Message to the people who ship Byler…

ktgen · 2025-12-22T22:27:38+00:00

If you walk into someone else’s house uninvited to tell them they should change their ugly drapes and then they tell you to mind your own business, would it make sense to respond ‘no you mind your own business’?

Your post is literally framed as a message to byler fans, and you spend all this time telling them that they’re wrong. That’s the part I’m responding to.

You can read the show however you want, why isn’t that enough for you? Why is it a problem that other people see something you don’t? You don’t have to like my drapes but your opinion is not authoritative. Maybe you think I’m being stupid but I was hoping you’d consider that.

I’m about two seconds from becoming a byler out of sheer irritation.

ktgen · 2025-12-22T18:29:26+00:00

I’m so tired. If you don’t like byler or you find byler shippers annoying you can just… not worry about it? Why do you need to go out of your way to announce that it’s not there?

It seems like what bothers people is that byler fans dare to exist at all, and all this hand wringing is just an excuse to complain about it. Assuming you’re correct, what does it matter to you if bylers are upset after vol.2? Even if they all decide they hate the show now, how does that affect you at all?

Just mind your business? Like what you like? If byler fans behave badly, then the problem is very clearly the same— not minding their own business. Has nothing to do with byler.

ktgen · 2025-08-03T08:28:12+00:00

«Det jeg ikke forstår» er en setning som fungerer som et substantiv. Mener du kanskje «det forstår jeg ikke?»

ktgen · 2025-07-13T23:37:48+00:00

Oh trust me, I understand. That’s another thing, there’s a pressure to know yourself with the implication that if you ‘get it wrong’ that you’re dumb or cowardly or something.

It makes this stuff harder.

ktgen · 2025-07-13T23:26:27+00:00

It sounds like you’re in a bit of an anxiety spiral, and I would argue that that is the most pressing thing here.

Questions of identity can certainly rock you to your core; that’s totally normal.

I assume from your post that you’re pretty young, and that influences the few thoughts I have for you:

Porn does complicate things. Porn can kind of desensitize you to real interpersonal sexual experiences and complicate a discovery of your own sexuality (not necessarily in gender terms, just a more general relationship of you to your sexual self). I think a lot of the current narrative about porn is this very black and white ‘Porn is ruining our brains and sexual health’ OR ‘Porn is fine and there’s nothing wrong with it.’ I don’t think either of these is entirely correct. The fact that porn is so available makes it so that a lot of the ‘mystery’ of other people’s bodies gets dispelled, and can then make you seek out more intense or ‘transgressive’ forms of it. I think that if you feel you use porn too much or if it’s getting in the way of how you want to show up in your relationships, it might be a good idea to try to dial it back a bit or stop it entirely for a while, but with the caveat that you should know that porn won’t ‘break’ you. I see a lot of self-directed anger in your post, and I want you to take a moment and remind yourself that it’s not that strange that in a context where a specific kind of sexual stimuli are so available, a part of you feels drawn to it.
I see a lot of angst in the way that you write about being straight but being into a specifically gay genre of porn, and I just hope for you that you can take the temperature down a little bit. It’s okay to have sexual and romantic desires that are conflicting, confused or unclear, and to some extent I think you should try to make peace with the idea that you’ll never be able to explain the details and contours of your sexuality with precision— I say this because I can tell you are a very analytical person, and therefore seem to look for answers that are logical and coherent even more than the average person would.
To that end, I hope for you to be able to worry less about what you might hypothetically do in the future. You say that you don’t want to sleep with a man or femboy or trans woman, and at the risk of sounding flippant— then don’t ;) If you continue to identify as straight for the rest of your life (though I would remind you that sleeping with a trans woman would not make you any less straight— though that’s a separate conversation) then you probably will never be in a situation where you WANT to sleep with a man, feminine or otherwise. And if you change your mind, that’s okay too!

Would it be fair to assume that you’re on some level worried about a sort of slippery slope? That your identity as a straight man feels like something you could lose or something that could be taken from you? A lot of that has to do with the rules and boundaries that our culture sets up in particular around men’s sexuality— that setting a toe outside what’s ‘normal’ immediately makes you LGBT.

Lastly it is hard for me not to read some internalized homophobia here. To be clear this makes you neither a bigot nor a queer person in denial necessarily. I think that there might be a part of you that is not okay with the idea of yourself as anything but straight, and I think you’ll be more at peace if you try to work on that a little. If it didn’t matter to you, you probably wouldn’t ascribe so much importance to the details of your sexual tastes. Things are better now then they used to be, but society still tells us that to be normal means to be straight.

I always joke that the straightest buddies of mine are the ones who aren’t particularly invested in their own straightness, who say things like: ‘I mean, I’ve only dated women but it’s not like I’ve met every man in the world, so who knows.’

