oh me, oh my, oh todd

academy

adventurer's guild

alchemist

apiary

apothecary

aquarium

armory

art gallery

bakery

bank

barber

barracks

bathhouse

blacksmith

boathouse

book store

bookbinder

botanical garden

brothel

butcher

carpenter

cartographer

casino

castle

cobbler

coffee shop

council chamber

court house

crypt for the noble family

Night Market fashion. Layers upon layers. No gender assigned clothing. Lots of patterns.

So most stories take place when Events are Happening, and this means that no matter what kind of job the characters have, they’re probably not too focused on them. Fanfics, on the other hand, often show the down time. Which means that the writer has to figure out what the hell these characters do in their jobs. Unless the characters have a job the author understands or knows well, the author is often at a loss for what to have the character doing.

So they sit them at a desk and give them paperwork. What is the paperwork for? Rarely specified. It is Paper Work for the characters Important Adult Job they have and they need to read or sign it or something. And there’s always a line about how Character Hates Paperwork. Doesn’t matter if Character is a Mafia Boss or a General or a Diplomat, here they are in an office trying to get out of Doing Paperwork.

There’s also a sense of, like, humor and mundanity that comes with it. Like the examples above, it always particularly stands out to me when a dangerous individual is griping about some paper they need to sign or something. The less you can picture Character doing paperwork, all the better to force it upon them. If Character is saddled with Paperwork, they’re usually now concerned about the physical damages their motley crew causes, because damage = More Paperwork.

it's because we see president snow everyday. hes that one white boy who's just a little bit too racist and a little bit too homophobic and a little too political and at the end of the day, a little bit too likely to pull out a gun and shoot up a school or place of worship just because he's white, he's young, and he can get away with it

coriolanus is so familiar and so scary because he still exists. we all know a coriolanus. we're all tentative friends with a coriolanus. and it's scary because that book shows us exactly whom he will become and even with the warning signs, we still don't see it. we all went into tbosas knowing that coriolanus was snow, knowing what he would do and stand for. and yet... it was so so hard to dislike him at first because he was just a kid.

i have so many feelings about it

so first let's start with the obvious, hottest take. the story is not a parallel of snow/lucy being like katniss/peeta. it is actually a parallel of snow/sejanus and katniss/primrose. i suppose the common denominator is snow and katniss, but it's just - it's what could have been. that's why snow was so fixated on katniss, because they were the same. different, obviously, but the same. sejanus and primrose were the medics, the soft, the wanted to make the world a better place. they also both died. snow and katniss, they were survivors, and snow saw that in her, and it killed him that she didn't turn out like him because he knew they were the same person with slightly different circumstances, so why didn't they end up the same overall? but that was the capitol vs the districts, that was the 1% pull yourself up by your bootstraps vs the people who didn't even have any bootstraps.

second hot take is that snow is was and ever shall be a villain and the reason why the story was so hard to read was because suzanne put enough humanity in him initially that you hoped that the story would end differently than you knew it would. she played us like the humans we are and if you didn't register that then i don't know what to tell you. that's part of the message, the eternal hope of humanity. the eternal wish for humans to be good, deep down. snow saw it, rejected it, and became what he was in the trilogy. in my mind, the "real" snow only came to the surface in the last twenty or so pages of the book, but it was the little hints throughout that were terrifying and sad to me.

oh my god and thats another thing! yes, the hunger games were boring. it's almost like... kids fighting each other... isn't entertaining... isn't colorful.. doesn't serve a purpose... huh, imagine that. it's only when you dress something up that it becomes interesting, engaging, entertaining. a show isn't a show if it's just the bare minimum.

speaking of colorful, it's time to talk about lucy gray baird, the lyricist and songwriter of the hanging tree. the first mockingjay, as it were. a gray little thing that spread her wings to reveal her pure humanity beneath. a wonderful girl, a wonderful character study, a wonderful songbird, a wonderful snake. venomous? maybe. but with a voice like that, who wouldn't be drawn in by a siren?