The End of the World (FernWithy) / Tear Jerker

open/close all folders

Multiple Stories

Every scene where Haymitch, Kay, or Madge (who shows signs of being a Generation Xerox to her aunt, especially in terms of the risks she takes) mourns Maysilee. The Last Tribute begins with Haymitch waking up from a dream about her and then realizing Maysilee isn't really there.
She hasn't been here for twenty-four years. She's been dead considerably longer than she was alive.
Danny and Mir's complicated and often unhappy marriage (especially seeing how happy he and Ruth were earlier on) is disheartening on many levels, as is the origins of their relationship coming from how she saw him as a knight in shining armor after he helped her during her darkest moment.
- While Used to Be a Sweet Kid doesn't apply to Mir, multiple stories discuss her Freudian Excuse in a solemn way. She was raised by an emotionally abusive mother who told her to think that she was better than other people and might get to live in the Capitol someday because her father was a Peacekeeper. Then she got a letter, supposedly from him (really a forgery written as a prank by sadistic Peacekeepers) mocking her for that belief and cruelly insulting her, and she believed it was real. Then, when she had a chance to apply for Capitol citizenship for real after earning a scholarship (being the only person in all 12 districts to be offered one that year), she got pregnant with Peeta's oldest brother and nearly had an abortion, but ultimately chose to stay in District 12 and marry Danny, only to spend the next couple decades frequently making herself and everyone around her miserable.^note
Haymitch's relationship with Capitol actress Mimi Meadowbrook ends when she is implied to have gotten pregnant and been forced to have an abortion (confirmed by the author in messages to several reviewers) by Capitol Dreams staff members including her own brother, who subject her to intensive brainwashing. Years down the line, she starts having delusions (or perhaps foreboding) about the districts plotting to put Capitol kids in the Hunger Games and commits suicide after leaving behind a cryptic message seemingly condemning the Games.
Cool Teacher Mr. Chalfant's arc throughout the prequel stories. His sympathy and support for his students leads him to subtly defy the Capitol when they demand twice as many dead kids for the 2nd Quarter Quell, getting him fired and sent to work in the mines. And then his son and niece are reaped for the same Hunger Games and both die.
Every District 12 tribute's reaping and fate feels fresh and tragic, whether it's someone from The End of the World and The Rites of Fall who Haymitch and Danny know well, like Violet Breen, Ginger McCullough, or Elmer Parton, a relative of someone he knows, a Mauve Shirt, or a Bit Character stranger who Haymitch and Effie can still recall something meaningful about.
Butterfly Skaggs: Do you remember them? I don't remember who got reaped last year! I honestly don't. Is anyone going to remember me?
Effie: It was Moss Bullard and Della Farragut. Moss told me that he loved the time of year when the snow and ice start to melt, and he can hear rivers cracking out in the woods across the fence at night. Della had a boyfriend named Dale, and she thought their names sounded too silly together to be a couple. I remember them. Haymitch remembers them. And if you don't win, I'll remember you.
Haymitch trying to kill himself after accidentally sending promising tribute Nasseh Rutledge the wrong message with a sponsor gift and making him think Haymitch is urging him to charge against a heavily-defended Career camp (which goes about as well as you'd expect). Throughout the following years, Haymitch views what happened to Nasseh as My Greatest Failure. In one lost live journal-exclusive story, Effie sees how invested and optimistic Haymitch is about Katniss and Peeta, recalls how he was the same way with Nasseh, and feels a sick certainty that if he loses them too, then there'll be no bringing him back from his suicidal depression this time.
While the two dates Haymitch goes on with tailor's daughter Violet Breen (when he's nineteen, two years older than her) don't turn her into The Lost Lenore for him like Digger, Maysilee, or even Mimi, he is still devastated when she is reaped as a tribute and repeatedly thinks back to her sewing a popped button back onto his shirt to calm her nerves the night before going into the arena. Twenty-one years later, in The Last Tribute, he has a brief self-loathing panic attack (which helps prompt another bout of drinking) when he momentarily forgets her name.
Haymitch's grief, anger, and estrangement from Effie after she starts supporting the Games in earnest following her indoctrination at the hands of Capitol Dreams. He doesn't blame her and he still cares about her, but he feels That Man Is Dead in regards to the Effie he grew to love and doesn't want to be around her with painful reminders of the past.
Annie's whole Break the Cutie arc is portrayed solemnley and as a This Is Unforgivable! moment for District 4 as a whole.
Annie can't be hidden. Before she was reaped, she was known in district — daughter of a ship's captain, beautiful and popular for her carefully hidden charity work, making slightly flawed nets and giving them away to poor fishermen. She never belonged in the arena, and when she lost her district partner, she fell apart, spawning an insulting fashion trend in the Capitol of claiming melodramatic madness. What finally broke District Four was the string of tacky movies the Capitol produced while they had to deal with a real person who they loved being publicly destroyed.
Peeta has a few moments of genuine bonding with some of his temporary Career allies, most notably Marvel and Charlotte, and thinks back on their deaths with regret.
Everything about Finch/Foxface becomes a lot sadder with the confirmation of her Actual Pacifist views, distant friendship with Chaff, and the reveal that besides being strategic in the arena, she was a brilliant inventor back home. She becomes suicidal after thinking that she killed Cato by pushing him off a cliff during his fight with Chaff, not knowing he survived. After her death, her teachers openly mourn her lost potential and hope to honor her memory by patenting her inventions, even as Haymitch knows that will never happen while Snow is in power due to his refusal to admit that tributes have potential value outside the Games which is lost when they die
Many of Haymitch's sponsors are old women who pay special attention to their pets. As the author points out, the Capitol is a world where marriages are short-term "contracts" that often aren't renewed and usually focus more on producing the next generation than giving citizens long-term domestic responsibilities. The Capitol isn't a world where many couples grow old together, and so for many people, their pets are the only ones who they can count on loving them permanently and sincerely.
Every mention of Duronda, District 12's first Victor, who went from a plucky and happy survivor of tough events to a broken woman mentally and sexually abused by District 12's escort while having a poor relationship with her daughter and losing her tributes, including her beloved grandson, in the arena until she finally hung herself. It doesn't help that Haymitch feels a kinship to her suffering that he'd rather not dwell on.

