so who's your dude from thg if not peeta?
the fact that you think me taking issue with the reductive popular analysis of peeta vs gale is about who i ship with katniss and not like.. a rejection of the fundamental premise of the narrative and dichotomy between characters/love interests that suzanne has constructed……… i literally don't have A Dude from thg, this is not about fucking ships, i don't give a fuck, i would just like people to start analyzing fiction on the level of being a story that an author wrote for particular reasons resulting in actual real world implications and not on the level of like "these characters are real people with agency who are Good or Bad because we accept what the author has told us about them at face value without questioning it further at all"
anyways. i've already talked about it here and here. but like. once again my problem with people's analysis of gale (and suzanne's construction and framing of him as a character) is that he gets the marvel villain treatment of: look, here is a Bad Person who is absolutely correct about his analysis of structural oppression and is the only character who is willing to actively do anything about it but OH NO it just so HAPPENS that he also has no empathy and humanity, what ever shall we do! truly unfortunate that radical revolutionary politics and particularly radical direct action necessarily require being full of rage and enjoying committing violence for violence's sake!!
BUT WAIT! good thing in THIS story we have an ALTERNATIVE for you who is a more moderate version of that, who fights against The Man but only reluctantly and is actually a pacifist at heart and values wholesome things like peace and family and Making Bread instead of violence, so as long as they are able to escape the immediate threats to their individual lives and personal happiness and well-being, there is no need for any of the Good characters we like to singlemindedly devote their entire lives to truly dismantling the status quo because who would want that? yuck, only a sociopath, that's who! good people only want to live out their individual lives in peace, of course! settle down and start a family! learning to go of your anger is Good, is growth and is character development, actually. it's what we should all be striving for.
like imo the prototypical real life example of this is the popular perception of martin luther king jr vs malcolm x—which, of course, is a bunch of bullshit and hinges on a purposefully sanitized and tbh fictionalized version of mlk in order for that dichotomy to be so neat and tidy. He Just Wanted Us To All Get Along :(
and over years and decades we have seen this false dichotomy recreated over and over again in both fiction (e.g. t'challa vs killmonger in black panther & drummer vs marcos inaros in the expanse are the two that come to mind immediately… the latter i have talked about at length and still fucking infuriates me) as well as the way narratives have been created about actual people in the actual real world, and in both cases having radical revolutionary politics and attempting to topple structures of systemic oppression, including violently oppressive governments, is framed as not just requiring acts of violence or terrorism but as being at its core necessarily indistinguishable from terrorism
because of course what we (that is, popular narratives and particularly narratives approved and published and filmed and produced by major mainstream media companies) define as terrorism is based on the laws defined by the state to protect the interests of the state. the ultimate interest of these narratives is to protect those in power and the structures in place that enable and protect that power and that status quo. (ted chiang explains this really well in an interview i posted here talking about how this is the fundamental flaw of superhero stories when it comes to revolutionary politics)
like. if we look at this story at face value and in a vacuum, fine. katniss deserves a life of peace. she deserves to let go of her anger and deserves a quiet future with no more violence, no more fighting. but the thing is, she is not actually a real person who does or does not "deserve" anything, she is a character written by an author as a tool to tell a story. and if we look at this story in the context of dozens of stories like it, of narratives and false dichotomies repeated over and over again in a way that has direct implications on how we view revolutionary action and the Appropriate Reaction to Injustice in real life.. it fucking sucks. i feel like a broken record repeating this over and over again but literally every time i take issue with how people are analyzing media i just want to scream BIGGER FUCKING PICTURE. bigger picture please.
i said this in the tags of one of my posts about thg that i linked above but i think it bears repeating here: i see a lot of posts about how the point of thg is that katniss never wanted to be a revolutionary or whatever, that she was not a Chosen One and she was never meant to be a symbol and all she cared about was her sister and she got thrust into that role. which! great! that's good narrative choice imo (esp for me, known hater of chosen one stories), like the whole Point is about the randomness and futility of war. okay fine.
but like. the thing is, sometimes people do have to want to be revolutionaries. sometimes people do want to overthrow oppressive governments on purpose. and i think a lot of (usually white) writers (and audiences) have trouble grappling with what that means, both in fictional narratives and in real life. like a revolutionary is good if she is a reluctant revolutionary, but if someone wants it too badly then that must mean they are too eager to cross lines that should not be crossed i guess? but think about how that affects how we view real world protest and revolution and the actions oppressed people are driven to take to fight back against their oppressors. sometimes (honestly more than sometimes) fighting injustice warrants an extreme response. sometimes even reacting emotionally in anger against a lifetime of oppression, or in a calculating way out of desperation to Do What Needs To Be Done in order to change an untenable unbearable status quo, is understandable, and neither of those responses makes an oppressed person Evil and lacking in empathy.
ANYWAYS. my analysis of this story is not about what i wish to happen within the universe of the story once we have accepted the premise that the author has laid out for us. my analysis of the story is about how and why the author laid out that premise the way she did and what effect that has on how we approach real life.
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