Devil Darling

Haymitch, Peeta, Hazelle, Leevy, Maysilee, Finnick and Greasy Sae look bizarre when you first see them written down, but then if you think about how they look and/or sound it's pretty clear that they're meant to be modern names, only modern names that have changed spelling and pronounciation over time— as you would have expected them to have done so over how ever many hundreds of years it's been since our modern day.

(Remember, though The Hunger Games themselves have only been going on for 75 years, the universe they're in is canonically post-apocalyptic— the reason nobody ever mentions what's happening in the rest of the world is that everywhere except America was destroyed in a nuclear war. We're not given much of an indication how long it's been since then.)

Peeta is Peter, Haymitch is Hamish, and Hazelle is Hazel, Maysilee is Maisie— the changes in pronunciation are slight (Peeta and Peter are already virtually identical in my accent), and the spelling has changed to match.

Leevy is either a corruption of Lily, or more likely I suspect 'Livvy', a common nickname for Olivia; Finnick is probably from Finnegan (shorten in to 'Finneg' and then say it over and over very fast); Sae could be short for Sarah, or Sally or even Susan— it's not uncommon for nicknames to become real names in their own right (look at Harry or Molly as examples).

I also love the trend of having District 1 parents give their kids names relating to the luxury items their district produces— Glimmer, Marvel, Gloss, Cashmere, Velvereen (presumably a corruption of 'velveteen'), Facet— because those things are all a) objectively pretty/nice (like naming a kid 'Diamond' or 'Star' today) and presumably status symbols in their district.

Meanwhile District 3 does the same thing, but all the pronunciations are corrupted. You've got technical names to do with the manufacture of electronics— Wiress (wireless), Circ (circuit)— but you've also got what I'm pretty sure are meant to be corruptions of modern brand names— Beetee (BT), Teslee (Tesla).

To me this kind of suggests that District 3 is less conscious of this influence than District 1. Like, parents in 1 are more likely to deliberately think "I'll name my kid Glimmer, because things that glimmer are pretty" whereas 3 as a culture might have genuinely forgotten that those names used to mean something, in the same way that most of us don't think much about how the name 'Arthur' comes from the old word for 'Bear'.

And of course, then you've got the Capitol leaning hard into those ancient Roman vibes with names like Fulvia, Plutarch, Seneca, Tigris… but still using the European/American personal name+family name format, which the Romans didn't really do. Like it's very clear that this is a future society fetishising the classical era, rather than an actual resurgence of Roman culture.

My girlfriend's school has a "LGBTQ" club for students to participate in, and so she attended one of the meetings because she's bisexual and wanted to find more bisexual and lesbian girls like her.

In a group of over 50 students, there were 6 same sex attracted people. The rest were nonbinary girls or FtMs.

6 out of 50 were actually SSA.

But it gets worse, so much worse.

The teacher wanted the students input about what was wrong about the school, and so my girlfriend put her 2 cents in about the sexualizing dress code and how sex education wasn't pulling it's weight in educating girls about their bodies. Topics that need to be addressed. Some other students also spoke up about the homophobia within the school and addressed the homophobic students attacking other students on the basis of their sexuality.

But my girlfriend and the other students speaking about homophobia kept getting spoken over by uwu my gender is frog girls crying about the teachers not referring to them as xe/xir. 44 students all whining about pronouns and preferred names while my girlfriend and a few others were trying to address misogyny and homophobia.

They were drowned out by privileged straight kids whining about teachers not bending over backwards and relearning the English language to cater to their special kweer feelings.

My girlfriend couldn't find connections in a place supposedly made just for her and others like her because of screeching identity warriors.

the misogyny of the trans right crowd, the inability to empathize with women, shows when they claim that “female” is prescriptive, that it necessarily entails certain actions and behaviors.

Me: