Sweetheartsoldier - Ranger's Dislodgment

“The Devil works hard, but AO3 authors work harder,” I mutter to myself like a mantra as encouragement while I trudge my way through my 10 year old WIP, which is not published on AO3.

As soon as I get a grave, the first thing I’m gonna do is start rolling in it.

*slaps roof of uncanny valley*

This bad boy can fit so many of my drawings in it!

One thing that bothers me about the ending of the Lilo and Stitch remake (among the other things people have already rightfully complained about) is how it acts like Nani has to go to college NOW or she's lost her chance forever.

As someone who was raised by a young mother that didn't get to go to college, because she got 2 kids at 18-20, but then went to college in her early/mid 30s when me and my sister were old enough to be left home alone, it just feels really insulting.

It really adds to the harmful mindset that someone's life, especially that of women, is over if they haven't "got their life together" yet before the age of 25.

There would've been no harm in Nani delaying college for like 5-10 years, instead of abandoning her sister during the most vital years of her development only 2-3 months after already having lost her parents. Animated Nani would never.

One thing THG says over and over is that it’s not enough to hate being a victim of injustice and it’s counterproductive to hate the people carrying out injustice; you have to hate the injustice itself.

Snow hated being a victim, only his solution was to grab up all the power he could and then isolate himself so no one could ever take it away. It turned him into a petty maniac who spent his days strategically gifting bread and milk to creep out a kid who dared to point out Snow did something wrong. He wasn’t a victim when he’d grown up to be an old man beefing with teenagers, but a lifetime of lashing out in what he considered justified self-defense ensured that he lived a miserable life surrounded by people who feared him, hated him, and eventually succeeded in brutally killing him.

Gale goes wrong (this goes for Coin, too) when he gets sidetracked assigning blame and meting out punishment on the Capitol citizens, when the priority should have been preventing the injustice from happening again—to anyone, not just him and his inner circle.

OP is so right with the example of the prep team. Katniss hated the prep team at first, too, because they saw her as expendable and treated her like a project, like a toy to play with, rather than a person. But she saw in CF that they were having a change of heart, noticing that she was a person whose life held the same value theirs did, and although it too little and too late to save her from the arena, it was enough for her to forgive them. They’d stopped being a threat to her, so her hostility toward them evaporated. Gale didn’t take that step with her, but considered a change of heart unimportant and reconciliation impossible. And yeah, he’s confused as to why Katniss isn’t doing the same. He can’t wrap his head around a world in which districts and Capitol don’t fight, can’t erase the imaginary lines that have had them pitted against each other by the Capitol’s own design. He can ally with some other districts, but even that has limits. His callousness toward the people in the Nut is an eerie foreshadowing of the later consequences of his inability to step outside the Capitol vs District paradigm. He thinks success for the rebellion means subjugation of the Capitol by the districts, when success would really be unity of the Capitol and districts.

His insensitivity to civilians in the Capitol, people he perceives as implicitly less-than, leads him to kill Prim. Any discourse on whether or not Gale could have reasonably predicted that his bombs would put Prim in danger (with an eye toward absolving him somehow if he couldn’t) misses the point. Prim’s life was not worth more or less than any of the Capitol civilians’. Intentionally targeting them was wrong with or without Prim getting caught up in it. It’s also not insignificant that Prim was only killed because she was trying to help everyone, with no concern for where they came from.

Hating being a victim is easy and everyone does it. Wanting to turn the tables and take revenge is easy and everyone does it. What’s effective, but difficult, is to see that oppressors are actually not the root cause of oppression. The problem, the reason violence persists even as power changes hands, is our willingness to pretend that we get to decide who’s worth something and who isn’t. A person is a person is a person and if you don’t want to be a victim, you can’t let anyone be a victim.

i get why a lot of people don’t like reading mockingjay as much as the rest of the trilogy, but i think it’s actually so essential to understanding the central thesis of the entire hunger games series.

the whole point of the hunger games is this: all human life is valuable, and artificial divisions between people keep them weak. and the only way out is radical love.

