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No one could come out of the theatre thinking Choreography Snow is in any way sympathetic just because he was sentenced to 20 years of being Eminem.

One of my favorite elements of the book is how Snow repeatedly has these big revelations about how evil the Capitol is (e.g. how they’ll gladly destroy anybody who opposes them, district or not; how they manufacture ‘war’ against the districts even after the war has ended, for no reason other than sadism and control; how district conditions are basically unlivable; etc), but he still knowingly helps them.

He knows that the system is evil, and even feels the repercussions of that on a personal level. But instead of fighting against it, he uses any means necessary to cement himself in a position of power and reinforce it.

Sure, he’s young and traumatized, but at the core of it, he’s still undeniably a bad person. He’s power hungry, openly manipulative, cruel. He views people from the districts as subhuman (even whilst living amongst them). Even his “love” for Lucy Gray is a blatant desire to own and control her.

While I think the themes are laid out pretty clearly in the movie, in the novel, Suzanne Collins takes every possible opportunity to remind the reader that Coriolanus’ circumstances don’t excuse what a horrible person he is.

As someone who still adores the hunger games i disagree with your take on coin. And katniss. Katniss isnt doing a centrist take. Katniss, at her core, is a broken character. She isnt a Rebel. She spent most of the books being a pawn being placed on the chess board, even when she thought she was doing things herself. Her one motivation was her little sister. By the end of the series, Coin is heavily implied to have sent katniss's little sister to her death, she wants to keep the games around, is one thing katniss and Peter want to get rid off. District 13 has been portrayed as a highly militaristic district with a strict hierarchy. In that reality, Coin is on of just instating a new elite and exacting revenge, rather than build something new. Removing her shakes that up and opens the opportunity for someone new. but katniss, in the end, doesnt think about that. She is killing the person she thinks killed her sister

How you gonna have an over 1 billion dollar franchise based off novels and films, and yet, despite the general audience members loving it, they misinterpret nearly ALL of the political analysis within your work? I'm truly befuddled 😅

"Are you really with the rebels or are you passively part of the empire?"

Yep... a question we all have to ask ourselves

I used to think the killing of Coin was a centrist thing, but definitely now think it's about the importance of Reconstruction after revolution, and not letting opportunitists use revolutionary language to steal power

The movie adaptation of Ballad downplays the dehumanization of the District people. Aside from being kept in a zoo, the Tributes who fled had their bodies dragged through the streets and one girl died cuz they gave her a veterinarian instead of a human doctor. 2 people died from asthma & tuberculosis & a simple doctor's checkup might've saved them

The distortion of the legacies of MLK and Nelson Mandela should tell you everything you need to know about how most see the rebels.

I'm Mexican; and I remember that when I read the promise I thought "oh, they wanted to do something like Mexico"
Mexico's history, like all the other countries in the world is a complicated one. After the colonization there was a lot of mixing, specially between poor white people that came here from Spain trying to find a better life in New Spain, and indigenous people (Plus African slaves (yes there were African slaves in Mexico too, it's just that they were freed a lot earlier, that's why it wasn't such a big deal here))
And the thing is that when the government tried to make a national identity, they couldn't use the Spaniard identity for obvious reasons, but they also couldn't use the indigenous identity because the Spaniards already had injected the racist ideology. So they decided to reject the Hispanic identity and reject the indigenous identity to create a new identity. The Mexican identity.
Nowadays a lot of Mexicans, like myself, are some degree of mixed. And the thing is we don't have any real past, because at most we can just said we were the result of a very violent act that replaced the original population, but we are also the descendants of the original population?
Now we are racist to other descendants of the original population because they managed to keep some of their culture despite everything?
It's a messy business.
So when I hear gringos talk about land back, I'm always in conflict because, what, I'm a colonizer too? But my skin is brown and my facial features are more similar to indigenous people than white people.
But I also can't say I'm indigenous, that culture was uprooted and forgotten by my family generations ago. Plus my mom's side of the family looks very white.
I don't know. I guess I can only say that I'm Mexican, whatever that means.
But hey, the good news is that my European ancestors at least gave me lactose tolerance.

