sorry hold on. are people valorizing the past so strongly these days that now ppl think old fandoms were BETTER? like im sorry i really think the problem is just that you arent 12 anymore

Im rereading thg and just read your post abt mockingjay right as gale tells katniss he loves her in the second book. And I gotta admit, I understood why ppl thought that katniss and peeta were good together, I agreed. But I still thought that gale and katniss should’ve gotten together. Yet, idk how I missed that gale /doesn’t see all lives as equal/. Like yeah it’s right in my face and shit, unfortunately I’ve never been the most observant. Your post though, has just changed my whole view on the love angle, bc peeta is the exact type of person katniss needs to help free her from the whole social divide. So like, thx so much.

But I would like to ask, how does the capital NOT benefit from the games? Is it bc they just give the districts even more fuel for the rebellion? Or am I missing smth else? Once again, thank you for that wonderful post!!

what a kind ask!!!! i’m so so so glad that you liked my post anon!! literally i had to stand up and walk around my room before i could answer because this made me so happy hahaha. (and i don’t think it’s a case of being unobservant necessarily!! i think mockingjay is really subtle in its commentary at times and it can be really confusing.)

i think that the captiol doesn’t benefit from the games for a few reasons.

the first reason is the one katniss lays out in her quote during her recovery: “i think that peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences.” i think this is really one of the key quotes in the entire series and one of the things that the movies really warped by casting adults--that katniss and peeta and gale and all the tributes who get involved with this are just kids. and i think the point more broadly is that any society that can so easily detach itself from the lives of its children in the name of entertainment is so morally corrupt that it cannot hold. so the captiol citizens really aren’t benefitting. they’ve been brainwashed to believe that the lives of children are expendable in the name of entertainment--they’re disgraceful in the callousness, to be sure, but it’s also a tragedy to imagine that they don’t even see this as wrong. (and i’m talking here about the regular citizens of the captiol. not the gamemakers, but the people who watch the games without considering the deeper implications of what they’re watching. they’re not benefitting from being able to view human children and their deaths as vehicles for entertainment. i think, morally, they’re suffering.)

the other thing i would argue about the captiol is: are the citizens of the captiol happy? the thing is--i don’t think they are. i think the implications are subtle, but one thing i would argue (somewhat controversially) is that many of the captiol citizens are as much victims of this system as those in the districts. to be clear, in no way am i saying that the citizens of the captiol are right, or deserve our sympathy more than the citizens of the districts. but they are still slaves to the system in their own right. i think all the scenes where katniss is getting “beautified” kind of exemplify this, but i think it’s harder to see this because for most of us, what katniss is going through isn’t that strange. but thinking about when she gets her legs waxed, or her eyebrows done, and she hates it. like it’s uncomfortable, it hurts, it makes her feel terrible. and that’s just something that’s just normal for the citizens of the capitol. so is that good? is a society good that commands us to rip ourselves to shreds in the name of beauty? that commands our children to tear the hair out of their bodies so that the adults around them can find them more beautiful? 

i think it’s really hard to read the hunger games this way, because that doesn’t seem strange to us. our modern celebrity culture nearly demands it. it doesn’t seem odd that britney spears, at age 16, was asked about her virginity by 30 year old paparazzi. it doesn’t seem odd to us that millie bobby brown was wearing strappy heels and black satin dresses and smoky eye looks to awards shows before her 15th birthday. because that’s the society we live in. the capitol seems terrifying until we realize that we’re not that far off from it. katniss talks about people dyeing themselves blue, implanting things into their bodies, and tattooing themselves all over in the name of beauty--painful procedures that warp their appearance and make them nearly unrecognizable. 

and so, i think, the hunger games asks us to think twice: is this worth it? is it all worth it to say, simply, beauty is pain? to place so much value on external appearance that we forget our very humanity? the citizens of the captiol are not benefitting from this kind of society. they’re suffering from it. and so are we.