the lit log

the robin who didn’t fit

when jason todd was first introduced in the 1980s, he was originally written as a near-copy of dick grayson: circus background, bright personality, batman’s new “son.” after crisis on infinite earths, however, his origin was radically rewritten. instead of the polished acrobat, jason became the street kid: a boy who tried to steal the batmobile’s wheels in crime alley, who had lived among gotham’s poorest and most brutalized.

this shift changed everything. unlike dick, who came from a working-class background but was still coded as “good” (performing artist, all-american boy), jason was coded as “bad”: impulsive, angry, and marked by his environment. his robin wasn’t aspirational; he was abrasive. he challenged batman’s decisions, expressed open rage, showed little interest in being polite for the sake of hero society, etc.

in-universe, this made him narratively volatile. out-of-universe, it made him unpopular with readers accustomed to the “ideal” robin archetype: clever, charming, deferential, and well-groomed.

the “stupid” robin

much of the criticism against jason hinges on his supposed recklessness. he “gets himself killed” in a death in the family, ignoring batman’s orders and charging into danger. in fan memory, he is remembered less as a victim of joker’s brutality and more as a liability to batman.

but this framing obscures the fact that jason was consistently written as capable, even brilliant at times. his detective work in tracing his mother’s identity in a death in the family demonstrates persistence and skill—his fatal flaw wasn’t stupidity but desperation for family and belonging. the narrative punished that vulnerability.

the label of “stupid” sticks less because jason is actually stupid, and more because he refuses to follow the scripts of politeness and obedience that fans project onto robin. “smart” robins—tim drake, for example—are praised for their analytical discipline, their ability to stay in line with batman’s ethos. jason, by contrast, operates on instinct and emotion, qualities coded as immature or unintelligent when displayed by working-class characters.

the “dirty” robin

visual and narrative language also conspired to mark jason as dirty, a portrayal many fans online have accepted. he is introduced literally stealing car parts, a figure of poverty in gotham’s alleyways. his resurrection as the red hood doubles down on this imagery: the leather jacket, the biker aesthetic, the rough-edged violence. unlike dick’s acrobatics or tim’s sleek detective work, jason’s skillset is grit and survival.

the reception of jason as “dirty” speaks volumes about the class-coded hierarchies of superhero fandom. fans are quick to valorize aristocratic trauma (bruce wayne’s wealth, damian’s assassins’ pedigree) or middle-class relatability (tim drake’s suburban normalcy), but jason’s urban poverty becomes shorthand for wrongness. his anger is “uncontrolled,” his methods “too brutal,” his hands literally bloody in ways that other robins’ are not.

this isn’t just textual; it’s cultural. fans project real-world class assumptions onto jason: that poverty breeds ignorance, dirtiness, and moral compromise. in contrast, the other robins embody aspirational ideals—circus heroism, boy-genius intellect, or literal princeling status.

the death that defines him

jason’s death was famously left up to a phone-in fan vote, and the majority voted to kill him off, as stated earlier. this event haunts not only the character but also the discourse around him: jason was the robin that fans didn’t want. when he returned as the red hood, his very existence carried that stigma, framing him perpetually as the failed robin.

what often goes unexamined, however, is how much this rejection was shaped by class-coded dislike. jason didn’t “fail” because he was incompetent; he failed because he disrupted the fantasy of what robin was supposed to be. he was too angry, too poor, too messy. and so fans punished him for it, both in the diegesis (via the vote) and in the decades of discourse since.

why it matters

jason todd is more than just an edgy antihero in gotham’s ecosystem. he embodies a discomfort in superhero storytelling: what happens when poverty, rage, and noncompliance enter the polished world of cape comics? his reception reveals as much about readers as it does about him.

to dismiss jason as “stupid” or “dirty” is to participate in a classist narrative that devalues his survival instincts, his lived experience, and his emotional honesty. where other robins are permitted to embody archetypes of cleverness, grace, or nobility, jason is locked into the role of the outsider, the one who “got it wrong.”

yet it is precisely this tension that makes him valuable. jason todd refuses to be a clean myth. he drags gotham’s ugliness into the bat-family, exposing the limits of its paternalistic justice. he is not the robin who failed; he is the robin who revealed what fandom—and batman himself—would rather ignore.

jason & the bat-family

jason todd is often misread as an outsider, a figure permanently at odds with the rest of the bat-family. but the truth is more complicated: jason is defined not only by who he is, but by how he reflects against the other robins, batgirls, and of course, bruce. his characterization becomes sharper when we see how he refracts the qualities of those around him.

dick grayson is jason’s mirror. where dick represents grace, optimism, and the ability to move beyond batman’s shadow, jason embodies gotham’s grime, cynicism, and refusal to let batman’s shadow go unanswered. they are equals in skill but opposites in philosophy: dick leads by hope, jason by realism. their tension doesn’t come from jason being “less than,” but from him being an alternative path robin could have taken.

tim drake highlights jason’s resentment and intelligence simultaneously. jason was replaced by tim, and that wound still festers. yet tim also respects jason’s tactical mind in ways others don’t. their conflict is less about rivalry and more about legitimacy: jason feels discarded, while tim represents the version of robin fandom wanted. together, they embody the tension between “the robin fans voted to kill” and “the robin fans embraced.”

damian wayne is a curious bond. both jason and damian are “difficult robins”—abrasive, violent, prone to breaking rules. but damian’s privilege (the league of assassins, wayne heir) stands in stark contrast to jason’s background. jason often sees in damian a version of himself with resources and support he never had. there’s occasional kinship there, but also a sharp awareness of how privilege cushions damian’s violence.

barbara gordon often clashes with jason, particularly over methods. yet beneath the tension, there’s mutual respect: barbara recognizes jason’s intelligence and tactical skills, even if she disapproves of his brutality. jason, in turn, respects barbara’s pragmatism, especially as oracle, more than he does bruce’s idealism. their relationship shows how jason doesn’t reject the bat-family entirely—he finds kinship with those who operate in shades of gray.

and then there is bruce wayne. every jason story is, at its core, about batman. jason once wanted bruce’s approval, even to inherit his mantle. now he wants something simpler: for bruce to stay out of his way. their bond is not father/son in the sentimental sense, but battlefield comrades locked in an ideological stalemate. jason forces bruce to confront the failures of his methods—failures that are too personal for bruce to accept.

in all these dynamics, jason is not the estranged son or black sheep lurking at gotham’s edges. he is the necessary friction within the family. he tests their assumptions, challenges their methods, and embodies the consequences they would rather not face. without jason, the bat-family risks becoming too clean, too idealized. with him, it is forced to reckon with gotham as it truly is.

jason in adaptations: the feedback loop of misreading

jason todd’s reputation has never existed in comics alone. animated films, video games, and television have all reinterpreted him, often simplifying or distorting his complexity. these adaptations, widely consumed by fans who may not read the comics, have reinforced the idea of jason as the “stupid,” “angry,” or “reckless” robin—creating a feedback loop where misreadings of jason in media bleed back into fandom discourse.

the animated film batman: under the red hood (2010) is perhaps the most faithful version. it presents jason as intelligent, articulate, and pragmatic, though still boiling with anger. his confrontation with bruce about killing the joker remains one of the sharpest distillations of his ethos: jason doesn’t want batman to murder indiscriminately; he just can’t accept that bruce lets the joker live. yet even here, the film leans heavily on jason’s emotional volatility, tilting him closer to tragic rage than to calculating strategist.

the arkham video games amplified that volatility. in arkham knight (2015), jason is rewritten as the titular villain, tortured and manipulated into donning the red hood persona. the game frames him as irrational, vengeful, and defined by resentment toward bruce. while the design and gameplay made him popular, the narrative flattened him into a rage-fueled antagonist, reducing his intelligence and pragmatism to background noise. for many players, this became their primary exposure to jason, entrenching the “angry failed robin” stereotype.

then came dc universe’s titans (2018–2021), which depicted jason as brash, cocky, and self-destructive. this version of jason leans into recklessness, more “punk kid who doesn’t listen” than “brilliant tactician.” while it gave him screen time, it reinforced class-coded readings of jason as the dirty, stupid robin who couldn’t cut it—cementing the idea that his downfall was inevitable, even deserved.

these portrayals matter because they shape the collective imagination of jason todd. fans who only know him through animation, games, or television internalize the exaggerated traits—recklessness, rage, stupidity—without seeing the nuance the comics sometimes afford him. and when fandom repeats those ideas (“he’s dumb,” “he’s dirty,” “he deserved to die”), it validates the same classist misreadings that marred his reception in the first place.

the tragedy is that jason is compelling in these stories—he’s often the emotional heart, the character who forces batman (and the audience) to confront the contradictions of justice. but when adaptations reduce him to his roughest edges, they obscure what makes him unique: his intelligence, his strategy, his pragmatism, and his deep (if hidden) care for gotham’s people.

the narrative function of jason todd

beyond his personal arc, jason todd plays a crucial role in the larger machinery of batman’s mythos. he isn’t just another robin; he is the test case that asks: what happens when the system breaks?

each robin has a narrative function. dick grayson proves batman can create something hopeful out of tragedy. tim drake proves batman needs balance and rationality. damian wayne proves batman’s legacy can be both inherited and challenged. jason todd, however, is different: he is the flaw in the system, the one who refuses to be smoothed into the narrative of batman’s triumph.

jason disrupts the myth of batman’s control. for decades, the fantasy of batman has been that he can walk into gotham’s chaos and impose order through discipline and morality. jason’s death—and later his return—shatters that illusion. batman couldn’t protect him. batman couldn’t save him. and when jason comes back, batman can’t control him. he exists as a permanent reminder that gotham isn’t clean, that bruce’s crusade leaves scars, and that the bat-family isn’t a perfect machine.

he also functions as the embodied critique of batman’s no-kill rule. in story after story, jason forces bruce (and the audience) to wrestle with the contradictions of letting mass murderers like the joker live while innocents die. jason doesn’t just disagree with bruce—he destabilizes the moral scaffolding that holds batman together. in this way, jason is less a “failed robin” than a narrative device designed to stress-test batman’s philosophy.

finally, jason prevents the bat-family from becoming too self-righteous. dick, tim, barbara, damian—each embodies an aspect of bruce’s mission filtered through competence, discipline, or privilege. jason injects discomfort. he’s the scar the others don’t want to acknowledge, the one who refuses to play the game of heroic branding. without him, the bat-family risks becoming an echo chamber of idealism. with him, it must continually face the ugly compromises of gotham.

jason todd’s function, then, is not failure—it is friction. he is the splinter under batman’s skin, the flaw that reveals the limits of the crusade. and in that way, he’s indispensable. gotham needs him because he tells the truth no one else will: justice in gotham is broken, and sometimes belief in batman isn’t enough.

how jason should be characterized

if jason todd’s reception has long been filtered through classist stereotypes and lazy shorthand—“stupid,” “reckless,” “dirty”—then what’s the alternative? what does it look like to take him seriously as a character, not as a cautionary tale?

jason, written well, isn’t the dropout robin. he’s an intellectual. a rebel, yes, but also an intellectual, which many fans seem to forget or ignore. he believes in the cause—protecting gotham’s people—but he’s pragmatic about the means. bruce clings to ideals like a priest clutching scripture while jason lives in realism. he doesn’t kill casually, and he doesn’t kill first. but he’s a soldier who knows that sometimes the only way to stop a monster is to put them down. that’s not recklessness; it’s clarity.

too often, writers flatten him into the dumb bruiser of the robins. in reality, jason is incredibly sharp. book-smart, street-smart, tactically brilliant. his detective style is different from bruce or dick’s—less clue-hunting, more psychological profiling. at nineteen, he took control of gotham’s underworld; beneath the red hood’s bravado is a strategist who plays chess with the board three moves ahead. he is someone who sees combat the way others see music or math.

and, crucially: jason is not just rage and trauma. yes, he’s angry, cynical, sharp-edged—but he’s not some frothing madman or sad boy in a leather jacket. his humor is sardonic, his cynicism a shield. he pushes people away on purpose because mistrust is his default defense. when he does trust, betrayal cuts deep. that doesn’t make him empty—it makes him deliberate.

jason is realism and tactical aggression. controlled, not unhinged. revenge isn’t his fuel; protection is. he’s not a “failed robin” or an “anti-batman.” he’s batman’s counterweight. the necessary one. he believes in the mission, but he refuses to worship the method.