Me: How can people not see that Snow is super white supremacist bootlicker coded? It's so obvious this character is a bad guy that we're not meant to empathize with, rather he's meant to be a reflection on how racist/totalitarian systems radicalize some people and dehumanize other people. This isn't that complicated, I'm sure media literacy will prevail.

Also me: sees thirst trap videos about the character and comment sections filled with people defending his actions claiming he did nothing wrong/vaguely incel commentary about how women are bad and make men into monsters by breaking their hearts

...oh... well, that's disappointing.

I mean, it’s not even only that Lucy Gray is hot. It’s that (at least in the book, it was so so in the movie) he believes she’s SUPERIOR to other ppl from the District. Her Covey identity means she’s not from the districts, they were neutral, therefore she is more like the Capitol, therefore she is more deserving of his attention. Classicism is a key factor in his attraction to Lucy Gray (hard to portray in a movie bc you don’t see his thoughts). And even then, by spending more time with her, he eventually realizes that she doesn’t see the world the same way that he does. And that makes her inferior again in his eyes. And is part of the reason he was willing to kill her and destroy her family’s living and identity (banning music in District 12). There’s also a certain irony of Francis Lawrence making 4 hunger games movies (he didn’t do the first one) and also being a Zionist.

What I will ALWAYS give Hunger Games credit for is that it shows that revolutions aren't quick struggles where only the heroes get hurt. Revolutions are messy, bloody, violent, and desparate wars that, by definition, are waged to destroy one power structure so it can be replaced with a new one. In real-life revolutions, people starve, innocents die, and the groups who are fighting institutionalized oppression may resort to unjust and unnecessary violence. The Hunger Games may only show very small glimpses of it, but revolutions, even just ones, leave an amount of trauma and instability in their wake.

I did a thesis on the hunger games and dystopia in YA broadly, I love the bread and circus aspect of Ballad so much, and the young Snow having genuine attachments and choosing to discard them, to be controlling, to watch and trim out what he finds weak: it's human and it's chilling. The capitol framing the rebels, how snow and everyone capitol sees them, I found that fascinating but also I might be more invested in the social theory of power in the hunger games than most

Anyone who thinks colonialism is 'over' is...too uncomfortable to really think about it too much and hope for a buzzword or two to terminate those thoughts.
Having been around a Mr. Snow, I'd say guys like him are very common and do have those very short fuses to then act on violence so quick!

I think your point on how passivity is just as violent as those who actively engage in oppression is on point.  Even when you look through history, especially from the last century, it's obvious how complacency has fed into both supporting and enabling brutal systems even if people don't necessarily mean to.

"if you do not nail reconstruction, you're kind of back to square one"

At this point, it's weirdly refreshing when people bring up ATLA as a negative example.

8:20 Then again, if you disband the Fire Nation monarchy, Zuko (one of Team Avatar’s only Fire Nation allies) loses all of his power & thus his ability to help end the war. Truth be told, Zuko becoming the Fire Lord is one of the ways that the tv show was able to believably get across that the war ended with the good guys winning. If Zuko’s not in charge, most of the power would probably go to the generals/heads of the Fire Nation economy (who might want to continue the war). Now in Korra’s time, it would be a great develop for the Fire Nation to dissolve their monarchy or at least become a constitutional monarchy.

Indigenous people are still fighting for what's left of their land and culture. They don't control the land they live on: the government pays to lease the land---and they barely get any of that money. All most Native Americans want is to control their own resources and make deals that will be honored. We're not being asked to give up our subdivisions.

Haven't seen that particular Lucas interview before, but he has always been clear that the rebels were based on the Vietcong. He considered Star Wars to be a follow up to American Graffiti. He passed on Apocalypse Now to make Star Wars and considered them basically to be saying the same thing in different ways.