Here We Go Again.

Here we go again.

Yall remember how Texas had that "report an abortion" form that they had to take down after a week?

Well, Missouri has one, only it's for reporting transgender concerns.

Comrades. Friends. Romans. Countrymen. You know what to do.

The fact that I didn't read these books for YEARS because people whose opinions I valued told me that they weren't any good and laughed at the nonexistent love triangle...and now I find these genius commentaries on the books. Bless you op

"snow hates katniss because she's lucy gray reincarnated" well no. it's not magic, not some kind of prophecy, not a saga of one family that's fated to overthrow the regime. katniss *isn't* lucy gray, she's just a girl. that's the point. she's nobody.

except that she is lucy gray. not *actually* but in spirit, in her actions. because what lucy gray and katniss -- and snow himself -- prove is that nobody can be truly independent of their community. snow wants to believe (he is taught to believe) that we are all ungenerous, calculating, power-hungry. that we all value ourselves above all else, that we could never love selflessly because we are, at our core, selfish. so when lucy gray shows him that doesn't have to be the case, it terrifies him. and so, in his fear, he kills her, hoping that will kill the doubt she seeds inside of him. kill the source of the doubt, kill the doubt itself. prove to yourself that love is selfish. win at the game that you yourself created -- snow lands on top.

and for years, you really believe that. you won. you gain steadily gain power, people show you the same story, over and over. and it twists you, warps you, into the calculating dictator you were told you had to be.

only then, decades later, another girl shows you the very same thing: true, unselfish, radical love. a girl who volunteers to die for her sister, who sings to her friend as she dies, would rather die than kill the boy she loves, and she's from the same place as the very person who first made you doubt it. you thought you'd killed that doubt years ago, but what you failed to account for was that killing lucy gray doesn't kill her love.

so katniss reminds snow of lucy gray, but not because she *is* her, but because she created something that can't be killed. it's not magic, it's art. it's no accident that katniss grew up singing her songs. lucy gray is dead, but her art lives on, and woven into that art is the love she showed snow all those years ago. her love can't be killed because it doesn't belong to her individually -- it belongs to her people. and it's nurtured in that community. it's in the art, the music, and thus in the people that live there. love becomes the soundtrack of an entire community, and then it lives on in their lives and their actions. it lives on in katniss' father who sings his way into her mother's heart, it lives on in haymitch who holds his ally when she dies, and then in katniss and prim and peeta and every person from district 12 who shows that same, selfless, radical love. it wasn't fate, or destiny, or even one family. it's community. it's art. no man is an island. we cannot survive without love.

Paint it a second time, and then choose the worse one to paint string bean on.

ok i know i'm one to talk but genuinely if you think 👍 or ❤️ is "passive aggressive" you might be spending a bit too much time on your phone jeez louise