everything-ornothing-aboutme

Latest Posts by everything-ornothing-aboutme

when you grew up as a lonely uncool girl it will never stop haunting you by the way. you will meet a cool person at a bar or the train station or at a friend's party and you can wear your most stylish outfit and striking eye makeup and you will swear that they can see through all of the facade and see the lonely terribly insecure teenage girl you used to be who desperately wanted to connect and you will swear that they know that there is like an insurmountable gap between you. this will happen forever

One of these is accurate for me, plz tell me I'm not alone

Also increasingly aware that a LOT of people "manage" getting through the 40+ hour work week by sleeping less than is healthy and relying on stimulants like coffee and energy drinks to keep them going.

For people who are unwilling or unable to do this...work really does just dominate your life. Like we really should not have to rely on unhealthy practices just to have a social life or keep on top of housework or whatever.

I know I post about this a lot but I'm so TIRED all the time and it's just so depressing that this is how we're expected to spend the one life we have.

i’m gonna cry it’s raining right now and i just passed by a family where both parents were without an umbrella but their kid who couldn’t have been older than like 3-4 was proudly holding this GIANT umbrella whose diameter was as tall (if not taller) as the kid. both the parents were getting absolutely drenched but u could tell the kid was just so happy to have an “adult” task and carry the umbrella themselves and i think that sacrifice is what love is all about

So you know how in the show, Annabeth is a black girl? Annabeth in the books is always mentioned to not be very careful of her appearance. She has curly blonde hair that she never really takes much care of and stuff, for instance. But in the show, she has really nice braids, etc. Now mind you, annabeth ran away from home when she was 7 years old, and her stepmom is Asian in the books and canonically wasn’t the most caring to annabeth for the years they spent together. This means, to me, that show-Annabeth never had anybody to teach her how to do her hair. She gets to camp half blood at 7 little years of age and is obliviously running around with a messy head of hair that she has no idea (and also probably doesn’t really care) how to take care of. My headcanon is that some black girl from the Aphrodite cabin saw her and was like “not on my watch” and took it upon herself to both braid annabeth’s hair and to teach her how to do it herself.

I also like to think Percy 100% learns how to braid hair just for Annabeth. And she doesn’t even know it because it happens during some school year. He stepped inside a braiding salon a couple of blocks from his apartment one day and was like “hi, sorry to bother, I wanna learn how to braid my friends hair” and the ladies at the salon where enchanted with this weird kid who came out of nowhere and who would NOT stop yapping about this cute black girl at summer camp who he absolutely was in love with but none of the ladies had the heart to tell him that because he seemed oblivious to his own feelings. So they taught him for free as long as he helped around the salon. And then one day at camp, he goes to get her at the athena cabin and Annabeth is sitting in her bed with a couple of mirror and a cloud of hair all around her and Percy’s like “need a hand?” And Annabeth’s like “as if you could help, seaweed brain” and percy just goes “is that a challenge?” And he helps her part her hair which can be a pain to do by yourself and then they both sit on her bed for hours doing knotless braids (Annabeth was wholly unconvinced he knew how to do them until he started working on a section of hair and it was all she could do to not hang her mouth open in surprise). Percy wasn’t quite as fast as annabeth had gotten after so many years of doing her own hair, but with his help it took half the time it would’ve taken her alone. The other kids of the athena cabin would stare at them from the door of the cabin and proceed to hightail it out of there. The amount of gossip going around camp that day was astronomical. But the two of them were oblivious in their little hyperfixated adhd bubble. After that it became tradition, as long as he could, Percy would help Annabeth braid her hair.

percy: i just don't get how everyone knew annabeth and i were in love before we did

grover: your attack patterns were synchronized by the age of 13

I saw somebody say that watching the Percy Jackson show made them realize that in the first books Percy doesn't even say half the stuff he thinks and he's just a quiet kid silently judging everyone, like they're so right.

Think about it from Grover's perspective. You know Percy as a quiet boy who certainly has his judgy thoughts but (aside from telling them to you) keeps them to himself. He's just trying to make it through school, for his mom.

Then his mom dies. And he loses the ability to give absolutely any fucks. He starts saying all this shit he never said out loud and to people who could do infinitely worse things to him than anything Nancy Bobifit ever even tried. And it only gets worse as he gets older.

