Thoughts:

they make me start frothing at the mouth and punching drywall thanks for asking <3

the spark, the ignition, the fire — victors of district twelve

There is a process — slow, mechanical, utterly indifferent to justice — by which franchises erase their own history. It does not require malice, though malice may be present. It does not require a conspiracy, though coordination certainly helps. It requires only time, volume, and the simple, brutal economics of attention. The newer version gets the merchandise. The newer version gets the marketing budget. The newer version gets the social media campaign and the IMAX screens and the algorithmically optimized trailer drops and the sponsored content and the themed merchandise and the fast food tie-ins. The older version gets a Wikipedia footnote and a “previously played by” parenthetical.

This is what is coming for Donald Sutherland’s Snow. And Ralph Fiennes — loud, theatrical, pantomime-adjacent Ralph Fiennes — is the instrument of its delivery.

Let us understand who the Hunger Games fandom actually consists of in 2026. The original films were released between 2012 and 2015. A teenager who was fifteen when The Hunger Games first hit screens is now approaching thirty. A child who was ten is now in their early twenties. And below them — the teenagers who will flood into theaters for Sunrise on the Reaping, who will generate the TikToks and the fan edits and the discourse that constitutes cultural memory in the modern era — many of them have no deep, formative, emotionally bonded relationship with Donald Sutherland’s Snow. They know the meme. They know the GIF. They may have watched the original films on a streaming service at some point, with half their attention on their phone. But they do not carry Sutherland’s Snow the way audiences who saw those films in theaters carried him. They do not have that specific, irreplaceable experience of sitting in a darkened cinema and feeling, in their bones, that this man was genuinely dangerous.

That experiential foundation — the thing that makes a performance live in the body of an audience member rather than merely in their memory — is gone for a huge and growing proportion of the Hunger Games fanbase. And when you associate one actor with one specific character, another actor in that same role takes you out of the story and into your head.  But only if you had the original association to begin with. If you didn’t — if your primary, dominant, most recent encounter with President Snow is Ralph Fiennes in a white suit, making the Ralph Fiennes faces, delivering the Ralph Fiennes theatrical declamations in the Ralph Fiennes register of operatic villain excess — then that is simply what Snow is. That is the default. That is the character.

And here is why Fiennes specifically, uniquely, catastrophically accelerates this process: he is extraordinarily, almost aggressively memeable. Sutherland’s Snow, by design, by the deliberate artistic choice of a great naturalistic actor, gave the internet almost nothing to work with. Stillness does not clip well. Restraint does not generate reaction content. A man who communicates menace through what he does not do, through the quality of his silence, through the glacial precision of a half-smile — this is not the raw material of viral moments. This is art. Art does not trend.

Fiennes, on the other hand, is a content machine. Every bulging eye, every theatrical arm gesture, every contorted facial expression that no human being has ever made in the actual course of normal life — these are precisely the frames that get clipped, captioned, reposted, stitched, dueted, and turned into meme templates within forty-eight hours of a trailer drop. His Voldemort generated decades of internet content because Voldemort-Fiennes is a gift to anyone with a video editing app and a sense of humor: the flared nostrils, the hissing, the spasmodic physical expressions of magical fury, the quality of a man who trained for the stage and brought every square inch of that training to a medium that rewards the opposite impulse. You can laugh at Fiennes-as-villain. You are meant to, at least partly. The theatrical excess invites it. It is the panto tradition translated into blockbuster cinema — knowingly broad, deliberately larger than life, designed to be entertaining in the way that pantomime villains are entertaining, which is to say: with affection and amusement rather than with dread.

This is what will colonize the Hunger Games fandom’s relationship with President Snow. Not dread. Not the cold, sick fear that Sutherland’s performance produced in audiences who watched those films. Amusement. Ironic appreciation. The specific fond mockery that attaches itself to theatrical excess when it is deployed in a franchise already compromised — as Sunrise on the Reaping has already compromised it — by the revelation that Snow’s motivational core is an unresolved teenage situationship. Fiennes and Collins’s Snow will be of a piece: a figure you laugh at, not a figure you fear. A meme, not a monster. The melodramatic, over-the-top, twitchy maniac  whose every scene in the new film will generate exactly the kind of social media engagement that Lionsgate’s marketing department is quietly counting on, because that engagement translates directly into ticket sales regardless of whether it is reverent or mocking.

Meanwhile, Sutherland’s Snow will be discussed, if he is discussed at all, in the elegiac tones reserved for things that have been superseded. “The original was better.” “They don’t make them like that anymore.” “Sutherland was actually terrifying.” These are the words that get said about performances that have been eaten by their franchise’s next iteration — words spoken by the older portion of a fandom to the younger portion, who nod politely and return to their Fiennes content. Recasting a character is always a tricky proposition. When you associate one actor with one specific character, another actor in that same role risks angering longtime fans who have emotionally invested in a particular actor’s performance.  But “angering longtime fans” is a manageable problem for a franchise of this scale. Longtime fans still buy tickets. They still stream. They still engage. Their anger is monetizable. Their grief is monetizable. Everything is monetizable. What matters is the new audience — the generation that will make Sunrise on the Reaping their entry point into this universe, for whom Ralph Fiennes’s Snow will not be a replacement but simply Snow, full stop, with no predecessor worth seriously considering.

