Reading comprehension sure is a thing

[farla]

Oh my god, I barely made it through the first post before getting fed up with inane pseudopedantry — like in order to be upset at Katniss hiding a bow beneath a berry bush, they assume that all berries are edible, which they're not. Or being unable to comprehend clauses like, "but carefully, carefully." For every moderately reasonable point, they go off on five idiotic tangents due to either their inability to correctly parse a sentence or their presumption that they understand the economics and ecology of dystopic Appalachia. Add to that some crazy Von Mieses bullshit about how the kids are morons to eat a strawberry (which do actually grow wild in much of America, including the Virginia Strawberry that is native to Appalachia) instead of selling it… Ugh. That's exactly the sort of shit that needs to be quarantined in LiveJournal so that no one outside of bitter fanficcers ever reads it.

I wonder what it is that makes about saying how wrong I am without daring to tell me I'm wrong so appealing? BEARS ATTACK PEOPLE guy was pretty into that too.

Comments

[nijireiki.livejournal.com]

I thought Katniss was a jerk and a brat, but I also interpreted that as being part of her teenager-iness that she would have to deal with/power through eventually (or not)? I thought I was supposed to know Katniss kind of sucked even though Katniss didn't know it yet. At least, that's how I read it. I may be giving the author too much credit, here. *shrugs* I liked that in the third book Katniss was on her way to realizing everyone and everything, including her, sucked all the balls, but I also thought the "happy" ending was kind of a downer, what with the depression, PTSD, and dub-con babies. Even though I'm a girl. I'm weird like that.

In the movie trailer, of course, Katniss is ~perfect~, and District 12 is very clean, and everybody looks well-fed and healthy (even the antisocial, filthy alcoholic...), so it would have earned my frustration even without the weirdness of Suzanne Collins's oddly racially distinct & segregated districts (excluding the Capitol, I guess, because CINNA, SASSY GAY FRIEND EXTRAORDINAIRE is Lenny Kravitz).

[farla.livejournal.com]

That seems unnecessarily charitable, yes. We had three whole books for Katniss to get a proper denouement. And we even get a denouement, but it's just "I suck because Peeta is so perfect and wonderful while I'm a lying slut", which is also never properly called out as bullshit before the end of the book.

And yeah, the movie trailer looks very sterile. I guess everyone dresses up for the reaping, but all I see is stuff being a bit faded, which just doesn't convey the idea that they're actually starvation-level poverty. And like you say, no one looks malnourished. But then, that's actually relatively true to the books, Katniss' thinness is referenced but Peeta and other characters are big.

(It's actually the same problem as with the Captain America movie. Steve doesn't just happen to be tiny and weak, he's tiny and weak because there wasn't much food or medical care or heat for kids during the Great Depression. He should be on the far end of the curve, but he shouldn't be the only guy who isn't in perfect six-foot health.)

[nijireiki.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, yeah, that was my big issue with Captain America. I didn't worry about it too much, because of course the Hollywood adaptations needs 6+ft buffed-up Chris Evans to make Steve Rogers "heroic"-looking enough (and some comic fans wanted him EVEN BIGGER), but at the time the comic was written, like with Superman, it was very much self-insert wish-fulfillment fantasy. The American comics industry was largely comprised of an immigrant population, often poor, and of course the workers stateside during the war would have been ineligible for service in some way or another. The audience was also American, so children of both genders, women, and men who were turned away from enlisting would have been part of the reader market.

There also wasn't the same level of mandatory education, child labor laws, or general workers' rights, like unionization or protection from workplace injury (the face model for "Rosie the Riveter" actually quit her machining job shortly after being "discovered" for the propaganda art because too many women's hands were being crushed and she felt uncomfortable with the prospect of losing her fingers, go figure), not to mention the agricultural devastation of the Dust Bowl affecting availability of nutrient-dense food even if you weren't going hungry. And WWI and WWII both highlighted a lot of chemical warfare, and most people's first instinct isn't to check their genitalia after exposure in the factory or in the foxhole, but all I'm saying is reproductive side effects are both 1) real and 2) a bitch.

TL;DR: Tall and/or healthy men would not have been the norm among the general populace of Brooklyn by any stretch of the imagination.