Personal blog. I am queer and disabled and a little cat mrow, 20s style. Young adult. Figuring life out. Constantly. Follow my craft account!
| I used to try and be safe for minors, but I've stopped putting effort into that. Say this blog is... I dunno, 16+. I don't do DNIs so just be mindful.
| I sometimes block people for ableism and suicide baiting no matter the target.
i totally get venting about facing microaggressions in public for using a mobility aid, and i’ve totally done it myself, but after talking with some disabled people who are afraid to start using canes or rollators or wheelchairs because they’re worried about people being assholes to them in public, i want to reiterate that my rollator changed my life and that the amount of harassment i’ve faced is frankly negligible.
anyway today i was able to take the train to physical therapy by myself, and stopped for coffee on the way back, and nothing bad happened and it was a beautiful day.
other mobility aid users feel free to share your stories about why it’s worth it.
yeah people stare at me and once in a blue moon there’s some harassment or whatever, but i can zoom around wherever i want in my power chair and it couldn’t be more worth it.
once i was transferring from the car to my manual wheelchair using my walker, and a woman walked past moving very slowly with a cane, and she stopped, and she looked at me, and i greeted her, and she said “do you like your wheelchair?” and i was delighted! people rarely actually give me the chance to tell them how much i love my mobility aids. so i told her yeah, it’s amazing, it doesn’t totally meet my needs but it makes things so much easier, sometimes i can go places and do things i hadn’t been able to do for years. the hardest part is when i can’t move around because of the way people design and build buildings, or when people park bikes on the sidewalk, that sort of thing.
she said “that’s really good to hear. i’ve been putting it off for a while and this makes me feel better about doing it. i’d LOVE to go places again.” and i said “do it! it changes your life, it can be difficult sometimes but that’s so small in the face of what it can do for you!”
most of the interactions i have with other people that are specifically about my mobility are positive moments of solidarity. not all, but the vast majority.
it’s worth it and i will take every opportunity i can to tell other people that it’s worth it. not just wheelchairs, any mobility aid. not a single person deserves to live even a single day putting off their mobility simply out of fear.
A character that once excited you might now come across as too perfect, a plot point too tragic, or the worldbuilding overblown. That’s okay. Media is saturated with all of these things, and that’s because op protagonists and unrealistic plotlines are rad as hell.
So, before swinging the metaphorical bat at your story’s kneecaps to bring it down a peg, let’s take a step back.
You can make an epic storyline out of paint drying or the most monotonous tale of the fall of an empire. That’s because good writing is 1% ideas and 99% execution and landing.
Write what needs to be written without fear it will land too hard, because the readers are there to feel the hit. Reigning in aspects of your work that excite and interest you pose a real danger—when the hit lands, the reader may feel nothing at all.
Reminder to avoid buying anything crochet new from big stores. Crochet (unlike knit) CANNOT be done by a machine and must be done by an actual human being. The person who made it was definitely not paid an appropriate amount for their labour. Most big stores use sweatshops anyway and I know it’s hard to completely avoid buying anything from a major store. But if those specific items don’t sell, we can send a message to companies that we don’t want items made fully by hand using slave labour
This summer, avoid any new crochet items. You don’t need THAT specific top that badly
Here’s the link to and info on the next comic anthology I’ve submitted a script to! Submissions will be open until the very last minute of June (2024) if y'all are interested.
ALT
I hope I can end up with my writing in this anthology with some fellow Tumblr creators — like @jubileegeode, who’ll be the artist if my script is accepted!
Apparently, some companies now are labeling mass-produced crochet items with “machine crocheted” to justify selling an entire granny square vest for 14 bucks.
1. Machines cannot crochet.
2. Knitting machines, to my knowledge, cannot make granny squares.
3. Even if there was a machine that could crochet, 14 bucks for an entire fucking vest is still too low to be paying people a livable wage basically anywhere in the world.
4. It takes me, a very fast crocheter, about twenty minutes to make one granny square in a single color with five rows. Multi-color granny squares take more time. I’ll say 30 minutes. Next time you see a granny square anything in a big box store, count one row of squares and multiply by 20 (for single color squares) or 30 (multicolor squares). Then consider that it’s skilled labor which should have an hourly wage you can live on. Then look at the price tag. This is Victorian piece work poor shit going on.