that’s what makes him compelling. jason todd is the question the bat-family doesn’t want to ask: what if gotham really is as brutal as he says it is? what if the mission needs more than masks and ideals? he’s not the outcast robin. he’s the reminder that belief and disillusion can coexist—and that sometimes the rebel is the one keeping the cause honest.

the tragedy & the triumph

jason todd is, in many ways, the great tragedy of the batman mythos. he was the robin fans voted to kill, the boy who broke batman’s illusion of control, the street kid punished for not fitting the mold of what robin was “supposed” to be. his death, his return, and his messy place in the bat-family reveal how gotham—and fandom itself—treats those who don’t conform: with disdain, suspicion, and dismissal.

but jason is also a triumph. he is the robin who refused to stay dead, the bat who will not be contained, the one member of the family who consistently calls gotham what it is instead of what batman wishes it to be. he’s not stupid, dirty, or reckless; he’s pragmatic, brilliant, sardonic, and terrifyingly effective. he’s the strategist in a leather jacket, the kid who was told he didn’t belong and built his own place anyway.

jason forces batman—and us—to grapple with questions most superheroes let us ignore: what do we do with villains who will never stop? what happens when justice fails? how much blood is the cost of morality? in a mythology that often celebrates idealism, jason is the reminder that realism has its place too.

the government’s monopoly on force is not supposed to be unchecked (1). in a democratic society, law enforcement is legally allowed to use force only under due process, necessity, proportionality, accountability. when the state kills first and asks questions later (or, not at all), it undermines its legitimacy. and—the lack of clear, independent investigation at the outset is infuriating.

the state isn’t just another private sector. it claims the right to use legal force, deadly force, but only within strict boundaries (again, necessity, proportionality, due process, accountability). when the state kills a citizen, it isn’t treated like a typical homicide. there are layers of legal protections, claims of “defensive action,” federal jurisdiction that often immunize agents from prosecution, and more. what a private individual is held accountable for, the state often is not. if a private individual kills someone unlawfully, they’re typically arrested and the case is prosecuted by the government. victims’ families have a clear path to justice. arrest, trial, sentencing. but when state actors kill citizens, there are contradictions. federal agencies often conduct their own investigations into their officers. state or local investigators can be blocked from accessing the scene or evidence. prosecutors may decline to bring charges, or internal reviews take months or years and rarely result in accountability. when a private person commits violence, the law treats them as individually responsible. but when the state uses violence, it often asserts the right to define the circumstances, including whether the target even deserves rights at the moment of violence.

to make that a little clearer, i want to briefly cover the asymmetry of power when a federal agent kills an individual: the state can kill. the state investigates itself. the state decides legality. the individual is dead. see the problem?

it’s common for authorities and commentators to tell us that the agents are humans with families, lives, emotions, training, etc. but let’s remember that they are representatives of the apparatus of the state. they’re empowered, funded, and sanctioned to use force. as it stands, the system they operate within will not hold them accountable. if the federal government can kill citizens in public spaces under broad operational authority, without transparent review, without clear and enforceable accountability, then all of us are at risk of being potential targets once policy shifts.

the deaths of individuals by ice agents are state actions with lethal force executed by federal actors. a government that can kill its citizens without transparent oversight is one that has abandoned democratic constraint, and what the state is permitted to do without consequence will be done again.

pacifism & the moral limits of peace

peeta functions as the moral conscience of the hunger games. he’s consistently advocating for mercy and the preservation of human dignity even in the midst of extreme violence. from the 74th games onward, he resists the capitol’s attempt to turn district survival into savagery. “‘...i keep wishing i could think of a way to…. to show the capitol they don’t own me. that i’m more than just a piece in their games’” (ch. 10) peeta tells katniss in the first book. this refusal aligns closely with the spirit of just war theory, particularly jus in bello (2), which emphasizes moral restraint even during conflict. peeta’s instinct is always to, when possible, minimize harm and avoid violence. in doing so, he represents an ethical ideal: that how you fight matters just as much as why you fight.

however, peeta’s pacifism isn’t totally unproblematic, and collins doesn’t present it as so. his commitment to peace often borders on moral absolutism, revealing a critical weakness in nonviolence when it’s detached from considerations of justice and power. this flaw becomes blatantly apparent after peeta is hijacked by the capitol, when he insists on live tv that katniss should surrender to end the war and save lives. while framed as a plea for peace, this position ignores the broader consequences of capitulation: surrender would preserve the capitol’s tyranny and abandon the districts to continued oppression. in terms of jus ad bellum (3), peeta’s stance fails the requirement of just cause, as peace achieved through submission does not meaningfully address the injustice that initiated the war in the first place. now, he was hijacked, but this statement works as a clear display of the most extreme viewpoint of his own.

peeta’s failure here illustrates a central tension within just war theory. peace is not inherently just, nor is the avoidance of violence always morally preferable. by prioritizing the immediate cessation of suffering without regard for long-term consequences, peeta’s pacifism risks enabling systemic violence to continue unchallenged. collins thus complicates the notion that moral goodness lies solely in restraint. overall, peeta’s intentions are unquestionably compassionate, but good intentions alone don’t guarantee a just outcome.

utilitarian violence & the corruption of justice

gale embodies a fundamentally different ethical framework from peeta. his is rooted in pragmatism, retribution, and utilitarian reasoning. for him, violence is not inherently wrong — at all. for him, violence is a necessary tool for dismantling entrenched injustice. growing up in the poorest region (the seam) of the poorest district under the constant threat of starvation and peacekeeper abuse, gale learns early that survival requires harsh choices. his father died in the same coal mine as burdock everdeen, and he had to provide for his family, even entering his name into the reaping bowl many, many times in exchange for tesserae for extra food rations. this background shapes his moral outlook: if violent action can end oppression more quickly and decisively, then it is not only justified but required. within the framework of just war theory, gale initially appears to satisfy several jus ad bellum conditions, particularly just cause, last resort, and likelihood of success. the capitol’s systemic exploitation and brutality provide clear moral grounds for rebellion, and decades of failed reform render violent resistance seemingly unavoidable.

however, gale’s moral reasoning becomes increasingly dangerous as the war progresses, which reveals the limitations of utilitarian ethics when applied without constraint. his focus shifts from resisting oppression to maximizing strategic effectiveness, even when that effectiveness depends on morally questionable means. this shift places him in conflict with jus in bello principles, especially the requirement to protect civilians (4) and ensure proportionality. gale’s willingness to accept civilian casualties as an unfortunate but acceptable cost of victory erodes the moral distinction between liberator and oppressor. violence ceases to be a necessity and becomes an instrument.

this ethical collapse culminates in the bombing strategy that kills prim. the attack deliberately exploits compassion — targeting medics and first responders — to increase casualties, a tactic that cannot be justified under the doctrine of double effect (5). civilian deaths aren’t incidental side effects but integral to the strategy’s success. in just war terms, the action fails multiple criteria: it targets illegitimate victims, causes disproportionate harm, and exceeds what is strictly necessary to achieve military objectives. through gale, collins illustrates how revolutionary violence, when unmoored from moral restraint, replicates the very logic of terror and domination it seeks to overthrow.

crucially, gale doesn’t view his actions as cruel but as just. this is what makes his character so unsettling; his moral clarity leaves little room for doubt or accountability. however, this is also, in my opinion, what makes his character so relatable. many of us think that the oppressed have the right to resist and beat their oppressors by any means necessary, and that it is absolutely justified. collins shows us the dangers of a black-or-white worldview, of extremism and the inability to consider nuance.

in contrast to katniss, who is haunted by the cost of each life lost, gale accepts loss as an inevitable statistic of war. collins thus critiques a version of justice that prioritizes outcomes over humanity, suggesting that victory achieved through dehumanization is morally hollow. gale’s largest flaw is in his certainty that justice can be engineered through force alone.

through gale, we get to see how seductive moral absolutism seems when it’s parading around as pragmatism. even wars begun with just cause can become unjust when jus in bello is abandoned, regardless of the reason. he represents the ethical danger of believing that the ends will always redeem the means, a belief that just war theory exists to challenge.

moral conflict & the burden of judgment

throughout the trilogy, katniss is torn between peeta’s insistence on mercy (he’s the dandelion) and gale’s belief in decisive force (he’s the fire). she recognizes the necessity of resistance — she understands that the capitol’s oppression provides a clear just cause for rebellion — but she remains deeply uneasy with how that resistance is carried out. katniss repeatedly questions authority, particularly the legitimacy of those who claim to act in the name of liberation. her distrust of coin reflects a central jus ad bellum concern: who has the right to wage war, and toward what end? when revolutionary leaders begin to mirror the capitol’s tactics, katniss senses that moral legitimacy is being lost, even if victory appears within reach.

katniss’ moral clarity emerges through her lived experience and trauma. unlike gale, after her games, she cannot distance herself from the human cost of violence. each death — rue, cinna, prim, cato — reinforces her awareness that damage is never theoretical. this sensitivity aligns her closely with jus in bello principles, particularly proportionality and necessity. katniss may accept that violence is sometimes unavoidable, but she refuses to accept it as routine or morally neutral. her revulsion toward strategies that deliberately endanger civilians demonstrates her insistence that means matter as much as ends.

the culmination of katniss’ ethical journey occurs in her decision to assassinate coin rather than snow. she’s basically rejecting cyclical violence justified by power. coin’s proposed continuation of the hunger games under her new regime represents the failure of utilitarian pragmatism and hollow moral rhetoric. by killing coin, katniss refuses to legitimize a victory achieved through terror and retribution. in just war terms, this moment signals her rejection of illegitimate authority and unjust intention, even when cloaked in revolutionary language. she’s rejecting both the capitol and revolutionary excess and refusing to perpetuate endless “necessary” violence.

what i love about katniss is how realistic she is. she doesn’t emerge from the war as some moral victor or hero but as a survivor that’s been forever scarred by the weight of her choices. it is this refusal of moral certainty that defines her ethical position. katniss isn’t offered as a model of perfect justice, because that’s an impossible standard to reach. she’s more of a reminder that moral responsibility does not end once a cause is deemed just, and that violence may be necessary but must never become separated from accountability. through her character, the hunger games ultimately argues that the most dangerous stance in war is certainty, and that true justice requires the courage to resist both oppression itself and the temptation to continue it.

stepping back & looking at the hunger games as a whole through just war theory

if you look at the hunger games with just war theory in mind, it’s a meditation on the ethics of war and so much more than a simple dystopian story about rebellion. collins depicts a just cause opposed by an unjust regime while also asking whether a war that begins justly can remain just in its execution and outcome. by dramatizing both jus ad bellum and jus in bello collin shows us the fragility of moral legitimacy and dangers of moral absolutism in revolutionary movements.

under jus ad bellum, the rebellion against the capitol initially appears morally justified. the districts suffer from exploitation, repression, state-sponsored violence, and a constant state of terror, establishing a clear just cause for resistance. diplomatic or nonviolent alternatives have been exhausted over decades, satisfying the criterion of last resort, and the growing unity among the districts suggests a reasonable likelihood of success. but collins complicates these conditions by questioning legitimate authority and right intention. as leadership shifts from snow to coin, the moral foundation of the war becomes unstable. the authority claiming to act on behalf of liberation increasingly reveals an intention not exactly to end oppression, but to inherit its power. in this way, we see how a war can meet formal criteria while still hollowing out morality.

in my opinion, the trilogy’s most forceful critique unfolds through jus in bello. as the rebellion intensifies, violations of jus in bello criteria become commonplace. civilian casualties are framed as acceptable/necessary losses, and tactics designed to maximize terror are defended as strategic and efficient. the bombing that kills prim represents the ultimate failure of just conduct in war: harm to civilians is a calculated feature of the plan. by placing this moment at one of the emotional climaxes of the story, collins emphasizes that moral collapse occurs in the accumulation of decisions that treat human life as expendable.

through peeta, gale, and katniss, collins personifies competing responses to these ethical failures. peeta’s pacifism highlights the importance of restraint and moral intention but falters when it refuses to confront injustice. gale’s utilitarianism highlights the urgency of resistance but collapses under the weight of its own excesses. katniss’ role is not to and doesn’t resolve these tensions. she lives within them and has to bear witness to the cost of every moral compromise. her final rejection of coin’s authority through violence signals the trilogy’s ultimate alignment with just war theory’s central insight: that justice in war is not guaranteed by good intentions or righteous causes alone, but must be continually reaffirmed through ethical judgment.

rather than offering a definitive answer to whether the rebellion was “worth it,” the hunger games settles on the conclusion that war may sometimes be necessary, but it is never morally safe. collins does not sanctify violence nor nonviolence.

beyond teams & toward moral vigilance

in the end, the hunger games doesn’t fall into the comfort of simple moral alignment. for katniss, it was never a question of just choosing peeta over gale, just as it was never a matter of choosing peace over violence in the abstract. collins shows us the inadequacy of moral extremes. peace can enable evil. violence an reproduce it. the love triangle is romantic and ethical, dramatizing the tensions at the heart of just war theory.

katniss’ ultimate rejection of coin by killing her crystallizes this warning. moral responsibility doesn’t end with victory. the trilogy tells us that the true measure of a just war lies not in who wins but in whether humanity survives the process intact. additionally, i think it’s important that she killed coin instead of, say, imprisoning her. katniss’ final act tells us that justice cannot survive when power is pursued without restraint. it doesn’t tell us that violence is always wrong, because it’s a means she and many other rebels use constantly throughout the series. but this is where it ends. katniss uses violence to end violence’s cycle, mixing both gale and peeta’s viewpoints.

the hunger games therefore asks us readers to question authority, scrutinize intention, and remain uneasy with any claim that any suffering is just “necessary.” in a world where violence is often justified in the language of justice and peace is offered at the price of submission, we’re reminded through this trilogy that some of the greatest dangers to us are extremism and absolutism.

