#my other problem with the movie is the lack of emphasis on the contract/chaos/control aspect of the games. that was like the whole point of

[blueskittlesart]

if by "galaxy brained" you mean "clinically insane" so true. anyways here

I watched the movie version of ABOSAS last night after absolutely loving the book and i thought it was largely a good adaptation, but there's one change I'm getting stuck on because I don't really understand why the choice was made to change it at all. Much of the changes from book to film can be rationalized either by the need to keep a pg-13 rating or by the need to not sensationalize/make a spectacle of violence, such as the changes made to arachne's death and the removal of the funeral procession scene. What I can't rationalize as easily, though, is how the movie seems to take a looser approach to snow's complacency/agency in the tragedies that occur. In the book, Snow is our POV character, and we see not only his actions but his inner thoughts and rationalizations for said actions. Because of this, I think it's a lot easier to make him recognizably morally gray, because every time we see him do something awful we also bear witness to his internal rationalizations for it. I think that the movie, in trying to walk that same line without the crutch of Snow's internal monologue, made choices that somewhat absolve snow of guilt in certain scenarios.

Specifically the scene that really irked me was the incident with Clemencia and the snakes. In the movie, Clemencia is framed as a kind of bitchy overachiever who deliberately attempts to take credit for snow's work, and snow as an outside observer to her downfall. The plotline is introduced when she, unprompted, interrupts snow in the middle of class and tries to one-up him. She then strong-arms both snow and dr. gaul into letting her partner with snow on an assignment which pretty clearly should have been snow's alone, since it's based off his original ideas. Later, when snow writes the entire project on his own and Dr. gaul asks who wrote it, Clemencia insists, unprompted, that it was mostly her work, and when called out on her lie decides she would rather try her luck with Dr. Gaul's snakes than admit her wrongdoing. Throughout all of this, snow is at best an enabler of clemencia's lies and at worst a completely silent observer, but he's never actually directly involved in clemencia's downfall.

In contrast, in the book version of these events, snow and clemencia are assigned to a collaborative project by dr. gaul herself, and while the assignment is based on snow's ideas, it's never implied that clemencia is imposing on snow here. In fact, the reason she's involved is specifically because the gamemakers feel like snow's ideas could benefit from being refined collaboratively. The reason that Clemencia doesn't end up actually working with snow on the assignment is because the night it's due, they both witness the violent murder of their classmate and childhood friend, Arachne. Clemencia, an 18-year-old girl, is understandably shaken by this, AS IS SNOW, and they BOTH leave the zoo after arachne's death without giving any thought whatsoever to the project they were supposed to be working on together. It's only later that night, in an attempt to distract himself from his grief, that snow decides to write the project completely alone and simply add clemencia's name to it. He turns it in the next morning with clemencia's name on it WITHOUT TALKING TO HER FIRST, assuming that he's doing her a favor. When she finds out he did this, she's even a bit upset at him, but she knows that they'll both be in bigger trouble if she admits it was a lie, so she has him give her the sparknotes before dr. gaul calls them in so that neither of them will be caught in a lie in front of one of the most powerful, dangerous, obviously unhinged women in the world. when brought in to talk to dr. gaul, clemencia falls into the trap BEFORE she and snow realize what's happening--she watches snow retrieve a page from the snake tank unharmed, and assumes she'll be able to do the same, since gaul neglects to explain what the snakes are capable of. Her hand is already in the tank when gaul reveals that she knows clemencia didn't write the proposal. it's not a case of clemencia being too stubborn to admit that she lied, it's a case of gaul inflicting the punishment before clemencia was even aware she was in danger.

the difference here is very obviously in the way that clemencia and snow are respectively framed in reference to this assignment. in the movie, clemencia is a stubborn liar who deliberately stole snow's work and refused to admit to it even in the face of death, and snow is the poor blameless witness to her downfall. In the book, however, snow and clemencia are childhood friends, eighteen-year-old students, given a difficult assignment with a difficult teacher after they've both been freshly traumatized. Snow is not at all blameless in clemencia's suffering--he chose to write the proposal alone, and he chose to give her credit for it, and he never asked her if she was okay with either of those things. His actions led to clemencia being put in dr. gaul's line of fire against her will--dr. gaul, a notoriously unstable and dangerous woman who snow still chose to deliberately lie to. And because we get the benefit of snow's inner monologue within the book, we get his rationalization after the fact--the way he chooses to cope with the incident is by telling himself, "well, clemencia could have told gaul that she lied. instead she was willing to take credit for my work." he avoids her attempts to contact him, refuses to visit her in the hospital, and as time goes on and she returns to school, his descriptions of her become more and more bad-faith, all in an attempt to distance himself from what happened to her, to insist that it wasn't his fault. this incident is fundamental in characterizing snow because it showcases the way in which he dodges accountability--nothing he does is his fault. guilt is always placed on the other party, no matter the circumstances. the movie's version of these events removes that characterization, because it WASN'T his fault. there's no accountability to dodge, because snow was really just a silent observer to clemencia's own bad choices.

Again, I can ALMOST see the thought process here. it seems like a lot of clemencia's later scenes had to be cut for time, and without snow's later interactions with her it's even more difficult to properly characterize the two of them irt this incident. If I assume good faith, i'd have to chalk this up to the aforementioned difficulty of walking the line of moral greyness without the crutch of snow's internal monologue--without his own internal rationalization, the book's version of events places a lot more blame obviously on his shoulders, which the movie's writers may have wanted to avoid. But it's really kind of hard to ignore that clemencia, arguably the most major female character in the story aside from Lucy Gray (and the only character played by an east asian actress), somehow went from a well-rounded, sympathetic, genuine childhood friend of snow's to a one-dimensional liar who deliberately stole snow's work in an attempt to gain academic favor, and that she's really the only major character in the movie to undergo such a drastic change.

uh oh sisters. hunger games hyperfixation