coram deo

i get why a lot of people don’t like reading mockingjay as much as the rest of the trilogy, but i think it’s actually so essential to understanding the central thesis of the entire hunger games series.

the whole point of the hunger games is this: all human life is valuable, and artificial divisions between people keep them weak. and the only way out is radical love.

and this is something that is literally echoed again and again in the books. take, for example, gale. why is gale such an interesting, complex, and yet reprehensible character? yes, it’s because at the end katniss cannot separate his bomb from prim’s death. but it’s deeper than that. why does gale build the bomb in the first place? it’s because gale doesn’t see every human life as valuable. gale is willing to kill people and to deny them their humanity simply because they are his “enemy.” so, there’s the obvious example of his willingness to blow up the nut with everyone inside and his disregard for the human casualty. and the people in the nut aren’t even from the captiol, he just wants to do it because the stereotype of that district is their allegiance to the capitol, and gale hates that.

but there’s another scene, also in mockingjay, that i think goes under-discussed which is his view of katniss’ prep team. when katniss finds her prep team literally imprisoned in 13, she’s horrified and upset by the conditions they are in. but gale isn’t. and he’s confused about why katniss would care for them! her response is to say that it’s because they cried when she went to the quarter quell. and gale is like, “sure, but they’re still from the captiol.” and this argument is so important. because katniss argues that the prep team deserves to be treated as human beings, and when he presses her on why, she basically says because they treated her as a human being. but gale can’t see that–all he can see is that they’re from the capitol, and he’s confused about why katniss should care.

and this is, so crucially, what katniss learns in the hunger games. she realizes that she doesn’t want to kill the other tributes just because they are from the other districts. she hates the fact that they have turned her against people who are, in their core, just like her. frightened children who have been manipulated to kill other children against their will, all selected based on their district, a social divide that has literally been invented and imposed on them.

and another just absolutely essential thing to understand here is that peeta knows this all along. we talk at length about how peeta’s defining trait is his kindness. but what’s so important about peeta’s kindness is how it transcends any boundaries of social class or social division.

when peeta gives katniss the bread, it’s important to note that just before he does that, we hear his mother talking about “seam brats pawing through her trash.” peeta’s mother buys into the social divides in district twelve–she views herself as better than someone from the seam simply because of her standing as a merchant, and reinforces these class divides by refusing to extend the simplest humanity to a child from the seam. she literally refuses to feed a starving child on the grounds of a social divide, within a world that already has divided them into districts. but peeta doesn’t see it like this. peeta refuses to deny katniss food just because she’s from the seam. peeta gives her kindness. peeta gives her humanity.

and he does the same thing in the games! his entire first interview, the dramatic king focuses, not on the games, but on his genuine love and adoration for another tribute. how radical! to refuse to subscribe to a system which asks him to hate her? to want to kill her? and to instead confess his love for her? sure, katniss ends up being the mockingjay. katniss might have held out the berries. but peeta in that moment is the one who sets the rebellion in motion. peeta is the one who refuses to engage in the senseless hatred of someone who “should” be his enemy. instead, he reaches out in love.

and it all culminates at the end of mockingjay, when katniss votes for the capitol hunger games to gain coin’s trust. and peeta is utterly horrified by this. because he can’t understand how she could have been through everything he has been through and not understand that continuing to senselessly kill human beings (children!!) for some kind of revenge just reinforces these binary modes of thinking. but the thing is–katniss DOES see that. and when coin proposes it, that’s when she knows she has to stop her. because coin, like gale, like peeta’s mother, and like so others many around her, is still buying into these divides. is still viewing the captiol as the enemy. is still viewing a human life as expendable. 

and there’s a quote in mockingjay that i think lays this out pretty explicitly. katniss says, after she kills coin and is recovering, point blank: “they can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them.” she’s realized the crux of the entire hunger games–that manipulating us to hate and kill our fellow humans, that drawing up divisions between people because of where they live and what they produce, that believing that hating someone on the basis of any of these is justification for their death, is all a farce. it’s all a distraction. it’s all pretend. she says, in the same chapter: “no one benefits in a world where these things happen.” not the districts. not the capitol. not the victors. no one.

the entire arc of the hunger games is really just about katniss catching up to what peeta has known from the start. katniss overcoming all the manipulation from those around her, all the glitz and glamour, all the artificial social and class divides to see what peeta has seen clearly from the start: love.

