#**thg

DISCLAIMER: I haven't reread THG in a LONG time.

Oooh man, that's a deep cut from the blog, lol! I mean, from what I remember of my line of thinking -- mostly the obvious, insofar as Finnick is largely defined by outsiders' perspectives of his physical appearance; is a story of sexual trauma that is not about reclaiming power through retribution (which would be a more stereotypically 'masculine' trauma-recovery story, not that male victims of sexual violence are get their stories told all that often); and the climax of his story is marriage and having a child.

To whit: I am not saying any of those are FEMININE THINGS in the real world. I am saying that in Western storytelling, those things are generally reserved for female CHARACTERS and are framed in THG in a way that INTENTIONALLY SUBVERTS GENDER EXPECTATIONS, much like many of the THG characters do. Most notably, ofc, Katniss and Peeta. (I wrote a whole chapter on Panem & Gender in The Panem Companion if I rememberrrr correctlyyy? where I go into Katniss and Peeta's gender subversions, so you can check that out for them!)

I think I also touched on Finnick in there, too, but since writing TPC, I've um. improved. as a writer. and also tightened my focus a lot on analysis, so what ISN'T touched on in TPC re: Finnick and gender, and also Katniss and gender, is on the actual sentence-level language used to talk about Finnick. Since THG is told in Katniss' first-person POV at a fairly close psychic distance and without any explicit narrative unreliability, we can take Katniss' judgments of Finnick to be her personal truth (and that is why, when Katniss learns that Finnick isn't a playboy, he's a trafficked sex slave, it's such a shock for the reader, too -- because we have been going through three books taking Katniss' POV on Panem as the truth, and that's one of the moments when we remember that she is just one traumatized and very sheltered 17-year-old girl, and she's not omniscient).

Katniss views Finnick, in CF, with the same disdain that she mostly reserves for people of the Capitol and for other girls and women. Katniss? Does not like Other Girls and Katniss does not like Women. She has a mile-wide Not Like Other Girls streak going. She tends to introduce and view male characters in terms of their potential danger to her, and she introduces and views female characters -- and Finnick -- by rejecting the idea of their interiority and/or commenting on their appearance in some way, depending on how she will be interacting with them. (Caveat: that's only true for the characters who Katniss actually introduces with any detail at all, which is NOT that many.)

Finnick inspires in Katniss a very similar reaction as Effie or the Prep Team, which I think was *intended* to compare him to the Capitol since Katniss thinks at that point that he is a willing Capitol citizen and ~lover~, but functions metanarratively as Katniss falling into the same trap OF THE CAPITOLITES THEMSELVES by viewing Finnick as a sexual object rather than a person with a private inner life.

Also, Finnick fulfills the trope of the courtesan-spy. He is let into the beds of the wealthy and powerful because he's beautiful and seen as simple or less-than, and he uses it to bring down the wealthy and powerful by exposing their depravity. He's word-for-word the courtesan-spy trope, except he's a man. It's ARGUABLE that his maleness is undercut by how young he was when he started being trafficked and therefore he's functioning in this trope as a child rather than as a man, but like, he's 24 when he finally gets to air all the dirty laundry, so I think it counts. This is probably the most The Obvious(TM) answer, but it's still true.

Also, Finnick's story is a rape recovery story. While obviously rape does happen to men (and people outside the binary), the Western canon basically says that rape recovery stories are the provenance of women. This is the other most The Obvious(TM) answer, so I'm not going to go into it (also because I'd want to pull specific examples from Mockingjay that take place during his breakdown and I'm not going to go to the other room and get my book womp womp).

That's true, but I wasn't talking about her hatred of Capitol fashion -- I was looking more at her reactions to Madge, Prim, Mrs. Everlark, and Annie. All of the openly "feminine" characters in Katniss' life are people she either thinks are weak enough to need protection or people she looks down on in some way, or both. (The case can be made with Mrs. Everlark and Prim that it's too complicated by Katniss' literal protector role in their lives to count.) I don't know whether I think SC did this on purpose or whether she was just committed to having Katniss think that all things not tied to survival were equally weakening/frivolous, but Katniss has a real chip on her shoulder about women who present as soft/feminine and/or are Merchant-class.

Katniss' feelings for the Prep Team, Effie, etc., are definitely borne of being oppressed by the Capitol and what their fashion represents, not their sexes (which is underscored by Flavius on the Prep Team). The Capitol are meant to be repulsive in their excess, and they ARE. The contrasts between the Capitol and the Districts are def not gendered*

*Although: I also think that someone could write a VERY interesting paper, in 2022, about how SC used gendered presentation differently in the Capitol and the Districts, and how although the District characters may flout gender stereotypes in their characterizations, only the Capitol characters -- who are meant to be disgusting, child-preying perverts -- blur gender presentation lines in their outward appearances. See: Flavius, Tigris, even Cinna to some extent. I am cis and not the person to interrogate THG from that perspective, but I'd read the hell out of someone who did.

I haven’t read it yet, but I do have it! I’m trying to work past my INTENSELY not caring about Snow as a character/person/archetype and how much I hate “humanizing the inhumane villain because he was sad sometimes too :(” prequels, although I’ve heard that it’s much less woobifying than it could be.

(But still, just, like, I do not care WHY he grew up to be the head mass murder arbiter and sanctioner of the child sex trade, like??? It doesn’t matter why???

