Whoever said "Fear is an illusion" was wrong
After receiving Joannie du'Preeste's report, the Governing Body was understandably concerned. Cooler heads reassured everyone that, until further analysis and a much more thorough scan of the entire interior of the planet is made, we should not jump to ludicrous conclusions. There is an unknown structure beneath the surface of the Earth that resembles a massive biological entity and it could just be a peculiar formation that our brains in their typical fashion interpret as such.
Then we did do a full scan of the planet and isolated the relevant layers and material compositions and
HOLY FUCKING SHIT IT'S CTHULU
Okay, don't panic, everyone. I SAID DON'T PANIC!
How did H.P. Lovecraft know?
*Breathe in, breathe out*
We're not losing our sanity, right? But how would we know...
Stop that, not productive, think rationally.
How? It's a literally planet sized eldritch creature in a sorta fetal position and we can't agree on basic details!
I'm veering on the side of it defies understanding. Even the computers give different answers every time we ask how many arms it has, which, obviously, doesn't make any sense. Plus each of us hear different answers as well, so let's be smart and not try to understand it specifically, but address the potential consequences of its existence instead.
Well, obviously we can't tell anyone else.
We should discreetly inquire if any of the aliens have made similar findings though. Maybe this is no big deal.
YES. Please, I need that to be true.
Hopefully, but we need to prepare in case this is unique. It's position may indicate it is sleeping, whatever that may mean for a god-being.
The report said earlier scans showed weaker consolidation of the structure. I think it is reasonable to assume the explosion that created the Pacific Abyss and the subsequent expulsion and shifting of magma is a contributing factor.
Wait. Don't tell me we are waking it up?
Oh MY GOD!!! I'm panicking!
Hmm, what if other gods and the like are real too?
That is plausible, assuming this is an entity with supernatural powers. We only have anecdotal evidence of passive perception manipulation. I would hope the alien species of the Coalition have withheld certain secrets from us. If not, we will need to strategically share this discovery and manipulate a number of experts to perform innocuous activities that would indirectly examine and test various hypotheses.
If it's become somewhat observable because of that explosion, what's gonna happen when we can no longer maintain Earth's structural integrity and it fully collapses in, what was it, 95 years?
.....
I'M PANICKING!
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Personally, it's always a bit wild to me to see commentators interact with the Hunger Games franchise as if Collins were writing science fiction stories instead of essays with faces. She's just not that interested in fleshing out side characters or digging into the details of the worldbuilding. These characters are concepts and symbols before they're people. There's an almost mathematical precision to who and what she explores and how deeply she does it. This is a step or two away from pure allegory. If she were writing a couple of centuries ago, she'd have named her characters things like Innocence and Anger and Watch-Carefully-Your-Soul-Lest-Ye-Be-Damned, but since she's writing for modern audiences, she has to settle for puns and allusions. If she has another essay to write, she'll assign some faces to it; she's not going to look into backstories or other eras just for the sake of storytelling, and it's not a failing as a writer that she doesn't.
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I can't stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They've both known it from the very start!
Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." Then he can't save her. The next time they meet, she's a monster. They're both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.
And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: "Maybe if we can help each other, there's hope for us both." But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.
Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she'd become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn't be Helen.
So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.
And this is a direct threat to Helen's world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he's been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she'd tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want's to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they'd both had choices.
And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.
This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she's so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.
When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." he thought. But he couldn't help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.
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