Very Queer and Chronically Online

this is Boston, Massachusetts, USA- a view from one of our main parks, the Common. not too far from City Hall.:

you probably see a mix of old and new here, and that’s reasonably representative of the whole city. there are a lot of shorter old buildings that aren’t visible, though, clustered around the skyscrapers (in skyscraper-intensive areas). within the city proper, I’d say a narrow majority of the buildings are 19th or early 20th century and retrofitted to some degree. It’s An Old City, is my point, full of cool old architecture

and this. is our City Hall:

not pictured: the VAST EMPTY PAVED PLAZA this building occupies the middle of. it’s supposed to be a community space. unsurprisingly, even when it’s not blocked off (seldom) the plaza is usually unoccupied. probably because there’s a gorgeous park just over Beacon Hill, that isn’t loomed over by concrete’s personal angel of death

like. I get it. some people enjoy Brutalism. but it’s hard to believe anyone finds this particular concrete behemoth welcoming or pleasant to look at. it certainly doesn’t harmonize with the rest of the city (see top picture again for reference)

until today I’d never been inside. but there was Museum Business to be done, so in I went...and discovered the interior to be a labyrinthine maze of half-levels, sub-levels, mezzanines, and vast logical-space-usage-disrupting atriums that would make Kafka lose his shit. the office I needed turned out to be a windowless interior room with MS Word printout signs taped to the door, behind ANOTHER door that was opaque and entirely unmarked

so, to recap: it does not mesh with anything around it, many people consider it deeply ugly (and I strongly agree), its plaza is a total waste of space in a crowded city, and it’s utterly impossible to navigate inside

oh, and by the way. this is our Old City Hall:

(at least it’s still standing and preserved? some things I found online indicate that the interior may have been ruined, but...better than it being demolished like they’d initially planned once the Brutalist Hellscape was finished)

tell the cops nothing

tell the paramedics everything

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.