A Certain Slant of Light

Oh hey! I wrote a fic! kore took me up on my fics in return for charity donations offer, which remains open, btw, in case anyone wants a fic For Great Justice.

This one is a Natasha fic. I have been vaguely kicking around this idea for ages (which of Natasha's old contacts did she get that file from?) and I'm delighted to have written it before the Black Widow movie comes out and presumably josses all of my thoughts on the matter.

Fic: Tea for Two
Fandom: MCU (post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, drawing on the Black Widow trailer for Yelena characterization)
Rating: General audiences
Warnings: None
Relationships: Natasha Romanov/Yelena Belova
Characters: Natasha Romanov, Yelena Belova, mentions of Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes
Summary: After the helicarriers fall, Natasha goes to an old friend to bargain for the Winter Soldier's file. Yelena is delighted to have this chance to gloat.

Today I have stories coming out in not one but TWO anthologies! They are a matched set, both on the theme of “magical pets,” one m/m and one f/f: His Magical Pet and Her Magical Pet. The proceeds for both are donated to OutRight Action International, which fights for the rights of LGBTQIA people worldwide.

I haven’t had the opportunity to read the His Magical Pet stories yet (except for my own story, of course, which is about two friends who pined over each other in high school, then reunited after years apart, and finally admit that they love each other with the help of the winged bichon frise that they rescued years ago) but I had the pleasure of proofreading Her Magical Pet so I have read all of those. A few of my favorites include:

“Beach Dirt on Bare Feet,” which is about a selkie! and a psychic! who connect with the help of the psychic’s dolphin friend!!! The psychic introduces the selkie to the pleasures of ice cream and it is adorable.

“As if the Sun Came to Shine,” which features a half-troll on the run from Fairyland and the changeling who has slowly gained her trust. I loved the prose and the worldbuilding in this one. Would love to see a longer story set in this world.

I also loved the prose and the worldbuilding in “How to Get a Girlfriend (When You’re a Terrifying Monster),” which features a human researcher coming through a portal into the Endless Dimension, which is… well, I’d better just quote the story:

“In the constantly changing void of the Endless Dimension, there is no such thing as people. There is only one person—or perhaps ‘being’ would be a better word. The constant, hungering entity that both is and fills the entire dimension: the Endless itself. Fragments of the Endless sometimes fracture off, spattering free like bubbles in a galactic pot of porridge, but they are quickly absorbed again, and anything they learned or thought or felt while they were separated is gobbled back up into the hungering one-ness.

Except for one.”

That one entity who broke off from the Endless is, of course, our other heroine. She is so fascinated by the researcher that she attempts to fashion herself a similar body, except it’s a bit awkward remembering to have arms instead of tentacles, and also that it’s necessary to have bones and so forth. Delightful. Probably my favorite story in the collection.

And of course I think that my own story, “The Mating Call of the Teleporting Warbler,” is delightful, although probably you shouldn’t trust the author on this sort of thing. It’s an epistolary story in which a winged cat carries messages between an established f/f couple, one of whom is on a summer fieldwork project studying the titular teleporting warblers. They reminisce about how they first got together.

I’m galloping toward the end of Ashlin & Olivia - finally found a good picture for the cover! Very curious to see if the paperback sells more if it comes out concurrently with the ebook. But the paperback will be coming out either way, because I’m selling books at Pride this year. My mother thinks I should also try to reach out to local bookstores. Is that a thing self-pubbed authors do?

But if I did reach out to bookstores, that would be an opportunity to do something with the paperback version of The English Breakfast Affair (I put it together as a Mother’s Day present because it’s my mother’s favorite of my books), which is unsuitable for Pride but might find an audience at bookstores. Hmm.

But anyway! I’m also getting my ducks in a row for my next writing projects. First, I have another charity fic to write (offer still open, incidentally, probably as long as Trump is president). This one takes place sometime after the end of Reciprocity and will feature, among other charms, this exchange:

Bucky: “Do you know what was wrong with the orphanage stories, Steve? They weren’t grim enough.”

Steve: “....No. I never thought that was what was wrong with the orphanage stories.”

Then I need to do revisions on my rough draft of a modern-day retelling of “Goblin Market” set at a university.

After that! I have three potential ideas to choose from!

