Love, I'm Not Sure How You Think All Your Points Don't Prove Mine.

Love, I'm not sure how you think all your points don't prove mine.

What I'm saying about Gale isn't that he isn't a good revolutionary at all, I'm saying, however, he's not an example to follow. So let's go through all of the points you make, shall we?

"What about the families, Katniss?" meaning, the families of his district. His community, the people he lived with his whole life, you mean.

It's easy to empathize with one's own community, the harder part of revolution is to understand not everyone is oppressed the same and empathize with the ones whose oppression doesn't look like yours. One thing that Gale repeatedly doesn't do.

So, the Nut provides weaponry to the Capital, right? And who produces this weapons? Is it the peacekeepers? Or is it the people of District 2?

The same people, mind you, who had their children thrown into the games despite having fought for the Capital during the Dark Days. The same people who were judged by the Capital as animals despite having more money then them, like with Sejanus. Their oppression is more insidious but it's there, that's why Katniss says that "they have no fight" between them.

Because they are not the real enemy.

Throwing a bomb at them is like killing factory workers for working on producing weapons for the US. Maybe it'd slow them down, maybe it'd cause problems, but at the end of the day, if the Capital had won, those people would be just another casualty of war and proof of the revolution's "barbarian ways".

Not even saying how dumb and disorganized it'd be to just blow the Nut and leave them to starve slowly under there, therefore denying the Revolution's own chance to seize these weapons, of seizing control of the flow of supplies, of seizing control of troops and gathering even more people for their own side. Not even saying what it'd do for the Revolution's propaganda.

Because you know, an organized revolution isn't just about gathering a bunch of people and weapons and attacking, it's also about spreading the revolution's prerogative, it's about convincing the people of their own struggle. Revolution doesn't work if you win but have a whole majority of people who oppose you in the territory you've won. It needs propaganda, it needs to be adhesive.

Otherwise you can win and never get to change anything because the people you claim to represent doesn't support you anymore.

Gale's idea for the Nut could've cost them the war, both strategically and politically, if it was done earlier in the war.

And the Capital? Is it the people in the Capital's own fault they're are systematically oppressed and alienated? Is it the avoxes choice to be slaves for the Capital? Is it their choice to be trapped there, most of them unable to reach District 13, like the Avoxes Katniss and Gale see running in the forest?

Sure, Gale has a lot of love — for people whose oppression he understands. He denies, however, the deep intersectionality that exists in oppression, the complexity of this oppression. And to deny that, is to deny the liberation of classes that also need liberation but don't look like you.

And I refuse to enter the discussion of whose oppression is more pressing. You don't have liberation unless every oppressed people is liberated.

Sure, I'm not saying the people in the Capital or even in the loyalist districts don't have much more privileges than Gale, Katniss, and the other Districts had. But that doesn't make them a free kill zone. I do support violent revolution, what I refuse to support is stupidity.

And do not accuse me of racism because I deny Gale's ability to represent revolutionary hate. I could very well cite Reaper or Thresh as better representatives of revolutionary qualities.

It's not by occasion that District 11 is the one to begin the revolution: all of the characters who represent District 11 exemplify perfectly what should be expected from a true revolutionary. They're compassionate people who understand no oppression looks the same and will NOT fight unless it's absolutely necessary to do so.

When Reaper gathers the bodies of the children who died in the arena, he gathers ALL the bodies, even of the kids from loyalist districts because he knows they're all oppressed. His empathy reaches all oppressed people, not only people whose oppression look like his.

That's revolutionary love. When he defies the Capital after giving the kids some dignity, that's revolutionary hatred.

When Peeta and Katniss want to donate their Victor's prize with Rue and Thresh's family, when all of the tributes from the Quarter Quell join their tables and have lunch together — that's revolutionary love.

When Katniss tells people to turn to the real enemy — that's revolutionary hatred.

When Fidel Castro tells people that the Revolution's use of violence is justified because that's the only language their oppressors understand, he doesn't mean it's fair game to annihilate your enemy. A revolution's ideal isn't to annihilate the enemy — it's liberating the oppressed. Cuba didn't exactly destroyed the US last time I checked for example but they did liberated their own people internally.

That's the crucial difference Gale's ideals and actions don't differentiate between. Armed struggle is more than fine but violence isn't the only tool at disposition and we shouldn't act like it is. Not only because it makes us forget the very purpose of the struggle but also because you don't win a war by only having the biggest army or being more ruthless than your enemy. War is decided by many other factors than this.

