Inner Demons At It Again…

tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

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.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

It doesn't get more snowbaz than this.

glues to my sweet father’s head while he sleeps

"I got guns in my head and they won't go. Spirits in my head and they won't go." (c) The Strumbellas

Isn't it weird that Christianity had convinced us that non-Christians were all secretly depressed and hopeless?

Like, with how christians have tried to proselytize to me, they talk like they think I'm desperately trying to fill some kind of void or some shit. They tell me I'm "losing my soul" like that means any more to me than threatening me with the Sith or Sauron.

And, like. No? I don't feel the need to be "saved" from anything. I don't feel some weird metaphysical angst now that I don't believe in some sky daddy. In fact, ever since I accepted the fact that souls don't exist, I've been better than ever!

It's kinda beautiful, don't you think? In the end, we discovered that the "pain" that Christianity claimed to be protecting us from wasn't painful at all. That the disease they claimed to cure was never there to begin with.

So have some fun! Do stuff that "poisons your soul!" Take pride in the fact that you no longer have to play by the rules of an imaginary dictator, or worry about an imaginary body part! Prove the Christians wrong by loving every goddamn second of your beautiful, sinful life. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, what's the point in not indulging yourself?

Besides, if you can feel this good without a soul, it clearly wasn't that important anyway.

People coming at ex christians' criticisms of harmful doctrine with "that's not what it really means it actually means [xyz]" is offensive and disrespectful, and the big reasons are of course that it's dismissive and off topic at best, sometimes it's the same exact toxic and abusive belief repackaged to sound better, there's often elements of victim blaming thrown in along with diminishing harm, people tend to skip over any kind of empathy about the harm caused to jump into Them Being Correct, and yes of course all of that (and probably more I'm blanking on rn) is gross. But on the less severe end of things, it's honestly just kind of insulting to me that people think I have no possible idea of other interpretations lmao.

I do believe people are well within their right to look at something that's harmful and completely drop it and leave it behind without any further consideration. But that is not accurate to my experience and the majority of stories I've heard about people leaving christianity. Most stories I know involve several months to years of investigating texts, looking into different sects and interpretations, extensively studying history and context, begging knowledgeable people in your church to answer your questions and trying so hard to will yourself into allowing their non-answers to satisfy them in a frantic attempt to dig your nails into a faith that's slipping away but means more to you than anything. Some people just let go, and truly good for those people, but so many of us tried anything we could to compromise so we wouldn't have to.

There is this belief in a lot of churches that leaving is a casual decision, a flippant choice, something you pick because you want to sin or you were undisciplined or are falling into your human nature or are otherwise deficienct. That narrative doesn't fit nicely into the reality of many that leave: latching onto your faith long beyond the point of pain, but ignoring it because you're so desperate to salvage any semblance of the faith you once had.

I know the other interpretations. I know the history behind it. I know the context. And I know that if there was a way for me to maintain my faith without destroying myself, I would have found it.

iwtv is so fun because it's not really about vampires who happen to be gay. it's about gay ppl with personality disorders who also happen to be vampires