Reminder to avoid buying anything crochet new from big stores. Crochet (unlike knit) CANNOT be done by a machine and must be done by an actual human being. The person who made it was definitely not paid an appropriate amount for their labour. Most big stores use sweatshops anyway and I know it’s hard to completely avoid buying anything from a major store. But if those specific items don’t sell, we can send a message to companies that we don’t want items made fully by hand using slave labour
This summer, avoid any new crochet items. You don’t need THAT specific top that badly
Think how much creepier it would be to see them killing other kids when they look so squishy-cheeked and little.
“Think how much creepier it would be to see them killing other kids when they look so squishy-cheeked and little.”
THAT’S THE POINT SUZANNE COLLINS WAS TRYING TO MAKE
Think about these cute squishy kids being forced into a romance in order to survive
And the threat of these cute squishy kids being forced into prostitution after the games are over.
REBLOGGING THIS AGAIN WITH A REMINDER THAT FINNICK WAS 14 WHEN HE WAS REAPED/WON THE GAMES AND WAS FORCED INTO PROSTITUTION SOON AFTERWARD
wait the kids were forced into prostitution after they won???
Some of the Victors were, especially if they were attractive to lots of rich people during the games. How do you think you pay off the parachute things people send you to help you win the game? Those books were so fucked up
That’s why I feel like actual teens should have been cast in the movie. It would have hammered in the message of the books so much more.
And if they had cast actual teenages, I’m sure they wouldn’t have focus so much on romance in the films. They would have focus on the horror of the hunger games, like they damn well should have.
The hunger game movies are the exact thing the hunger game books was trying to warn us about
Just going to add in a few other things that a lot of people seem to miss because it was either de-emphasized or cut entirely from the movies:
-Haymitch Abernathy was 16 when he won the Hunger Games, and the Capitol attempted to force him into prostitution as they did with Finnick and many other popular victors. He refused, and in retaliation, they gradually killed off everyone he loved one by one—his friends from home, his family, his girlfriend. He began drinking heavily at a young age to deal with the trauma of the Games, the loss of everyone he’d ever cared about, and subsequently having to continually relive the trauma of the Games in mentoring roughly 50 children, two each year, whom he’d then have to send to their deaths in the Arena.
-The Capitol also attempted to force Joanna Mason into prostitution. She, too, refused, and like with Haymitch, the Capitol retaliated by killing off everyone she loved one by one. She alludes to this in both the book and the movie version of Catching Fire, not flinching when she enters the Jabberjay area of the arena because there’s “no one left” that she loves. The movies don’t really explore this, though, while the books do more exploration both with everything the Capitol has taken from her and the lingering effects of her PTSD from her imprisonment by the Capitol.
-The only reason Peeta and Katniss weren’t forced into prostitution was because the Capitol was too invested in the “Star-Crossed Lovers from District 12″ narrative.
-Also, Katniss spent the latter half of her first Hunger Games deaf in one ear and had to have her middle and inner ear reconstructed after the Games—the explosion at the Cornucopia permanently fucked up her hearing in that ear. She’s able to hear again after the surgeries but never quite the same.
-And Peeta had a prosthetic leg! He was severely injured while fleeing the “Mutts” at the end of the Games and was bleeding out from his leg by the time he and Katniss reached the Cornucopia. Katniss gave him a tourniquet using one of her last two arrows to tighten it. Doing so saved his life, but by the time the Capitol doctors took them out of the arena, the leg was beyond saving and had to be amputated. Katniss finds this out in their “post-Games” interview with Cesar Flickerman.
-Just generally the movies glossed over or completely cut a lot of characters whose experiences in the games left them physically disabled (Katniss’s partial deafness and Peeta’s lost leg being cut entirely, Beetee’s spinal damage from the forcefield leaving him wheelchair-bound being largely kinda glossed over) or with PTSD (Katniss and Peeta’s PTSD isn’t really explored that much, Joanna’s PTSD is pretty much skipped over entirely, Annie’s barely in the movies at all, Haymitch’s entire backstory is cut, the fact that Finnick is basically just constantly putting on a show and barely holding it together under the surface isn’t ever really explored, pretty much all of the addiction subplots including Haymitch attempting to quit drinking and Katniss starting to drink at one point and everything related to morphling are cut…).
-Basically as “rough” as the movies are they sanitized the FUCK out of the Hunger Games and the world surrounding them, and that’s…not a good thing.
TL;DR: @isashi-nigami is completely correct, The hunger game movies are the exact thing the hunger game books was trying to warn us about.
