#also just bad interpretations of parts of tbosas

[shieldwife]

I need the hunger games to go back to no longer being relevant to most people because I keep getting genuinely heated over other people's opinions on a ya series and it's embarrassing

[tomwambsmilk]

I feel like I've noticed a weird thing in some movies lately where they sort of feel like watching visual representation of a sparknote. You know how when you read a sparknote, it gives you the beat-by-beat of everything that happens plotwise, but without any of the depth? It might say "Character A goes to a party and argues with Character B, and then they profess their love for each other. The next day Character A goes to work and cries in the copy room because they feel uncertain about the relationship." But if you read the book those two lines are a good 50 pages of narration and dialogue which explore the nuances of Character A's mindset and their relationship with Character B. So if you just read the sparknote, you might know what happens, but you don't necessarily understand the characters and everything they're meant to convey.

And I feel like I've seen a lot of movies lately that feel like a sparknote. They want to convey that Thing Happened so they'll show a scene with two lines of dialogue establishing Thing, and then they'll jump to the next scene with two more lines establishing Next Thing, etc etc through the whole movie. And these movies tend to also be the WORST for on-the-nose dialogue, because the dialogue just exists to Establish Things. For example - I went to see TBOSAS last night, and the whole idea of Snow turning into his father is Established with exactly two scenes - one where Tigris tells him that she remembered seeing hate in his father's eyes, and another at the end of the movie where she says he looks just like his father. Boom! Established! They want to establish Snow's influence on the final form of the games, so they have a scene where Snow stands up and lists all the types of pageantry he thinks would make the Games more appealing. Boom! Established! They want the audience to know that Snow is in love with Lucy Gray, so they have a scene where he visits her and wipes away a tear with his handkerchief. Boom! Established!

But.... where's the exploration? People are complex, and so the most fascinating and interesting characters have multiple facets that need to be explored in a variety of circumstances. What does 'becoming his father' mean to Snow? Probably not just one straightforward thing that can be readily established in two scenes. What does Snow admire about his father? Is there any degree of internal conflict in the idea of becoming his father? There's just so much you can't learn in a movie like this. Why does Snow love pageantry? What does he understand the relationship between pageantry and politics to be, and how does that evolve over the course of the film? What is it that draws Snow to Sejanus when he's so despised by the rest of the Capitol elite that Snow wants so desperately to be a part of? Does Snow really love Lucy Gray, and if so, why? What does she represent that he can't find in the Capitol? The movie doesn't even need to give solid answers - honestly, questions like these hit better when there's enough ambiguity for audience members to have different interpretations - but there needs to be SOMETHING for us to work with.

And I think what drives me most insane is that when a movie like this comes out, if there's a big enough name behind it people will laud it for making its primary character 'inscrutable' ???????????? bitch that's just bad storytelling????????? Look, if you mean 'inscrutable' as in 'can't be put into one simple box' - sure, great, but that's not what these characters are. You straight-up just don't know anything about their interior lives, which is such a major misstep that I can't believe people are celebrating it just because Christopher Nolan did it (yeah I'm still pressed about Oppenheimer, the other great example of sparknotes storytelling that got endlessly celebrated just because Nolan did it. It's crazy to me that Oppenheimer has the higher RT score because at least TBOSAS has redeeming elements)

[thatwouldbee-enough]

😅🎢🎶🛠⛔🌞❌💲🧐🎃🦅👀🤗💞🤲😬⌛ anyfandom!

Ahhhh thank you so much for this! Sorry it took a while there were so many to answer <3

😅 What's a story or scene you've created that you're a smidge embarrassed exists?

Anything from the very very early days of my AO3 account lol. They weren't bad but there's definitely so many things when I go back and read them where I would write things a lot differently now

🎢 Which of your fics would you call your wildest ride?

Oh man. Interpreting wildest ride in two different ways here.

