Nobody Sees Our Hearts Break...Or Our Mental Trauma

I must admit, I took a break from history last week and travelled into the future while reading The Hunger Games series.  I think I am still reeling a little from shock and the raw emotion the books brought out in me.  I was so horrified, so intrigued, so angry, and so absolutely devastated.  For anyone who has not read this series, (and you need to read it now!) it is about a distopian future where two teenagers from each of the twelve districts that the United States has been divided into after a civil war are required to participate in The Hunger Games.  Basically they are thrown into an arena, which could be anywhere, a desert, the plains, mountains, and they must fight to the death.  It is a celebrated annual event in the Capitol.  Some of the tributes have trained their entire lives to fight, others have not since they are chosen randomly in a ceremony known as the reaping.  The entire thing is televised and it is required viewing for the whole population.  The main character, Katniss, defies the Capitol and becomes a symbol for the people's revolt against the horrors which have been inflicted on them.  It is an amazing look inside the head of someone suffering from the nightmare of PTSD and how they must keep coping in order to keep living, even when more violence is forced upon them.  At the end of Mockingjay, which is the last book in the series Katniss's terror is still palpable after almost 15 years.  Her fear for her children, both because of the world they live in and because of her psychological wounds is so intense and so real that it leaves you stunned. 
This video is what really got me hooked and why I started reading the series.  The beginning of it scares me to death, and the end, mmm...I think you just have to see it.  I wish the girl in this video had been chosen to play Katniss instead of the too hot blond babe actress with big lips that Hollywood chose.  This is Katniss and will always be for me.


Now, since I must throw something Tudor into every blog entry I am posting another video that I liked this week.  It does a good job of showing just how many people Henry had executed during his reign, and by that I just mean people he knew personally, it doesn't include all of those he didn't know that he had put to death.  I think the parts with Wolsey and Cromwell hurt the most.  I liked the way James Frain portrayed Cromwell.  He was sort of a frightened little man who liked to appear as if he was in total control of everything and seemed to have no feelings at all until the end of his life.  I feel like Cromwell was much more ruthless in real life but I liked the acting in The Tudors.  You get a good sense of how badly Henry treated everybody in his life, and how it ate at him. Trauma of a different kind, the self inflicted kind, but the scars are still there.