1. an ethical and philosophical framework used to decide when it’s acceptable to go to war and what actions within that war are permissible.

2. one of the two concepts within just war theory asking how a nation can make sure the war they’re already fighting stays just. there are six criteria in jus ad bellum, and for a war to be justified, it must meet all of them.

just cause: there has to be a moral reason to go to war. however, there is a lot of gray here. for example, if a nation’s moral reason for war is self-defense, when can they act? when they think they’re about to be attacked? after they’re attacked?

right intention: the goal has to be to achieve the cause. selfish aims like territorial gain or money, for example, are the wrong intention. a nation must ask themselves if they have the right intention to go to war, and if this war is trying to achieve something good.

nationhood/legitimate authority: only a proper governing body can declare war, not private individuals or groups. there’s a lot of gray in here, too, because what constitutes a nation? how do we determine a legitimate vs. illegitimate authority?

reasonable hope or likelihood of success: there has to be a realistic chance of achieving the war’s aims. otherwise, it’s a futile waste of life, resources, time, etc. but what defines success?

proportionality (of ends): the overall good expected from the war has to outweigh the inevitable harm and destruction it’ll cause. imagine a future with the war. imagine a future without it. which one is better? how do you know? are you certain?

last resort: all reasonable peaceful alternatives (ex. negotiation, sanctions, diplomacy) have to have been tried and failed or proven ineffective. war has to be the aboslute last resort. this one’s tricky, too, because how do you know what peaceful alternatives are available and feasible? at what point can a nation say said alternatives are ineffective

3. one of the two concepts within just war theory covering what a nation should consider before going into war. there are three criteria in jus in bello, and for a war to be justified, it must meet all of them.

distinction/discrimination: a nation must differentiate between legitimate targets (enemy combatants, equipment) and civilians/civilian objects (homes, hospitals). consider the doctrine of double-effect: “sometimes it is permissible to cause a harm as an unintended and merely foreseen side effect… of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to cause such a harm as a means to bringing about the same good end” (stanford encyclopedia of philosophy).

proportionality (of damage): the collateral damage from war — to people, infrastructure, environment — must be proportionate to the military advantage expected from the attack. but how can you be certain of that you will have an advantage?

necessary action: force can only be used to achieve a legitimate military objective, and only the minimum force necessary is allowed. so, is each and every action necessary?

4. technically, as gale’s direct intention isn’t to harm civilians to invoke terror, he meets the standard of “legitimate targets,” even if he tells katniss in the mockingjay pt.2 movie, “even if those civilians are just mopping floors, they’re helping the enemy. and if they have to die, i can live with that. no one who supports the capitol is innocent.”

so, below are some questions i like to keep in mind as i’m reading or consider after i read fiction stories:

what is the author’s message?

what is the author’s purpose?

these two are different because the message is what meaning i can take away from the story, but the purpose is why the author is writing about this intention, why they want me to grasp this, and what they want me to do after having read their story.

for example, the message of malcolm x’s speech “message to the grassroots” is a warning that engagement in nonviolent activism is inefficient and gives white people the upper hand in the strife towards racial justice. the purpose of his speech, on the other hand, is to revert the african american community’s energy away from unproductive movement in order to transition into an area of radical self-liberalization.

what was the context? does the book fit its context? what did people think about the book during the period of its publishing, and how has that changed since?

what was the exigence?

how does kairos factor into this?

these three are different as well. the context is what was happening at the time and place of the story. the exigence is the direct catalyst of the story. kairos is timeliness to the degree that the persuasive impact of the story is at a max.

for example, the context of thomas paine’s the american crisis, no. 1 is at the time, the revolutionary cause seemed doomed and public support waned after continuous british victories, and morale was needed now more than ever. the exigence is a loss in new york, which, afterwards, the continental army faced a low point as they retreated (many soldiers deserted/returned home). the kairos is an important aspect of this pamphlet/speech because it was spoken to soldiers two days before christmas; colonists were particularly worn down after a lot of loss and the bleak holiday season. paine united them under god against the british and uplifted them. the speech would not have been as impactful as it had been given during, say, the southern campaign.

what ideology is the author imposing?

who is the author’s audience? how do i know? what assumptions exist in the writing about this intended audience?

how does craft/writing style contribute to the story?

how does this story relate to other stories i’ve read?

how does this character struggle? what are their conflicts? how do they respond? what does this say about them?

why does this character do or think this? (consider this especially if a particular action/thought seems out-of-character)

do i see growth in this character?

why do i feel this way about this character, whether i like or dislike them?

what particular rhetorical and/or literary devices do i notice, and how do they impact my feelings toward or my interpretations of the story?

some rhetorical devices to consider: anadiplosis, anaphora/epistrophe, conduplicatio, metonymy/synecdoche, litotes, parallelism, polysyndeton/asyndeton, antanagoge, hyperbaton, parataxis

some literary devices to consider: figurative language, symbolism, imagery, irony (cosmic, dramatic, verbal), juxtaposition, paradox, double entendre, allegory, deus ex machina, in media res

what stands out to me about the story’s syntax?

think: short sentences vs. long sentences, simple vs. compound vs. complex vs. compound-complex sentences, punctuation

what stands out to me about the story’s diction?

take note of: specific words that seem stronger than others, a pattern in words or repetition of same exact words, how effective the diction is, what words i can use to describe the diction

how do internal monologue and dialogue contribute to the story? are character voices clear and distinct?

how do the perspective and the tense the story is written affect the story?

what are some significant tone/mood shifts?

consider: tone and undertone

how does the setting contribute to the story?

consider: weather, location, time

what is consistent and inconsistent in terms of plot, characters, setting, etc?

what are some recurring and important symbols i notice?

does this work ask a question or answer a question (or both)?

1. sunrise on the reaping by suzanne collins

(we all knew this was coming.) not only does this prequel put the entire revolution into perspective, but it brings in the concept of hume’s implicit submission and also reminded us how evil the capitol really is. with the kairos of the book’s release in mind, everything about it felt necessary. it added so much lore to the original trilogy, was one of the few books i had to have a cry count for, and picked up where tbosas left off in terms of political philosophy. it makes us consider propaganda, why we submit to overtly unjust forces, the necessity of nascent rebellions that dwindle so eventually a successful revolution can be sparked, and how history can easily be erased and altered—and how we are so, so susceptible to that. bonus points for nostalgia.

2. giovanni’s room by james baldwin

i went into this book with very limited knowledge about james baldwin. i’d read the paris review’s “james baldwin, the art of fiction no.78,” seen clips from “meeting the man: james baldwin in paris,” and listened to his debate with malcolm x and subsequent interview alongside him and mlk jr, but i’d never actually read his work. so, honestly, i don’t know what i thought it would be like going into i. and by the end, i was absolutely distraught. baldwin’s writing style is so gripping and profound and relatable. this book was a beautiful commentary on love, on youth, on class, on shame, on sexuality, on cowardice, on the human condition, on our ugly truths. i unfortunately saw myself in david, in his self-preservation and his instinct to give in to fear instead of love, in his disconnection from his own self. this book forced me to think beyond the characters and look inward as i judged or understood the characters.

3. just kids by patti smith

i will always, always recommend this book to people. it’s so poignant and wonderfully written; smith has a way with words that captures her thought process, love, art and passion so well. i usually cannot stand nonfiction books or memoirs, and the beginning of the book was pretty slow—but once i got into it, i could not get out. i think the writing is super unique in that i can’t find myself relating to any of her life experiences or a lot of her thoughts/feelings but i do understand them, because she’s just so articulate and such an amazing storyteller. coming out of it i was incredibly inspired and this will stay one of my forever favorites.

4. stoner by john williams

i already wrote a review of this book here, so i’ll keep this one brief. williams turns a very simple man’s life into something so poignant and meaningful; i loved the main character because, similarly to just kids, it wasn’t a matter of relating but understanding. williams’ prose is also gorgeous.

5. kindred by octavia butler

kindred was an amazing read. prior to this book, i’d only read excerpts of butler’s work. i just finished this so i need a little more time to properly reflect on this, but i love the concept that you cannot come back from a past as terrible as slavery and come back whole. dana, the main character, is yanked back into the antebellum south, and through her us readers are reminded that slavery may be over but it is our history and our country’s nature.

6. love in the time of cholera by gabriel garcía márquez

this book is so much to unpack. i read this after one hundred years of solitude and i was not disappointed. i was so struck and had to think for a while about love and its definition. overall i love stories with this sort of sweeping scope (see: pachinko, east of eden, of course also one hundred years of solitude, the joy luck club) and this was a beautiful portrayal of imperfection, aging, and love in all its beautiful and hideous forms.

7. demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver

i could not put this book down. it was so eventful, and that and kingsolver’s writing style had me totally invested. reading from demon’s perspective is so much fun—i love his character voice. the entire way, i was just rooting for demon. kingsolver also very distinct supporting characters. if you’re looking for a book that’s moving, a decently long read, and builds up a ton of momentum all the way to the end, this is the one!

8. intermezzo by sally rooney

i really liked how this book felt like a character study. i got super caught up in the characters and rooney’s prose, but i didn’t really mind. i felt so close to ivan and peter. as expected, intermezzo was pretty political as well, talking about wage and the class dynamics present in relationships. i sped through this book super quickly and enjoyed it almost as much as i enjoyed normal people.

9. letters to milena by franz kafka

if i had to describe letters to milena in one word i would say it’s about longing. as i read, i could literally feel kafka’s ache. it was a little difficult to get through if i’m being completely honest because it was letter after letter and i’m a fiction reader before anything else but kafka was down bad and i loved seeing into his mind this way.