1 (craziest/most disturbing): Let Me Crawl Up Into Your Mind

2 (wild ride plot-wise): Fate and the Fall

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

Yes!!! Some songs from recent writing playlists:

this is me trying by Taylor Swift

The Cause by Tommy Lefroy

Paul Revere by Noah Kahan

reckless driving by Lizzy McAlpine

Letter to an Old Poet by boygenius

Partners in Crime by FINNEAS

tolerate it by Taylor Swift

Colorado by Renee Rapp

You Could Start a Cult by Niall Horan w/Lizzy McAlpine

⛔ Do you have a fic you started, but scrapped?

So many 😬

🌞 Do you have a preferred time of day to write?

Honestly either early in the morning right after I wake up or middle of the night lmao. Middle of the night has given me some of my best writing for real but at what cost

❌ What's a trope you will never write?

I don't like to say never on any tropes because I think with the right idea any trope can be done well. Some things that I tend to stay away from are heavy mental health fix it style stories because 1) I don't feel qualified enough to write that well and 2) I don't find them super interesting usually. Exploring darker storylines is always more fun for me, or mayyyybe the occasional fluffy romance lol

💲 Would you ever open commissions?

For fanfiction based on someone else's intellectual property, no, because there are legal issues there. For writing in general maybe, but I don't see a huge market for that

🧐 Do you spend much time researching for your stories?

Way too much time

🎃 Do you write fics for certain holidays? Which is your favorite holiday inspired fic?

Occasionally! Maybe Sleigh Bells Ring for a favorite. Most of the holiday pieces I've written have been very fluffy lol

🦅 Do you outline fics or fly by the seat of your pants?

It's a mix. Usually seat of my pants, but if I have a lot of details worked out in my brain already then I'll outline

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!

I have a TBOSAS piece that I'm working on where Coriolanus's punishment after cheating in the Games is to be sold as a sex worker (similar to how Finnick was in THG series) rather than being forced to enlist with the peacekeepers and he ends up with Strabo Plinth as a client.......

🤗 What advice would you give to new fanfic writers that are just getting started?

I cannot recommend enough just... doing it. Everyone worries so much about it not being good enough, but just like every other skill, you'll never get better without practice and just doing the damn thing over and over again.

Also read a lot. Read fanfic and actual books. You pick up a lot of things as a writer when you're reading other people's work. Sometimes you'll see certain ways of writing dialogue or inner monologues that you love and want to incorporate into your own writing. Sometimes you'll see things that pull you out of the story or don't flow well, and you'll learn that it's something you don't want to include in your writing. All of it is useful.

And MOST importantly, please please please learn how to properly format your dialogue 😭 (this is just a pet peeve of mine, but SO MANY fics don't have proper dialogue formatting)

ex: "This is the correct way to format a spoken sentence," she said sternly. "When you write a spoken sentence followed by a dialogue tag, the dialogue tag is PART of the sentence, so you should end the 'spoken sentence' with a comma, and then add the dialogue tag (starting with a lower case letter if it's not a proper noun), and then the sentence ends."

"This is correct too!" she exclaimed.

"This is also correct," she explained, "because the dialogue sentence hasn't ended, it was just interrupted. When dialogue is interrupted, but the sentence hasn't ended, the dialogue tag is surrounded by commas, indicating a whole, ongoing sentence."

INCORRECT EXAMPLES:

"This is not the correct way to format a spoken sentence." She said, crying a little bit on the inside.

"Neither is this!" She exclaimed.

"And neither is this." she sighed, rubbing at her temples as intentionally writing dialogue incorrectly began to trigger a headache.

💞 Who's your comfort character?

For Hamilton/Amrev, it's probably Hamilton. Sorry, basic bitch answer.

For TBOSAS it's Sejanus <3

🤲 Would you please share a snippet of a wip?

A snippet from the TBOSAS AU with Coriolanus and Strabo Plinth that I mentioned above 🙈

But fighting? Fleeing? He thought back to the arena. The way his heart had pounded as he smashed at Bobbin until he laid unmoving on the ground.  He refused to let that sort of response control him again. He was better than base instincts. Especially here. This wasn’t life or death. All he had to do was play things smart, and he would come out on top again eventually.  And then everyone who ever tried to make him feel small would pay. 

😬 Which of your fics would you be most horrified for friends, family, or coworkers to stumble upon?

