#again justice for disabled Peeta

[itsajollyjester]

"No I've got it!"

[orangegaytorade]

I'm adding my 2 cents for The Hunger Games Renaissance:

I love the Gale Slander people are doing, but some people make the blatant statement that he's a ruthless killer and act like he personally killed Prim. While I do admit the Prim Reaper jokes are funny, he's so much more nuanced than that. He went through the same trauma that Katniss did, but he is a look into what happens if Katniss had gotten bitter. He is filled with rage and wants the other side to hurt just as much as he does. We get notes of this in the first book when he tells Katniss that killing people is no different than killing animals, and especially when he plans for bombs that he doesn't care if they hit civilians. But he doesn't make the order to drop the bomb that kills Prim, he doesn't ensure that Prim is there. He is simply complicit, an accessory to that crime.

When I fist read the books I didn't understand a lot of the description words simply because I didn't have prior context for them (and I was like 10 years old). However now that I am old enough I am so mad we missed out on native or even hispanic Katniss in the movies because that's how she's described! She has olive-toned skin and it's dark like most people from the Seam. This is going into my own headcanons as her being native, but I wish more people understood that the movies, while good in some places, severely lacked in others

Another thing about the movies: I do think Josh Hutcherson was good for the role, and tbh he filled in a lot of the characterization for Peeta that the movies lacked.

On the portrayal of disabilities in the movies: I really wish that they had kept in Katniss being half-deaf and Peeta losing his leg. I've seen a few people give excuses at least for Peeta's leg by saying that maybe they didn't have the tech to do it. But the first movie came out in 2012, the second in 2013. They used CGI for the mutts and multiple other things, I believe they could have CGId or at least given Josh Hutcherson a sleeve that looks like a prosthetic, because without the knowledge that Peeta is physically disabled in Catching Fire and the Third Quarter Quell, him being clumsy and off doesn’t make sense!

More, because I'm watching MJ pt 1 again: Gale is so blinded by his sense of justice that he despises Peeta when they see the second message the Capitol makes him do, and that is another way we see that Gale is so caught up in his own hurt that he hates anybody who opposes their cause. He genuinely believes that if he were in Peeta's shoes he wouldn't say the things he did, but he genuinely has never been in the Capitol or the games, let alone understands exactly how cruel they are. Katniss knows Peeta, which is why she sees how much he has changed and that they're doing something to him, and she knows it's bad for them to be changing Peeta in that way. This is another look into how Gale is different from Katniss. He may care about her, but he has been absent through much of what she has been through that he doesn't talk with the same Katniss after the games.

[scripttorture]

You mentioned the Cold War in relation to the origins of the damaging myth of "reprogramming torture." Is that where the trope of sleeper agents and stuff comes from? The aspect of a sleeper agent (ESP one created from "reprogramming") isn't realistic then, right? Are other kinds of things, like the hijacking from the hunger games (where Peeta is tortured and "programmed" via fear to attack Katniss on sight) realistic?

I’ve never read orwatched The Hunger Games so I’m notsure I understand this cultural reference. And I’m honestly not entirely sure where the idea of ‘sleeper agents’ comes from although I know a lot of people seemed to think they were real during the Cold War.

 I think the best wayfor me to tackle this might be to step back from all the specific incidents andterms in your ask, because it seems like you’re driving at a more generalquestion about what’s possible and what isn’t. So I’ll start simple and thentalk a little bit more about the tropes connected with these sorts of ideasabout torture.

 1)     People can’t be forced to change their ideals.

 2)     Torture can’t remove or change specific/known memories.

 3)     Victims can not be put under any long term compulsion to actin particular ways.

 4)     The effects of torture can not be accurately predicted.

 5)     The effects of torture can not be controlled by the torturer.

 What all of this means is that anything which relies on the idea that a torturer ultimatelycontrols how a victims acts, thinks, feels or remembers is wrong.The variation between individuals is so great that you really just can’tpredict anything useful.

 Let’s go with a quickexample here, using two of the cases from ADarkling Plain which is interviews with people who survived traumaticevents varying from the Armenian genocide (the woman interviewed was possiblythe last living survivor) to Idi Amin. Now the focus of this book is how peoplerespond to trauma and how they ‘kept their humanity’.

 Two women, ‘Sara’ and ‘Kimberley’talk about growing up under the Khmer Rogue. They must have been about the sameage and of similar social standing.

 Sara describes feelingsof frustration, anger and hatred. She talks about feeling that the War CrimeTribunals were a farce and that the perpetrators, the communists, who causedher and her family so much suffering, should be starved and tortured andkilled. ‘Even Stevens’, she says.

 Kimberley in contrastbarely talks about the perpetrators. She talks about family and the importanceof a loving supportive family. She describes how the people she loved kept heralive and helped each other recover. She talks about trauma and sadness and thebrutality of the time but gives no indication of anger or hate.

 These are responses tobroadly speaking the same trauma.

 And the people behindthat trauma were aiming to create a generation of young people that believed inthe ideals of the Khmer Rogue, that would act in ways the party saw as ‘good’and would preferably forget all about family and religion and capitalism. Saraand Kimberley showcase two completely different forms of failure for them.

 Part of my point hereis that torturers can do exactly the same thing to different victims and getpolar opposite responses. Even when the victims are (on paper at least) verysimilar.

 And since they can’treally predict or control the way victims respond in the short term there’s noway for them to be able to predict or control how victims respond in the longterm.

 They could (if theybothered to read the literature) broadly predict that their victims might developPTSD or depression or anxiety. But there’s no guarantee any one victim would getthose three possible symptoms rather than say hypervigilance and pronouncedlearning difficulties. If you can’t predict how someone will respond then, wellthe idea of controlling them is a little ludicrous isn’t it?

 In the same vein we know torture usually causes problemswith recent memory, but there’s no way to predict which memories would be affected.There’s also no way to predict howthose memories would be affected. We know what the common problems are(essentially losing small chunks of recent memory surrounding trauma and inaccuracies in memories of trauma) butthere’s no way to say which problems will be most prominent.

 And well then we comeback to the central point that torture can not forcibly change someone’s mind.Ever.

 The character youmention Peeta? If they were tortured by this Katniss then fear is a possible response as is attacking them.But it’s only one of about a dozen possible responses which also include,running away, having a panic attack (this was a torturers response tounexpectedly seeing a former victim as reported by Fanon), attempting suicide (theresponse of the victim in the previously mentioned case), or simply not recognising him at all.

 There’s no way topredict which of these responses ismore likely. At all. Torture is ridiculously imprecise, which (again) makes theidea of using it as a tool to control people preposterous.

 And if it can’t be usedto predict or control someone in the veryshort term (such as Peeta’s trauma-response to Katniss) then the idea of itcontrolling a victim years or decades later to trigger some kind of surpriseattack is even more bizarre and even more out of touch with reality.

 These tropes are wrongand I believe they are ultimately harmful to victims because they essentiallysay that victims are dangerous, that being tortured makes them violent and thatbeing tortured makes them disloyal to their ideals. They say that torturevictims can’t be trusted, that their loyalties should be questioned and thatthey can be expected to attack their friends.

 That is a pretty shittything to suggest about people who are generally already: less likely to get anyform of justice, more likely to be isolated by their community, less likely to receivemedical treatment and more likely to be disabled. It is an attack on a group ofpeople who are already profoundly marginalised.

 I hope the answers yourquestion. :)

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