1. In the waning days of World War I, a princess (serving in disguise as a fighter pilot) rushes back to her tiny homeland to rescue her brother, the crown prince, from the Communist revolutionaries who want to behead him...who just happen to be led by the princess’s best friend from Swiss finishing school.

Pros: THE DRAMA.

Cons: The research. It’s not so much the World War I that concerns me as the German background.

2. A Little Red Riding Hood retelling that begins in tsarist Russia and ends in the theaters of Paris, where our heroine has been performing as Little Red Riding Hood with her wolf friend, who is actually a student revolutionary transformed into a wolf by her fellow anarchists once she tried to defect from their plan to topple the tsar by making a deal with the devil.

Pros: THE DRAMA.

Cons: I don’t know how to end this one. How can a girl and a wolf can defeat half a dozen Satanic anarchists? Also, the fact that one of the heroines spends most of the book as a wolf strikes me as an insuperable barrier to romance.

3. A silent film actress-turned-director recruits an old friend/ex-lover to make car chase movie together during the waning days of independent silent film production.

Pros: This one is slightly less DRAMA but it still has lots of exciting possibilities. The girls will be doing their own stunts and you know someone’s going to get hurt and there will be h/c POSSIBILITIES.

Cons: This one might be all pro, actually. I’ve already lined up some more books to read about women behind the camera in silent film.

4. I would also like to write another m/m story, but I have no specific ideas for this one, only a stew of vague “this would be cool to use in a story someday” ideas. Springtime! A glass-bottomed chain ferry! (I wanted to use that one in Ashlin and Olivia but I just couldn’t make it fit.) Maybe I should go somewhere cool just to work it into a story.

I finished reading The Three Musketeers a month or two ago and did not post about it because I was Very Upset with some of Dumas’ choices about the ending, in particular about one of the characters he decided to kill, and therefore probably could not have written anything except “KEYBOARD SMASH RAGE WHAT HOW COULD YOU?”

I have calmed down enough to write a fix-it fic, and now I feel much better. It is, of course, a spoiler for the ending (for a book that is 150 years old, but still), so I’m going to put it ( Behind a spoiler cut )

Weirdly, despite the keyboard smashing rage that the book ending inspired, I now want to search out retellings of the story - rewatch the 1993 Disney version (I got the VHS when I was about 11 and watched it so many times that I broke it), perhaps see the Doug Fairbanks version, maybe watch the recent BBC series? I’ve heard that the BBC series is only VERY LOOSELY based on the book, buuuut the book seems to have been VERY LOOSELY based on history in the first place, so really I think loose adaptations in the name of extra swashbuckling are the most Dumasian thing of all.

Building your army of conquest was the easy part. This week, the Society for Improved Dictatorship will move on to the more delicate side of minion acquisition: how does a dictator fill his inner circle?

Here are the two most important qualities in a minion: they must be good company, and they should make good fall guys. Remember, you’re going to be spending hours every day with these men, so you ought to enjoy their company. This is far more important than their supposed competence at their jobs. That’s what they have assistants for! Your minions’ most important task is keeping you entertained.

Besides, it will make your minions delightfully insecure if they know that their assistants are the ones who are truly doing their work. It will tend to engender jealousy and dislike and nip in the bud any deplorable tendencies toward loyalty to their underlings.

Loyalty, in fact, is one of the qualities that you emphatically do not want in a minion. Real internal loyalty, rather than the showy ass-kissing kind, can be dangerous and unpredictable; you never know what undeserved wretch or stupid cause a truly loyal minion may decide to die for. They should be too terrified of you for their loyalty to ever come into question. They should be willing to throw anyone else under the bus at a moment’s notice, up to and including their wives and children.

There is a charming story about Stalin’s minion Molotov, whose beloved wife was arrested late in Stalin’s reign. He continued to set a place for her at the table when he ate dinner at home, in his bugged house, surrounded by his servants who were Stalin’s spies – but made no actual move to free her. Thus, his seeming display of defiance was actually a slavish display of terrified loyalty: although you have broken my heart, Stalin, I continue to serve you faithfully every day. Strive to instill such terror in your minions.

Machiavelli was a fool when he suggested that it is better to be feared than loved. If fear is strong enough, it creates love.

If you force enough obsequious outpourings, even people who yearn to hate you will find that you are wrapped around their hearts – as Anya von Bremzen’s would-be dissident mother discovered when Stalin died, and she realized that her dream of being an actress had died with him, because in her heart she had always yearned to perform before him.