That generation is being handed a pantomime villain and told he is President Snow. They will believe it because they have no reason not to. And within a decade, the question “Who played Snow better, Sutherland or Fiennes?” will be the kind of question that gets debated in the comment sections of retrospective YouTube videos, with the answer increasingly and depressingly splitting along generational lines — the older viewers insisting on Sutherland’s irreplaceable naturalism, the younger viewers unable to fully understand what all the fuss is about, because what they know is Fiennes, and Fiennes is what Snow is, and the idea that Snow was once something quieter and more frightening and more serious has become, for them, simply a historical curiosity.

This is the annihilation. Not dramatic. Not sudden. Gradual, demographic, inexorable. The fandom does not stand still. It replenishes itself constantly with new, younger members who come to the material fresh, without the experiential history that would allow them to understand what has been lost. And with every new film, every new piece of content, every new Fiennes clip that circulates on social media, the gravitational center of the fandom’s relationship with Snow shifts further from Sutherland and further toward his replacement. Characters are what the audience remembers long after watching a film — sometimes even more so than the film’s actual plot.  And the character the audience will remember — the character that will be on the posters, on the merchandise, in the algorithmically served content — will be Fiennes’s Snow. Loud. Theatrical. Gesticulating. A knowing, operatic grotesque where there used to be something genuinely dangerous.

Suzanne Collins chose this. She chose Fiennes knowing exactly what Fiennes does, knowing exactly how it would land, knowing exactly what it would do to the memory of the man whose performance she had never publicly acknowledged even at the moment of his death. She signed off on the theatrical pantomime villain to replace the great naturalistic one. She authorized the content machine to devour the art.

And ten years from now, when some teenager encounters a clip of Donald Sutherland’s Snow for the first time and says, with genuine surprise, “Oh, I didn’t know someone else used to play him” — that will be Suzanne Collins’s true monument to the man who made her villain worth remembering.

Not a tribute. Not an honor.

Community, Identity, Stability

ALDOUS HUXLEY’S BRAVE NEW WORLD ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY CARROLL

A few recent comments and reblogs have taken issue with the idea that the works of Aldous Huxley are an important defense against the propaganda challenges of our time.

But Postman was right:

"Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us" is terrifyingly relevant to the mid 2020s.

We're not living in Orwell's nightmare of enforced ignorance and pain, we're living in Huxley's nightmare of voluntary distraction and pleasure.

We're drowning in:

Infinite scroll and algorithmically optimized engagement which has made propaganda more effective and widespread than ever before

Outrage as entertainment

Complex policy reduced to memes and hot takes

Complex peoples reduced to black-and-white moral caricatures

The transformation of citizenship into spectatorship and team sports

"Discourse" that's really just performance

What makes this particularly insidious and aligned with Huxley's warning is that nobody is forcing us to watch TikTok for hours, let it reprogram our brains, or reduce politics to team sports. We're doing it willingly because it feels good, because it's easier than sustained attention, because trivial culture is more fun than serious engagement.

That's how we know we're living in Huxley's Brave New World.

The Huxley-deriding replies and reblogs fixate on his coming from an elite, well-off, British, intellectual family, but those who dismiss him as an elite snob are doing exactly what he warned about, using a simple, emotionally satisfying dismissal (eg. priviledged white guy = bad/wrong) to avoid grappling with uncomfortable truths about how we've all become complicit in our own intellectual infantilization.

Why do people reach for this particular class-based line of attack when I make an argument about Huxley's prescience regarding media and propaganda?

Ad hominem deflection: It's easier to dismiss ideas by attacking the messenger than to engage with whether Huxley was actually right about soma-like escapism, entertainment as distraction, or technological control. If they can make Huxley seem unsympathetic or out-of-touch, they don't have to grapple with how his warnings apply to our current media landscape. Thinking too hard is scary.

Academic Class Bias: Many online fat-left critics see Huxley as a stand-in for a kind of British paternalism or condescension. They aren't necessarily responding to what he wrote, but to the archetype they've constructed. A soft-spoken Oxbridge intellectual wringing his hands about pleasure while ignoring material injustice.

Discomfort with cultural self-critique: Huxley's critique lands hardest on us. Our appetite for distraction, our complicity in choosing comfort over thought, our thirst for spectacle. That makes some readers bristle. Dismissing Huxley lets them redirect attention away from their own eager participation in the system which is actively manipulating them.

It's easier to dismiss Huxley as a privileged pessimist than to ask what he actually saw coming and examine how close we are to living in it.

It's more comfortable and satisfying to mock the man warning us that this comfort will be our undoing. It's unsettling to realize the undoing is already underway.

If Huxley was right, they have to face that we didn't lose our freedom, we traded it willingly for dopamine, for distraction and for emotional resonance.

That's hard to protest and feel righteous about because there's no villain to topple...just thousands of tiny daily choices we're already making...and making poorly.

Over 90% of parents of visibly intersex children opt for cosmetic surgery on their infants.

The ones that don't experience medical violence then, likely experience it as a teenager.

I didn't.

I am very rare in that I did not experience medical violence.

Why? Because I learned what intersexuality was as a young age, and I actively fought against what doctors wanted to do to me. All the way down to legal research on what medical care minors can be forced into. I remember walking into that doctor's appointment with the state law written down that proved that if I did not consent they could not do surgery.

If not, download it to your phone, and under "Add library card" select the button to search for a library and start typing in "queer"...

Sign up with an email, no actual address required, and you are good to go 🏳️‍🌈