#the ballad of songbirds and snake

[helloyadvi]

Katniss literally was Lucy and Sejanus combined. No wonder Snow hated her so much. She was the reflection of two people closest to him.

[booksandpaperss]

Suzanne collins wrote a trilogy where a main media propaganda strategy was to market a horrific act of violence as a love story to distract ppl and then it got adapted into a box office breaking movie and ppl made it all about the love triangle. so then since they didn’t get the point the first time Suzanne collins wrote a prequel story about the main dictator and she makes it so that you as a reader want it to be a genuine love story so badly even tho it’s so very clearly not and instead feels extremely unsettling to make her point even more meta which then gets adapted into another box office breaking film and now ppl are making romantic snowbaird tik toks. do u think she’s gonna write another book that’s somehow even more blatant or just give up and start executing ppl? hard to say but I wouldn’t blame her for the second one

[quinnspinkcamera]

when people are like "i didn't come here to make friends" i'm like thats sooooo unrelatable. i am always on the look out for some girl friends. I would be in that hunger games cornucopia like "your ex boyfriend did WHAT."

[super-nova5045]

and just when you think you’re at your absolute lowest a blonde motherfucker comes along and makes everything so much worse

[zorosnavigator]

[agentmilayawithshield]

Her manifestation skills are actually insane

[sweetlucygray]

sadly the only copy of s10 of thg i found is in the spanish dub but the only thing theyre saying is i love you and i know thats not right so can someone hook me up with their panem plus pleasee

[dcvina-claires]

i am a tragedy enjoyer before i am human

[percabething]

when the fandom is so small that everybody knows everybody

[ayo-edebiri]

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) + tweets

[timelesslords]

thinking about how the hunger games were designed to prove that without society, order, government, someone to rule, we devolve into little more than animals, and how the games themselves prove over and over again that this is not true. We see it in every single game we witness.

Katniss placing flowers around Rue's body in the arena. Thresh sparing Katniss because she was kind to Rue, even though he was making it that much harder for himself to win.

Haymitch going back for Maysilee after hearing her scream even though their alliance had been broken. Haymitch holding her as she dies the same way Katniss did Rue.

Coral's "I can't have killed them all for nothing" when she realizes she's not going home. Lamina cutting down Marcus at great personal risk. And, my favorite moment in tbosas, Reaper collecting the bodies of his fellow tributes, his peers, even the ones who tried to kill him, into a pile. Taking the weapons from their hands. Closing their eyes and crossing their arms in the best approximation of a proper burial he can manage, covering them with the Capitol flag as a makeshift shroud.

The Games bring out the worst in people, yes. But despite the extreme circumstances, despite the exterior pressure of the Capitol, despite the fact that it could mean pain and heartbreak and death, it also shows that people have an enormous capacity for goodness. That even in a situation purposefully designed to make empathy impossible, people can't help but have it anyway.

Snow looks at the Games and all he can see is what's inside himself-- this pure animalistic drive to conquer and defeat. He kills and it feels good and he thinks that everyone else must feel that way too. He doesn't realize (maybe can't realize) that he is the exception, not the rule. He cannot see outside himself, outside his own warped perspective, to realize that the fact that people do show humanity in the games proves his entire worldview wrong.

[janeaustensgf123]

The Percy Jackson renaissance and The Hunger Games renaissance happening in the same year is something so special to me

[sassy-cass-16]

look i know the hunger games fandom is entrenched in songbirds and snakes brainrot right now but i just wanna mention how horribly genius the tesserae system is

like. it's designed to keep the poorest districts from ever winning the games, by keeping the population of those districts on the verge of starvation without ever tipping the line too far. the poorer you are, the more you need your children to take tesserae. the more tesserae your children take, the more times their name is added to the reaping pool. the more times a name appears in the reaping pool, the more likely they are to be drawn over a person who doesn't need to take tesserae. a kid who's been surviving off of tesserae grain and oil is exponentially more likely to die early on in the games due to the effects of malnutrition (low muscle mass and body fat, not to mention the mental consequences).

pretty much the only reason katniss was physically capable of surviving the games was because she'd been able to catch meat in the forest. surviving on just the tesserae she was taking for her mother and prim, there's no way she would've had the physical strength to make it out alive.

say what you want about the realism of the hunger games but the tesserae system is horrifyingly well-designed to do exactly what it's supposed to do.

Edit: guys I wrote a fic that's meant to dissect all these horribly genius systems involved in the functioning of Panem, check it out

[logicalbrina]

what makes Snow such a formidable villain within THG universe is that nothing he does was set in stone. there was no sense of inevitability about his actions and his brutality. Snow had enough perspective of poverty, capital cruelty, district hunger and not to mention his own arena experience’ and yet he actively chose at every moment to stray from natural goodness. its even more terrifying in the sense that he had the ability to care. Snow is not a mindless sociopath, he displays feelings to others such as sejanus, lucy grey and tigris but ultimately he will always choose himself. his ability to betray those he cared about in order yo advance himself makes him so much more than the stereotypical villain who is forced into his actions.

[danyllura]

Snow always comes across as cold and unbothered when he’s dealing with Katniss and the rebellion- but knowing how actually delusional and unhinged that man’s inner monologue is and with all the Katniss/Lucy Gray parallels I know when he was alone that man was probably ripping his hair out and screaming trying to figure out how the two are connected and assuming all of Katniss’ actions had ulterior motives that were directed at him. Just raving in his room alone like:

[cant-find-anyone-elseeee]

there was a moment when the people in the movie theatre and the capitol audience in the stands were laughing at the same things, having the same reactions to the games, to the deaths, to flickermans jokes, to the doctor's announcement...i wonder aren't we watching it for entertainment too

suzanne collins' books may exist in popular culture as "dystopian", but they have always been a meticulous and startlingly close social critique of our world. at what point does our own idolization of the movies and the books repeat that story? we watch just as the capitol audience does.

all dystopia eventually crosses a line from realistic futurism to current relevancy. how long will it take us to realize we've already crossed that line with these books? and the very people who need to realize this are the ones in that audience...real or fake, we're the same: consuming and consuming.