#truly a songbird

[readingforaneternity]

RIP Lucy Gray,

You would have made an insane amount of money from a Surviving Coryo Snow inspired breakup album and a Comeback album after he died 😔.

[p4nishers]

the way can't catch me now could easily be about sejanus too is a stroke of genius on olivia's part. because, in a way, snow was haunted by sejanus. sejanus' death was his final pushing point into cruelty. sejanus was the only good left in him, the only thing holding him to goodness, but the moment coriolanus betrayed him, he was changed. he became snow. he is haunted by sejanus in the jabberjays, the mockingjays, he sees him in katniss, in her stubbornness, in her unwillingness to be easy for others to swallow, in her bravery, in her fierceness. everywhere he looked, he saw sejanus, in the whole rebellion, in the face of his parents who basically adopted snow, in katniss honoring rue's death by surrounding her with flowers the same way sejanus honored marcus' body by sprinkling bread on him to help his journey. he caged peeta, the same way he wanted to cage lucy gray, but he couldn't cage katniss. he couldn't cage sejanus. no matter how hard he tried, sejanus remained a good person, remained true to himself till his death. he killed sejanus but he couldn't kill what he stood for, he couldn't kill the inherent goodness in people. lucy haunted him till the ends of his days, but so did sejanus.

[bladesrunner]

Tom Blyth behind the scenes of The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes (2023)

[oceanview15]

[noonemonitorsmyscreentime]

What I think is kind of interesting is that if Dean Casca Highbottom, seeing exactly how good of a student Young Coriolanus Snow was, had taken the boy under his wing instead of despising him and trying to get revenge on a boy that never knew his father (and who only had of his father the words of others about the great man that he was), he might have had a good helping hand in stopping the games he so deeply despised.

It would have been, at the same time, quite a revenge on Crassus Snow to use his son to dismantle the Games the man helped implement. Not only that, but it would have offered young Coryo a person to depend on during his most formative years where he had to grow up under the immense pressure of keeping up appearances, taking care of an ailing grandmother and fighting everyday to keep himself and his family fed.

What Casca failed to realise during the 10th Games was that there weren't 24 tributes, but 25. Snow was fighting for survival just as much as the rest; of course, with the caveat that Snow was never in danger of losing his life. But, for a boy who had for all his life to survive instead of to live, those two might have been the same thing. In saving himself, Coryo would also save Tigris and his grandmother, while all the other tributes were saving mosty themselves since they would be going home with nothing to show for winning the games other than their lives and some (crippling in some cases) trauma.

Maybe things would have played out differently, maybe not, but we have seen time and time again through all four of the Hunger Games books, the power of a kind gesture: Peeta with the bread, Rue healing Katniss, Katniss singing to Rue, Mags sacrificing herself, Boggs treating Katniss like a young traumatised girl when no one else did. Who knows if Snow (and, in turn, the rest of Panem) wouldn't have benefited from it?

[charles-jpg]

you say i killed you, haunt me then! | coriolanus snow and lucy gray baird

1. lev st. valentine // 2. clarice lispector // 3. anne carson // 4. anne carson // 5. haruki murakami // 6. richard siken // 7. unknown // 8. t.b bliss // 9. brenna twohy

[agir1ukn0w]

y'all really think we don't know coriolanus snow, son of crassus xanthos snow, is a (future) dictator and mass murderer who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, the vast majority of whom are children, including finnick odair??? y'all really think we don't know that even as a youth he's already a controlling, narcissistic, scheming, calculating, traitorous son of a bitch?

you've severely underestimated our powers of media literacy, and also of knowing the difference between reality and fucking fiction.

[lumiapricity]

[sejanusarchive]

There’s so many layers to Sejanus being devastated by Marcus’s fate. He hates how the districts are treated by the Capitol, hates the cruelty of the Hunger Games, he feels the same emotional pain he would have felt being a tribute himself, if not even more, having to watch completely safe from afar, unable to do anything to put an end to the senseless slaughter, while guilt gnaws at him for not risking getting picked to participate himself, for having escaped. No innocent child deserves that, and it gets even worse when one of the children picked is someone he personally knows, someone he used to share a routine with, someone he used to spend hours alongside in a classroom.

And that child isn’t just someone, that child is Marcus, the kind boy who, while not even being his friend, went out of his way to help him when he got hurt, completely unprompted, just out of the goodness of his heart. That boy is a testament to what Sejanus already knows, that everyone seems to keep forgetting, which is that humanity at its core is and can be better than how it’s currently behaving. Not to mention how that was probably the last time Sejanus ever experienced an act of such pure, unconditional kindness. And that simple gesture was so impactful on him, it was enough to cement Marcus’s presence in his heart for all those years and then the rest of his life, and it no doubt helped shape Sejanus into the person he became. Someone as good as Marcus shouldn’t be going through all of that, and it drives Sejanus crazy. If the Hunger Games were too much for him to handle before, now that Marcus is involved, they're unbearable.

But there’s more to Marcus. He is also a safe memory to Sejanus, one who undoubtedly often comforted him when he was feeling at his worst. And he’s one of the main things Sejanus thinks about when he thinks of District 2, his home. Home, which despite the fact that he lived there during the war, despite all the suffering he witnessed, despite the reality of the current living conditions there, is still Sejanus’s happy, safe place; it’s the place he belongs to, the place that could fix almost everything for him. But he can never return there. It has to exist only as a memory, kept safely locked away and untouched in his mind and heart.