Like bro went from quiet kid in the back of the class to fist fighting a god in the span of like a week. Then he openly told the gods to pay their child support. Grover was having heart attacks every other minute.

Reading Mockingjay as an adult is extra devastating because. Of course the plucky teenager and her ragtag friends aren't going to sneak into a government building to kill the president with a bow and arrow. That's absolutely ridiculous. It's the kind of thing that's only possible in the kind of propaganda that Coin developed. But she's so good at it that in some ways she tricks the reader into thinking that's the kind of story this is, too--even after 3 books reminding us that pretty much everything that Katniss does the second she volunteers is manipulated by adults pulling strings to make propaganda in some form or another.

People talk about District 12’s meadow being a graveyard after the war, but if you think about it, the entire district is a graveyard.

Many of my ancestors do not have graves because they died in coal mining accidents and no one bothered to take their bodies out because it was too expensive. My dad can even point out where they are. There are warehouses built on top of essentially a graveyard, but that apparently doesn’t matter because they didn’t have enough money to be important.

Think about how many people are underneath District 12 because they were never gotten out of the mines. It was a district built on top of death from well before the war.

At this point I would like to thank all the people out there who write fanfiction. I love reading stories about my favorite pairings and try to write some of my own. You are the reason why my expectations of men and women are so high and I wouldn't have it any other way. 😊❤️

PERCY JACKSON FANS HEAR ME OUT!

It’s season 3 of the PJO show AKA The Titans Curse. Percy (Walker) is sitting in front of Aphordite Goddess of Love and Beauty who just so happens to look like an older version of his best friend Annabeth (Leah) totally unrelated we’re sure.

Then he blinks and the beautiful woman in front of him changes….now she has brown hair and blue eyes she smiles, its Alexandria Daddario movie Annabeth. Just a split second cameo and then she’s gone.

Now a different woman is sitting in front of Percy, a woman with blonde hair and hazel eyes Kristen Stokes Lightning Thief Musical Annabeth. She shifts and changes again.

The final and last woman we see before Percy has curly blonde hair, tanned skin, and stormy grey eyes it’s book Annabeth.

Percy doesn’t realise it but we do. The Goddess of love shows him every version of the girl he loves from every universe he loves her in. It’s beautiful, it’s cinema, it needs to happen.

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

I know that we've gotten 500 unnecessary Twilight retellings but what I really want is a retelling of Mockingjay where instead of Katniss getting rescued at the end of CF, it's Peeta, and he spends at least half the book gaslighting, gatekeeping, and girlbossing his way through this entire situation, completely derails Coin's attempts to use him as a political mouthpiece by weaponizing her own manipulation against her, and in general being an insufferable nuisance who is just so good at charming everybody into siding with him that Coin gives up and agrees to rescue Katniss

Started rereading the Hunger Games series and I feel like it’s so overlooked how in 74th and 75th Hunger Games, we don’t know every Tribute’s names, with Katniss only referring to them by their District numbers but in TBOSAS, we knew every single Tribute by name. We associated them with the clothes they wore on the Reaping Day and Suzanne even goes so far as to describe how they looked, however briefly. We see these Tributes and we’re familiarized with them by the little tidbits provided to the mentors and to Snow and Lucy Gray. But we never get this in the original trilogy.

In two generations, President Snow alienated the Districts from each other so much that Katniss didn’t even care to know all the names of the Tributes sent into the Arena with her, with the exception being those who posed great risk against her safety and those she felt great compassion for (e.g. Cato, Thresh, Rue, Mags, Betee, Wiress etc.). Katniss even went so far as to call the D6 Tributes in the 75th Hunger Games morphlings, for their affinity to imbibe in the drugs that help them forget their own traumas (an incredibly hurtful description, in my own opinion, to be known by the qualities you hate the most about yourself). We never know the real name of the 74th D5 girl, with Katniss only referring to her as Foxface and we don’t even know Marvel’s name until we get to the second book and he was Katniss’ first personal kill. Katniss even kills the D4 girl in the books with the same tracker jacker venom that killed Glimmer and yet still, we don’t know her name. We are so removed from the identity of the other Tributes that we don’t even know what some of them looked like beyond brief descriptions of mangled bodies and dead Tributes in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia.

