all the drowned ghosts
is a completed fanfic for The Hunger Games written by Sanamun, focusing on the life of Annie Cresta, the 'mad girl' from District 4, from her reaping through to the revolution.
The fic has since been taken down.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents:
- Adora casually relates that the scar on her face comes from her father, though Annie notes that she doesn't seem particularly upset by this and wonders if Adora was lying so that she looks more sympathetic to the Capitol.
- Lorelai's obsessive training to prepare Annie for the Games, and making Annie responsible for caring for her during her worse PTSD episodes from a young age, can easily be considered a form of emotional abuse.
- Action Girl: Annie scores a 10 (out of a possible 12) during training for the games. Presumably though, this trope applies to all female career tributes, and at least some of the non-career ones.
- Aerith and Bob: Annie, Luka, and Mags exist in the same world as Finnick, Adora, and Topaz.
- Big Sister Instinct: Coral Brigham "all but threatens" Annie into saying she'll protect Luka in the arena.
- Break the Cutie: Finnick comes pre-broken.
- Break the Badass: Annie is a career tribute coming to understand the reality of Panem and of the games.
- Burial at Sea: A district four tradition that Annie tries to do for Luka in the arena.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Annie, though she walks the line between quirky and genuinely deeply mentally ill. Mostly she comes off as living in her own world, 'not quite right', but basically functional if you can keep up with her strange logic.
- Child by Rape: Possibly Annie; her mother was a previous games victor and in all likelihood would have been "sold" by Snow.
- Children Forced to Kill: By definition; it's The Hunger Games.
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: Can be inferred for career tributes like Annie and Ajax.
- Contrived Coincidence: A victor's daughter being reaped for the games herself.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: Annie is a very observant girl, for all her strange mannerisms, difficulty expressing herself, and reputation as "mad".
- Dead Person Conversation: Luka lives on as a voice in Annie's head.
- Determinator: Annie views it as an established fact that she'll survive the games, before she ever enters the arena.
- Doomed by Canon: All the 70th games tributes except Annie have to die for her to have the story she does in Hunger Games canon.
- Establishing Character Moment: Annie initially refuses to go on stage as a tribute because the escort called a name she no longer uses, and is quietly stubborn enough to wait for said escort to correct herself, despite the potential result of blatantly flouting authority in a dystopian society like Panem.
- Eye Scream: See 'Flying Seafood Special', below. It's an illusion, but the idea is somewhat squicky in itself. Later, Annie kills Adora by squishing her eyeballs in before stabbing her.
- Flying Seafood Special: Annie's fish. They talk as well, but only to her. At one point, they're seen flying in and out of someone's eye sockets.
- Friend to All Living Things: Somewhat dark version with Annie. Or more accurately, to all non-human oceanic living things; Annie is described as befriending seagulls and starfish, but has a fairly logical, detached view of being forced into a tournament that will require her to kill people, likely as a result of her upbringing as a career tribute.
- Girly Bruiser: Annie wears lacy dresses and makes jewelery. She's also an action girl career tribute who initially doesn't seem all that worried about the hunger games, though she learns better rather fast.
- Hallucinations: Annie; mostly visual, though she has also alluded to hearing voices.
- Jerkass: Ajax Titinius' creepy, objectifying comments about Finnick, and Annie's view of him as "pretending to make friendly conversation while he searches for her weakness" suggest him to be this. However, he is also a tribute, and one that seems quite naive as to the reality of the games, so he's arguably as much a victim of the Capitol as they are, not that it necessarily makes him any more sympathetic.
- Killing in Self-Defense: Annie to Adora
- Meaningful Name: Aside from the ones in canon (Finnick, Cresta); Lorelai was a woman in German mythology who drowns herself in a river, and many of District 4's residents have oceanic names eg Coral and Orca.
- Morality Adjustment: A big part of Annie's character development; chapter three ends with her deciding to not be the perfect tribute the capitol wanted her to be anymore, and that she "belongs only to herself".
- Mummies at the Dinner Table: Annie keeps Luka's severed head with her.
- Nervous Wreck: Lorelai manages to go from scolding Annie for getting distracted too easily to having a breakdown about her own hunger games over the course of one sentence. Of course, Lorelai is presented as being unstable at the best of times.
- Open Secret: Annie being trans seems to be this.
- The Ophelia: Played with a little with Annie. She has hallucinations, atypical speech patterns, a somewhat limited attention span, and a fondness for starfish, seashells and torn frilly dresses, and she's quite pretty in a dishevelled sort of way, but she is also very emotionally insightful, quick thinking and surprisingly coherent, and sometimes mocks the way people assume she is before they know better. Her mother Lorelai possibly fits the trope more completley.
- Original Character: Several secondary characters, mostly from around district 4, including Lorelai Cresta, Luka Brigham and Orca Kevern.
- Psycho Psychologist: Lunaria Etumbe is a capitol psychiatrist who works with victors after their games; based on her interactions with Annie, this mostly means molesting them and trying to convince them that being forced to murder children wasn't actually traumatic at all.
- Sex Slave: The fate of most victors after the games, Annie included.
- Slave to PR: Annie feels like this is a central part of being a tribute or victor, and decides that she is having none of it.
- Stepford Smiler: Annie describes Finnick as one. She's probably right.
- Title Drop: "She is the avenging messenger of all the drowned ghosts, all the lost children of Panem."
- Together in Death: Ajax and Topaz volunteered for the games together, knowing that likely neither of them would win, because neither wanted to be left living without the other.
- Traumatic Haircut: Annie undergoes one before her games, which serves to show the control the capitol has over the tributes' and victors' public identities.
- Rape as Backstory: Like in canon, Finnick has been a Sex Slave for the Capitol since he won his own games. When he was fourteen.
- What You Are in the Dark: "Once you've taken your friends to a watery grave, what will be left of you, Annie Cresta?"
