Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

Is it weird of me that the main thing about THG that seems to bother everyone else - that Katniss never had to choose to kill someone who didn't "deserve" it - doesn't bother me a bit? Yes, it makes things easier on her than another author could've been. But not only would that have been much darker than YA might allow for, the point of her story is that she was trying to survive rather than win, and that she has a sense of justice.

I mean, it's a game set up to kill children. Plenty of them are said to die from natural factors, sickness, starvation, etc. Annie won by treading water, not by taking out the competition. It's "unrealistic" for Katniss to have played the way she did only in the sense that ASOIAF is especially "realistic" for always having the worst thing happen. It may not be the most likely thing, but it's plausible and possible.

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I'm now listening to a Yale Open University course on Early Modern England. It's perhaps even better than the Early Middle Ages one, although it might just be that I have a bit more interest and knowledge of this period. (I really wish there were a corresponding High/Late Middle Ages podcast.) I had to take a short break, though, because the discussion of Henry's reign and the Reformation led me to some great thinking re: my own writing, but I got too attached to the comparison and trying to incorporate it as time went on. I had to stop for a while and then come back with it just about history. Protip: deciding that your hero should die youngish so your heroine can be regent for their daughter and she can be a young queen like Elizabeth and do all sorts of stuff after both of your main characters are dead is sort of ghoulish.

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Carrie Underwood is NOT a satisfactory Maria von Trapp. Who cast this and why? OTOH it is amusing to watch this as I still know all the lines.

But they went with the stage show's score instead of the movie, so that's very good.

Later note: she got better as it went on. I don't know why she was so awkward at first.

I was really surprised at how strongly I got caught up in it, to be honest, as

( specifics with spoilers )