NakTheCow

Nak

@NakTheCow

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Cow appreciator making his way across the internet. 18+. No Minors. May have weird stuff within.

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NakTheCow
@NakTheCow
shel
@shel
shel
@shel

I think anyone who thinks the Hunger Games is an unrealistic YA dystopia with nothing to say about America needs to take a good hard look at College Football

shel
@shel

I’m rewatching the first movie now and even though I still think the book is better there’s this scene they added where Snow is literally pruning a rose and explains that the Hunger Games has a winner because it gives the districts something to hope for. “A little hope is good, a lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is good, if contained.”

And I just feel like that’s so apt for what so much of American culture and propaganda is. Redirecting hope away from hoping for revolution or deep systemic change and towards hoping for your sports team to win, hoping for your candidate to win. Small, contained, controlled hopes.

So that you imagine how wonderful it would be if your district won the hunger games this year, and not how wonderful it would be if there weren’t any hunger games at all. That would just be too outlandish. They’ve been going for 74 years after all. It’s always been like this. And you don’t even think about what it would be like if the economic system and government were different completely

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in reply to @shel's post:

pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

"A spark is good, if contained," is a chilling thing to say about hope, and it's so true. America is really good at producing canned hopes; hope is one of the many things that advertising tries to sell. Whether it's Elon Musk advertising himself as the future of humanity, or an insurance company claiming that they can give you peace and security in the form of a policy, it's always about selling hope.

It's ominous to me, somehow, that marketing people can use this line so reliably, even for trivial things. Why would people be hoping (just a little bit, not admitting it) that they'd be able to turn their lives around by buying a consumer product, unless they were in a perpetual state of misery? Can one avoid the conclusion that marketing needs our misery—needs us always to be desperate, so that even desperate ad pitches will always work? ~Chara

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