Violence for liberation is more than a must. Stupidity isn't, lacking will to empathize with others isn't, lacking of significative and critical strategy isn't, because that's lack of organization. Many of the reasons, for example, why Che left the fight in Congo was because their lack of popular support and internal conflicts between the revolutionary side.

Why do you thinks that is? Because organization comes from various fronts, and there's always other ways to consider how yo fight a revolution. Sides Gales doesn't acknowledges or recognizes.

White or non-white, Gale is a mediocre example of revolutionary so stop presuming things about me regarding my understanding of what I read and start respecting that some people do have both the intelligence and the academic background in both political science, war strategy and racial studies, and can still have a different take on a literary fiction than you do.

I don't appreciate being told what my own values and morals are by people who don't know me and don't seem interested of having a conversation instead of just dumping their frustrations and projections on me.

Gale and Revolutionary Hate

Okay, it's been a while since I last spoke about THG but I'll give it a try because I've been thinking a lot about this matter.

It's been a while since I saw someone on TikTok defending Gale because, if I remember correctly, he was somewhat of a true revolutionary. The person meant that Gale not only believed in the Revolution but also thought violence was justified for it and although I don't disagree with it - I do think violence is justified in the face of oppression - I think this person forgot a crucial part of what is needed in a Revolution: organizing.

When Marx first brought up the idea of hatred as fuel for the Revolution, what he meant wasn't scorching and annihilating the enemies but using the hatred (born out of indignation for our oppression) as motivation to organize. Organization means being able to get together, form a community, and with that be capable of resisting capitalistic oppression.

And that's exactly what is lacking in Gale.

Don't get me wrong, there is a tremendous anti-violence message in Hunger Games - although I attribute it more to the trauma Katniss goes through because of it (which is warranted) than any ideological point Collins could be trying to make. And that message is definitely not one to pass when the motives of the Revolution are fair but anyhow, the point is: message or no message, I still believe Gale isn't a good example of a revolutionary.

That's because Gale, although filled with an appropriate amount of hatred to fuel a Revolution, lacks another essential aspect of a revolutionary, one Che Guevara puts quite well: "The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."

That's because love is the thing that should be at the core of your hatred. Otherwise, we fall into a trap: in our hatred and need to destroy our enemies, we forget why we're fighting in the first place - the people who are oppressed by this enemy.

So the fact that Gale is willing to go so far as to explode the people out of the mountain on District 2, that he'd bomb the Capital with no care for the people who are there on the side of the revolution but unable to get to the other side of the fight, is what makes him a bad revolutionary.

Because his hatred isn't filled with the notion of community, he sees anyone who doesn't rebel loudly and proudly as an enemy, which simply isn't true. Not everyone will help the Revolution by making a fuss, or by fighting, not everyone can do that. Gale's unwillingness to understand so shows that his hatred isn't founded in any idea of community between the oppressed or love for the people he's a part of but actually is founded in personal offense of the Capital against him and the people he cares about.

Although that's a valid sentiment if your motivations are wrong, so will your actions.

And that's why I think Prim (in the films) and Peeta are the closest thing to a good revolutionary we've got there:

Prim understands there's a reason for violence, which she doesn't partake in not because she thinks it is wrong but simply because it's not her. More than that, Prim's capacity to empathize isn't blurred by her need to survive like Katniss's (understandably so, of course) so she is able to see the people who become collateral damage with kindness and openness that lack in Gale, for example.

Peeta is the same: he understands the necessity of violence but he won't partake in it unless it's the only way (which reminds me of Fidel Castro's quote: "Revolutionaries didn't choose armed struggle as the best path, it's the path the oppressors imposed on the people. And so the people only have two choices: to suffer or to fight"). Peeta chooses to be kind but his violence stems from the hatred this very kindness creates.

So no, I don't think Gale is a good revolutionary regardless of how The Hunger Games was written.

I really like how this is structured by the way lol (:

I could talk about it anytime

I wanted to make an analyses about Six of Crows and neoliberalist policies and how it's perfectly portrayed in Ketterdam, anyone interested in reading it?

SOC and Neoliberlism

So, as promised, here it is my analysis of Six of Crows and how neoliberalism is amazingly portrayed in Ketterdam, and how the city is an example of what happens in a community that is not provided for.

Before we begin, I wanted to say that English is not my first language, and, considering I read SOC in Brazilian Portuguese, I might translate some names literally or differently from the English version but I think it's manageable to read and understand my point. If not, I'll edit the text.

