#also NOT saying that little empathy = evil person … thats simply untrue

[handmemyshovel]

the way that coriolanus constantly disassociate a himself from pain that’s not only going on around him but affecting his loved ones is just… well, not really surprising.. but interesting to me. he is quite the narcissistic person, even early on in tbosas.

at the very beginning of the book he cannot bring himself to think of what trigris could be doing for his own good. and one could argue, “yeah.. who would want to think about that??” and i could understand that, but when he thinks of it again later on, and actually in a conversation about it with tigris herself, he strays away from the topic entirely. THIS IS HIS COUSIN WHO PRACTICALLY RAISED HIM!! And he just dismissed such a serious topic?!? he knows it’s wrong, even he is repulsed by it; he should try to stop it, but doing that would only do harm to him and his family, and i’m sure he knows that in the back of his mind, so he steers the conversation away from it almost immediately.

coriolanus dosen’t allow himself to sympathize with the tributes. when he catches himself doing so, he scolds himself. when he puts himself in a position that would display him as equal to the tributes (while in the truck with them, eating with lucy gray, even him gripping onto lucy gray’s shirt in the arena tour), he is humiliated. to think of them as actual people is unimaginable to him and therefore all the things they are going through is okay!

also, after clemensia got bit by the snakes, coriolanus hardly showed that he cared. he didn’t make any attempts to visit her after the first time—and even then, he didn’t actually visit her! and when the topic comes up, he lies saying that he tried (multiple times he said, if i’m remembering right). when she came back to the academy, he hardly acknowledged her (also she was kind of scary but… she had a right to be)

another thing to add, the way coriolanus reacts to death itself is bad in itself. again… disassociating himself. when arachne died, he barely gave himself time to grieve (and people do so in different ways, but is this the healthiest??) when gaius breen (a classmate of his) died from injuries in the arena, he hardly depicted sadness. he remembered a joke from the guy, but past that, not many other emotions.

anyways, the point is that coriolanus turns out to be.. a bad person at the end of things. and him separating himself from everything that’s occurring around him doesn’t make him any better. and there is probably more times he’s done stuff like this that i simply can’t remember!! coriolanus is just an interesting villain, and even early on you can see even the most subtle signs of what he will grow up to be—even if it doesn’t directly relate to it all (if that even makes sense).