Ailidh

Any time a post implies that there is absolutely any evidence of SOTR 'truths' being in the OG canon will always be a no from me. We get literally no indication that Haymitch ever knew, let alone liked, the now-named Burdock. Fucking nothing. The retconning done in SOTR is not only 'cheating' in my book, it's not even good! Having Haymitch apparently only care about Katniss bc she came out of Burdock's balls makes him seem like POS for never caring about the 23 other girl tributes (and 24 other boy tributes aside from Peeta) for so long ON TOP OF ruining the arc they had previously had which was a pure and perfect 'begrudging mentor/mentee become found family and, turns out, are basically soul mates platonically.'

This is sadly just more proof that Suzanne writing Snow so fucking poorly that he takes out his 65y/o situationship on a country was a mistake. You shouldn't be able to boil down an interesting and complex monster like Coriolanus Snow to just 'well, he's upsetti that he never got his dick wet again.' I'm fucking sorry, what?! Where is the nuance? The characterization? The care given to the world-building? Was Lucy Gray's cooter really that good that he took over and basically tortured a country for more than half a century just to spite her ghost?!

I've made a few posts ranting about this fact before but turning Haymitch's 'sweethearts' from a basic and petty demeaning pet name that earns its power and familiarity into literally just 'you remind me of this dead kid' is so fucking insulting. Like, I'm sorry. No. We're not going to ruin the arc of 'begrudging drunk learns to hope again after almost 25 years of being hopeless bc random girl inspired him' into 'asshole drunk decides to finally give a shit about the kids he watches be murdered yearly bc one of them finally reminds him of his past loves.' Do we not see how fucking shitty that makes Haymitch seem?? And we're celebrating that?! That kind of mindset should make him a villain! No a protagonist with a new movie...

Again, this is just boiling a once-complex and terrifying monster into basically an incel with a penchant for nuclear revenge. It's fucking pathetic that Snow became this after Sunrise just wouldn't let him be a normal bad guy. And, no, I don't think Ballad is to blame. It showed us his descent into suspicious, murderous, and proactive evil stemming from a place of entitlement, superiority, and narcissism. It's Sunrise's watered-down villainy for the sake of fucking w/ a little boy loosely related to his situationship from 40 years prior that ruined his character.

Having Effie be involved w/ Haymitch and D12 from the 50th Games, implying that she more than likely stayed with them for the next 24 years, is lowkey insane. Like not only does it strip away the power and interest of her being ignorantly malicious bc she's 'new to the Games' (to an extent) and generally remove the interest of her backstory in general but like...she's a far worse person now?? Like you're telling me she's watched Haymitch be destroyed by Snow right after his Games and get re-wrecked every year (tho apparently he never cared about his tributes so idk) and she just...remained a calloused and ignorant asshole? You realize that makes her worse, right? And not a good, interesting, complex worse, either. A lazy, 2D, caricature-type worse...

Again, and I'll say this as long as I need to for people to grasp it, this makes Haymitch look like an absolute PIECE OF SHIT. It isn't cute that he could only apparently have empathy bc she reminds him of his past, it makes him a selfish asshole. And not the good kind.

And one meme I wish was basically canon to end on:

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

When we look into the history of asexuality, the first mention of it can be traced back all the way to the 1860’s. In 1869 a Hungarian doctor named Karl-Maria Kertbeny anonymously created pamphlets, against a sodomy law in Germany. In these pamphlets he mentioned three different sexual orientations: heterosexual, homosexual and monosexual. This was also the first known public appearance of the term homosexual. These days monosexuality means feeling romantic or sexual attraction to only one sex/gender. But when doctor Karl-Maria Kertbeny wrote about ‘monosexual’ he referred to people who only masturbate. (“sexual satisfaction only with themselves“)

Other 19th century mentions from Nothing Radical:

Richard von Krafft-Ebing writes about asexuality in his 1886 work Psychopathia Sexualis (Psychopathy of Sex). In it, he uses the term anesthesia sexual to refer to people with an “absence of sexual feeling.” [---] This is likely one of the first examples of the pathologization of asexual people which continues to this day.

German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld [---] also published the pamphlet Sappho und Sokrates in 1896, which recognizes people without any sexual desire under the label “anesthesia sexual”—the same term used by Krafft-Ebing. In this work, Hirschfeld also develops a quantitative scale for describing human sexuality which rates the intensity of same-sex and opposite-sex attraction on separate axes, each from 1 to 10 [---] the first I was able to find which explicitly accounts for asexuality.

German sexologist Emma Trosse not only gave us a definition of asexuality, but was openly asexual herself. Trosse was the first woman to publish a scientific work on homosexuality in women and advocated for legal protections for sexual minorities. In her 1897 work Ein Weib? Psychologisch-biographische: Studie über eine Konträrsexuelle (A woman? Psychological-biographical study of a contrary-sexual), she gives us a definition of asexuality under the label Sinnlichkeitslosigkeit (asensuality) and says in a footnote, “Author has the courage to admit to this category.”

"What’s the point of supporting gay rights but nobody else’s rights. You know? Or - workers’ rights but not Women’s rights - it’s - I don’t know - illogical."

"There’s a lodge banner down in the welfare. We bring it out for special occasions. It’s a hundred years old. I’ll show it to you one day. It’s a symbol like this -

Two hands.