#thg commentary

Especially when they compare him to Snow or Coin, or say he’s worse than them? Suzanne Collins, sweetie, I am so sorry!

Then they’ll just get gross and immature and start calling him ugly, which is calling Liam Hemsworth ugly. So, you’ve gone from hating the character to hating the actor now? Because you’re such a moron that you can no longer separate FICTION from REALITY?

“He makes my blood boil” What valid reason do you have, bitch? He had flaws? He was a teenager with the emotional maturity of a teenager? GOD FORBID!

But I guess that's one of the points of Sejanus as a character—in a series/country where one of the core themes/goals is survival/"stay[ing] alive", he had like zero sense of self-preservation (honestly the way he was going, he was likely gonna end up dead—or at best, an Avox—sooner or later, probably sooner, even without Coriolanus's help).

Edit: "Peeta has a lot of tact. He seems very, very good at maneuvering the social elements of at least everything around the game. So he was always kind of playing the public. Sejanus just didn’t know how to not speak his mind." --Josh Andrés Rivera (all but saying, Yeah Sejanus just physically could not stfu)

let’s start with my initial thoughts on drawing katniss as Native American:

i think it’s great for artists to draw katniss as a poc and as native (esp seen as many readers perceive her as native-coded!) and i truly love seeing art where she is depicted as a woman of colour  - it feels true to my perception of her and the perception i know a lot of other non-white (and white!) readers had whilst reading the books! 

however, i also think that an effort should be made to portray her heritage accurately and respectfully if depicting her as native american is an aim the artist has. 

that is to say, by not hypersexualising her/her clothes, not reducing her clothing to a stereotype

it reminds me of an instagram post i saw a while ago by @soia-jpg​ regarding piper mclean (a Cherokee character from the Heroes Of Olympus series). in the second slide of the post it reads “there are more ways to portray a native character without using their heritage as a prop, or using it wrong and in an irrespecutful way”

this is true for piper, and I think it should be true for katniss too if the intention of an artist drawing her is to depict her as native american. 

okay, now lets move onto my thoughts regarding katniss being drawn as pocahontas;

whilst i do not think the artist who drew her as pocahontas had any harmful intentions, i do think that the piece was harmful/perpetuated a harmful idea. 

pocahontas is a movie which many people enjoy and love because of its nice animation and catchy songs and environmentalist message (I get it, it was one of my favourite movies too when i was younger!) but it is also a movie which romanticises the violent history of genocide and colonisation in North America and that isn’t something that can or should just be forgotten for the sake of how pretty it is visually. frankly, drawing any character as pocahontas - the main character from a disney movie which is largely deemed to be disrespectful and problematic due to the way it represents indigenous cultures and colonisation -  is harmful and ignores the damage that pocahontas as a movie did to how the history of colonisation in America is perceived, and the way it whitewashed the true story of Matoaka. 

like,, disney chose to make a movie vaguely based on the life of a Native American girl who actually existed, but didn’t have had any intention of making a historically accurate story when they could have. if Matoaka’s story was considered too gruesome, they could have chosen to retell a tale from Native American folk lore/mythology. rather than, you know, basing a movie off the life of someone who existed and underwent enormous pain but deciding to ignore that completely and change the narrative. 

basically, i think that it’s important to remember that the disney movie pocahontas does a great disservice to history and is harmful in its depiction of Native American societies and colonisation - largely whitewashing and romanticising history and the life of a young Native American girl who’s life was anything but the fairytale it is shown to be in the movie. pushing the entirely fabricated romantic relationship of pocahontas and john smith (who were in reality 10 and 27 years old when they first met) onto two characters is tone deaf and is unfortunately something ive seen it done time and time over, not only with everlark but also with zutara (zuko and katara from A;TLA).

here are some links to places where people have discussed why pocahontas as a piece of media is problematic;

poverty, alcoholism and suicide - but at least the natives can paint with all the colours of the wind

Disney’s Racist History of Native American Caricatures

Inside The True Story Of Pocahontas That Disney Didn’t Tell