I love all kinds of things I don't trust.

THIS IS KANTHONY

"She could fly around District 12 all she liked, but she and her mockingjays could never harm him again."

Yeah, you thought that this was the end

all your wasteland flowers — What happened to this man? What happened to her, to be such a stupid, naïve goose, to be staying here so pliantly, so obediently, like a lamb extending its neck for the axe?

Takes one to know one You're a cowboy like me And I'm never gonna love again

THE HUNGER GAMES

Coriolanus and Lucy Gray 🫶🏻

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes + reactions

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)

(Lucy Gray Baird, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes)

The Hunger Games Renaissance. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part. 1 (2014), dir. Francis Lawrence The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023), dir. Francis Lawrence

"It's the things we love most that destroy us. I want you to remember that I said that."

seeing so many horrid takes about tbosas like… it’s so upsetting how much people shit on it and how much people don’t understand snows character!! Obviously he’s not a good guy but to say he’s a heartless monster throughout the whole book makes no sense when the whole point of the book is him being in between choosing his good or bad nature until he finally decides at the end

I feel like any alternate ending of Shadow & Bone that involves Alina losing her powers is inherently flawed.

For example, I’ve see people say that they could accept the Ruin and Rising ending if Alina actually CHOSE to give up her powers as opposed to them being stripped away by as punishment for her “greed”. Another potential ending I’ve seen involved Alina undergoing an actual corruption arc before losing her powers as a consequence for her wrongdoings. But I can’t help but feel that these endings are still dissatisfying.

Having her powers, and by extension her status as a minority in Ravka, taken from her gives her the easy way out and does not actually challenge Alina in a meaningful way. Why go through the difficulties of embracing your differences in the face of an intolerant society when you can simply be cured of those differences and assimilate? Of course, Alina loses a great deal when she loses her powers but what gives her ending the illusion of happiness is the fact that she gets to abandon all responsibility she had to her community and blithely trot her way into a life of obscurity where she never has to do the work of embracing who she truly is.

But of course, because her powers are intertwined with the Darkling due the fact that they are symbolic opposites any ending where he dies would be unsatisfying. LB would have to change the Darkling’s character quite radically to justify an ending where he is killed and Alina lives. The Darkling’s attempts to sway Alina by telling her that he is her only equal might be manipulative exempt for the fact that his claims are absolutely true! The contrary dynamic of Alina and the Darkling must remain in order for the story to be balanced and that balance cannot be achieved unless both of them reconcile.

Alina keeping her powers would deprive LB of taking the easy way out and using the Darkling as a convenient scapegoat to pin the systemic problems of Ravka (THAT SHE WROTE) onto. The story should have taken the route of a journey of self acceptance and liberation instead of glorifying repression and passivity.

I wish that fandom wasn't so finger waggling about the potential of fans sympathising with Snow, or being moved by his relationship with Lucy, or even considering there was love there. It just makes his story so much less interesting.

This is a villain origin story. Which means that Snow is not yet the villain at the beginning. The groundwork is there, the potential. The toxic attitudes and the basis of his future evils. But there was also a chance for him to choose different, for him to become something different. He could have chosen good, he could have chosen love, the potential was there for both. He didn't.

And as an aside, in terms of shipping. Toxic villain/hero ships are interesting. Fans are gonna explore Lucy and Snow and play with them, exploring who they were and who they could have been.

TOM BLYTH as PRESIDENT CORIOLANUS SNOW

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes [2023]