And she had never even met Stalin! The force of your personality should make this effect even more powerful on your minions. You will be their abusive father and cruel lover (emotionally rather than physically) and they will never be free of you even decades after your death.

Now, as to your minions’ personalities, we suggest that you consult your own tastes. Every dictator is different. Get yourself an obsequious toady if that’s what you want. Do you like the spectacle of cringing cowardice? Treat yourself. We suggest you limit yourself to one or two minions of this variety, because occasionally you will need minions who have some resolution and force of character – but you can certainly have that one or two.

Indeed, a toady or a coward will be very useful to you. They are likely to be quite unpopular not only with their fellow minions, but with the populace at large. This will happen even if you allow no mention of their unpleasant qualities in your official press. Rumors get out. It is impossible to quash them entirely, so be selective. Anything less than flattering about yourself must be quashed, but your minions… well, if you need one of them to take a fall, it helps if there are already some ugly rumors floating about to prepare the populace.

And thus we arrive at the second most important quality in a minion: being a good fall guy. We don’t advise that you should dispose of your minions recklessly, mind. If your inner circle is in a constant state of flux, it makes you look out of control. That will make your populace nervous. They want to know that you are steering the ship of state with a strong and steady hand.

But occasionally, a military defeat, an overly enthusiastic purge, or a misjudged policy will cause such unrest that it must be blamed on someone, and that’s what your minions are for.

A few helpful notes about finding good fall guys. We’ve already mentioned a few personality characteristics to look for: cowards and toadies are generally unpopular and easily destroyed. Boring technocrats fall into much the same category. Do you have a minion who likes to corner people at parties and drone on about agricultural statistics? That’s your man if there’s a famine. No one will weep for him.

People with visible deformities also make good fall guys. Any issue that distorts the face, like goiters or elephantiasis, will prime your populace with distrust. Humans flinch from ugliness. Exploit this base instinct.

However, we recognize that in this one instance you may share this weakness with your populace, and may not wish to look at a minion with a pendulous goiter every day. In that case, ethnic minorities may prove an attractive choice. The populace may warm to them despite their origin, but their ingrained mistrust will remain underneath – and that mistrust will flare swiftly with the aid of a well-prepared newspaper campaign when you need to blame that minion for something.

Also, ethnic minorities and deformed people make excellent employees. They know that you’ve given them an opportunity that they might never have gotten anywhere else, and they will generally be suitably grateful, or at least suitably hard-working.

If you can find a minion who is a deformed ethnic minority and also a sexual deviant of some variety, congratulations! That’s a hat trick. Make him the head of your secret police, wink indulgently at his bizarre sexual habits, and then throw him under the bus when your purges get out of hand.

A note about sexual deviancy: always remember that humans are censorious hypocrites in the end. Any sex that is not marital heterosexual intercourse in the missionary position is potentially deviant if you need it to be. It may be ideal for a minion to have drug-fueled homosexual orgies, but a collection of women’s stockings can take someone down in a pinch.

If you find that you yourself are an ethnic minority or deformed, fear not. Stalin was a pockmarked Georgian with a withered arm, but he nonetheless rose to become the Soviet Union’s unchallenged dictator. You have total control of the media. (And if you don’t, why the hell not?) Force them to present you in a flattering light.

And if you find yourself suffering from any lingering qualms of conscience about betraying your minions like this… Remember, it is their job to support you, and that means sacrificing themselves if it’s in your best interests. They ought to be proud to provide this glorious service to your empire! And you ought to remember that conscience is nothing but a set of chains for lesser mortals. You’re above all that. Nothing moves you but the exigencies of power.

I am participating in a fandom auction to raise money for Puerto Rico, so if you have a yen to buy a fic from me, now is the time! My post is here. Come buy, come buy!

To the illustrious President Snow:

What dictator has time for books? This is the most frequent complaint that we at the SfID hear when we send out our reading list. It’s true that dictatorship leaves little time for leisure - heavy is the head that wears the crown! - but even the busiest dictator needs to carve out some quality alone time for reflection and self-improvement. And what could be a more fruitful topic for reflection than the theory and practice of dictatorship?

