Characters / The Capitol Series

A Capitol Experience

Kalika Hope

• Big Bad: The whole time, she is seen as the one to kill. Even after she is actually dead.
• Dark Action Girl: No High-Heel–Face Turn here.
• Eye Scream: The way she dies.
• The Sociopath: She is very fond of killing. Not so much for taking the feelings of others into consideration.

Soren Kailash

• The Dragon: To Kali's Big Bad.
• Deadpan Snarker: Pretty much the root of his audience appeal. He's not terribly excaptional as Careers go, but he is entertaining to watch.
• First-Person Smartass
• Heel–Face Door-Slam
• Jerkass

Maren Ericsson

• Action Girl: Though a bit of a reluctant example. She was pressured a little into choosing full-on Careerness, though she hates spilling blood and enjoys comfort.
• Comfort Food: Fried clam strips. And chocolate.
• Doting Parent: She has two of 'em.
• Jerkass: Second only to Soren in aCE.
• Oblivious to Love

Actassi Peixoto

• Beware the Nice Ones: When he snaps, he snaps.
• Nice Guy
• Non-Action Snarker: Especially so after all his allies are dead and he has no one but himself to snark to.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: He dispatches Sherman from hundreds of feet with a spear.
• Reluctant Warrior: Maren's death briefly spurs him into becoming one, but it doesn't take long for him to break down altogether.
  • Additionally, District Fours are forced into training, including him.

Carden Chaney

• Children Are Innocent: As the youngest competitor in the arena, Carden is plenty naive.
• Kill the Cutie: He doesn't make it past the final two.
• Moe: A good majority of reviewing readers were rooting for him by the end, and many were more than a little sad when he didn't win.
• The Pollyanna: It doesn't get much more idealistic than him. And his optimism is, sadly, often grossly misplaced.

Diane Glenn

• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: She manages to take down another one of the protagonists, who meant her absolutely no harm, in a case of Thoroughly Mistaken Identity.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Misplaced. Through a series of events, she believes Kali to be alive and responsible for Hetcher's death, which she thinks she would otherwise have to accept as her own fault.

Hetcher Smith

Capitol Punishment

Diele Hobel

• Abusive Parents: Abusive stepfather, although he mostly leaves her alone.
• Action Girl
• Big Brother Instinct: She's frustrated to no end that she can't better protect her half-sister from her verbally abusive stepfather.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: With Dylan.
• Disappeared Dad: Her father died serving in the Capitol's army.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man

Lucian Gray

• Ambiguous Disorder: He functions differently than the rest of the characters, though no exact information is given.
• Boom, Headshot!: He prefers these, and has the aim to pull them off.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Rippel, Gull, Martial... if he's aiming for you, you die.
• The Sociopath: Not a true sociopath, though genetics and environment have given him some of the characteristics of one. District Two can do that to you.
• The Gunslinger

Demetra Boise

• Action Girl
  • Action Duo with Lectic, once they ally.
• Anti-Hero: A type IV example.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: She is given a healthy amount of Pet the Dog moments with Lectic, though she reverts quickly to their standard relationship.
• Axe-Crazy: Now with more conflagration! More than a little insane by current standards, though compared to most of District Two, she's not especially unhinged.
• Combat Pragmatist: Demetra fights to kill, end of story.
• Cool Big Sis: To her younger brother, Celer.
• Deadpan Snarker
• First-Person Smartass: Snarking is her favorite thing to do!
• Generation Xerox: Demetra's uncle, Soren, allied with the District Three girl, Lecia, Lectic's aunt. Entirely coincidental, but still.
• Genki Girl: Demetra is remarkably perky when she isn't murderous.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold
• Kill It with Fire: A common reaction on her part. The flamethrower helps enormously.
• Pyromaniac
  "The thought of conflagration tends to get me into a good mood."
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: She consistantly swears more than any other character in the story, and encourages those around her to do the same.
• Tsundere
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: It's like the Gamemakers knew she was a pyro.

Lectic Riggs

• Action Survivor
• Mr. Fanservice: And he's totally oblivious, too.
• I Die Free: Lectic provides similar reasoning for why he volunteered.
  • A little bit of Always Save the Girl in there, too.
• Nice Guy: Demetra is doing her best to change him, but he's an honestly good person, and reluctant to hurt even a mutt.
• Playful Hacker: Lectic is somewhere between this and The Cracker. He has no real malicious intent, but he does use his hacking skills for material and monetary gain.
• The Smart Guy
• Technical Pacifist: He can be spurred into his own defense, but he's not going to like it.

Dylan Ahava

• Badass Family: His parents were both members of the potential Career pool, but never volunteered.
• Good Parents: His father is extremely stern, and expects a lot from him, and his mother is the harried peacemaker, but they really love him. He forgets this a lot.
• Not a Morning Person: He has a chronic lateness problem, and his Mean Boss, Scilla is borderline abusive Jerkass. Difficulties ensue, as is predictable.
• Oblivious to Love: Or even like, really.

Holland Love

• Big Brother Instinct: For his older sister, Charlotte, as well as Lissom. The latter hates it, however.
• Break the Cutie: The Hunger Games'll do that to you.
• Despair Event Horizon: After Skiff dies on the ground in front of him Holland seems to break. The idealism, hope, and humor that initially define him as a character are gone.
• High-Pressure Blood: Deconstructed. After Lissom slashes his carotid, he bleeds to death in seconds.
• In the Back: Lissom cuts his throat when his back is to her.
• Meaningful Name: Love.
• The Pollyanna: He's just a very, very happy guy...