In traditional Irish folktales, the elves only understand/respect Gaelic: the English language revolts them, so don’t expect to be winning any of those famous riddle contests or song tournaments in English. I’ve idly considered making one of those memes where it’s like [THE IRISH] *brofist* [THE JEWS] and the point of agreement is “our language is magic,” but the joke would take too much explaining to be funny. A lot of Irish Gaelic is structured around speech and the power of language. There isn’t, for example, a word for “yes” or “no.” In order to answer a direct yes/no question, you have to use a form of the verb that was used to ask the question. So basically, if the question is–say–”did you murder your wife” then there is no way to simply say “Yes, Your Honor” or “No, Your Honor.” Your minimum required effort involves using the verb that was invoked in the question: “I murdered,” or “I didn’t murder.” Of course you can just as easily, in just as few syllables and maybe fewer, change the verb. “I was framed,” maybe. Which is to say that the most basic speech acts in Irish involve constructing a narrative, assenting to others’ narratives or challenging them, and most crucially elaborating on the narratives that have already been established. 

(I chose murder just to be a colorful example, but actually I need to go back to my language reference books and check because I bet this interacts interestingly with the tendency in Irish for the narrator never to be the subject of her own story. You’re always the object, in Irish: you can’t drop a plate, for instance, the plate drops itself at you. You’re not thirsty but a powerful thirst is on you. You didn’t murder that woman but she very well might have gotten murdered in your general vicinity.) You see this lots of other places in the language too. For instance there’s also no word for “hello” or “goodbye.” If you want to greet somebody your required minimum is to cough up a formulaic blessing: Dia duit, God be with you. Here’s the thing. The second person can’t just be like “yup, uh huh. dia duit.” No. The stakes have been raised. The second person’s required minimum answer is now Dia’s muire duit, God and Mary be with you. If a third person joins they have to invoke St. Patrick on top of the two already mentioned. I’m not kidding. At four people you do hit a limit where you’re allowed to just say “God be with all here,” but in the very traditional country pubs it’s an insult to cross the threshold without saying at least that to cover everyone inside. Actually worse than an insult; basically a curse. That’s the burden you bear when you start speaking a magic language.

That puts a lot of conversations I’ve had with rural Irish people into a far better context. Because even when speaking English they will speak in this structure, knowing that context makes so much more sense now.

The way Irish structures the speaker as *positional* is also deeply insightful. Not just because the speaker is the object of a narrative- though that is unique and fascinating too- but also because that narrative happens in a conceptual *space* around speaker and subjects. Tá brón orm, sorrow is on me. If I’m missing my coat it’s apart from me; my accomplishments are beneath me; my careers and skills are in me; if I’m to do something, it’s on me to do that. If I welcome you to my home, I’m putting the welcome in front of you.

We distinguish between temporary and permanent and habitual forms of being, even in English. The only other place I know that does this is AAVE. Marcus be playing the drums; aye lads, he surely does be playing them.

You can’t say please or thank you or I love you; those are powerful ideas, and you must put a little effort into articulating them. Le do thoil, with you will. Go raibh maith agat; very roughly “a good is at you.” (Good on you, mate; good going!) I love you, Christ if there’s not dozens of ways to say it, but none simple. The simplest I know translates most closely to “my heart is at you.”

Great addition!  A lot of people are also chiming in to say that the Irish language is called Gaeilge, not Gaelic. I am 43 and American, and when I studied Irish in school the class was literally called “Irish Gaelic” (though the teacher just called it Irish and that’s usually how I think of it too). So like, I hear you all that “Irish Gaelic” is wrong, but it is the way I was taught twenty-five years ago. Aithním go raibh dearmad orm, I find that a mistake was on me.

Please to me is “Má’s é do thoil é” it’s what I got taught as a kid and it’s the one I use more often than Le do thoill. It literally means “if it is your will” too.

Let's take a moment to appreciate the fact that the first two times Palpatine tries to turn Anakin against the Jedi, in Revenge of the Sith, Anakin’s first instinct is to stand by them.

In the script and the comic book adaptation, he takes it a step further and declares the Jedi are his family.

As shown here... he’s mastered the theory of the Jedi teachings. Rationally-speaking, he knows the Jedi are good and the Sith are evil.

Unfortunately, it takes discipline and commitment to put these teachings into practice. That’s the part Anakin struggles with.

This is partly because throughout his training, while the Jedi were trying to teach him things like discipline and emotional intelligence, Palpatine would tell Anakin that "he doesn’t need any guidance, he’s perfect just the way he is", enabling him.

Despite that failing, Anakin is still a trained Jedi and there is no scenario in which Anakin would just choose the Sith over the Jedi.

Which is why Palpatine switches his approach and stops framing the choice as a choice between the “Jedi or Sith” but rather a choice between “Jedi or Padmé”… 

… and that makes Anakin’s defenses crumble.

But that rational part is still there. Deep down, Anakin knows the Jedi are good and what he’s doing is straight up evil.

So as he lies to Padmé, he lies to himself.

He focuses on the bad so it makes the killings easier to swallow.

"The Jedi were plotting a treasonous coup to overthrow the Republic. A strike force led by Mace Windu tried to assassinate the poor old defenseless Chancellor."