The first thing we have to understand is how neoliberalism works and the theory behind it, and then we'll talk about how it's portrayed in Ketterdam.

So neoliberalism is a theory born more or less at the end of the 20th century (70s-80s), and it finds its roots in laissez-faire capitalism, meaning that it's a political current that tries to suppress and/or eliminate the State's influence from the market. The neoliberalist view understands that the market can supply by itself the population's needs without help or limitations imposed by the State.

The thing here is that most people listen to this and think neoliberalism is about electronics, cars, and other stuff. The truth is, that neoliberalism aims to suppress the presence of State-run facilities in ALL corners of society, such as health care, housing, water access, electricity, etcetera.

So, we can use the American and Brazillian health systems to understand it better, for example:

In the US, the ones providing health care for the population are great corporations - they decide the price of care, they work together with pharmaceutical companies to define medicine prices, and the laws that bind them are pretty much only offer and demand. There is almost none State intervention to provide the population with accessible health care.

However, this brings problems, of course: not everyone (actually, most people) has real access to health care simply because they can't afford it, or they can't afford it without taking a big financial hit, which threatens their other basic needs, such as food, housing, water, electricity, etcetera. Not everyone can provide for their medical needs, such as diabetic and disabled people.

That leads to:

(a) an increase in poverty;

(b) a decrease in educational levels - if you don't have the means to pay for higher educational levels because of health care debt, or if you're sick and need to go to class and tough through it but you're not really learning anything, and so on, which leads to a major workforce in base level production and a minor class who has access to this education;

(c) an increase in overworking people - meaning that we have a lot of people taking on several jobs to be able to pay for things like health care, which increases the competitiveness between people, making individualism levels go up and breaking up human beings' natural sense of community.

I could also talk here about how this breeds isolation and increases the potential for mental health problems but I think you got what I was saying.

On the other hand, we have the Brazilian health care system (SUS), which is a universal gratuitous medical care service through the whole country. Its purpose is not profit, it's providing health care for the community, so therefore, any SUS unit is bound by State law and run by the State. By law, every SUS unit must provide for anyone who enters its premises in need of medical care. Everyone, Brazillian and foreigners, poor or rich, must be treated if they need to. It's the law.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's all rainbows and flowers, there are definitely many problems in SUS. However, what I'm trying to showcase here is that, when the needs of a population are met, the population itself is more resilient, their life quality goes up and so does their participation in their community.

On the other hand, in neoliberalism, when the State is absent from these areas of community service, the market is, in theory, the one providing for the community. In practice, however, what we observe from neoliberal policies in cities with a great poor population in Latam for example, is that when the State doesn't provide for the community, the market is unable to step up for them because of their obscene prices.

The poor population that doesn't have their needs met by the State or the market sees a great boom in criminal activities within their spaces. That's mainly why criminal organizations are so present in slums and favelas throughout Latin America: criminal organizations are a way for the community to provide for themselves and, as a means to become more powerful, they provide for the community in exchange for their services (not to say they do that for the good of their hearts, of course not).

It's why it's so common, for example, that criminal organizations such as PCC in Brazil pay for kids from favelas to undergo Law school, for example.

And that's is where I wanted to go to start the conversation in SOC: one of the main traits of Ketterdam is the Barrel and, in the Barrel, we have the presence of many criminal organizations, such as the Dregs, the Dime Lions, the Menagerie staff (not the girls, ofc), etcetera.

This, as observed by Kaz himself, is one of the only ways to survive on the Barrel - you filiate yourself to a gang because you need to be able to provide for yourself and, more times than others, for your family as well.

Kaz's story is actually a perfect example of how Ketterdam is the representation of America in the early 20th century in full policies of laissez-faire (neoliberalism): as we can see in Titanic and many other historical fictions, the said American Dream had people believing the US to be this economical paradise where they could all enter the market and become millionaires.

The result of it is the Great Depression, of course, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

When Kaz and Jodi leave Lij for Ketterdam, Jodi believes he'll become a merchant - which is a pretty common belief of those who arrive at Ketterdam, as Pekka Rollins and Kaz himself state in Crooked Kingdom.

The reality of it, though, is much harsher, because the truth is that when you have a market that controls everything, as we see in Ketterdam with the Merchant's Guild (I think that's how it's translated?) and the Stadwatch as a police force, you see perfectly how neoliberal policies really work in real life:

You have a higher class who controls the market and the riches (question: who do you think got the money Shu Han sent to Ketterdam at the beginning of the first book: the people of the city/country or the merchants in the "government"?), and a lower class that, without support from the State or the market to have their needs met will turn to their own means to do so.