10. this is how you lose the time war by max gladstone and amal el-mohtar

leviathan of panem

enlightenment thinker thomas hobbes famously argued in his book leviathan that in the state of nature—without a sovereign authority—human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” for hobbes, people’s self-interested drives lead to constant fear and violence, and only a powerful “leviathan” sovereign can impose peace.

in panem, president snow and his capitol effectively are a leviathan. the annual hunger games pit unregulated individuals into a brutal survival contest, which echoes hobbes’ “war of all against all.”

indeed, early in the games katniss must overcome the hobbesian arena by force and cunning to survive. after katniss volunteers to take prim’s place, she has to hunt and kill to stay alive, reflecting hobbes’ view that in nature, self-preservation compels cruelty. the capitol reinforces this outlook. a scene in the ballad of songbirds and snakes makes clear that the spectacle of the games is meant to remind citizens what might happen without the capitol’s iron rule; head gamemaker during dr. gaul tells a young coriolanus snow, “‘what happened in the arena? that’s humanity undressed. the tributes. and you, too. how quickly civilization disappears. all your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are. a boy with a club who beats another boy to death. that’s mankind in its natural state” (ch. 16) snow himself comes to share this hobbesian lesson, eventually stating that “unless there’s law, and someone enforcing it… we might as well be animals. like it or not, the capitol is the only thing keeping anyone safe” (ch. 27). (2)

hobbes argued that only an absolute sovereign could restrain mankind’s brutality. panem’s capitol is such a sovereign, as it wields terrifying power to discourage rebellion (bombing civilians, executing dissidents) and claims the games are necessary to keep order. in mockingjay, for example, snow uses child refugees as human shields, an ultimate assertion of state power.

katniss’ challenge to hobbesian logic comes when she and peeta threaten to eat nightlock, preferring mutual death to killing each other under capitol orders and thus shocking the capitol. this principled refusal to play hobbes’ game (life at any cost) forces the authorities to change the rule, turning the pair into symbols of defiance. katniss’ act is a deliberate rejection of submission to a leviathan; she shows that individuals can choose a dignity even in extreme danger. this is the foundation for symbolizing the mockingjay and through it the revolution. in effect, the novels dramatize hobbes’ premise—the games are hobbesian chaos—and then question it: if people can develop solidarity, as, for example, district 11’s salute shows, or defy death to make a stand, perhaps the hobbesian state of nature is not inevitable.

from a lockean pov

by contrast, john locke believed that humans in a state of nature are governed by reason and basic rights, not constant war. locke held that even before governments, people enjoy “perfect freedom” to act and dispose of their possessions as they wish, subject only to the natural law that forbids harming others. in locke’s view, all individuals are equal, and government arises by consent to protect life, liberty, and property. and, importantly, if a government fails to safeguard these rights, people retain a right of revolution.

lockean ideas are reflected in the rebels’ cause in catching fire and mockingjay. from katniss’ perspective, panem’s social contract has been broken: the capitol starves district citizens (violating their natural right to survival), and even conscripts their children. locke’s principle would grant the districts moral license to rebel, and indeed katniss becomes the figurehead of exactly such an uprising. katniss’ compassion, like when she sings “deep in the meadow” as rue dies, exemplifies a lockean sense of basic humanity and mutual duty. district 11’s revolt likewise invokes lockean justice; the enraged villagers claim the capitol has forfeited its right to rule. the series ultimately culminates in a popular overthrow of the capitol’s sovereignty, a literal exercise of locke’s “right of revolution.” governance is tolerated when it protects our inherent, inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property, and if not, the aforementioned right can be exercised.

collins contrasts the capitol’s authoritarianism with lockean values at nearly every turn. the districts are often shown as communitarian and egalitarian; in each hunger games, katniss wanted allies like rue, and wiress, beetee, and mags, which can symbolize a preference for collective well-being over individualism. in the rebellion, characters repeatedly invoke universal rights—katniss rebels in the name of saving all the districts, not just her own. at the end of mockingjay, the new panem government holds democratic elections (an echo of locke’s political theory), and eventually commander paylor of district 8 becomes the first president following the revolution. the series clearly sides with the lockean view that when a regime violates natural rights, the people can and should replace it. (3)

sejanus plinth, one of the most ideologically outspoken characters in the series, articulates in my opinion the clearest lockean statement in the entire hunger games universe. his impassioned declaration—“you’ve no right to starve people, to punish them for no reason. no right to take away their life and freedom. these are things everyone is born with, and they’re not yours for the taking. winning a war doesn’t give you that right. having more weapons doesn’t give you that right. being from the capitol doesn’t give you that right. nothing does” (ch. 11)—is very two treatises of government-esque, as his outrage rests entirely on locke’s central principle: that life, liberty, and basic subsistence are natural rights, not privileges dispensed by rulers. his insistence that “nothing” grants the capitol moral authority to violate these rights is a direct rejection of hobbesian absolutism; it’s the voice of a subject who refuses to consent to an illegitimate sovereign. what makes this quote so powerful is that sejanus expresses it not as political theory but as moral truth—as something self-evident. his instinctive grasp of justice exposes the capitol’s rule as oppressive and also philosophically incoherent. in sejanus, collins creates a character who embodies the pure lockean conviction that when a government systematically destroys the rights it was meant to protect, rebellion is both justified, and more than that, morally obligatory.

rousseau’s general will

jean-jacques rousseau took another angle: humans in nature are free and innately good, but “civilization” corrupts them. he famously opened the social contract with “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” and this is actually one of the epigraphs in the ballad of songbirds and snakes. rousseau envisioned an ideal society governed by the general will—the collective interest of all citizens. his concept of the noble savage (4) suggests people outside of corrupt society live under simpler, egalitarian social bonds.

this rousseauian spirit resonates in panem. the districts, though oppressed, often act with mutual care, implying an underlying goodness. for example, after rue’s death, district 11 publicly honors her, and its salute to katniss and katniss’ reciprocal hand gesture symbolize a shared solidarity beyond tribal divisions. katniss herself eventually becomes a symbol of the districts’ collective will through the mockingjay. her image and songs ignite hope across panem not because she is a perfect leader, but instead because she represents what the people want (end of tyranny, freedom to live). in this way, the series hints at rousseau’s notion of general will. the rebel factions claim to fight for “a just society” for all, not for individual gain.

something else i noticed was that when president coin begins to behave like snow, endorsing a “symbolic” hunger games where the tributes are capitol children, this reflects a danger rousseau warned of: that once the general will is claimed by a new ruling class, freedom can vanish again. in mockingjay, plutarch says, “now we’re in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated... but collective thinking is usually short-lived. we’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction” (ch. 27). the post-war panem in the epilogue, on the other hand, suggests a humble return to natural values, where katniss and peeta are in the covey meadow and seeds of democracy hint at rousseau’s vision of liberty restored.

rousseau’s admiration for small-scale self-government in the social contract (“the savages of north america govern themselves in this way even now, and their government is admirable”) can be seen in collins’s portrayal of the districts. when left largely to themselves, people thrive communally. by contrast, once the capitol exerts control, even natural kindness must be hidden or replaced by performance. indeed, throughout the trilogy katniss is caught between her genuine feelings and the role she must “perform” as the mockingjay, another theme rousseau hinted at: the tension between authentic nature and social facade.

the spirit of romanticism and the covey

while the original trilogy is mainly full of enlightenment debates, the ballad of songbirds and snakes introduces romanticism as a countercurrent, particularly through the character of lucy gray baird and the covey. lucy gray embodies romantic ideals. she is intuitive, poetic, emotionally vivid, and deeply connected to nature. the covey, too, live on the edges of panem’s structured society, adhering to folk traditions and oral storytelling rather than rationalist systems. their music is raw and pretty subversive, and it serves as both resistance and identity.

lucy gray’s defiance is not framed in terms of social contracts or political theory, but as an assertion of personal freedom and dignity in the face of institutional brutality. this romantic impulse contrasts sharply with snow’s trajectory toward cold control and order. whereas enlightenment thinkers debated the best form of government, the covey question whether civilization itself, with its rules and hierarchies, is worth the cost.

lucy gray’s relationship with the natural world—her affinity with snakes and plants, and just nature in general—invokes rousseau’s ideal of uncorrupted nature, but goes further into the emotional and mystical, aligning her with romantic figures like wordsworth’s solitary wanderer or mary shelley’s creature: beautiful, feared, and exiled. her mysterious disappearance into the woods leaves this poetic ambiguity that rational explanation cannot resolve, and this highlights the romantic belief that some truths are felt rather than known.

hume, particularly in sunrise on the reaping

david hume offers a skeptical, empirical angle on politics and human nature. unlike the rationalist hobbes, locke, or rousseau, hume emphasized feelings and social psychology. insight is that political power ultimately depends on popular belief and habit, not force alone. in panem, we see this as the capitol maintains control over the districts not by occupying every village, but by shaping public opinion through propaganda and spectacle.

each hunger games is broadcast as entertainment, teaching citizens that rebellion is futile. districts accept this for decades, illustrating hume’s principle. only when katniss provokes the arena audience with her defiance does their “opinion” shift; the people begin to see the capitol as unjust. in fact, katniss’ defiant suicide threat is a personal action that works by shattering the capitol’s narrative in the public mind, a concrete example of challenging “implicit submission.”

hume also wrote that in every government there is “a perpetual intestine struggle… between authority and liberty,” and that perfect liberty is never fully compatible with strong authority. the hunger games embodies this conflict. from the pacified districts to district 13’s militant order, every regime demands sacrifices of freedom. hume understood that revolutions can easily replace one form of authority with another. indeed, after the capitol falls, many rejoice that they’ve toppled one tyrant, but, again, collins grimly shows that the rebel leadership can just as easily trample liberty. katniss’ final choice to assassinate coin instead of snow embodies hume’s warning that power corrupts both sides. in that climactic moment katniss appeals not to cold reason or ideology but to a moral sentiment: she has grown to see all life as precious, reflecting hume’s own assertion that compassion often guides judgment over abstract rationales.

in addition, hume famously argued that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” meaning that people’s emotions, not logic, ultimately drive action. katniss personifies this. she repeatedly acts out of love or empathy, whether she’s volunteering to save prim or protecting rue. these emotional choices conflict with the rational strategies around her (gale’s willingness to bomb children in vengeance, for instance, conflicts with her mercy). even her decision in the final duel to spare snow is motivated by personal morality, not any grand political calculus. collins portrays future leaders, from snow to coin, as relying on instruments of reason and policy, while katniss relies on instinct and feeling. this tension between rational governance and individual sentiment is very hume, reminding readers that “the great sacrifice of liberty must necessarily be made” in any government, but also that unchecked authority eventually clashes with human empathy.

now, collins herself has said that sunrise on the reaping was explicitly inspired by david hume’s observation about political power. specifically, what hume called “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few” in of the first principles of government, which is a phenomenon he links to implicit submission and to the governors’ dependence on opinion rather than brute force. collins frames the novel as a probe into how propaganda creates that implicit submission. how people come to accept, by habit and storytelling, institutions that are objectively cruel.

hume’s diagnosis is twofold and collins stages both halves in the book.

first, hume notes that force alone cannot explain why populations accept domination; rulers rule because people believe in the rulers’ legitimacy—or because custom and habituation make subordination seem normal. “nothing appears more surprising… than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,” he writes, adding that governors “have nothing to support them but opinion.” collins dramatizes this through the capitol’s rituals, spectacle, and staged narratives— the games themselves, the commentaries, the interviews, the manufactured “danger” of the districts, etc—supress resistance by fear but also manufacture a set of meanings and expectations that stabilize rule until someone like katniss punctures the story.

second, hume’s moral psychology (bringing back the “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” quote) tells us that people act out of feeling, habit, and sentiment far more than abstract rational calculation. collins shows how emotion, ritual, and performative affiliation through songs, salutes, costumes, televised parades, etc create loyalties and excuses for cruelty that survive despite rational reasons to resist. the way the capitol’s broadcasts shape what citizens regard as desirable or shameful, for example, is a humean display that sentiment overriding detached argument. when a single, emotional image (a child’s death, a rebellious salute, a song) is broadcast widely, it shifts collective feeling faster than policy debates ever could—and once feeling shifts, hume predicts, so does political reality.

sunrise on the reaping makes hume’s logic its engine rather than an allusion. collins stages examples of implicit submission on three levels: 1 - the individual (characters who accept the “naturalness” of the reaping), 2 - the spectacle of the games (how ritualized violence normalizes hierarchy), and 3 - the national (how repeated messaging hardens a society’s moral imagination). the opening quarrel, which is written below, between haymitch, who assumes the reaping will always be, and lenore dove, who argues you cannot deduce the future from precedent, is itself a humean lesson about induction: what has always happened may not have to happen tomorrow if the habits that sustain it are questioned. that scene, and collins’s choice of the novel’s title, deliberately echo hume’s worries about induction (5) and thereby ask, what sort of propaganda work must be done, and by what techniques, to keep a population consenting to a barbaric ritual of oppression like the hunger games?