"They’re all gonna come for Anakin, now, so they need to be eliminated before they kill him."

"The Jedi are evil, they turned against him, and the galaxy is better off without them."

"He’s doing to end the war and bring peace to the galaxy, because it is better off with a strong leader who’ll put an end to the squabbling and indecisiveness of a corrupt Senate."

"He’s doing this for Padmé."

It’s all bullshit, he doesn’t actually believe that.

But it’s the only way to pacify that rational part inside of him, the valorous Jedi, the sweet little boy who keeps telling him to stop.

So this, right here...

... is Anakin repeating Palpatine's paper-thin rationalization to make himself feel like he's still in the right. Nothing more.

Lucas even says this directly to Hayden for motivation in these scenes:

And when you look at Anakin’s words on Mustafar, almost every single accusation he throws around are ones that are parroting Palpatine’s words, “Good is a point of view, Anakin.”  “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!” He doesn’t actually have any accusations with any specificity, just vague, “I should have known the Jedi were plotting to take over” and “I don’t fear the dark side”--again, things he got from Palpatine’s speech at the opera house--because it’s all justification for Anakin knowing he’s doing the wrong thing.  He’s using Palpatine’s direct words, not even his own. He has to, because it’s the only way he can justify what he’s doing that has no rational justification.

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

i love this post

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

you know it also occurs to me that due to how - unlike twitter - we indulge in memes for weeks or months at a time, to the point of some of them becoming shorthand used for years after the fact, we also have a lot of our own oft-incomprehensible-if-translated-literally idioms, of a sort! (not PRECISELY idioms, but they’re something more than just a funny meme, a lot of times, y’know?)

AND many of them are visual idioms or w/e, is that a thing? we use specific images (or images clearly based on the original image) to indicate a certain emotion or response, often with either not enough words to actually convey the response on their own, or no words at all! But those of us fluent in this dialect know what’s meant by it and it actually communicates quite clearly. Which is hella cool. :D

Tumblr is one of those sites that’s insular enough that it’s essentially ended up coming up with a language and culture of its own, to the point where if I interact with someone online whose main social media is Twitter or Reddit I can more or less instantly tell that they’re Not From Around Here. It’s cool and a little freaky at the same time.

Tumblr is an island ecosystem and we are the finches evolving more and more highly specialized bills.

To be honest i liked Little Women 2019, tho i havent read the novel

I am curious as to why people would dislike it /why they think its disrespectful to the historical period

I think reading the book itself with fresh eyes answers most of these questions... it's complicated (one of the reasons why I'm reblogging this so many days after you posted, sorry).

The historical period one is the easiest one. To me it's just a bit jarring/baffling? These people behave in a modern way in forms that rather than transgressive, seem just... weird? Like when they come back from the New Year's party and the girls start undressing in front of Laurie. It is the modern equivalent of striping to your underwear and changing clothes in front of a guy you just met that day. But in the great scheme of things, to me it is one of the smallest faults of the movie.

And the same thing goes to the costumes. It's ludicrous they got an Oscar not just because they are innacurate to the period. The story covers around a decade -it begins with a 15 year old Jo close to the beginning of the American Civil War, and the main action of the second part of the book ends with 25 year old Jo, and then an epilogue set a few years later. The style of dress changed more than a bit between 1861 and 1871, and it could have provided an excellent way to keep track of time between the past and present storylines.

These are 1861 styles (consider that, given that the Marches are going through genteel poverty, they would be dressing at this point with older fashioned clothes even):

1871 styles:

You can also use costumes to reflect the respective money status of the characters. Realistically in a family of the means of the Marches, clothes would be handed down a lot, specially with 4 sisters (in the books Amy wears hand-me-downs from her cousin Flo, which is very mortifying to her because her aunt Carroll has horrible taste). Fritz Bhaer is meant to be a person tight on money, as he has to feed and clothe two nephews on a tutor's salary, but his clothes don't reflect that here (well, his economic status in the movie is rather nebulous, and that being generous).

In both those accounts the costuming fails to help the story the movie is telling along. It tries to do something for characterization, but what it does is rather lazy. Color-coding the sisters like power rangers is unimaginative, and putting Jo in almost-crossdressing clothes is both anachronistic and rather trite (there were styles of the era that were rather masculine). And it doesn't even fulfill the "pretty shiny" criteria that is the baseline of period costuming when it cannot provide anything else for the most part (there is a piece of clothing here and there, but it is rare); it's not that Jacqueline Durran hasn't made eye catching if historically innacurate costumes before.