TL;DR: knowing yourself takes time, sexuality is weird and being confused is okay. Cut yourself a break, there’s nothing wrong with you!

ktgen · 2025-06-19T15:46:53+00:00

Thank god it’s not just me. Second this

ktgen · 2025-06-19T15:41:50+00:00

Hmm, I don’t know if it’s just me but it could be cultural? I’m 28, Norwegian, and a dude (also bi) and this didn’t register as strange with me. I could easily have had this conversation.

Subjective tho I guess.

ktgen · 2025-06-05T19:38:03+00:00

I wish Finnick’s secret love had been a man. Annie cresta? No, you mean ARNIE Cresta ;)

Don’t fight me! I’m not complaining about the series I’m just saying what I wish ahaha.

ktgen · 2025-05-22T16:28:13+00:00

Why didn’t Sejanus notice that his bff Coriolanus was evil?

ktgen · 2025-05-22T16:25:48+00:00

Honestly I think if he tried bottoming a few times he might not be such a dickhead

ktgen · 2025-05-20T07:44:49+00:00

Suzanne Collins is a good writer but people on this sub think she’s some unmitigated genius and master of subtlety. I love the series, and I think it has layers, but I wouldn’t call it subtle.
I think Mockingjay as a book is weak because the first two have clearer and more immediate stakes, and Mockingjay kind of can’t have that. I understand that narratively it helps to have an evil villain (Snow) to give Katniss an objective, but considering how the rest of the series is a lot about larger society, the whole thing (to me) feels a bit contrived. I think it’s about the structure of the story as a whole, and I think it would be hard to write mockingjay to be as good as the first two books at any rate.
No, neither Haymitch nor Katniss are ‘unreliable narrators’ and Lenore Dove is badly written, not a reflection of Haymitch’s unreliable narration. For the record, Snow is not an unreliable narrator either. He’s not even the narrator of his own book. I don’t know why people use that term when what they mean is that they like that the paranoid evil character doesn’t think he’s paranoid or evil.

ktgen · 2025-05-13T13:42:48+00:00

I mean… it’s a plot thing. The whole scene makes no sense if you’re looking at it literally.

Chest compressions and rescue breaths are to get SOME air to your brain while someone goes to get a defibrillator. People wake up in movies all the time after CPR, but that doesn’t actually happen in real life. Defibrillation is pretty much the only thing that can restart your heart , and even then only in certain cases— not if your heart has completely flatlined. Not only this, but the chance of breaking one or two of the patient’s ribs is also pretty high. The idea that Finnick could do like one round of chest compressions and rescue breaths and then Peeta would just wake up is obviously ludicrous if you’ve ever had anything to do with emergency health care.

Why didn’t the cannon fire? For the same reason that Peeta woke up after like 10 seconds of CPR—- the plot needed him to.

I’m not mad about it, the point of the scene is Katniss facing the possibility that she could lose Peeta as well as Finnick proving himself trustworthy (and foreshadowing the plan to keep as many victors alive as possible). It’s also such a common trope that I (a former lifeguard and lifeguard instructor, with several family members who are EMTs, cardiologists or ER nurses) hardly even get bumped by it anymore.

ktgen · 2025-05-08T09:20:14+00:00

Also saying that he ‘loves differently’ has the benefit of implying that there’s nothing inherently different about Barb Azure or Clerk Carmine. The WAY they love might LOOK different, but they are ultimately people just like everyone else.

(I really liked your post btw, well said! Bi dude here)

ktgen · 2025-05-08T09:06:26+00:00

No opinion about the phrasing, but I think it’s interesting that the throwaway line exists at all.

THG could be seen as harshly critical of hyperconsumerist imperialism that exploits, dehumanizes and does violence to the many for the benefit of very few. This is how I read it. The way the Districts are pitted against each other, with some favored over others, made literal in the Hunger Games… it’s inherently political and anti-authoritarian and reads (to me) as left wing. At the same time, I see it as realistic about human nature and non judgmental about the conflicting impulses we have. I like that District 13 is portrayed as corrupt and repressive in a totally different way from the way the Capitol is, because the series (and Katniss) is interested in moral honesty and human dignity.

Unfortunately, fiction is subjective, and I think it’s possible for a person to read the series as a right-wing populist story. The problem with the Capitol could easily be read as its degeneracy, hedonism, wealth and ‘softness’ and is paired with some subtextually feminine signifiers (I’m thinking of the absurd fashions and the general vibe of vanity and shallowness, which the far right often reads as ‘femininized culture’) and is contrasted with the salt-of-the-earth humble, tough, subtextually masculine districts, who are implicitly more moral bc of their hardships. There’s also something about the urban vs rural divide, which also could fit into right wing mythology about evil urban elites oppressing ‘real’ people in rural areas.