One note of caution: don’t read too many memoirs or other works actually written by dictators themselves. Many of them have the obvious drawback of being written by deposed leaders, like Nikita Khrushchev, who are clearly poor role models. But even those written by dictators at the peak of their powers are suspect: they’re writing to burnish their own images, not to give a nitty-gritty how-to guide to other budding dictators. Why help the competition?

Fortunately, however, there are plenty of students of human nature who have provided reams of helpful work. Anything with a title like “cult brainwashing” or “emotional abuse” is likely to be full of wonderful tips. They tend to be couched in terms that suggest that they aim to help their readers foil such strategies, not make use of them, but any clever dictator can figure out how to turn their advice to his own ends.

If, however, you don’t want to suffer through the headache-inducing task of doubling advice back on itself, there’s always C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Told as a series of letters from a demon to his apprentice, a novice in the ways of tempting humans, this book is a must-read for any dictator - for temptation is one of the pillars of any long-running dictatorship. If you want people to work their hearts out for you, then you can’t just give them something to fear; you need to offer them something they want.

Now of course base bribery has its place. The loyal should be rewarded with good food, fancy cars, trips abroad, etc. But Lewis’s chief insight for the dictator is that the strongest and most binding temptation is that of self-righteousness, particularly when it is paired with an ideological commitment to judge oneself not by one’s actions, but by the intended effects of those actions. Minions can forgive themselves any atrocity if they believe they performed it in the name of some far-future utopia - especially if someone in authority tells them so. (Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority is also a key text here. Humans are beautifully receptive to the blandishments of authority figures.)

Solzhenitsyn makes a similar point when he discusses ideology in The Gulag Archipelago, but the SfID realizes that three thousand pages is too much reading to heap on any dictator’s head. The early sections about the secret police, however, are well worth a look. They point out the heartening fact that a totally incompetent secret police force is just as terrifying than a competent one - and perhaps even more so, because the randomness of their arrests fills the populace with superstitious dread.

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is similarly a godsend to any dictator with staffing problems. We can’t count the number of dictators who have come to us despondent over their difficulty in finding good minions. We invariably find that their standards are too high: they want active malice, mustache-twirling, the whole shebang from their rank and file.

But Eichmann in Jerusalem has good news! It turns out that you don’t need any of that. In fact, the best minions are absolutely average types. You want utterly unimaginative nose-to-the-grindstone company man types, the kind who join every organization that comes their way but never lead anything. These people are a dime a dozen. Their consciences may flinch at the first atrocities they’re ordered to carry out, but in most cases their consciences will be too weak to exert any control over their actual behavior - and after the first atrocity is hurdled, habit is a great salve.

In any case, you can turn that flinching of conscience to your own advantage. Focus on your minions’ heroism in overcoming their inner scruples to commit atrocities for the greater good. They still have nightmares about the bloodshed they caused! How heroic they are, overcoming their inner suffering to continue fighting the good fight! Their feelings about their actions are far more important than the actions in themselves.

However, when you’re filling key staffing positions, it’s best to get someone a little more colorful. Stalin liked to hire non-Russians to head his secret police, crescendoing with N. I. Yezhov, a bisexual Jewish dwarf, whose status as a triple outsider made him the perfect scapegoat when Stalin wanted to distance himself from the mass arrests. Find yourself a hunchbacked albino with a foot fetish to place in a highly visible role in your regime. You’ll thank yourself later.

Yours,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

To the illustrious President Snow:

It is with some pain that we find ourselves forced to broach this topic. We had hoped that as the course continued you would realize the necessity of coming clean to us, but alas, we have reached the point where we can prevaricate no longer, and still you have not confessed, so we are forced to say: we know that you lied to us about District 13.

We confess ourselves baffled, President Snow. Not baffled that you lied to us - any good dictator lies - but baffled that you told this particular lie, not only to us, but to your people as well. District 13 could be so very useful to you, President Snow!

Oh, sure, we know you think they’re useful to you now - a warning to your other districts what will happen if they rebel. Nuked out of existence, like District 13! But this is simply one more example of your wrong-headed attitude toward fear. You subscribe - forgive us for our bluntness - to the one-dimensional cod-Machiavellian belief that it is better to be feared than loved.

Well, maybe. But what’s best of all, President Snow, is for your subjects to love and fear you in equal measure, as if you were an overbearing father who nonetheless occasionally doles out a few crumbs of love. They may cower from you when they’ve done something wrong, but when there are enemies at the gate, nonetheless they’ll run to you for protection.

