have put a “spoiler alert” before this paragraph. This foreshadows exactly what happens in the series. And she just told us on page 42. That saucy minx.

Katniss is the mockingbird. She isn’t a mutt of anything; she is purely her father, a product of the Seam. She is so “Seam” she is practically a monolith. As a child, she overhears her father singing and spouting anti-Capitol political rhetoric, and she replicates his call, getting scolded by her mother. (THG 6, MJ 123) When her father would sing, all the birds would stop to listen to him. And lo and behold!, the same is true of Katniss. (THG 301). Throughout the series, Katniss only ever sings the songs her father taught her, those she heard as a child. She doesn’t have a song of her own. The mockingbird, in literature, symbolizes innocence and purity. And, despite the countless horrible things Katniss thinks about herself, she is an innocent. She isn’t privy to the political machinations of the adults around her. She doesn’t even know the content of her own heart. She’s pure (but for Peeta she’s perfect).  

….Which brings us to Peeta. He is the jabberjay. He is described by Katniss as being good with words more times than it’s useful to recount. One of my favorite examples is when Katniss thinks, “Peeta doesn’t need a brush to paint images… He works just as well in words” (MJ 22) In fact, following his first interview with Caesar Flickerman, she adds, “I don’t care [that he is a traitor]. Not what he says or who he says it for, only that he is still capable of speech.” (MJ 27) He is the voice of reason in her world, the leader she envisions in a just society. Just as Peeta hears her call and is “a goner,” so too is Katniss for him. They are two songbirds impossibly, irrevocably attracted to each other.

Peeta isn’t just a songbird, though. He is, specifically, the jabberjay.  He is tortured by the Capitol, turned into an “evil-mutt version” of himself, and is sent to destroy Katniss and, therefore, the rebellion (MJ 243). When he is rescued and brought to District 13, the Capitol’s scheme has apparently worked. He tries to kill her (let’s not talk about that), and his attraction to her is “gone” (her words, not mine). He uses the “L” word with Katniss for the first time- in past tense (ouch! it burns!!!). And he says to her, “You’re not very big, are you? Or particularly pretty?” (MJ 230) Let’s just say that hijacked!Peeta isn’t immediately a fan of the bird in front of him. But he’s a homing bird, and time after time, he finds his way back to her. In the beginning of Mockingjay, Katniss notes that “Peeta would have nothing to come home to anyway. Except me…” (9). And he does. Again and again, he finds his way back home to her.

If Katniss is the mockingbird and Peeta is the jabberjay, that makes their children the mockingjay. Katniss had been drawn to the mockingjay since she was a child, admitting that there was “something comforting about the little bird” (THG 43). Despite her insistence on not having children within a totalitarian regime, the mockingjay always served as a symbol of hope for her, even if she didn’t want to admit why. Katniss and Peeta’s children are that hope- and “only Peeta” could give her that. Peeta finally gets Katniss to buy into that future, to allow herself to feel the hope he has always represented to her. Falling in love and having children together is the way to show the world that they, as people, are more than just pieces in anyone’s Games.

So Mockingjay must end with the children, with a girl and a boy who possess traits of each of their parents and who are a new species of mutt that the Capitol never intended to exist. These children are the most important characters in the series. Katniss and Peeta’s children are the symbol of hope that we were promised, as readers, from the very beginning. They are the mockingjay. They don’t know that they dance on the ashes on the dead, and that’s okay. The fire and ashes are in the past, and the mockingjay is the symbol of a hopeful future, freewheeling in a sunshine-filled meadow. Suzanne gives us that token to carry with us, to take into whatever games we find ourselves forced to play.

(And a shout-out to everlarkedalways for inspiring me to write this)

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

Reconstruction of bust of Roman emperor Caracalla.

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

my dealer: got some straight gas. this strain is called “linguistics class” you'll be zonked out of your gourd

Me: yeah whatever. i dont feel nothin.

50 minutes later: dude i swear there's invisible words in these sentences

my ∅ friend, pacing: the determiner phrases are lying to us

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

sometimes i need to remind myself that i'm writing fanfiction for free and i'm allowed to have a shitty sentence or two

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

"it's not that deep" it's never that fucking deep according to some of you. books? not that deep just enemies to lovers. films? not that deep just fun colors on screen. music? not that deep just ai generated lyrics. art? not that deep i could do that. and what if i want it to be deep for fucking once? what if i'm not content with surface level? are criticism and opinions and concerns to be dismissed in their entirety because you are happy floating on the surface never once wondering what's actually underneath? it's just a fun little thing it's not supposed to have big themes or ask the big questions well good for you but i'm asking

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

My boyfriend was showing me his cat and I leaned over to kiss the cat on his soft little baby head and he went "meow" and scrambled away because I'd been wearing my headphones and I accidentally jabbed him with the microphone.

And I said "Damn, this is exactly like in the Iliad"

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

I think something that also drives me up a wall is that people like don't realize that you don't get fired or blacklisted or ignored for being a zionist or a zionist sympathizer whereas if you so much as wear a palestinian flag pin you get fired or in trouble like no actually i constantly have to watch myself irl to make sure I don't have my words potentially misconstrued because the entire American sociopolitical system will come at me if I so much as accidentally say one word out of place I can't even say "from the river to the sea" without being accused of genocide meanwhile people publish literal thinkpieces about how an overwhelmingly Muslim town famous for their sweets is a center for terrorism like come on. Like there's a levels of fuckery happening right now and we have politicians openly calling Palestine protests as "Russian funded" I'm sorry but Palestinians, Arabs, muslims and people racialized as from these groups are in pretty immediate fucking danger??? Like??? Can you not see the fascism unless it directly happens to you????

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

can’t criticize plastic surgery as an institution because it’s none of your business if a woman wants to “fix” her insecurities. can’t criticize the makeup industry or beauty standards because some women feel good when they shave and wear makeup. can’t bring up the challenges women face in the workplace because some women want to be stay at home wives instead of working. everything a woman does is automatically feminist and we shouldn’t stop to think about the context surrounding her actions because that would be misogynistic. here’s what i had for girl dinner. according to my girl math the barbie movie was a revolutionary piece of feminist media. i may not show it but i feel the life slowly draining from me day by day.

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

Afternoon sunlight in Meldon Bluebell Woods by Miles

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

“the arts and sciences are completely separate fields that should be pitted against each other” the overlap of the arts and sciences make up our entire perceivable reality they r fucking on the couch