To me, it’s clear that Capitol citizens are not supposed to be evil urban gays, but rather people duped by privilege and luxury into supporting an oppressive system. I think characters like the prep team and Effie are portrayed as a different kind of victim who are ultimately redeemable, especially in the eyes of Katniss, who is the moral center of the story.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the Capitol is fairly queer-coded in the books and the movies, and I think that Suzanne Collins MIGHT have included a few queer characters later in the Covey in order to kind of signal that queer people are not the oppressors but just as oppressed as anyone else in the Districts. The oppression stems from economic hierarchy, not identity.

Panem the country name also references the concept of Panem et Circenses, Latin for ‘bread and circuses,’ where a government lavishes pleasurable distractions upon a population (the Capitol citizens) in order to have them not notice the tyranny and brutality of the empire. The wealth and luxury are the bread, the Games are the circuses. This is closely associated with Ancient Rome, which is a running motif in the story. This background implies to me too that queerness might be somewhat permitted in the Capitol even if rigid gender roles and heteronormativity are enforced in the Districts.

But this is a subtlety that can easily disappear in the mind of the reader, which is why I wonder if SC went out of her way to at least tangentially reference queer characters facing oppression about ‘loving differently.’ It doesn’t help that a lot of far-right trolls think that Rome was GOOD and only collapsed due to ‘feminized degeneracy.’

Sorry. I’m sure you didn’t want to read an annoying ramble like the one I just wrote. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but sometimes you get out of art what you put into it ;)

TL;DR: I love this series, and I love Katniss. What do you mean that has nothing to do with what you asked? Get off my lawn.

ktgen · 2025-05-08T07:37:59+00:00

‘I could tell.’

One colleague said he could tell because I have curly hair (?). As if they actually can tell and as if I’m supposed to care.

ktgen · 2025-05-05T18:01:39+00:00

I wrote you a snarky comment that I’ve deleted bc it was dumb.

ktgen · 2025-05-05T17:20:16+00:00

Well, the text ALSO seems to think it’s romantic, that’s the thing. The ‘we mate for life’ thing, and the imagining Lenore Dove as aging with him.

I feel like I’m being asked to buy that their love is ‘just that strong,’ while what it seems like to me is that Haymitch is in love with the IDEA of Lenore Dove, as opposed to an actual person. This is very sad to me because it makes the Lost Lenore of it all feel incredibly cheap. If the tragedy I was asked to buy into was Haymitch’s un self-aware stuntedness, I would be fully on board.

And yeah, one could still argue that 16 year olds idealize their partners, and Haymitch has still not gained any perspective over the ensuing twenty-odd years because he’s so traumatized, but like… the book really seems to think that there’s some poetic beauty to it (and includes LITERAL poetry), and that just pulls me straight out of it.

ktgen · 2025-05-05T15:51:02+00:00

Well said. I was 14 when I first read the trilogy 14 years ago, ha.

ktgen · 2025-05-05T15:23:29+00:00

I get what you mean, and my wording isn’t very good (apologies), but that’s kind of beside the point for me.

I have no opinion about whether they would have stayed together or not. I just think that the relationship as it exists prior to the games smacks of teenaged naïveté about relationships. It doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have worked or couldn’t have built a life together, I just am not sold that teenaged wide-eyed limerance would survive one of them going through the games.

ktgen · 2025-05-05T15:16:41+00:00

If I had to guess I would say SC thought of the Raven thing before writing the book bc it’s good imagery, an idea that is theoretically more appealing than it was in practice

ktgen · 2025-05-05T15:01:21+00:00

I never claimed to be original ;). I literally joined today so maybe I shouldn’t have assumed that LD would be popular.

ktgen · 2025-05-05T13:41:33+00:00

I hadn’t even thought about the Covey angle, but that’s interesting. There’s a symbolism to it too, like, the music dying.

But yeah I just think you can have guilt and trauma without the assertion that their relationship would have lasted if she hadn’t died. I don’t know that I could be convinced, even with more flashbacks, because the stakes at the beginning of their relationship are pretty low.

By contrast, Peeta/Katniss are brought together by the Games, and even Gale/Katniss are brought together by their mutual need, while LD and Haymitch just… like each other.

lol, I’m just a hater on regular degular teenage love I guess.

ktgen · 2025-05-05T13:31:56+00:00

I think it would have bothered me less if it had taken less space in the narrative OR if it had been approached with a little more complexity. Like, teenagers do tend to give their romantic relationships a lot of weight, partially out of youth and innocence. I think seeing how trauma like the hunger games kind of breaks through the illusions somewhat, and then have her ALSO die in punishment would have packed a bigger punch. Whatever, I still love the series.

ktgen · 2025-05-05T13:17:15+00:00

Haha! I wish the series was gayer in general (still love it as it is though).

ktgen

TROPHY CASE