“…the reaping’s going to happen no matter what i believe. sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.” lenore dove frowns. “well, there’s no proof that will happen. you can’t count on things happening tomorrow just because they happened in the past. it’s faulty logic.” “is it?” i say. “because it’s kind of how people plan out their lives.” “and that’s part of our trouble. thinking things are inevitable. not believing change is possible.” “i guess. but i can’t really imagine the sun not rising tomorrow.” a crease forms between her eyebrows as she puzzles out a response. “can you imagine it rising on a world without a reaping?” “not on my birthday. i’ve never had one that came without a reaping.” i try to distract her with a kiss, but she’s determined to make me see. “no, listen,” she says earnestly. “think about it. you’re saying, ‘today is my birthday, and there’s a reaping. last year on my birthday, there was also a reaping. so every year, there will be a reaping on my birthday. but you have no way of knowing that. i mean, the reaping didn’t even exist until fifty years ago. give me one good reason why it should keep happening just because it’s your birthday.”

finally, hume’s skepticism about rationalistic justifications for power helps explain collins’s moral ambivalence about revolution. hume warns that revolts and new regimes can themselves rest on persuasive fictions and contagious passions; collins dramatizes this when the insurgent leadership begins to traffic in the same instrumental narratives and brutal policies as the capitol. in collins’s humean world, the political question is less “which abstract theory is true?” and more “which sentiments and stories hold sway?” that insight makes the hunger games a cautionary tale about the fragility of political legitimacy. the capitol rules because of belief and habit; it falls when belief is broken; but what replaces it will be as morally contingent as whatever passions and narratives bring it into being.

enlightenment dilemmas in panem

the juxtaposition of these enlightenment philosophies in the hunger games trilogy creates deliberate tensions. hobbes’ authoritarian leviathan, the capitol, is ultimately overthrown, suggesting that locke’s limits on government and rousseau’s faith in popular will win out—at least temporarily.

but collins refuses to grant any simple victory. the death of innocents, both in the games and on the battlefield, and the rise of coin’s dictatorship caution readers that neither blind trust in authority nor naive confidence in human goodness is sufficient. the hunger games is not about declaring human nature inherently one way or another, i think; it’s more of a warning to be aware that humans aren’t black and white, we don’t inherently act one way or another. in practice, panem’s leaders (hobbesian or ostensibly rousseauian) all rely on manipulating public “opinion”—a very humean observation—and katniss’ heroism shows that authentic emotion and individual conscience can disrupt those calculations.

collins thus weaves hobbes, locke, rousseau, hume, and romantic concepts into a single narrative tapestry. katniss herself is at the center of this debate. she is neither purely hobbesian nor purely rousseauian, but a person driven by love, fear, anger, and hope. through her eyes we see locke’s revolution, rousseau’s distrust of inequality, hobbes’s fear of chaos, and hume’s skepticism about power. she also comes from the covey and uses music to revolt (“the hanging tree”).

the series asks the reader to weigh these ideas: when the capitol claims that only tyranny can prevent chaos, katniss and the rebels remind us of locke’s and rousseau’s insistence on liberty and justice. when rebels begin to mirror the capitol’s ruthlessness, collins channels hume to suggest that vigilance and moral sentiment must guard against authority’s abuses. when the capitol reinforces a colorless, desolate life for its district citizens, the covey bring life and color (like lucy gray’s dress, the music, nature, etc).

in the end, the hunger games offers no tidy answer, but it does illustrate the enlightenment’s most enduring question: how do we balance authority and freedom in view of fallen human nature?

the intellectual movement (1685 - 1815) throughout europe and the west that emphasized reason, science, individual liberty, and the concept of achieving wisdom. concepts of rationalism and empiricism, the theory that knowledge derives from sense, challenged traditional authority and promoted new ideas about government and society.

in the movie, snow also claims that “the whole world is an arena. and we need the hunger games. every year. to remind us all who we truly are.”

locke’s faith in reason also informs peeta’s approach. his morality—like when he says in the hunger games “i want to die as myself… i don’t want them to change me in there. turn me into some kind of monster when i’m not” (ch. 10) to katniss—represents the belief of truth’s power.

“the uncivilized man, who symbolizes the innate goodness of one not exposed to the corrupting influences of civilization” (britannica).

evolutionary roots of art

if you peel back the layers of human history far enough, beyond the manuscripts and museums, past the ruins of ancient cities and the first permanent dwellings, you eventually arrive in a world where nothing “extra” should exist. this is the sort of world where every hour is spent on staying warm, fed, and alive. but even there, in, for example, paleolithic caves, human beings were smearing ochre onto walls.

when i look at those earliest drawings, i immediately thought, who even had time for this? because whoever made these had to deliberately take time between hunting and sleeping to find pigments and surfaces, then create this art.

we often imagine our ancestors as purely practical beings, but the evidence doesn’t let us keep that illusion. the impulse to create was there from the start; it was never something that appeared once we got comfortable. it’s part of how we became human.

and so we turn to evolution to understand why creativity is such a persistent, cross-cultural obsession. why does every group of humans, even under dire conditions, make room for it?

one theory suggests that art evolved as a kind of display, a way of advertising intelligence and skill. it might be a little weird to imagine our earliest songs as mating calls, but i don’t think it’s actually that far fetched when i think of how cool young me thought ashton irwin was when he was drumming.

another theory sees art as social glue. before we had written contracts or legal systems, we had dance. dancing together created trust and helped small, more vulnerable groups work together. even today, anyone who’s sung with a choir or danced in a crowd knows that the boundary between “me” and “us” gets blurry fast.

others argue that art was our first educational technology. the world was dangerous, and stories were a way of passing on hard-won knowledge, like what happened the last time someone strayed too far from camp.

and then there’s the possibility that art evolved because the human mind is simply too complex to be contained by utility alone. once consciousness—this strange mix of memory, emotion, imagination—arrived, maybe creativity was inevitable. maybe it was a pressure release, a way to metabolize the overwhelming experience of being alive.

all of these theories point to the same truth, regardless of which one(s) you believe: art was never superficial. it helped our ancestors survive physically, and also emotionally and socially. it shaped our relationships and our identity.

that means, then, every time you pick up a brush or sit down at a piano or work on your manuscript, you’re reenacting a process millions of years old. you’re doing what humans have always done and turning survival into a little more than survival.

meaning and transcendence

at some point in adulthood, usually after a few rounds of heartbreak and a couple of unexpected losses, you start to realize that the real challenges of life are ontological and internal. who am i? who should i become? how do i live with uncertainty? no one prepares you for those questions. we just stumble around and try to build a life while also wrestling with this internal world. so, this is where the art steps in.

art is the human attempt to metabolize existence. through art, we’re turning the shapelessness of our inner lives into something more real. art about heartbreak, for example, gives shape to confusion and lets us name what it means to be human without making us solve anything.

at its core, art is a meaning-making technology. when i feel i have something to say, i write. when i feel upset, i listen to music. when i feel overwhelmed, i (attempt to) paint. there’s a reason people take to art when they’re mourning or after a breakup. art holds an emotional truth to it.

whenever someone says art is “unnecessary,” it kills me. i want to roll my eyes and walk off. unnecessary for what? for paying rent? maybe. but for for living a life you can actually bear? for staying literate? (look at the emotional and media literacy crises we’re in). for dealing with sorrow and appreciating joy? art is as essential to us as oxygen is.

it’s also one of the only ways we transcend ourselves. most of life traps us inside our own perspective. however, art lets us slip into another consciousness, momentarily dissolving the boundaries that separate us from each other. a novel quite literally shifts your point of view to another person’s.

when we stand in front of a great painting or hear a gorgeous song that short-circuits your mind, the effect is spiritual. maybe not necessarily religious, but spiritual in the sense that it lifts us briefly out of time and reminds us that we’re part of something larger. a cosmic thread, a shared human experience stretching back centuries.

no wonder early humans painted in caves they considered sacred. no wonder so many cultures blended art with ceremony and the gods. there’s something in us that recognizes beauty as a form of truth. art lets us reach toward what we can’t find words for, or whatever we mean when we say “life.”

the real transcendent quality of art is that it allows us to step outside the bluntness of speech and logic and enter a realm where meaning is allowed to be ambiguous and open-ended.

artists, of course, know this intuitively. when you’re deep in a creative process, it feels like slipping through a crack in reality. hours can disappear. the world narrows into a single gesture or phrase or brushstroke. you’re communing with something older and deeper. some people call that flow. others call it intuition or spirit. but whatever the name, this experience reminds that art is about both expression and connection, the entering of the liminal space between the real and the imagined, the self and the world. in that space, even briefly, we transcend the smallness of daily life. we become, for a moment, larger than ourselves.

art sustains our souls and gives us language for what would otherwise remain unsaid, and so, we need it just as much as we need food or companionship.

a tapestry of creativity

if you ever want proof that creativity isn’t some niche hobby reserved for the particularly whimsical, all you need to do is look at history. every culture reveals itself through its creations. there’s a lot of variety, but also a lot of consistency. across continents, climates, languages, and time periods, humans keep arriving at the same instinct: to turn the raw material of existence into something beautiful. wherever humans gather, creativity follows.

in a cave in sulawesi, tens of thousands of years ago, someone pressed pigment around their hand and left a stencil on stone. meanwhile, half a world away and countless years later, an ainu storyteller in northern japan recited long epic chants of myths and memories. in the andes, artisans wove textiles with patterns so intricate they functioned as both art and language. in west africa, griots held entire histories in their voices; they were living libraries. aboriginal painters dotted stories of creation across rock and canvas. inuit carvers turned myth into bone and ivory. polynesian navigators tattooed symbols of ancestry, spirituality, and ocean knowledge.

it’s endless. the tapestry of world art is endless. it goes across geography and time by millions and millions of human hands.

and these traditions emerged independently. cultures separated by oceans and millennia still found their way to art. it’s as if creativity were a kind of instinctual language. humans just can’t help creating.

so if you’re an artist today, you’re participating in something unimaginably vast, a continuous chain of human expression stretching back to the dawn of our species. to go back to the tapestry metaphor, you’re contributing a thread to a tapestry millions of hands have been weaving long before you arrived and will continue long after you’re gone. art is how we remember ourselves and inherit each other.

art unites us and makes us better

if you think about the moments in life when you’ve felt most connected to other people, chances are at least a few of them were held together by art. dancing in a crowded room where everyone is sweating and no one cares or singing along to a song that everyone knows (i always think back to the videos of people in washington square park singing to lorde on a speaker).

art often slips past our defenses and reminds us that we’re not actually as separate as we pretend to be. it creates a kind of emotional commons, a shared internal landscape where people who have nothing in common on paper still find themselves moved by the same chord progression, the same book quotes, the same image of a skyline.

and you can measure this, of course. neuroscientists will tell you that when people make music together or move in rhythm, their brains literally synchronize. anthropologists have long observed how ritual performances (like storytelling, drumming, chanting) bind communities. psychologists describe how shared aesthetic experiences soften us, lowering our guard, thus making empathy easier.

but those explanations, true as they are, miss something essential—art gives us a safe, almost sacred, place to feel things in public.

in most areas of life, we’re asked to be efficient and composed. but when we enter artistic spaces like concert halls, we’re granted permission to be porous again. we get to feel without restraint or embarrassment. the emotional privacy we cling to so tightly suddenly becomes communal, and that vulnerability strengthens us.

there’s a reason communities turn to art in times of crisis. people sing from balconies during pandemics or they paint murals after tragedies. when all else fails, art steps in. it doesn’t really solve anything, but it holds our pain.

and something fascinating happens in those moments: art not only helps us endure the worst parts of being human, it makes us better humans in the process. it’s no coincidence that people who engage deeply with the arts often report higher empathy, greater resilience, and a stronger sense of belonging. creating or experiencing art gives us pleasure and connection, but it also stretches our emotional muscles. we learn how to inhabit complexity, tolerate ambiguity, delight in nuance. these are not small skills. relationships, communities, societies depend on these.

in a world increasingly fractured by distraction and distrust, art remains one of the last places where people can gather without needing to agree on anything except the fact that they’re all the same at their core, just human. art turns individuals into a “we.” beneath all the surface differences, there’s this shared pulse.

art is enough to change a life. it’s also enough to change the world.

embracing the creative lineage

evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology all point to the same conclusion that art matters deeply to us. it matters personally and it has shaped our species. every time you mold clay or choreograph a dance, you are tapping into something primal and pervasive. you’re validating a human need. american anthropologist ellen dissanayake says in her book early rock art of the american west: the geometric enigma that to artify (1) “is a universal behavioral predisposition like other characteristic behaviors such as language, tool-making, attachment in infants, maternal care, adult pair bonding, group living, ritual/religious practices, warfare, ethnocentrism, and many other behaviors that are found in all cultures.” we share this predisposition with our ancestors and, likely, with all future generations.

so, if you’re an artist, your creativity is not in vain or from vanity. if that thought has ever crossed your mind, send it straight to the trash. you’re part of human evolution’s grand experiment in meaning and connection. you’re continuing practices as old as our kind, practices that have given and will continue to give countless people a glimmer of beauty in dark times.

keep making. the world needs art in every form and artists of every kind. you’re participating in a lineage that is timeless and universal. by expressing what you care about, you are helping to bind us into a richer, more empathetic society.

ultimately, we humans need art because we need to feel alive, seen, understood. art turns our inner life outward and builds bridges between souls. art is how we remember we are human. keep creating; in doing so, you honor the millions of artists who came before you and light the way for those yet to come.