and this is something that is literally echoed again and again in the books. take, for example, gale. why is gale such an interesting, complex, and yet reprehensible character? yes, it’s because at the end katniss cannot separate his bomb from prim’s death. but it’s deeper than that. why does gale build the bomb in the first place? it’s because gale doesn’t see every human life as valuable. gale is willing to kill people and to deny them their humanity simply because they are his “enemy.” so, there’s the obvious example of his willingness to blow up the nut with everyone inside and his disregard for the human casualty. and the people in the nut aren’t even from the captiol, he just wants to do it because the stereotype of that district is their allegiance to the capitol, and gale hates that.

but there’s another scene, also in mockingjay, that i think goes under-discussed which is his view of katniss’ prep team. when katniss finds her prep team literally imprisoned in 13, she’s horrified and upset by the conditions they are in. but gale isn’t. and he’s confused about why katniss would care for them! her response is to say that it’s because they cried when she went to the quarter quell. and gale is like, “sure, but they’re still from the captiol.” and this argument is so important. because katniss argues that the prep team deserves to be treated as human beings, and when he presses her on why, she basically says because they treated her as a human being. but gale can’t see that–all he can see is that they’re from the capitol, and he’s confused about why katniss should care.

and this is, so crucially, what katniss learns in the hunger games. she realizes that she doesn’t want to kill the other tributes just because they are from the other districts. she hates the fact that they have turned her against people who are, in their core, just like her. frightened children who have been manipulated to kill other children against their will, all selected based on their district, a social divide that has literally been invented and imposed on them.

and another just absolutely essential thing to understand here is that peeta knows this all along. we talk at length about how peeta’s defining trait is his kindness. but what’s so important about peeta’s kindness is how it transcends any boundaries of social class or social division.

when peeta gives katniss the bread, it’s important to note that just before he does that, we hear his mother talking about “seam brats pawing through her trash.” peeta’s mother buys into the social divides in district twelve–she views herself as better than someone from the seam simply because of her standing as a merchant, and reinforces these class divides by refusing to extend the simplest humanity to a child from the seam. she literally refuses to feed a starving child on the grounds of a social divide, within a world that already has divided them into districts. but peeta doesn’t see it like this. peeta refuses to deny katniss food just because she’s from the seam. peeta gives her kindness. peeta gives her humanity.

and he does the same thing in the games! his entire first interview, the dramatic king focuses, not on the games, but on his genuine love and adoration for another tribute. how radical! to refuse to subscribe to a system which asks him to hate her? to want to kill her? and to instead confess his love for her? sure, katniss ends up being the mockingjay. katniss might have held out the berries. but peeta in that moment is the one who sets the rebellion in motion. peeta is the one who refuses to engage in the senseless hatred of someone who “should” be his enemy. instead, he reaches out in love.

and it all culminates at the end of mockingjay, when katniss votes for the capitol hunger games to gain coin’s trust. and peeta is utterly horrified by this. because he can’t understand how she could have been through everything he has been through and not understand that continuing to senselessly kill human beings (children!!) for some kind of revenge just reinforces these binary modes of thinking. but the thing is–katniss DOES see that. and when coin proposes it, that’s when she knows she has to stop her. because coin, like gale, like peeta’s mother, and like so others many around her, is still buying into these divides. is still viewing the captiol as the enemy. is still viewing a human life as expendable. 

and there’s a quote in mockingjay that i think lays this out pretty explicitly. katniss says, after she kills coin and is recovering, point blank: “they can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them.” she’s realized the crux of the entire hunger games–that manipulating us to hate and kill our fellow humans, that drawing up divisions between people because of where they live and what they produce, that believing that hating someone on the basis of any of these is justification for their death, is all a farce. it’s all a distraction. it’s all pretend. she says, in the same chapter: “no one benefits in a world where these things happen.” not the districts. not the capitol. not the victors. no one.

the entire arc of the hunger games is really just about katniss catching up to what peeta has known from the start. katniss overcoming all the manipulation from those around her, all the glitz and glamour, all the artificial social and class divides to see what peeta has seen clearly from the start: love.

Petition to start referring to Susan Pevensie's arc as "The Tragedy of Susan" rather than "The Problem of Susan." Her arc is not defined by the "problem" of growing up; it is the tragedy of forgetting she is a queen.