But to protect your people from outside enemies, you need to have some outside enemies in the first place, and District 13 seems to be your only option. But what an option it is! District 13 is a truly top-notch enemy, President Snow, exactly the kind of rival we would have designed for you if someone had given us the chance.

They are weaker than you - always a plus in an enemy - but nonetheless truly terrifying because of their nuclear capacity. Simply mentioning the threats of nuclear annihilation they have leveled against Panem ought to be enough to bring your terrified subjects in line.

We realize these threats are the reason why you haven’t told your people of District 13’s existence, but frankly, those threats are clearly a bluff and we’re embarrassed that you haven’t had the guts to call it. District 13 is small, resource-poor, and all in all much more easily wiped off the map than sprawling Panem. It is not going to risk its own annihilation just because you tell your people of its continued existence.

And they make such a delightful contrast to Panem! No need to exaggerate imaginary differences between your two nations: District 13’s militarized, highly mechanized society could hardly be a greater contrast to free-wheeling, fun-loving, Games-running Panem. They’re Sparta to Panem’s Athens - and a starving Sparta at that. They’re stodgy gray East Berlin to Panem’s decadent West. We bet some of them are just dying to defect.

Think of the intelligence coup you’ll score when they do! You just have to make defection a bit easier for them, and step one is simply admitting they exist.

This Cold War metaphor gives us another thought: spies! What better way to keep your people in line than a good spy scare? And it will be especially easy to whip one up because District 13 still has so much in common with the rest of Panem. They look like you, speak like you, could be sneaking among you even as we speak, soaking up information, looking for weak points, pretending to be your friends and neighbors and all the while plotting your destruction.

You might want your spy agency to look into this for real - quietly, of course. Spy scares are good for social control but poor at flushing out actual spies.

And a spy scare would be a wonderful distraction from the tiresome antics of Katniss Everdeen and her supposed lover, that Peeta fellow. Perhaps you could arrange to arrest Katniss’s friend Gale Hawthorne as a spy? He’s certainly spent enough time outside of District 12: everyone’s seen those bags of game he brought back. Little did they know that this was merely a blind to cover for his real purpose out in the wilds: meeting his spymaster from District 13!

At very least, arresting one of Katniss’s friends ought to make her take you seriously. And if you’re lucky, she’ll unwisely try to fight the arrest - not only connecting herself with a known spy, but making herself look unfaithful to Peeta in the process. We have no doubt that the people will turn on her in a heartbeat if she destroys the love story they’ve enjoyed so much.

Yours,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

To the illustrious President Snow:

Thank you for laying out your Katniss Everdeen problem for us in your last letter. Annoying though she sounds, we see no reason for alarm; her upcoming appearances on her Hunger Games victory tour should give you ample opportunity to discredit her. Simply convince the populace that she’s tragically insane, and they may very well realize that their rebellious rumblings are unhinged as well without any more effort on your part.

Given her family history, it might be tempting to present her illness as depression, but we advise against it. Depression has some unfortunate positive folkloric connotations among the uneducated masses: artistic talent, deep emotional sensitivity, even leadership qualities, if they’ve spent too much time imbibing Abraham Lincoln biographies. At very least, the people may latch on to the idea that “She’s miserable, and we are too,” which will only strengthen their sense of identification with her.

No, if you’re going to discredit her, you’d better fake a full psychotic break. Start a whisper campaign: the girl sees things, she’s got voices in her head. For extra verisimilitude, pretend to try to stamp out the rumors: that will make them spread like wildfire.

Then all you’ll need from Miss Everdeen is bizarre behavior at a couple of public appearances, and that can be induced easily enough with drugs. Perhaps she could claw Claudius Templesmith’s face on live television? She’s got an impulsive streak that can be easily turned to your advantage here.

Oh, but for maximum impact, it ought to be Peeta’s face that she claws on camera. Think what a beautiful addition this would be to their love story! The saintly Peeta, his cheek still bleeding from her attack, cradles a weeping Katniss in his arms as she sobs out disjointed words that only make her insanity tragically obvious. Oh, we’re wiping away a tear just imagining the propaganda coup. There won’t be a dry eye in Panem when you broadcast it.