the narrative we’ve been sold

somewhere along the way, we got tricked into thinking cynicism was intelligence. that being jaded made you serious, and that anyone still talking about hope was either naive or selling something. i don’t even blame people for buying into it—because what else were we supposed to do? when every election feels like choosing between evil and evil-er, when the headlines read like obituaries for decency, cynicism starts to look like armor. we stopped expecting anything from politics except disappointment.

it’s wild how quickly “anti-establishment” got twisted into “anti-human.” the internet’s full of people who think compassion is a brand strategy, who sneer at anyone trying to make politics about care. but look at who actually won this week. people who speak in full sentences, who don’t posture like pundits, who spend more time knocking doors and talking to their local communities than tweeting slogans. they’re not viral personalities. they’re not designed for the algorithm. they’re the kind of politicians who make hope look… boring, at least compared to outrage. but that’s the trick of it, right? hope doesn’t trend. it just works.

somewhere beneath all the noise, people got real tired of being angry. we wanted someone who’d fight for them without performing it. the sweep was powered by a belief that the government should work for people again (2).

and that’s the part nobody wants to admit. hope isn’t soft. it’s hard, hard work. it’s getting up when everything tells you it’s pointless. it’s choosing to care, again and again, in a system built to wear you down. it’s a practice, not a mood. hope is something you do with your hands. it’s the canvasser who still knocks doors after a twelve-hour shift, the phonebanker who keeps calling even when no one else picks up, the voter who still believes their small act matters. it’s a fight against despair.

because despair is easy. despair sells. hope, on the other hand, is messy. it requires faith in people who will inevitably disappoint you, patience with institutions that move like glaciers. hope means accepting that progress might not come fast enough for you to see it, but planting the seeds regardless.

i think that’s what this moment represents. we’re realizing that disengagement isn’t helping us, at all; it’s surrender. if you check out, someone else checks in, and it’s usually the people least interested in your well-being.

policy, turnout, messaging, strategy—all of this helped, yes. but this sweep was, in large part, because of the fact that we’re deciding to believe again, not in politicians, but in our own power to demand better.

superman and the myth of hope

somewhere in the last decade, we decided hope was embarrassing.

we got sick of hoping. you could track our collective burnout just by watching the cape. superman used to stand for something simple: “truth, justice, and the american way.” he was earnest to the point of parody. a farm boy who still believed in people. then our values shifted. we started wanting our heroes “gritty.” we wanted anti-heroes, gray morals, “realism.” and suddenly zack snyder’s superman showed up—all shadows and brooding silence and slow-motion jesus poses. superman, the most genuine hero out there became too soft and naive for the “real world.”

people want something different, now. we want the guy who believes the world is worth saving, even with all this mess. we want leaders—and neighbors—who don’t act like goodness is outdated.

superman’s whole deal is that he could rule us if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. he saves people because they need saving. they need saving. that’s it. and he’s the model we lost somewhere along the way in politics. we started idolizing the batman types, the lone vigilantes, the disruptors, the “necessary evil” archetypes.

but then james gunn brought superman back, and his rendition was entirely focused on superman’s inherent goodness and kindness—a rebellious act in a cynical world. his movie was a return to the classic comic book feel, too; we saw superman prioritizing saving every single life, teamwork, and themes of duty and humanity. his reboot was a little reminder to us all. the light of hope never really went out, we just forgot to look up (3).

when mamdani campaigned on freezing rent, fast and free buses, and free childcare, it was a little jarring. we’ve been fed a lot of ideological fluff from democrats lately; their messaging is all wrong, focusing on things that people just can’t care about when they need to pay the bills. but all mamdani cared about was new york, and making it a city all of its natives could afford to live and thrive in. his campaign was so human, full of conviction and the belief in a possibility for change.

and that’s why this sweep hit differently. it wasn’t only born from outrage or revenge or even desperation, but also from the radical idea that hope still matters. that we can build something instead of just burn it down.

i always think about how superman was created in 1938, in the middle of the great depression, by two working-class jewish kids in cleveland who dreamed up a man who couldn’t be corrupted by power. they didn’t make him rich or untouchable, they made him good. that’s not an accident. it was an act of rebellion. hope, for them, was anti-establishment.

maybe that’s the same energy we’re seeing again now. a generation that’s been told for years that idealism is childish, standing up and saying, actually, no—kindness is the point.

again, this doesn’t mean blind faith in politicians. don’t do that. this means recognizing that the most radical thing in a world full of greed and cruelty is still empathy. it’s the willingness to look at something broken—a city budget, a healthcare system, a democracy—and thinking that we can fix it.

i think that’s why this sweep felt so personal for so many of us. it wasn’t just the idea of that blue wave we didn’t see in 2024, it was proof that people still care. that we still want to believe in something bigger than cynicism.

a cultural reset

the strangest part of november 4 wasn’t the scoreboard or the way we saw win after win pile up. it was how it felt. you could see it in the way people were posting that night. the disbelief wasn’t about the wins themselves—it was about the fact that these wins were powered by hope. the idea that, actually, maybe the government should care about people again.

spanberger. sherrill. mamdani. wu. the PA courts. prop 50.

it wasn’t one type of candidate. it wasn’t one demographic. these victories were scattered across geography and messaging style and constituency, but stitched together by the exact same emotional thread: people recognizing themselves in their representatives. for the first time in forever, it didn’t feel like the candidates were trying on a costume to appeal to “the working class.” they’re just people. not above. not performing solidarity. actually standing in it.

this could’ve very quickly gone the other way. if people caved to that voice in their head whispering that nothing matters, if turnout was just a little lower by consequence. but people dragged themselves to those polls. they signed up to phonebank and canvass. i saw a video of a couple podcasters talking about seeing white girls canvassing for zohran in the bronx. people put in the work, got their hands dirty, and fought for hope.

if you offer people sincerity, they show up.

the work is hope

hope gets treated like a feeling, but really, it’s a job. it’s a noun, but it’s also, and more importantly, a verb.

after the sweep, my dad and i celebrated. but then, the question hung in the air: now what? it’s far from over, so now what? we have to keep working. work is where hope stops being theory.

it’s easy to romanticize the sweep as a turning point, a cinematic moment when the credits could roll and we all exhale. but that’s not how it works. real progress is granular, tedious, unphotogenic. it’s the spreadsheets, the city-council testimony, the ten-minute chat with a neighbor who thinks politics is pointless. hope lives in those little acts, the invisible ones that never make it into campaign recaps or victory speeches. and it requires humility.

if this election reminded us of anything, it’s that no single person, no single race, carries the weight of salvation. spanberger, sherrill, wu, mamdani—they’re not icons; they’re participants. they hold the torch for a while, then someone else picks it up. idolizing them misses the point. the miracle isn’t in who won; it’s in the millions of ordinary hands that made winning possible. there’s the revolution hidden inside this sweep: collective agency.

in a media landscape that feeds on spectacle, the idea of shared labor doesn’t trend. but that’s exactly what turned the tide. translators at polling places, texts with your loved ones.

a fellow volunteer drove myself and another around to canvass in her rusted-out honda. these are the engines of hope. when you realize you’re a part of that machine, you stop waiting for someone else to rescue you. you start acting like a citizen again.

superman was never meant to be a god, he was meant to be a mirror. a reminder of what we’re capable of when we decide to help. every story about him is secretly a story about us. and right now, “us” looks like a thousand small acts of maintenance. hope doesn’t need a cape. it just needs consistency. we don’t build movements by winning; we win by building movements. this sweep is just the beginning of a story, and we have to keep going. hope, in my opinion, isn’t the light at the end of the tunnel. it’s the act of carrying the torch while you’re still inside it.

so, yes, there was a blue wave. but the real win is that, for a moment, millions of people remembered what hope and what the fruits of that hope feel like. and i hope we can hold onto even a fraction of that. because in the end, the work is the hope, and the hope is the work.

this is not to say these people are perfect or should be idolized! this win says more about us than it does them!

AKA popular sovereignty; their power comes from our will, and their duty is to serve it.

i think about the way memory works—how it can expand a single mistake into an entire multiverse of regret and i-should’ve-done-this. and sometimes, just for a few minutes, i can feel the weight of it pressing down and i can’t escape it. but then the wind moves through the trees outside, scraping against the window, and i remember that the world’s still turning. the morning air smells faintly of wet leaves and cold earth. the smell is november, and it exists only now. something is happening that isn’t in the past. i’m here. the faint sunlight is here. i can feel it on my skin if i tilt my hand just so. and for a moment, i don’t really think about anything else. no rewinds. no if-onlys.

but these moments are so, so fragile. my mind drifts easily, weakly. i start to remember that utterly un-funny joke i made, or that miniscule thing i did that changed how a person sees me. and i feel the old tug, this magnetic pull of what has already happened. it’s an echo that won’t stop bouncing in the hollow of my skull.

i try to remind myself that even the echoes are part of now, in a way. that they’re the residue of living, the proof that i acted and that i felt. that the mistakes and embarrassments, they’re mine. mine to hold, mine to release if i choose.

but choosing to release is hard. harder than it should be. it’s like trying to unlearn the way you learned to hold your pencil. awkward, uncomfortable. you can’t help but fall back into old habits without noticing.

so i don’t always succeed in it. releasing, that is. that’s a major understatement; i fail most times i let my mind wander. but there are these small victories: noticing the sound of my own footsteps on the sidewalk, watching the sun rise in the morning while i’m studying. little things i didn’t see last november, or the november before that, because i was too busy with the ghost of some careless word, some wasted opportunity.

i want to keep trying. the alternative is unbearable. living entirely in the past leaves nothing left to inhabit except for hollowness. and so i turn my attention to the present, as small and uneven as that attention may be. i open the window and let the november air slip in, let it brush against my arms, let it remind me that i am not my regrets. i am this: here, cool, breathing, alive. i tell myself that these moments are enough, that they are everything. that life doesn’t wait for me to stop thinking about the past. it flows anyway. and if i can meet it even a little, just a little, i am learning how to live.

the beauty of the visuals

flanagan and cinematographer michael fimognari build a world drained of excess color. the palette leans toward ash and dusk, faded blues, soft greys, the occasional amber glow that’s reminiscent of candlelight. even daylight seems mournful in this show, touched by grief. the result isn’t the high-contrast chiaroscuro of gothic horror, which i think we’ve grown accustomed to by classic horror. instead, the visual tone is similar to that of a fading photograph.

each shot is composed with a sort of restraint. the characters are framed in doorways and mirrors, caught in symmetrical balance that recalls religious iconography. the stillness is like an altar to the past. the camera holds on a particular character’s face (for example, nell whenever she encounters the bent-neck lady, or shirley in the scenes where she’s alone with nell’s body), it feels like a moment of prayer. the lens invites us to dwell in the sorrow.

even hill house itself is filmed as a living memory. its corridors are symmetrical, recursive, almost impossibly orderly, like the architecture of a dream. the repetition of space—the same hallway glimpsed across timelines, the same staircase reappearing decades later—creates a sensation of déjà vu that blurs memory and reality. we’re never sure if the crains are haunted by ghosts or by their own recollections/replayings of the same emotional loops until grief itself becomes spatial.

this sense of looping finds its apotheosis in “two storms,” the bravura sixth episode filmed largely in long, unbroken takes. the camera drifts between timelines, moving through the present-day funeral home into the past’s grand, collapsing mansion. the transitions are fluid, melancholy, almost tender. the technique could easily have felt showy, but here it becomes emotional architecture. time folds in on itself, memory refuses to die.

time as mourning

where most horror depends on acceleration through things like sharp edits, abrupt sound cues, the quickened pulse of fear, flanagan builds his dread through duration. he lets moments breathe until they ache. the pacing is deliberate, almost hypnotic; every long take, every lingering glance forces the viewer to sit in the space between emotions.

in this stillness, grief expands. the show’s rhythm mimics the experience of mourning. time doesn’t progress linearly but pools and recedes, trapping us in cycles of remembrance. the camera doesn’t cut away from pain and instead remains, unflinching, until sadness becomes a kind of transcendence.

like i said earlier, there’s horror here, definitely. i was frozen after that car scene with shirley and theo. but there’s also the horror of realization—the slow dawning that some losses just can’t be undone, that love and suffering are entangled beyond separation. in hill house, ghosts are residues of feeling that never left. steven himself says, “ghosts are guilt, ghosts are secrets, ghosts are regrets and failings. But most times most times a ghost is a wish.”