But when Marcus arrives in the Capitol, he brings his home with him too, he is the physical manifestation of it. Sejanus’s desperation doesn’t just stem from the fact that it’s Marcus, the innocent, kind-hearted boy, undeserving of such cruelty; but also from the fact that that’s his Marcus as well, the one whose existence is synonymous to his home, his sweet boy from his memories, his comfort. Marcus being there doesn’t only mean the pointless, unjust death of a good person, Marcus being there also means the death of Sejanus’s home, its image no longer far away, safe and untouched, kept only in his mind. Now it’s here and crumbling in front of his eyes. He already knew the reality of things, but it was just that: knowledge. Now he’s face to face with it, face to face with the fact that neither Marcus or his home are or will ever be safe. And, worst of all, he has no way to save them, or anyone else, he’s powerless and completely hopeless against the cruelty of the Capitol, against their fate; and now more than ever, since he’ll have to witness the death of the boy whose memory so often brought him hope before.

In the end all that’s left of both of them, for Sejanus, is a small chunk of marble, made from the same material as his District and carved into the shape of a heart, because that’s exactly where Sejanus’s own is: home with Marcus. We learn he has carried it to his new life in Twelve, immediately before we learn the only pictures he’s taken with him are of his family and his classmates in Two, of him, home for one the last times, standing with Marcus right behind him. That heart is the last physical object connected to Two and Marcus that he’ll have with him for the rest of his life, the last symbol of what he lost and will never get back, of what he couldn’t save or help. But it’s also the one object connected to them that he brought with him when he regained faith, when he felt like he could finally make a difference and actually help people in the districts; the last symbol that things could still get better and not all hope is lost.

For Sejanus Marcus is a kind and innocent kid; he’s the good in humanity; he’s a safe memory; he’s the marble heart because he is hope and comfort, and despair and helplessness, and home, and because he is deeply rooted in his own heart

[phantombirds]

Track: Songbird

Artist: Fleetwood Mac

Album: Rumours (1977)

“That was a strange little baby, that one. I woke up in the middle of the night and the song just came into my head. I got out of bed, played it on the little piano I have in my room, and sang it with no tape recorder. I sang it from beginning to end: everything. I can't tell you quite how I felt; it was as if I'd been visited - it was a very spiritual thing.”

— Christine McVie (1943-2022)

Rest in peace, Songbird. Thank you. 🕊️❤️

[felixravinstills]

Coriolanus Snow & Felix Ravinstill: What's in a name?

o puer, qui omnia nomini debes. / Oh, boy, who owes all to a name.

Creator's Notes:

I actually really need to be doing grown up stuff right now, so if I'm weirdly silent after I post this, that's why! Unfortunately, I got hit by inspiration, so my attention has been split. The final piece of the puzzle that I started putting together since writing Tu Fui, Ego Eris finally dropped into my lap!

Latin quote from Cicero's Philippics (13.11): Cicero ascribes the quote to Mark Antony referring to Octavius (later known as Augustus Caesar)

Gifs created by me from TBOSAS movie

English translation of felix taken from Lewis & Short's 4th possible definition.

Quote from TBOSAS Ch. 4

Screenshot from the Wikipedia page for "Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus"

Screenshot from the Wikipedia page for "cognomen"

Quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Act 1, Scene 2)

Quote from TBOSAS' epilogue

Illustration of Romulus killing Remus (unable to find a proper source for it. If you know where exactly it's from (book, artist, not all the website reposts I saw), let me know! I got this image from an Ebay seller with prints).

...

I've contemplated potential Cain-Abel parallels between these two, but the Romulus-Remus parallel that struck me like a bolt from the blue really blew my mind. It actually really matches with this webweaving(?) because Romulus and Remus did disagree about the naming of the city... Anyway, while making this, I lowkey forgot that Felix's Death-by-Coriolanus-Arranged-Car-"Accident" isn't canon.

I was tempted to quote Shakespeare's Coriolanus for when the titular character receives his cognomen instead of the Wikipedia pages, but I think this helps emphasize the name bestowed because of deeds idea without any distraction from the point. Also putting the two Wikipedia pages really emphasizes it... rip the second screenshot having smaller text, but that's the page layout's fault, and I'm too lazy to fix it.

[diiwata]

for context: filipinos sometimes use their own ship names as their child's name, so "finnick" was the ship name in my little jokey joke.

[threestarsinline]

It's the 2010's all over again and I am HERE for it:

-The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games) movie coming out this Friday

-The Percy Jackson series in a little more than a month

-The Twilight reboot show in development

-And the Harry Potter one too

[chamomile-tea-time]

GUYS HELP

ok so. i've been thinking about how it was so weird that everyone made sejanus coriolanus' responsibility because, as ma plinth said, he was sejanus' only friend. but ma plinth wasn't entirely right to say sejanus had no friends. in another post i talk about how lysistrata interacts with sejanus like they're at least friendly enough for her to comfort him. so sejanus has other friendly acquaintances, if not friends. but that's exactly what snow wants to remain—an acquaintance, not a friend. yet he still thinks about sejanus, calls him over to eat together, sit next to each other, gets into his business, broods over him, and all that. from an outside perspective, they're close (despite what snow thinks). but even if they're close, you wouldn't send someone's “friend” after them in such a dangerous situation like the arena situation. that's not the role of a friend.

do you see where im going with this.

i'm CONFIDENT everyone thought they were dating. dean highbottom was /definitely/ sitting there like.... hey your bf is in the arena go get him. hey, find that guy you like a seat near the exit. i swear literally everyone believed it. i'll die on this hill.

[mswyrr]

[keenadraws]

Mr President 🫡