Literally any of the smut lmfao.

But specifically the Henry Laurens/Alexander Hamilton fucked up intern AU, Let Me Crawl Up Into Your Mind, and A Royal Affair are probably all up there for top contenders

⌛ How long does it take you to write a fic, or a chapter?

Highly dependent on a lot of different variables (what I'm writing/whether it requires research/what else is going on in my life/level of motivation and focus/etc). Anywhere from a couple of hours to a month lmao

[travllingbunny]

I'm not sure what exactly happened at the end of TBOSAS (except that I'm sure Lucy Gray ended up dead) so I like your theory, as one of the possibilities.

I'm still not inclined to fully believe it thought, that is that Snow actually found Lucy Gray's body and dumped it into the lake. It's not impossible, because of the state of his mind at that point iand how much disassociating and paranoia is going on. However, while Suzanne Collins likes to use the Unreliable Narrator to present the events through skewed perceptions and wrong interpretations, I don't think she has ever used it to present factually incorrect physical events, so I'm not ready to believe that Snow found Lucy Gray's body and dumped it in the lake but still kept on thinking she might be alive (including even that part where he leaves the suppies at the house before leaving, thinking "hopefully she will use it to escape").

I do think he either killed her when he was shooting at her after he heard her sing, or wounded her and she went on to die alone in the woods. Somehow, whatever version happened, I imagine her dying alone in woods, rather than being killed instantly - it just fits the entire character and the mood of the story better.

But in any case, I think you're spot on with the rest of your analysis. It doesn't even matter if he found her body and knew 100% sure she was dead - he was already having a sort of mental break and weird disassociated thoughts about intending to kill her, as if his mind was struggling to admit to himself what he was about to do:

"Still, to think he would kill her? He looked down at the loaded gun in his hand. Maybe he should've left it in the shed. It looked bad coming after her armed. As if he was hunting her. But he wasn't really going to kill her. Just talk to her and make sure she saw sense.

Put down the gun, he told himself. but his hands refused to cooperate."

And the entire scene is then him coming up with a scenario in his head where she is laying traps for him and trying to kill him - which she is not - until he talks himself more and more into repeatedly trying to kill her. I don't think we need to imagine that he also knew he had succeeded - the fact that he would intentionally murder her to cover his own tracks and remove her as a potential threat to his ambitions is enough of a horrific realization of just what kind of person he is deep down - the "vicious animal" he first felt he was after killing Bobbin in the Arena - and all the things he is ready to do when push comes to shove.

Whether he found her body or not, I don't think it makes any difference - the Lucy Gray survival theories are IMO all extremely unlikely, and I'm sure Snow is aware of that deep inside (it doesn't sound like he believes she survived even after he thinks she might be) - so I think your assessment of his mental state and how he deals with this is spot on:

"Was she alive, dead, a ghost who haunted the wilderness? Perhpas no one would ever really know. No matter - snow has been the ruination of them both. Poor Lucy Gray. Poor ghost girl singing away with her birds."

SPOILERS!

Obviously the ballad of songbirds and snakes and Lucy gray’s fate is meant to be up in the air and for the reader to speculate on, but I really think snow killed Lucy gray and sunk her body to the bottom of the lake with the guns in the sack. That’s why he gets sick, that’s why he’s in such pain and disorientation and he blames it on the snake bite, which ends up not being venomous. He killed Lucy gray and hid her body and it’s so horrific to him that he makes up his own story in his head, he lies to himself and creates his own mystery like the song in order to keep going, because snow knows if he thinks about Lucy gray and what he actually did to her he will never forgive himself, and he won’t survive.

Suzanne Collins walks a fine line in writing Coriolanus snow in this book between deep, burning hatred and genuine sympathy, and I’m in awe of it. It’s interesting though, the fact that after he drowns the weapons (and Lucy grays body, but again that’s just me) in the lake, it’s like a baptism for his presidential life. His family photos and his mothers powder are unsalvageable, but his fathers compass survives. In killing Lucy gray, snow finally chose his ambition over his heart, and it rules his life for the rest of his days.