This will solve your current problem. But this is only the beginning of what greater mental health awareness can do for your reign! We urge you to commit to an extensive effort to educate your people about the dangers of Rebellious Emotive Disorder (RED). This disease has been recognized as far back as antiquity. In the antebellum American south, where RED was recognized under the name drapetomania, they considered the sovereign treatment whipping and hard labor. It wasn’t until Soviet times that RED came under the proper care of psychiatry.

Sufferers may exhibit sullenness, lethargy, a distrust of authority, an aversion to work (often coupled with the fatalistic belief that hard work will not improve their lot in life), and dissatisfaction with the current state of society. Their hallmark delusion is that it is society’s flaws, not their own defective brain chemistry, that causes their unhappiness. People who suffer from RED later in life often display a tendency toward the disorder even in early childhood, when they are drawn to legends about “heroic” outlaws and pirates. Robin Hood is an oft-mentioned favorite.

As the disease grows more severe, sufferers begin to experience suicide ideation, particularly in the form of a suicidal desire to fight the government. They may believe that going out dramatically in their paranoid fight against the government would be preferable to living a quiet, orderly life.

In the most severe cases, sufferers act on their impulses. Because RED is highly contagious, this can result not merely in lone suicidal terrorist attacks, but full-scale rebellion.

RED requires prompt and extensive treatment if there is to be any hope for remission. Although some sufferers prove incurable and must be kept in permanent quarantine, many can be treated successfully and sent back to their districts to live useful lives if their illness is identified soon enough. All your subjects should be encouraged to help their friends and loved ones by telling a trusted authority figure as soon as soon as they notice signs of RED.

Ideally, however, this kindly intervention should prove unnecessary. Once mental health awareness has really taken root, your patients will start presenting themselves for treatment as soon as they recognize symptoms of their own mental disintegration. It is so much easier to help patients who already accept their own insanity: they are far more amenable to replacing their bad thoughts (“I’m unhappy because society is so unfair; only revolution can make me happy”) with good ones (“I’m unhappy because my brain chemistry is broken; I know this must be true because only a person with a defective brain could be unhappy in a society as wonderful as the one I live in. Only submitting completely to treatment will make me happy”).

But resistance is the hallmark symptom of RED, and therefore most patients do prove resistant to treatment. The infectious nature of the disease often proves the practitioners’ friend in this regard: once RED patients fully understand that their loved ones may be infected, which would force the authorities to bring them in for treatment as well, they often become much more cooperative. The power of love is truly impressive.

However, for a serious mental health disorder like RED, one can’t depend on love alone for the solution. We urge you to consider transporting the most severe RED cases to the Capitol so they can receive top of the line treatment. The mere glimpse of the Capitol’s wealth, splendor, and vast, glittering military parades is often enough to lift the clouds of rebellion from all but the sickest of sufferers. It may be tempting to terminate treatment then, but it’s important to continue treatment to completion. Early termination often leads to relapse.

There will doubtless be some grumbling among your subjects that the regimen used to combat this disease turns patients into zombies, even heightens the risk of suicide. This is simply a sign that your subjects are deeply prejudiced against mental illness and would prefer for their mentally ill brethren to suffer indefinitely rather than receive the help they need. More education should set them straight. If it does not, their persistent grumblings may very well indicate that they themselves suffer from RED, and deserve prompt, compassionate, and comprehensive treatment.

Besides, suicide (as distinct from suicidal terrorist attacks) is far from the worst outcome in cases of RED. Better dead than RED, as they say.

And that’s another way to deal with the Katniss Everdeen problem, if worst comes to worst. If she won’t commit suicide for you, once you’ve set up convincing evidence of her instability, you can always fake it. Perhaps a double suicide with Peeta, even? He finds her dead body and kills himself in despair. There’s nothing more romantic than the excesses of young love.

Your friends,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

To the soon-to-be-ex President Snow:

We wash our hands of you. Had you heeded our advice in our last urgent letter, your reign might yet have been saved, but instead you stubbornly continued down your wrong-headed path. Everything you’ve ever built is about to tumble down around you and we want you to know that it is 100% your fault.

The faults in your governing style are too manifold for us to enumerate them all in a single epistle, but in the end, they can all be boiled down to two words: Katniss Everdeen.

( Spoilers for Catching Fire )

We are ashamed that we allowed you to purchase our course. Your name is a blot on our list of alumni.

The Society for Improved Dictatorship