In Prince Caspian, we see the seeds of this. "It's no good behaving like kids now that we are back in Narnia," Peter tells her when she is afraid of entering the treasure chamber in the ruins of Cair Paravel. "You're a Queen here." Aslan does not chide her for being too grown-up to believe in him; he lends her his breath for bravery so that she can stop listening to her fears. Susan's "problem" in this book is in fact that she behaves more like a child than a queen.

In many ways, Susan's arc parallels Prince Rilian's in The Silver Chair. He is the Lost Prince; she becomes the Lost Queen. He is enchanted to forget who he really is. The Green Lady twists his birthright so that he is going to conquer his own land and rule as a usurper--the land where he is meant to be the rightful ruler! He unconsciously trades his role as the true prince for a false kingship (similar to Edmund trading his birthright as a true king of Narnia for the Witch's false promise to make him a prince ... hey, you'd almost think this was a theme or something).

Susan likewise trades her identity as queen for a false substitute in England, exchanging the substance for the shadow. She is a child pretending to be a grown-up, not actually being grown-up. Lewis never says there's anything inherently wrong with "lipstick and nylons and invitations," but they are merely the outward trappings of society. What makes a person a king or queen comes from inside. When Rilian returns to Narnia, he is instantly recognized as a prince, despite his lack of a crown or any of the other formal trappings of royalty. He is recognized because he is no longer hidden by the armor of the Green Lady--and so he looks like himself. In fact, he not only looks like himself, he looks like his father. (Which is also how Lord Bern recognizes Caspian in the Lone Islands, despite Caspian not having any outward proof of his kingship--Caspian looks and sounds like his father. Shasta is recognized as a prince because of his resemblance to his brother--oh hey, we've got another theme going.)

Susan has put on the armor of the world, and in doing so has lost herself as queen. That is what makes her arc a tragedy. But! There is always, always hope. Rilian is rescued. Shasta is restored to his true identity as Prince Cor. Edmund is redeemed. Aslan breathes on Susan. Caspian's kingship restores right order to the Lone Islands. No one is ever irredeemably lost.

Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.

Even when they themselves have forgotten who they truly are.

The only fear death holds for me is that, even if I find myself in Heaven, I’ll have to explain to jirt that I posted LOTR fanfiction and edited his poetry to suit the plotline I had in mind. It could be worse, though: I could be Peter Jackson having to look Tolkien in his eyes and explain why Christopher Lee played Saruman.

I actually feel terrible for the kids who’ve only seen the live action Lilo & Stitch. Imagine being a little kid identifying with Lilo and having the “happy ending” of this movie tell you that you are, actually, a burden. That being little and needing help and maybe being weird, being troubled, not knowing the right way to act, not fitting in and not understanding why you can’t be like everybody else is, actually, grounds for your family to abandon you during your time of need in favor of . . . going to school? That thing that can happen at any time? Yeah, that’s more urgent than being there for a grieving kid and making sure she spends her formative years living with someone who understands her, someone she already knows and trusts.

Not that anyone couldn’t figure out that ending the movie this way doesn’t make any sense, but I say this as someone who cut off my family and then went to college. I did that because the family was abusive, not because getting a degree is more important than a loving family. I actually feel uniquely qualified to say that a loving family is vastly more valuable than any kind of degree or career. The former wasn’t an option for me, though, so I set my aim in life lower and went for the education.

Nani, on the other hand, had both options. I won’t be the first person to point out that she very well could have waited to go to college until Lilo was older and more stable, or until she had the means to move both of them to the mainland and didn’t have to leave Lilo behind in order to go. It’s not bad to be a nontraditional student, far from it. I can’t fathom the motivation for giving this version of Nani a dream career that she never had in the original and then making that the most urgent and important thing in Nani’s life . . . in a movie ostensibly about the importance of family.

The infamous ending of the latest live action cash grab is a reflection of the lives, values, and choices of the kinds of people who make it in Hollywood and are in a position to shape such things

They have to write an ending like that and it has to be noble because that is the choice they all make in those kinds of circumstances