SHHG! Episode 10: School Mentioned
Added 2023-07-21 14:01:01 +0000 UTCThe Hunger Games chapters 21 & 22
Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for scams! We apologize for our accidentally-prophetic bonus episode last week and discuss the market for 2000s internet nostalgia. Then we've got two action-packed chapters to discuss--well, actually, one is action-packed and the other is steamy. Kind of? It's attempting to be? We're still not sold on this Peeta guy, but there's plenty else interesting going on here. As we get closer and closer to the end of this book, one question lingers on our minds... who will win our game of spot the fake dystopian YA novel?!
Comments
JOHN LEGEND NEOPETS AMBASSADOR????
Cromalin
2023-07-25 20:23:34 +0000 UTCI assumed the Inheritance Games were fake because it's a fucking mashup of the Benedict Cumberbatch escape room and Umineko
Kzinssie
2023-07-24 22:30:21 +0000 UTCBy the way, when you do the movie, PLEASE watch the deleted scenes afterwards. Some of them are so funny, and there are some golden comments on the videos.
Zachary Coleman
2023-07-24 13:35:45 +0000 UTCYes, absolutely! A weapon of choice like this is free character development, and it feels oddly underutilized.
The Shrieking Shack
2023-07-24 03:59:47 +0000 UTCI've only watched the movie and this is just my armchair analysis based on the Shrieking Shack retelling, and maybe this is just my hyperspecific brainworm now, but I'm getting more and more put off by how underutilized Katniss' bow is. In theory it's such an interesting choice for her. She's already been shown to have issues with feeling like an impotent onlooker, and her entire characterization at the start makes her feel detached from the whole dystopia she exists in. Giving her a weapon that basically let's her constantly observe the battlefield from the outside is really interesting, and there's so much fertile ground for her to feel like a coward for sniping people as she watches her allies die in meelee range, having her feel disgust over using what to her is a hunting tool on humans, letting her delude herself that she's actually choosing the pacificstest route, etc. etc.; Her relationship with her bow could be a great metaphor for her relationship with the struggle (tm) and could change as she overcomes her misanthropy and manages to work with people against the common enemy and everything. But she really seems to just, be sitting there looking at people grab loot without a single interesting thought between her ears
Cutey! Candy!! Cataclysm!!!
2023-07-23 13:43:36 +0000 UTCYeah, I’m very curious about why that got included in a newer printing of the first book when it’s almost certainly going to be about the full series.
deepFlaw
2023-07-23 03:58:03 +0000 UTCHaymitch is just a big fan of the fake dating into real dating romance trope, clearly.
Eric
2023-07-22 19:50:59 +0000 UTCthank you liz for beginning this episode by beating me to death with a rock to keep me humble
Cynoiz
2023-07-22 11:14:34 +0000 UTCthat said [with ghibli tears in my fucking eyes] please just fix the site and make it normal and stop hitting me with torture beams
Cynoiz
2023-07-22 11:09:59 +0000 UTCas a 16~ year neopets veteran who consistently played until the nft shit made me so upset and embarrassed i took a hiatus from the site: the recent news is so good because even the worst case scenario of being eventually dead is better than your corpse being paraded around for nostalgia money. please stop pet semetary-ing my lupe so you can sell gold chain jewelry and bitcoin jpegs. id rather the site be allowed to die with dignity than being kept on the world's worst life support
Cynoiz
2023-07-22 11:08:00 +0000 UTCI just realised that for all the times you have brought up Elfen Lied I still had no clue what it is, and was apparently expecting it to be some sort of anime Erlkönig based on the name
A sudden absence of bees
2023-07-22 11:05:48 +0000 UTCyoooo
The Shrieking Shack
2023-07-22 02:51:38 +0000 UTCNeopets is just one of those things that won't work unless it's all Flash games and HTML and I'm in fourth grade using the computer at the public library
BuoyantTrain37
2023-07-22 01:57:16 +0000 UTCI heard that there was an extended cut of clove threatening katniss with the knife while straddling her but it had to be cut because it was too twisted
TJ Guiney
2023-07-22 00:35:59 +0000 UTCUnfortunately I knew the Darkest Minds was real right away because I took a poetry class (in college) in which someone submitted a poem recounting the plot of the book.