Two things:
The only reason Katniss and Peeta were saved from prostitution was timing. After their own Games, the rumblings of rebellion had really started to gain traction. All victors have to do a celebratory circuit of all the Districts, but Peeta and Katniss’s celebration circuit was being used by Snow as a “everything’s fine, please don’t rebel, we’re just a pair of teenagers in live” prop tool for Snow to try and supress the rebellion. Peeta and Katniss were much more useful to him as teens in love than they were as prostitutes. Then we went straight from there to the 75th Games, in which Peeta and Katniss were fighters. Between being used to quell a revolution and having the Quarter Quell go the way it did, there was no time for Snow to loan them out to people. But had the timing been different – had there been no rebellion or had Peeta and Katniss not been central to it or had it all been delayed long enough for the post-games celebrations to die out, then yeah, they would have been sold to the highest bidder just like Finnick was.
I actually thibk that the fact that the film’s focussed on the romance and the glitz and glamour and etc was… accidentally clever, on Hollywood’s part. They certainly didn’t mean to do this, but they 100% replicated the Capitol’s attitude to the Games. They made it all about the entertainment, all about the story and the romance and the drama. So many people would have watched those movies and been taken in by the romance plot, and the revolutionary plot would have been secondary. The social commentary wouldn’t have even registered. Even the fact that they used older actors for the teens – in the books, Katniss and Peeta are never seen in public without a full face of make up once they’re Reaped. Katniss undergoes a full beauty treatment and not only is she wearing make up that makes her look older and more mature, but so is Peeta. The Capitol didn’t want them looking like fresh faced babies, and neither did Hollywood. If you watch those films merely for the entertainment they provide, then congrats. You’re the canon target audience of the Hunger Games. Hollywood was never going to make a movie that focuses on the true horrors of such a story, the way it should. Especially when the social commentary in the Hunger Games is terrifyingly similar to a social commentary on our society as a whole. No, no - they were always going to focus on the romance and the glitz and the glamour and the heroism. Which is……. kind of poetic, really. That they went and did the exact same thing that the villains did.
THIS MAN ^^^ I wrote an essay about the lack of humanity in this book and man I should’ve read this first
The whole youthful and innocent vs older and sexy thing actually gets brought up at the end of the first book.
Cinna puts Katniss in a dress that is consciously designed to make her look much younger than she actually is, so as to play up the ‘teens in love’ angle they’re trying to sell the Capitol.
But the dress also has padding, so as to make her breasts and hips seem larger than they are, since she’s been literally on the verge of starvation for weeks, and wasn’t eating that much before that, and as a result she isn’t that curvy. Katniss is shocked by this, but Cinna explains that the dress was actually a compromise, because the original Capitol plan had been to give her plastic surgery.
Katniss then realises that none of the male tributes grew facial hair in the arena, even though several of them were old enough (note: she doesn’t say that all of them were old enough. Though Rue was the youngest, this suggests that there were other tributes who were young teenagers) and that something must have been done to them to prevent that from happening.
Also, it’s worth considering that Katniss and Peeta probably looked even younger than your typical sixteen year olds.
Katniss makes a big deal about how much they both get to eat at home, but if you read between the lines, Peeta lives off stale bread from the bakery and the odd bit of meat, and Katniss is essentially living the hunter gatherer lifestyle, supplemented by what they can buy from the baker and what they can get from Prim’s goat.
They’re much more well-nourished than the bulk of District Twelve, but Katniss can still easily spot the Career Tributes, because they’re the ones who have always had enough to eat. She’s one of the older (and therefore almost certainly heavier) tributes, but she still gets to hide in trees to get away from the Careers, because she’s significantly lighter than all of them.
Malnutrition tends to push back puberty. Katniss would probably be less well-developed than a modern teenager of the same age.
Notably, we don’t hear about her getting her period— or even wondering about that like she does with the facial hair— in the arena. Which, yeah, could be because of our culture’s habit of viewing menstruation as less kid-friendly than graphic child murder and mentions of prostitution, but it’s worth considering that in real life she might well have not started it yet.
While wearing the final interview dress, even with the padding to give her bigger breasts and wider hips, she says she looks about “fourteen at most”, which even accounting for Cinna’s borderline magical design skills, suggests that she probably tends to look like a younger teen even without it.
The Hunger Games would have been almost unbearably disturbing, if they hadn’t decided to cast almost all the characters as incredibly fit twenty somethings.
Some ppl are like “I’m a kinky sex-positive pervert freak!!!” and then make fun of virgins and asexuals….. sure, reclaim freakiness but keep working on that because teasing ppl for their sex lives (or lack thereof) is, unfortunately, very normie mainstream vanilla behaviour. the right to sexual determination includes NOT having sex. 101 shit. Like this isnt subversive dude, it’s using the edge of an ideology for bullying
ALT
