#I've always been a chronic poster tho

[the-physicality]

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[pennyserenade]

Hello! Hope you’re doing well!! I’m not sure you’d like followers to respond to/ interact with your posts w your thoughts in the tags but I just wanted to say that I totally agree w your thoughts on Coryo and Sejanus LOL. Im v surprised (tho I guess I shouldn’t be given how old I am at this point + the no. of fandoms I’ve been in) that people can read them so differently from the novel. Coryo is an unreliable narrator and that makes it kind of fun to read because his pov shouldn’t always be taken as the truth. In fact I think it’s fun to read how differently his peers view him/ his r/s w other people vs what he himself perceives. Sejanus is such a nice, sweet boy and it’s kinda sad that other people don’t read him that way just because the book is filtered through coryo’s thoughts haha. He’s kind and dares to stand up for what he believes in… I think the saddest thing abt his story is that he was genuinely trying to help others directly but unfortunately the people he spoke to weren’t the most honest/ dependable (I don’t think the stuff with the rebels would have gone down well) and he also trusted Coryo (I don’t blame him cause Coryo was the only “nice” person in the Capitol) 😭 I suppose that’s also how difficult it is to deal w people sometimes IRL (in extreme situations). Anyway ya just wanted to share my thoughts :x feel free to ignore if this isn’t something you’re ok with!!

hi nonie! i'm absolutely okay with followers interacting with my tags and posts/coming to talk about this stuff with me! as you can probably tell i've got a lot to say about this stuff - i'm just a chronic in the tag poster lol.

because suzanne collins wrote the ballad of songbirds and snakes in a third person point of view, i think that readers have taken to assuming that what they're getting is an unbiased narrator, when in fact we are still very much getting a biased point of view from coriolanus. sure, we are distanced from his thoughts--not exactly seeing things through his eyes as we did with katniss--but that doesn't mean we don't have access to him and that his thoughts aren't distorting what we are seeing. i've thought a lot about the reasons suzanne collins might've chosen to use third person pov when she used a first person pov for the rest of the novels, and i don't think there was one definite reason. some of the brilliance of suzanne collins' writing lies in the fact that you do have derive these meanings for yourself at times. personally, i like to think that she chose to use third person pov because this story, while very much coriolanus-centric, belonged to characters like sejanus plinth and lucy gray, too.

the fact that this book came out during the trump's presidency isn't at all lost on me. i think what suzanne collins was saying was: look how badly this system failed this once privileged white boy. for all intents and purposes this should make him angry, and here are these district kids who have suffered just as he has. he can relate more to them than he can to any of his capital peers. he knows what it is to hunger and suffer and fight for your life every day, to be made to perform. when coriolanus turns his back on sejanus plinth and lucy gray baird, it is so tragic because he was meant to side with them and yet at the end of the day he turned his back on them because he wanted to be with 'his people.' he upheld this system that had so failed him because he thought people like lucy gray and sejanus plinth were primitive and less than because that's the mindless shit he had been fed his entire life. this is exactly what happened during that election. i've seen countless white people, who are every bit as poor and destitute as the immigrants that seek to come to this country for help -- if not more -- turn their back on them and support trump. even the poorest of whites think they are better than the richest of latinos or black people because this what their systems teach them, and it makes them feel good to think that.

i think that's why sejanus was district 2 turned capital. i believe that this was commentary on how, no matter how far poc and/or immigrants come, these white people will always view them as less than and that the system will never be forgiving of them. i do genuinely believe that coriolanus thought that sejanus' parents would save him in the end, and the fact that they couldn't was so shocking because he had, up until that point, seen the ways wealth had benefited plinth. he could not conceptualize a world where wealth wouldn't get a person what they wanted because he did not know what it was to be district. they did not see sejanus plinth, heir to the plinth fortune. they saw a district rat, a nameless, faceless traitor to kill. it is no surprise that coriolanus snow climbed to the top on the back of sejanus plinth tragic ending, because that's simply what happens every day.

i do understand and don't absolutely hate the conversations people have surrounding sejanus' privilege and what he chose to do with it/ what he chose not to do, but i think to consider sejanus an annoying, selfish character is erroneous. he was a boy who knew that this system would never favor him and was trying his best to envision a world where it might, and yes he did make stupid rash decisions, but at the end of the day what killed him was coriolanus snow and snow's desire for power. sejanus plinth was not stupid for trusting coriolanus snow, either; coriolanus snow was evil for betraying the boy's trust for his own self-serving agenda.

it is hard to live in a world like this. even as a white woman with a mexican father, i have have had to experience the kind of things sejanus did with people talking poorly about him and his family behind his back, and openly to his face. i am not accepted by either side and never will be, just as he wasn't. i will say i do experience immense privilege because of the color of my skin, and i won't ever pretend that i don't know that, but that's what i'm talking about: no matter how much i look like them, and act like them, i will always be a mexican's daughter and i am happy about that fact. i am mexican as much as i am white but it doesn't make the fight i have to struggle because of it any more fun.