Moving on, at a meta level, I feel this movie is pretty soulless, because it was produced and advertised like a cash cow: get that director that made much noise with Ladybird, get all stars, both old and up and coming to fill these roles (someone would point out that LW also had big stars... but at that point, those were Wynona Ryder and Susan Sarandon. Kirsten Dunst's breakout role, Interview With the Vampire, was released a month before LW 94 was released. LW 94 was Claire Danes' breakout role, and it could be argued the same for Christian Bale, considering Newsies only got cult following status several years later. I digress), get Alexandre Desplat for the score, get that woman who won oscars for P&P and Anna Karennina for the costumes.

There was a lot of the advertising that was really misleading about the book (that this movie was the only true to the spirit of Louisa May Alcott (how could they possibly kow that?), that Little Women was FINALLY getting written and directed by a woman (every single adaptation since 1994 -2017, 2018 was written and directed by women), or that Laurie was Jo's feminist ally -we are talking about a guy who in the books cannot take any hints that his romantic attention is unwelcome, that tells Jo that girls sometimes mean yes when they say no, and hints about commiting suicide if he's rejected. Not counting that time where he catfished Meg by letter pretending to be John).

For that reason, the movie cannot really agree on what it wants to say, and tries to be everything to everyone. Jo will be asexually coded, but Greta will say in interviews -and will weave into the narrative with the insertion of the take-me-back letter- that Laurie is Jo's the one that got away, right person, bad time... because a lot of the people that are familiar with LW ship Jo/Laurie (and IRL there's an insane Saoirse Ronan-Timothee Chalamet shipping, which is... something). Marriage is an economic proposition but also not. Meg¡s dreams are as important as Jo's but also not. And so on and so forth.

More in detail:

the movie does not understand the philosophical framework of the movel. LW is a modern novel; it's filled with the hope of progress and the general idea that humanity walks towards a better tomorrow. The second part of the book is happier than the first. The sisters get more independence, get a chance to do the things they want, some get to see more of the world on their own. But the movie is post-modern and is enamoured with the idea of childhood as the golden age and adulthood as the disillusionment with life.

In the book, Alcott addresses marriage by presenting her ideal of marriage as a meeting of the minds and a covenant of equals; Meg's story on the second half of the book revolves most of the time about the notion that she cannot be the perfect wife, home maker ad mother on her own, and that she needs the help of others, specially her husband, to be happy and balanced as an adult. Amy and Laurie are two people of deep artistic sensibilities and love of the social game, that take the hurt of their frustrated artistic careers and focus it on helping poor but talented artists make it. Jo finds in Fritz Bhaer the synthesis of home and adventure, strangeness and kindness, the place of belonging she had been looking for her whole life, and they run their school on equal footing.

That way also the movie either misunderstands or drops the ball when it comes to certain relationships. We have no idea why Meg would marry John Brooke. Amy never wanted to be Jo or felt she was second to her, because they always wanted different things from life. Beth is not fridged for Jo's authorial inspiration in the books; her death is a blow to the family because she was the glue that kept all things together, with silent but fruitful work. Laurie is a rather traumatized orphan who is terrified of letting go of childhood and having to become an adult, and his proposal to Jo is an attempt to tie her as his forever-mom-girlfriend (not as was said by Greta, that Laurie wants Jo to step into adulthood with him). Jo's anger is a self-destructing force, and her learning to manage it a conquest; she's a deeply generous and affectionate person, and her main drive to write is not "making it in the world" but providing comforts to the ones she loves (after that, the safe exploration of adventure, and only in third place writing as a career). Besides becoming an artist, Amy wants to become a lady in all her manners and ways, ad she's not shamed by the narrative for it. Both John Brooke and Fritz Bhaer are poor but kind and hard-working men, warm and servicial. Marmee is the idealization of the wise and reliable mother, and not a quirky soccer mom.

This is a tight summary of why I dislike this movie. I think, if Greta Gerwig had such an interest in Louisa May Alcott as a figure, a movie about Louisa and the process of writing Little Women. She could even have had sequences about the scenes in the book. But the reality is that the studio wanted a new version of the American classic, not some biopic about an author (and hence the compromise-not-compromise-mock-ending that tries to both give the novel ending and give a different ending to satisfy everyone).

Anyways. There are a few things I like about this movie -and they are all moments: the very young Mrs Hummel opening the door of her house and us seeing the poverty they live in. Mr Lawrence crying while he listens to Beth play. Amy being introduced as a painter but clearly in a style that is becoming out of fashion. I think Greta Gerwig is far more suited for that sort of quiet, impactful moment form of storytelling, like it is in Ladybird. When she tries to go meta ad heavy handed, the story more or less falls apart upon close inspection.

I'm sorry this is so long, but it is the summarized version of my thoughts XD hope it explains at least the basics of it.

This is a crystal-clear distillation of so many of the problems I have with the 2019 Little Women. I am so glad to have read it. Wonderful job. 

That said, is it cool if I chime in with a couple more quick things that bothered me particularly? They piggyback off of your analysis rather nicely, and I’ve been meaning to post about them somewhere, sometime ;)