And, the thing is, Suzanne established the importance of names in the series. Even in real life, we recognize the importance of being named. It is a fundamental aspect of being human. If you’re ever in a perilous situation where a person might be placing your life in danger, we’re told to remind the person that you’re human. “Keep saying your name, how old you are, where you came from. Remind them you are a human being just like them.” Before any propaganda can work against a group of people, refusing to recognize a person’s name is the first step to dehumanization. And just like the people of the Districts, we don’t care enough about the other Tributes to even want to know their names. Their propaganda worked on us, the readers.

In two generations, President Snow completely wiped out any sense of familiarity and camaraderie the Districts may have shared with the other. In two generations, Snow sowed the seeds of distrust and division into the Districts so deeply that even we, the readers, were affected by the effects of Capitol propaganda. In two generations, the Districts ceased to genuinely care about the others beyond the vague sense of injustice they feel for their shared plight. It’s why Career Districts don’t seem to care about killing the other Tributes. How can you care, to show your compassion and humanity, when you can barely see them as people? Yes, they may have been in the Arena with you. Yes, they may have been starved and beaten and forced into labor like you were. Yes, they might be children just like you. Yes, they might be subjected to the same deplorable system that turned you into virtual slaves. But they are not your friends. They are not your allies. They are strange, with different customs and traditions that you have. You do not share the same values. They do not care about you. At the first chance they get, they will kill you with your bare hands and they will do it with alacrity if it meant their survival. There can only be one Victor and it can’t be them. It has to be you.

Jesper: Why's Kaz in the corner?

Inej: he's in time out.

Jesper:...why?

Inej: he just pitched th idea that instead of discarding amputations, we should let cannibals have them, and that we should legalize cannibalism.

Wylan: ...he had a po-

Inej: CORNER.

A whole childhood spent drawing Percy Jackson and I never drew this. Feels like I missed a rite of passage somehow, luckily the pjo crowd is still going strong🔱

My headcannons about District 12

Katniss's parents' names are Ruth and Robin.

Ruth never knew that Peeta's father liked her. My boy never tried to get closer lol

The ages and names of the Mellark brothers are: Peeta (16y), Rye (18y) and Bran (21y)

Katniss's father was a leader among the miners, they spread words of revolt with music and tried to change the inhumane conditions in the mines. That's why he was killed with his colleagues in a fake accident.

The miners have work songs that they sing every morning on the way to the mines.

The water is very polluted because of coal mining waste in the rivers. You need to buy packaged water to drink.

Robin and Gale's father did not get along and always stole from each other's bushmeat customers, but they were friends during their childhood.

Gale's grandmother is Maude Ivory

Katniss and Gale are actually long distance cousins lol

Rory Hawthorne has a crush on Prim and kisses her in D13 (hihi 👉👈)

They have many respiratory illnesses because of the coal dust.

A tradition for boys who reach the age to work in the mines is to have their faces smeared with coal by their father.

The birth rate is high because the Capital does not provide any form or education for birth control

Most women have their first child at age 18.

Ruth's parents are alive and still keep the pharmacy running, but they refuse to talk to their daughter.

Peeta has many cousins.

Gale is very popular with girls, until kissing them. Because he's a really bad kisser lol

Katniss Everdeen is a legend! Everyone has heard of her. The girl who always shoots squirrels in the eyes.

There are many myths about forests, children are terrified of the sounds of wolves, they think they are monsters

There is a tradition that brides have to put flowers and herbs inside their bras on their wedding day to attract good luck.

The most stylish thing you can have in District 12 are cowboy boots. Everyone wants one, but only the richest kids have.

At school there are three types of sports that you can choose from: wrestling, running and distance jumping.

i also like to collect you tried stars.

there's actually more at someone's old and dead sideblog that i found like two minutes ago while researching this autistically

@youtriedstars

hi i'd like to cause damage today :3

6 year old Peeta Mellark, very seriously, asked Mr. Everdeen for Katniss' hand in marriage when he was trading at the bakery one day.