GroceryStorePhobic
2023-07-22 00:10:57 +0000 UTCIt sounds like the thing Neopets is trying to do is just Gaia Online tbh
Dawnbreak
2023-07-21 22:40:38 +0000 UTCso i dont remember enough plot details of the next two books to say if they do what you guys have been wanting this one to do, but regardless i think that they would be good books for the show based solely on how weird the scifi angle gets
sarah
2023-07-21 22:37:55 +0000 UTCI told my friends I had never broken a bone and then I snapped my ankle real bad and I’m listening to this podcast just shaking my head at the broken bone curse y’all have accepted. This broken ankle has allowed me to read along this time though
Alexa Galloway
2023-07-21 22:01:57 +0000 UTCOoh, thanks for the heads up! I'll double check before diving too far in.
The Shrieking Shack
2023-07-21 21:49:14 +0000 UTCAs a warning that I'm sure somebody else gave I'm pretty sure that writing about war interview is gonna be in reference to all three books not just the first one
Cole Schwerzler
2023-07-21 21:42:45 +0000 UTCBillionaire romance hunger games!
The Shrieking Shack
2023-07-21 21:23:10 +0000 UTCI can’t believe the Knives Out one was real
Sarah Z
2023-07-21 21:22:18 +0000 UTCXeecee didn't actually say what their inspiration was for the fake YA scenario this week but my guess is "succession but Greg is the teen girl lead"
Miles
2023-07-21 18:52:34 +0000 UTCShriekcast leylining Neopets back into the news and then immediately pivoting to leylining it into the grave is such a powerful flex
Addison Stumpf
2023-07-21 17:47:11 +0000 UTCA couple of episodes ago you had a discussion about whether or not something with cool action scenes can be anti-war/violence. I've been mulling that over since then, and I think the answer that I came to this week is: No. I think that media with a strong thesis regarding those subjects can have that reflected in the violence such a way that it is still able to present those arguments effectively and have engaging action. Something that I ended up thinking about in the same context is Animorphs, because Animorphs is also a nominally anti-war thing for teens but it has cool animal fights with aliens where everyone who isn't dead heals from all their wounds. But part of Animorphs' central thesis surrounding war and violence is the scars that that leaves and their permanency and that is reflected in how it handles the aftermath of these scenes; All the heroes heal physicially from their wounds, but not only are the teen protagonists clearly being negatively mentally affected in the moment by the horrific violence that they are suffering from and are inflicting on others, their increasing desensitization to that violence and what that desensitization leads to is something that builds over the course of the series. I think fundamentally that is the core problem with the action as presented in the book so far, its lack of a strong central thesis regarding violence that can be consistently seen in how it writes its action scenes. For a book that was written after the author was struck by the juxtaposition in American media around the time of the Iraq war between America's military actions abroad and the banality of reality TV it has an extremely cinematic and immature view of what 'war' is. Katniss's enemies are all videogame midbosses right down to her fighting them using environmental hazards or losing to them in gameplay and then getting away in a cutscene. Even things that are meant to be performatively gruesome like the field dressing scene or Clove's head being smashed with a rock in this chapter happen cinematically and are divorced from the rest of the book in tone. Like, putting aside for a moment the inherent silliness of Katniss dropping a wasp nest on patrolling enemies like she's in MGS3, when you start thinking about how combat has been portrayed in the book up until then and start trying to apply that same level of cinematic surgical detail to how medical care would need to be applied in the aftermath it's absurd. Imagine Katniss hadn't been able to dodge the Katarina ult that that girl tried to use on her during the first Hunger Games proper chapter and what the aftermath would have been, with every lurid detail described of her slowly, horrifically dressing the wounds left behind after she removes a bunch of comedically oversized knives that were sticking out of her like pins on corkboard. It just all feels very poorly considered. Also Katniss should get to do more cool stuff and snipe people with bows but that's a different issue.
Shift
2023-07-21 16:02:01 +0000 UTC