the emotional climax of the series, when the surviving crains finally confront the house and their own entanglement with it, the tone is elegiac, not exorcistic. there’s no expulsion of demons or destruction of monsters here. it’s just reconciliation, because to let go of the haunting would be to let go of love itself.

the sounds of grief

i absolutely love the newton brothers’ score. their music is spare and looping—soft piano arpeggios, faint strings, etc. the themes recur gently throughout the series, shifting only in key or texture. sometimes the score sounds like a lullaby; other times, a dirge. either way, it functions as emotional connective tissue, linking moments across timelines.

even silence becomes musical. the show often holds in hushed stillness, like in the soft creak of floorboards. these sounds give so much weight to the void. we can almost hear the house remembering. it feels alive.

one of the score’s most affecting moments comes in the finale, when the piano motif returns as nell’s voice, now spectral, speaks of love that bends time. the music and the words blend into something resembling grace. what began as horror resolves into harmony.

haunted by tenderness

in my opinion, what makes hill house so, so beautiful and tragic is that it refuses to separate love from pain. every ghost in the series is an echo of devotion: a mother who can’t stop reaching for her children, a twin who can’t stop looking or looking out for the other, a father and husband who can’t stop remembering how he’s failed his wife, his kids. the house keeps them, but not cruelly. it holds them the way the heart holds grief—tightly, endlessly, because it cannot bear to let go.

this show mourns the endurance of love. the camera’s slow movement, the music’s repetition, the muted palette—it all conspires to make the audience feel what it means to be haunted not by malice but by memory.

even the structure of the series mirrors the act of grieving. each of the first five episode focuses on a different crain sibling, circling the same events from new emotional angles. by the finale, we’ve seen every side of the house’s sorrow, and what emerges is just pure love. longing, mourning, all words that come from love. the repetition that once seemed oppressive becomes redemptive, and loss becomes continuity.

love beyond loss

in the finale, as the surviving crains gather and the house releases its hold, the show makes a pretty bold move by letting the melancholy remain. there’s no cathartic triumph, no eradication of the ghosts. the ending instead hums with acceptance. there’s recognition that the past is part of us, that grief and love occupy the same space in our hearts.

the haunting of hill house begins as a ghost story and ends as an elegy. its real horror isn’t death or monstrosity, but endurance, seen in the persistence of emotion, the impossibility of forgetting. but that endurance is also what redeems it. the house, for all its darkness, becomes a metaphor for memory itself. terrifying, yes, but also the only place where love can survive untouched by time.

i think about that often. that the same sentence could carry him across the pacific and also carry him out of the world. life begins in departure, and it ends in departure, too. my grandfather knew and accepted this. to him, change was not something to resist—why would it be? life demands motion. it doesn’t pause for our convenience or wait until we are ready. change arrives whether we welcome it or not. this has proven true again and again throughout my life.

as a child, i wanted desperately for things to stay in place. i wanted the world to hold still like a scene in a photograph—the kitchen in the morning with my grandmother’s hands wrapped around our old starbucks amsterdam mug, the rooms i knew the layouts of by heart, the way the light used to fall through my old kitchen window at four in the afternoon. i thought change was a kind of mistake, an interruption in the story that is life. i thought change was something to endure until things settled down, and once you got over it, you could become yourself, once and for all.

but life has a way of tugging at the roots you try to plant and grow from. people leave. plans dissolve. jobs end. you wake up one morning and the person in the mirror has a new face—one you didn’t choose, exactly, but one you’ve grown into. when i moved away from my hometown and much of the family i grew up with and all of my old friends, i thought at first that the ground was falling away. it took time for me to come to understand that it was still there, just reshaping. every change i faced opened up a space i didn’t want, but filled it, too. sometimes with something better, sometimes with something worse, but always something new.nothing is immune to the passage of time

i have learned—since leaving my small hometown, since sitting by my grandfather’s hospital bed days before and the day that he passed—to welcome change as both teacher and companion. it’s not a disruption but something you live with. it’s not a failure of stability but the evidence of living. it’s proof that i’m alive enough to be remade, again and again and again. impermanence doesn’t mean insignificance or imperfection. it means possibility.

now, when i think of my grandfather’s words—“it’s time to move, isn’t it?”—i hear less of a question and more of a reminder: that we have to take risks. we have to change. we have to move forward without certainty, and find meaning not in what endures but in what doesn’t.

the illusion of constant connection

we live in an age where distance has lost much of its meaning. a text can cross oceans in seconds. a photo can summon someone’s face instantly. we can reach out to anyone, anywhere, at anytime. that should feel like freedom, right?

wrong.

often times, instead of feeling liberated, many of us feel suffocated.

the modern love story unfolds in a space where availability has replaced presence. there’s this unspoken rule in digital connection: if you can respond, you should. if you don’t, it must mean something. a delay feels like detachment. silence feels like rejection.

in this hyperconnected landscape, intimacy can feel like a performance. it’s a constant stream of messages meant to reassure people on both ends that the bond still exists. “good morning,” “thinking of you,” “how was your day?”—sweet, habitual gestures that tether us together, yet also blur into digital noise. we’ve never been more reachable, but so many of us feel profoundly unseen.

psychologists call this ambient intimacy (the feeling of closeness to people achieved by passively observing flashes of their lives through social media). it’s the illusion of closeness created by continuous low-level communication. we share tiny fragments of our lives, but rarely the deeper truths that require a sort of vulnerability that can only be present in real life.

before smartphones, there were natural rhythms to communication. you’d wait for a letter, a call, a planned meeting. the pauses between contact gave us room to breathe. time to miss someone, to reflect, to anticipate. now, those pauses are filled with notifications. the instant we feel distance, we reach for our phones, trying to close the gap instantly.

but connection isn’t the same as closeness. sometimes, being constantly in touch can actually dull emotional intensity, like listening to a song on repeat until it loses its weight.

true intimacy needs space. aka silence. why? because it leads to longing. and, as i’ve said in one of my earlier essays, distance does indeed make the heart grow fonder. but the modern relationship is so often crowded with digital chatter. we know what our friend had for lunch through their story, what song they’re listening to through airbuds, even when they were last online. but we don’t know what they really feel.

we mistake access for understanding, responsiveness for care. we are together all. the. time. all the time. it’s exhausting. this constant, low-volume hum—always there, always on, demanding our attention but, in the end, meaningless.

the anxiety of the read receipt

few modern experiences capture the troughs of digital love like the moment a message says “read 2:14 pm.”

it’s such a small thing—a gray timestamp beneath a few lines of text—but it can send the mind spinning.

they saw it. why haven’t they replied? did i say too much? not enough? did i misread the tone?

love used to be measured in gestures and words. now, it’s measured in response times. if someone doesn’t respond to you within a certain period of time, they don’t care about you.

the read receipt is a perfect metaphor for our digital emotional landscape. constant visibility, but uncertain meaning. it gives us information without context, proof without reassurance. you know they’ve seen your words, but not how they felt reading them.

this new form of limbo has created what psychologists sometimes call texting anxiety (the heightened emotional response triggered by digital ambiguity). a pause that might have once gone unnoticed in a face-to-face conversation now becomes an agonizing void. we fill it with projection, with overanalysis.

when communication becomes instantaneous, so does overthinking.

texting collapses time and space, but not insecurity. if anything, actually, it magnifies it. we refresh the chat, reread our own messages, wonder if a shorter reply means something has changed. the brain, ever hungry for narrative, invents one in the absence of clarity.

tone, too, becomes a minefield. without facial expressions or body language, every word is open to interpretation. “sure.” could mean agreement, indifference, or suppressed irritation. “ok!” could be enthusiasm, or an attempt to mask disappointment. emojis try to soften the edges, but even they can misfire. is the heart emoji too much? is the lack of one a sign of distance?

in the analog world, silence had texture. you could feel someone’s hesitation, see it in their eyes. digital silence, on the other hand, is formless and infinite, a blank space that reflects our own fears back at us.

there’s also something uniquely addictive about this uncertainty. each ping of a new message delivers a small hit of dopamine, a neurological reward that mirrors the patterns of gambling or social media scrolling. the next message could be affectionate, thrilling, disappointing—we never know. and that unpredictability keeps us hooked.

so we stay tethered to our screens, chasing reassurance in the form of notifications. we think we want connection, but often what we crave is confirmation, proof that we matter, that we’re still in someone’s thoughts.

but love can’t be fully quantified by digital signs. the “read” doesn’t mean understood, and the quick reply doesn’t equal care. the moments of waiting, of wondering, might still hold something sacred—the last remaining space where patience and trust can live in a world obsessed with instant clarity.

hyper-personal, but surface-level

there’s something paradoxical about how texting draws us closer. we talk more than ever, between meetings or before bed or during breakfast. the phone in our hand becomes a confessional booth, a diary that talks back. we can reveal things we might never say out loud, because a screen feels safer than a face.

that’s what makes it feel hyper-personal. you can be lying in the dark, whispering your fears to a rectangle of glass, knowing the person on the other end might be doing the same. the exchange feels electric, almost sacred. the distance between two hearts collapses.

but beneath this intimacy, something skims.

texting compresses emotion into fragments: a thought, an image, a line of affection. we share constant updates but rarely the fullness of ourselves. it’s intimacy stripped of context. no smell of skin, no tone of voice, no timing of laughter to remind you that what’s being said is real.

digital closeness gives us the illusion of depth. you can know someone’s favorite coffee order, their spotify listening, the tiktoks that make them laugh, and still not know how their voice changes when they’re nervous, or how they laugh when something’s actually funny.

the conversation scrolls endlessly, but it’s often built on surfaces. photos, jokes, affirmations, small talk about dinner plans. the deeper things—vulnerability, conflict, apology—can feel harder to express through text. there’s so much chance for misunderstanding. so, we curate ourselves instead. we type, delete, re-type. we send the best version of our thoughts, not the raw one.

that’s what makes digital intimacy both comforting and deceptive: it can feel transparent, but it’s actually carefully edited. we’re fluent in the language of emotional exposure, but not always in the practice of emotional risk.

in-person connection is messy. it demands patience, periods of silence, physical presence. it’s awkward. it’s imperfect. (aka: it’s human). texting offers an escape hatch. you can craft, delay, withdraw. you can say i love you without eye contact, or end a conversation without consequence.

but the soul of love isn’t efficiency, it’s friction.

so while our phones make us feel hyper-connected, they also give us permission to hover at the surface. to touch without touching, to know without knowing.

maybe that’s the central tension of modern intimacy. we are closer than ever, but rarely present. the connection feels personal, but the experience remains pixel-thin.

the lost art of subtext

in the analog world, so much of love lived in the spaces between words. subtext was the secret language of affection—glances, breaths, and silences that revealed more than speech ever could.

but texting doesn’t have room for that kind of nuance. in digital communication, everything is literal. the pause is just a delay. the silence isn’t meaningful—it’s ambiguous. we can’t see hesitation or warmth, we can only guess at it. a single message must carry all the emotional data that body language once delivered for free.

so, we compensate.

we add ellipses to imply thoughtfulness, exclamation marks to mimic enthusiasm, emojis to approximate feeling. our texts are performances of tone, written in shorthand.

but something gets lost in translation. the messy, living pulse of human interaction is flattened into typeface. where we once had texture (the trembling voice, the long look, the little pause) we now have symbols. emotional cues that used to arise naturally now require coding.

and in that coding, we often misread. what was meant as playfulness can sound cold. what was meant as brevity can sound dismissive. a missing emoji can spark an argument. the absence of subtext turns every message into a kind of emotional rorschach test—we project what we fear or hope to see.

subtext once protected intimacy too. it allowed lovers to communicate subtly, to sense one another beyond words. it offered layers—what was said, what was meant, what was felt. now, we flatten all three into a single line of text and hope it lands where we intend.

there’s a certain tragedy in that loss. because love, in its truest form, thrives in what’s left unsaid. it’s in the quiet glance, the half-smile, the shared silence where meaning ripens. digital language is efficient, fast. it also leaves little room for that slow, wordless intimacy.

we’ve built a communication system optimized for clarity, but love was never meant to be clear. it’s supposed to unfold in tension and implication, in what’s hinted rather than declared.

maybe that’s why texting can feel so thin, if that word makes sense. not because we lack words, but because we’ve lost the pauses that made them matter.

ghosting and situationships

in the digital age, endings have become optional. you don’t have to say goodbye anymore, you can just stop replying, leaving someone with the permanent “delivered” that never turns into a response. it’s swift and brutal.