Mr. Everdeen was absolutely chuffed about it. He thought it was the cutest thing in the world and it took everything in him to maintain a serious tone when he responded with:

"That's a really big commitment. What do you have to offer my daughter, young man?"

"I can draw real good, my cupcakes are way better than both of my brothers, and I'll always let her take the top bunk."

"Well, son. Those are all really fine and respectable offerings. But if Katniss is anything like her mother, she's going to do what she likes. But if you ever ask her, you'll have my blessing. Just make sure to lead with the top bunk, that's a major selling point."

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

Jabberjay aftermath

Ada Limón, “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance”

kaveh akbar, 'calling a wolf a wolf' // doc luben, 'love letters or suicide notes' // @/nutnoce, tumblr // 'my body's made of crushed little stars', mitski // @/ojibwa, tumblr // 'spring', mary oliver

😭😭😭😭

it has always been so cute to me that even tho a war has just happened half of camp is destroyed or dead that the campers still thought it would be fun to bully percabeth

like did we ever learn why all of camp was just there when annabeth and percy kissed ??

like did annabeth recrute ppl to help ??

like maybe annabeth got malcom to help with the cupcake and he started the wildfire that was “annabeth and percy are sitting really close ALONE together for his birthday” so everyone went to eavesdrop or smth

or actually tyson definitely did that by accident now that i’m thinking abt it like he just told ppl who asked and everyone was like “thanks for letting me know >:)”

i always kinda thought maybe clarisse knew it was percy’s birthday and was planning on being a menace but when they pulled up annabeth was already there then the kiss happened and everyone was like “holy SHITTTTT”

like maybe the plan was to dunk percy in the water but they couldn’t find annabeth so they showed up late just to witness the kiss some kids probably cried a little but clarisse was like “sick now i can dunk BOTH of them” so that’s what they did

to me i always loved that clarisse was the one to be the head of that bc throwing them into the water to celebrate wasn’t for her - personally i don’t think clarisse could give two real shits abt percabeth actually dating or not (not that she doesn’t think they should- it’s just not her buisness) but yk who did ?? selina

there were probably long talks where all selina talked abt was the percabeth tea

“i have insanely hot gossip right now. >:)”

“ooo really?? >:)”

“yeah and it involves your two favorite people >:3”

“oh…really…… :|”

i like to think that was for her and i love that

i think something that elevates the hunger games franchise is not just the quality of writing but the integrity of it. tbosas isn’t just a cash-grab by suzanne collins in the age of sequels and reboots (though i won’t pretend that didn’t play a part), it’s a character study of the main antagonist with a different structure than the main trilogy. and importantly, it doesn’t just re-hash the same old themes and beats the main trilogy had, it expands on not just the world of the hunger games but the themes as well, it actually has something new to say about the trilogy’s themes about class, capitalism, power, and control, in a way that couldn’t be explored with the main story because the protagonist of that story simply did not have access to the world that’s being explored in tbosas.

i understand the people who call for books/movies to be made about haymitch, finnick, johanna, different years of the games — we love those characters and want to see more of them! i’d kill for a novella on finnick’s days mentoring tributes, or katniss’s parents falling in love. but at the end of the day we probably wouldn’t be very satisfied with those stories being fleshed out if they had absolutely nothing new to say about the world, they’d be enjoyable, but not as interesting and engaging as tbosas has been.

Both the hunger games before and now the ballad of songbirds and snakes proves that the young adult genre can produce some genuinely good storytelling while also examining social issues without talking down to its audience, which makes the ungodly amount of popular bad ya novels all the more embarrassing.

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.

suzanne collins is such a genius... the cultural phenomenon of her series leading to the hanging tree house remixes, mockingjay being milked for two (bad) movies, the capitol-inspired makeup palettes, the halloween costumes, the explosion of the market for dystopia, the butchering of her characters and removal of disabilities, disfiguration, and racial tension + representation to sell more tickets, the extra gale scenes to fuel discourse, and the audience showing up to cinemas to watch what was pretty honestly marketed to them (the jacob vs edwardification of the symbolic love story and also to watch children fight to the death) it's just so ridiculously ironic i would say you can't write this shit, but she did write about it... in The Hunger Games published 2008