Lissom Henley

• Blood Is the New Black: After she kills Holland she is too dumbfounded by what she's done to somehow wash off all the blood, leaving it undisturbed until it dries.
• Combat Pragmatist: When she believes it is the only way she can win, Lissom is totally willing to cut Holland's throat from behind, and doesn't stop cutting until she hits the cervical spine.
• The Determinator: Two weeks, several hours a day spent repeating the same knifework drill over, and over, and over. It's pretty much the only exceptional thing about her. Without her extreme mulishness, she would be a standard ill girl.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: She has a very low tolerance for people who offer her assistance.
• Five-Finger Discount: A little thievery goes a long way to feeding one's family.
• I Can Still Fight!: Throughout the games, she sustains multiple injuries which should be so painful as to be debilitating. Even before she was reaped, Lissom was fighting through an untreated illness causing her horrible pain. She has learned to live with it to the extent that she can shake off almost anything and continue hacking people to death.
• Jerkass
• My God, What Have I Done?: After killing Holland she realizes what she's done and runs away, soaked in blood and scared of herself.
• Traitor Shot: Notably, before Skiff is killed by the vending machine she is shown as keeping silent rather than telling him what she knows about the coin return, only beginning to speak when Holland notices her silence.

Skiff Child

• The Comically Serious
• Eye Scream: A Gamemaker-manipulated vending machine sends a quarter through his eye, killing him quickly and horribly.
• Friendless Background: The Capitol has to kidnap a random District Eleven citizen who was seen talking to him on the day of the reaping in place of a friend, as he has none, being an extreme loner.
• Ineffectual Loner: A mild example, but nontheless.
• Odd Couple: With Holland.

Gamemakers

Aculeo Lupus

• All a Part of the Job: He stayed after most of the Gamemaking staff was fired or executed because he genuinely loves the work despite the many, many risks associated with being in charge of such a public, important event as the Hunger Games.
• Team Dad: Seems to be this to the Gamemaking staff. Aculeo is the one who steps in as de facto leader after Xenia dies suddenly and is shown as one of the few people who canget Justinion to shut up without actively throttling him.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Aculeo has adopted this trope from Xenia and not only mediates internal conflicts, but sorts through the rumors Justinion parrots for grains of truth and tries to act for the best of the country based on what he knows.

Cinian Liaison

• Naïve Newcomer: The most recent addition to the Gamemaking team, she is much less hardened to suffering than the others and is prone to panic attacks, at least to start out with.
• Took a Level in Badass: Gamemaking would be a high-stress job even if the team wasn't critically understaffed and suffering from the loss of Xenia. Cinian goes from The Ingenue to Silk Over Steel in a matter of days, finding her way in the control room and standing up to Justinion when he tries to rattle her.

Epicure Goodwin

• Married to the Job: He is married and has a college-aged son, but sometimes he doesn't leave the office even to sleep and has to be formally instructed to go home and spend some time with his family during a particularly stressful few days on the job.
• Only Sane Man: He often seems like this, with Aculeo or Xenia trying to keep control of the team, Cinian suffering a panic attack, Justion causing said panic attack, and Falx coming in to work blackout drunk.
• Papa Wolf: As Cinian is roughly the same age as his son, Epicure often tries to shield her from the harsher realities of the job and will even lash out at Justinion when provoked (almost always when he has brought Cinian nearly to tears).

Falx Darcy

• The Alcoholic: To the point where he passes out at work, is always either drunk or hungover, and has gotten his liver replaced at least once.
• Drunken Master: Inverted. He is implied to have been an exceptionally good Gamemaker before he started drinking.

Justinion Grissom

• Jerkass: The other Gamemakers find him obnoxious and senselessly cruel, which is something of a feat considering what they all do for a living.
• Kick the Dog: He gets plenty of moments to drive Cinian to panic attacks, make fun of children on the way to their deaths, openly ignore tributes during their scoring sessions, and overall be a total Jerkass who is inexpendable purely because the team needs a certain number of Gamemakers to function. He even manages to stand out from all the other Gamemakers, who think they're doing good things.

Xenia Udine

• Cool Old Lady: Though the rest of the Gamemakers don't know it, Xenia is over eighty and keeps herself looking young with surgery and cosmetics, relying on her passion for her job to keep her emotionally young.
• Iron Lady: It takes a tough constitution to be Head Gamemaker with President Norris ultimately calling the shots, a tiny staff, and two Gamemakers who are useless more often than not along with a Naïve Newcomer to train. Phew.
• Mistaken Age: She appears to be in her early forties, but really is over eighty and has been working as a Gamemaker for decades.
• Older Than They Look
• Women Are Wiser: After she dies, the Gamemakers realize just how good at her job Xenia was. She accomplished a great deal without letting on that she was doing anything outside the boundries of her job, and the team begins to fracture with her gone.
• Workaholic: Xenia is shown spending an almost excessive time at work; even more than is required of the Head Gamemaker. Epicure comments often on just how much she seems to accomplish in a short amount of time, which would be impossible if she wasn't working nights as well as days.