The only arguably interesting take on this genre was the Tom Riddle Sr. and the Gaunts chapters of HPHBP because they were literally not even about Voldemort, they were just about how the wizarding world itself can be an abuse of power just by existing, but then JKR ruined that with whatever Fantastic Beasts did with Grindelwald and like, all of Dumbledore’s dumb backstory in general which is terrible and boring. Also I maintain that while I enjoy the SW Prequels, the entire reason they’re generally considered subpar movies is because there aren’t any stakes to a story when you already know how every character ends up.)

(I REALLY HATE VILLAIN-CENTRIC PREQUELS. They’re like, my MAIN TROPE that I dislike, I think. I like almost every category and trope at least a little bit or at least like, “in the case of this one story,” but I am HARD-PRESSED to think villain-centric prequels are ever anything but a boring cash-grab that makes me annoyed.)

Predictably, I’m going to say, “I’m very tired of people thinking that they need to, or can, explain/justify/humanize their fascist villain’s fascism. Here’s the backstory to every fascist, fictional and real: they want power, and they have the privilege, so they use their privilege to solidify the power they already have and eliminate any potential opponents for future power.” That’s it.

It’s not interesting anymore, and – what disappoints me with the THG prequel in particular, because THG itself was so timely and salient – it’s not a story that we need to hear again right now.

The last four years have been a barrage of “watch this dapper neo-nazi go grocery shopping in his swastika armband and pepe the frog pin and bad haircut” stories, again, but in the fictional realm and the fucking real newsmedia.

I don’t fucking care why Coriolanus Snow ~became Snow.~

(I mean, for one thing, it’s because he was an archetype and not really a character in THG, in which SC had an actual point to make, and like, he’s a goddamn white cishet male tyrant whose name is Snow [as in white, like, it’s in the name].) Like, realistically, he became Snow because the archetype of Power is what Katniss’ story needed to fight against, and Snow is nothing but that archetype of toxic, masculine, white supremacist, classist, misogynist, kyriarchal power. SC had Coriolanus Snow Be Coriolanus Snow because she was telling a story about the evils of Being Coriolanus Snow through the heroism and bravery of Katniss, his opposite in every way except, ostensibly, being hetero (and even that’s arguable with aro/ace-readings of Katniss.)

So, like, do I think that she’s writing about Snow as the main character now to totally swap her POV and argue that he’s the hero? No, I don’t. But I also think it’s always going to be a less effective choice to tell your story through the POV of a character who, A, we know won’t learn anything from his experience mentoring a D12 girl because he fucking becomes Snow in another 64 years, and he spends those 64 years using his Power to murder deeply, deeply vulnerable and oppressed children.

And on the flip side, if this is SC setting up a retcon backstory where The Mockingjay Rebellion Happens Because Coriolanus Snow Played The Long Con And Set It Up Since Long Before Katniss Was Born, then that’s fucking racist and misogynist and classist, too, because it’s effectively removing the agency and autonomy of every character who actually rebelled in the THG trilogy, so I FUCKING HOPE that it’s not going to go that direction. If Snow is, effectively, sanctioning the rebellion or planting seeds for its fruition, then it isn’t a rebellion against Power at all, and the THG universe will be asserting that One Lone White Cishet Man Is The True Savior, HAHA, You Thought It Was A Brown Girl?! and like… clearly that’s fucking horrific and disgusting. And again, not a story we need right now. (Or, like, in the last 6,000 years.)

I’m sure someone will go snark on anon somewhere about how it makes me unintelligent and boring and over-the-top to say that, and if I were writing a companion book to the prequel, then I’d force myself to draw out the lines of metatext enough to care, but like… I do not ever care why someone chooses to kill children, A, and B, I’m just sick to fucking death of either Dudes Who Look Like Draco or Dudes Who Look Like Snape getting woobified despite being mass-murdering dildos.

IF SC managed to write Snow’s POV in a way that doesn’t serve to humanize him or attempt to justify his racism, sexism, classism, and boner for child-murder and the child sex trade (LET US NOT FORGET FINNICK, HERE, TOO) then – okay. But writing entirely from within a character’s mind and perspective and not having it possible, at all, to come across to at least a segment of readers as justification and truth – see Nabokov’s attempt with making it very clear that Humbert Humbert is a delusional, disgusting scumbag with every single line of Lolita and how culture took THAT book – is… arguably impossible??? Like, I don’t think it matters how overt SC is with Snow’s cronies and mentors, or whatever, being corrupt bungholes, because there will be corrupt bungholes who read it and find themselves validated on the page. (Also, there are people who think THG is about the virtues of libertarianism, so like, people can twist a text to be about anything, apparently.)

I WANT to be hopeful and optimistic, but the opening of the EW article doesn’t give me a lot of good vibes –

“[Snow is] a villain — a manipulative tyrant, a brutal killer. Those were Katniss Everdeen’s novels, after all, and Snow’s dictatorial presidency stood as the main antagonist to her resistance-underdog story. But what if there was more to him than we knew? What if he could be — crazy as it may sound — a hero?”

The Hunger Games - Fanmix: Uprising Tide (District Four)

The sea is everything. … Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite.

[Originally posted 2/4/2011, Reupload/Moved to Spotify]