ghosting is the perfect symptom of a culture allergic to discomfort. we disappear not because we don’t care (maybe also in part because of that), but because facing another person’s reaction feels unbearable. the screen that connects us also shields us. we can exit a relationship without ever witnessing the hurt it causes. no awkward silences, no explanations. no mess. just silence that stretches until the other person understands.

but what looks like avoidance is often fear—of confrontation, of vulnerability, of being the villain in someone else’s story. technology gives us the illusion of control: we can curate how we appear, when we engage, and when we vanish.

and somewhere between connection and avoidance, a new category of relationship has emerged: the situationship. it’s the romance that never quite solidifies, the connection that lingers in ambiguity. you talk daily, share tiktoks, flirt, maybe even sleep together—but never define it. the ambiguity feels freeing at first, unburdened by labels. but over time, it can morph into emotional quicksand. you’re both invested, but no one knows what the rules are.

technology makes these half-relationships thrive. texting is perfect for sustaining something undefined. it’s casual and endlessly renewable. you can check in just enough to keep the spark alive without ever taking responsibility for what it means. the rhythm of messages—a good morning here, a heart emoji there—becomes its own kind of maintenance. you can “be together” without truly being together.

it’s not that people don’t crave intimacy anymore. they do. but the tools we use to communicate reward the opposite. dating apps, dms, and texting all run on abundance. there’s always someone else a swipe away. and in a culture of endless choice, why endure the discomfort of confrontation when you can simply… move on?

but ghosting and situationships both reveal the same longing for closeness without the risk of pain. we want connection, but we want it on our terms. editable, reversible, low-stakes. and in trying to avoid hurt, we often create more of it. why? because silence doesn’t erase feelings, it only leaves them suspended. the message unsent still lingers. the absence still communicates—louder, even, than words could.

i think the hardest truth about digital love is that technology can protect us from confrontation, but not from consequence.

when we vanish, when we linger ambiguously, when we ghost, the conversation doesn’t truly end. it just moves inside the other person’s head, looping endlessly, waiting for a reply that will never come.

the “forever text” phenomenon

once upon a time, love letters yellowed and faded.

ink smudged, paper creased, memory softened. there was mercy in that, the way time slowly blurred the edges of heartbreak. but now, our love stories live in perfect digital preservation. every text, photo, emoji, and “goodnight” still exists somewhere in the cloud. the past never really leaves. it just waits for us in the chat history.

this is the forever text phenomenon (yes i just made it up)—the way technology has turned our private moments into permanent archives.

we can scroll back through old conversations like archaeologists of our own hearts, excavating tenderness and regret line by line. we can see exactly when someone said i love you for the first time, or when the tone began to shift. every moment of connection and disconnection is time-stamped. and that kind of permanence changes the way we heal.

where breakups once ended with physical distance, now they end with a thumb hovering over a thread of messages we can’t quite delete, or the pictures in our camera roll we still haven’t erased. we say we’re moving on, but keep the evidence close—because just in case. there’s a strange comfort in looking back at what once was, even when it hurts, like touching a bruise to confirm it’s still there.

memory used to be unreliable, selective, merciful; now it’s searchable. you can relive the exact wording of your last argument. you can replay the rise and fall of affection, line by line, in perfect clarity. but love wasn’t meant to be preserved this way. it’s supposed to be lived, forgotten, reshaped by time. when every word endures, the past competes with the present.

technology has given us the illusion of control over memory. we can decide what to keep, what to erase, what to revisit. but that control often turns into obsession. we curate our histories the same way we curate our profiles: deleting the ugly parts, keeping only the highlights. we don’t just remember love—we manage it.

and yet, sometimes, those archives become time capsules of tenderness. a conversation that once caused pain might years later read like a love letter from a different version of yourself. the permanence cuts both ways—it can haunt, but it can also remind us that we once loved bravely, even imperfectly.

digital intimacy is ephemeral in the moment, but immortal in the archive.

we used to fear forgetting. now, we fear remembering too much.

our phones have become museums of love, and sometimes, the hardest thing to do is leave the exhibit.

do emojis count as expressions of love?

we used to sign our letters with yours truly, or all my love. now, we send a ❤️. a single icon has become shorthand for emotion—tiny hieroglyphs standing in for the complexity of human feeling. love has never been so easy to type, or so easy to misread.

emojis are the punctuation of modern intimacy. they soften blunt words, hint at tone, add warmth to what might otherwise feel sterile. a well-placed heart can make a simple “goodnight” feel tender. a crying emoji can feel a call-out seem softer. we sprinkle them like breadcrumbs of emotion, hoping the other person knows how to read the trail.

in some ways, emojis are the most universal language we’ve ever had. across cultures and generations, they let us communicate nuance beyond words—joy, affection, sarcasm, longing. they bridge gaps that text alone can’t fill. when we send a heart, we’re not just communicating affection; we’re performing it. the symbol becomes part of the ritual of care.

but symbols can only go so far.

emojis compress emotion into simplicity, reducing the messy, layered texture of feeling into something bite-sized. they’re efficient, but they flatten. a string of hearts doesn’t quite capture the trembling uncertainty of early love, or the ache of missing someone who doesn’t text back.

but we depend on them. they’ve become emotional scaffolding in our digital conversations—a way to clarify tone, to protect against misunderstanding. without them, messages can feel cold or abrupt. we’ve learned to communicate like actors reading stage cues, managing perception as much as expression.

there’s also something tender about the way we personalize these icons.

each couple, each friendship, evolves its own code—specific emojis that carry private meaning in a way that others reading the same message wouldn’t be able to understand. these tiny symbols become tokens of connection, small digital relics of shared understanding. in that way, they’re not replacements for love, more so the proof of it.

maybe the question isn’t whether emojis count as love, but what they reveal about how love adapts. every era has its language of affection—the letter, the phone call, the mixtape. emojis are ours: imperfect, fleeting, sincere in their own way. they may not hold the weight of a handwritten confession, but they carry the same impulse: to reach across distance and say, i feel something, and i want you to know.

love, after all, has always found the tools it needs. today, those tools just happen to be small, colorful, and sent with a tap of a thumb.

love feels less real without physical presence

there’s a particular kind of longing that only digital love can produce—the ache of being emotionally close but physically apart. you fall asleep to a voice note instead of a kiss, wake up to a “good morning” text instead of a warm body. the connection feels vivid, immediate, alive—but also just out of reach.

technology has made long-distance love possible in ways that were once unimaginable. we can see each other in real time, share photos of our days, send messages that bridge entire oceans. the screen becomes a portal, a temporary substitute for presence. and when it lights up with their name, it almost feels like touch. almost.

but love, at its most elemental, has always been a physical language.

it speaks through small gestures: the brush of a hand, the smell of skin. screens can translate words, but they can’t replicate that quiet sensory intimacy. the body is an archive of memory. it remembers warmth, pressure, nearness. without those cues, something feels unfinished, like a melody missing its final chord.

that doesn’t mean digital love is less real, though; it’s just harder to anchor.

when connection lives mostly in words, imagination does the rest. we fill in the missing pieces—their expression, their touch, their energy—constructing a composite version of the person we love. it’s beautiful, in a way, but also fraught. the boundary between memory and fantasy starts to blur.

yet for many, long-distance relationships reveal a deeper truth about intimacy: it’s not confined to proximity.

without the distractions of the physical world, conversation deepens. you learn to articulate affection, to name feelings you might otherwise express through gesture. you become fluent in the language of reassurance. you learn patience, that love doesn’t always need to be immediate to be meaningful.

still, the ache of absence never fully disappears. video calls end, the room goes silent, and the loneliness seeps in. not because the love isn’t real, but because the body hasn’t caught up with the heart. there’s a part of us that still believes touch is proof.

maybe digital love asks us to expand our definition of intimacy—to see connection not just as something that happens in person, but as something that can live in language, attention, and persistence. to realize that presence can also mean showing up, consistently, even across distance.

love through a screen is a kind of faith, believing that pixels can carry feeling, that a voice through a speaker can still make you feel seen. and maybe that faith, that daily act of choosing someone you can’t touch, is its own proof that the love is real.

is digital intimacy a lesser form of connection, or an evolution? (hint: it’s both)

every generation believes their way of loving is the most authentic one.

our grandparents wrote letters. our parents made long-distance calls. we text, send voice-notes, send pictures. the mediums change, but the desire underneath—to be understood, to be chosen, to be known—remains stubbornly human.

so is digital intimacy a diluted version of love, or simply love reshaped by new tools?

it’s pretty tempting to see it as a loss. a flattening of depth, a trade of sincerity for convenience. and sometimes, it is. screens can make affection performative, relationships transactional. the emotional labor of typing and replying, of managing tone and expectation, can leave us exhausted. we risk mistaking communication for connection.

but there’s another side to this evolution, one worth noticing. in a world that relies so heavily on words, many of us have learned to express feelings more clearly than ever before. we’ve had to learn how to say what we mean—to translate instinct into language. texting, for all its constraints, forces articulation. we can’t rely on glances or gestures; we have to name what’s inside us. this a linguistic revolution of the heart. we are, perhaps for the first time, writing our emotions in real time, composing small love letters throughout the day. even if they vanish into the void of message threads, they’re still proof of our attempt to reach one another.

technology also allows for kinds of connection that once seemed impossible. people find love across continents, identities, and communities that geography once kept apart. digital intimacy can be deeply inclusive—a place where shy or anxious people can open up in ways that physical space doesn’t always allow. it’s not lesser, i don’t think, it’s just different.

maybe the question isn’t whether this evolution makes love better or worse, but whether it makes us more aware of how fragile and creative intimacy really is.

to love digitally is to love consciously—to fight for attention in a world of distraction, to craft meaning from the small symbols on a screen, to keep faith that behind the message is a real person, typing, hesitating, hoping. we’re still learning the language of this new kind of closeness. and like every language, it will evolve—shaped by longing, by loss, by the endless human urge to bridge the space between you and me.

so maybe digital intimacy isn’t the end of real connection. maybe it’s the latest proof that love, despite everything, always finds a way to adapt.

to conclude

perhaps every generation worries that technology will cheapen love. that the faster and easier it becomes to say i miss you, the less those words will mean. but if history teaches us anything, it’s that love always adapts. the telegram, the telephone, the skype calls—each was once accused of ruining romance. and yet, people still fell in love through them, still found ways to make those channels feel sacred. texting is simply the latest version of that story.

it’s messy, inconsistent, full of misunderstandings and miracles. it gives us immediacy but steals our patience. it allows for vulnerability, yet tempts us to perform. it’s love at the speed of light—thrilling, fragile, human. what’s changed is not the feeling of love, but the form it takes. the medium shapes the message, yes, but the message persists. every emoji, every unsent text, every moment of waiting for a reply is just another expression of the oldest impulse we have: to be seen, to be known, to be held, even if only through words on a screen.

i don’t know if love in the age of texting is better or worse. it’s just ours. the way our generation loves now carries both the ugliness and the beauty of our time—the constant connection, the subtle distance, the hope flickering in every notification. and even through all the noise, we keep trying. we write, we reach, we send our digital messages into the void, believing that someone, somewhere, will understand.

because no matter the medium—a letter, a call, a dm, a text—the heart always wants the same thing. it always wants to say, i’m here. i feel this. do you feel it too?

but what i’ve learned (albeit painfully, slowly, humiliatingly) is that romantic love feels less like liberation and more like a prison, less like devotion and more like self-erasure. at least, as i’ve known it.

loving, to me, has historically meant curating yourself. it’s been a performance that starts to feel holy until i realize the altar is empty. and the worst part is how absolutely seductive it seems. in every song, every show, every movie, there’s a “they complete me” narrative. loving is marketed as emotional ascension. as if the pinnacle of human experience is finally being understood by someone who never truly tried to understand you. i’ve absorbed this idea so deeply that when real life experiences didn’t match it, i was left disillusioned.

but my dream was never him. it was never anyone. my dream was always me. my full, unfiltered, undistracted self. i don’t want someone else to have the power to destabilize me.

does partnership = peace? does love = salvation? if love is effort, why does it feel so futile? lately, i struggle to see the beauty in romantic love. it looks like everything when you see it on tv or read it in a book or hear it in a song, but in real life, it doesn’t feel like that. and what if it’s not? what if all the energy i’ve poured into romantic love was meant to be poured back into my own becoming? into my friends, my family, my passions? there are so many other ways to love.