So you have the trafficking that brought Inej to the island, the unlimited gambling that Jesper was trapped in, the cons Jodi and Kaz fell for - it's all product of liberal policies.

And so, you have Ketterdam and its neoliberal policies (:

(I really love to make this kind of analysis, please, if you have something you want me to talk about, don't hesitate to ask)

Hey, thank you for your preocupation in being kind to me, I'll just respond quickly because I think this subject deserves a deeper analysis but I'll try to explain what I meant on my post.

So yes, what you're saying is right, HP is a work of fiction. However, fiction isn't produced in a vacuum, it's produced by someone, who's (in this case) writing about things that are part of their material experience as a human being in determined a time and place.

Any Art, even fiction, reflects culture, it's why we have "waves" of things that are popular in Art. For example, fascism and colonialism in sci-fi movies like Star Wars, Dune, and so on; or nazism allusion in Harry Potter or The Shadowhunters Chronicles; these are all produced by people who suffered from the indirect impact of rising fascism in the world a few decades after it rose. They're all produced more or less in the same range of time because it's when the children who were impacted by the echoes of fascism in the late 20th century.

Now, it's fair to notice that the cultural production of these works were validated by (and even reflected) the climate of their times. Does this means that Cassandra Clare, JK R*wling or whomever more would combat fascism should it ever happen again? Not necessarily, the very instance of JK's transphobia in the last years, Clare's position in favor of Israel in 2014, are examples of that.

So yes, you're right in that regard, it's not because someone likes a work of fiction or a determined thing or characters in it that they have a determined set of morals. But you're also right that that's not what I meant.

You see, what I'm interested in questioning is not people's liking of these specific characters in HP, it's questioning why these characters, and what does it say about our cultural climate now; I'm questioning rather how does this popularization reflects our material reality and what does it say about this reality, what are the historical and political background that justifies it.

And yes, in a way it's also a warning about how our cultural production is being guided by fascism-apologists but it's hardly a condemnation of people who like DEs characters or so on, its way more broad than that. I quite like them myself, I can't begin to confess how many edits and imagines and fanfics I consume of them daily lol. So my analysis is not so much a critic to the people who popularized villains such as the DEs for example, it's more an analysis of a cultural phenomenon that goes beyond that but it's exemplified and more easily studied by the products of Art such as Harry Potter.

And it's importante that I say, I could easily do that analysis with Coriolanus Snow or The Acolyte, I just so happened to be Harry Potter because not only I'm more prepared to talk about HP and also because I wanted an excuse to analyse some specific characters 😅.

I'm not sure I was very clear but I'll explain better when I finally do this analysis (:

On Fascism, DEs and Dumbledore

I really think we should be talking more seriously about how dangerously close to condoning fascism and actually villanizing those who oppose it we are getting as a fandom, especially on TikTok and especially when we talk about the Marauders Era

Anyone interested in my rant/book and characters analysis?

Fun Fact - or not so much

Okay, so, in my new book, there's a couple who is based off of Patroclus and Achilles and y'all know that quote from Song of Achilles right?

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”

My couple has various moments where "Patroclus" recognizes "Achilles" right away by the sound of him walking, or how he smells, or (when he's dying) by his touch as a reference.

I did that at random. I didn't plan it but still happened.

And now I'm crying.

For the record as well,

There's a reason why it's Jack who dies instead of Rose (besides the point that she's the protagonist) and that is that Jack is the poor one in their relationship.

The whole thing about the Titanic, both the movie and the actual tragedy, is that it's about class. It's about how higher class people get to live every time while poor people need to beg and fight and play dirty to survive (just like the high class people, with the only difference that poor people are punished for it).

Jack had to die because he represents the poor people in the Titanic, the one who were barred from accessing deck until it was no longer possible, the ones who were treated like dogs being waken in the middle of the night while upper class got the calm polite treatment, the ones who didn't have the right to live.

So yeah, I'm gonna cry on my bed now

For the record.

The reason why Jack does not survive, regardless of wether he could fit or not, is that Jack represents the victims of the Titanic and everything that was lost.

While Rose represents the survivors who somehow made it and got to tell the tale.

In the end, all the survivors of the Titanic lost something that day, which they could never recover. May it be friends, family, lovers or the life they had before, it's something that sunk with the Titanic and they would never recover.

It's the irony that a cold, useless piece of rock survives, but the bright, warm soul full of potential perishes.