The End of the World

Whenever Haymitch sees birds near Kay Donner, he has flashbacks of bird mutts killing her sister and attacks them to protect Kay.
The death of Haymitch's girlfriend in canon (here named Digger Hardy), mother, and brother are elaborated on here. Haymitch is Forced to Watch in every case, and when Digger dies by electrocution (Beckett turns on the electric fence while she is climbing it), her body falls apart in Haymitch's arms as he tries to save her. Haymitch has a terrifying flashback to this when his Perspective Flip of Catching Fire shows him see the electric fence get turned on while Katniss is outside, causing him to fear that history may repeat and the closest thing he has to a daughter may suffer the same fate as Digger.

The Hanging Tree

Due to his alcoholism and {{ PTSD}}, Haymitch can't remember how many people he killed during the 2nd Quarter Quell (just three Careers) and has a panic attack at the idea of being Innocently Insensitive in a District whose tribute he killed and can't even remember.
Haymitch's pleasant introduction to the family of District 10 Victor Earl Bates takes a grim turn when Earl's twin sons mention they will be eligible for the reaping during the next Hunger Games.
Perhaps the most poignant District 12 tribute death is Elmer, Haymitch's close friend and second ever tribute, being ripped to pieces by a lion mutt while his widowed father is watching. The mutt is being controlled by a woman who Haymitch refused to let himself get pimped out to, and he goes on one of his worst benders yet after that.
Henry, the District 7 boy in the 51st Hunger Games, has to watch a mutt kill his cousin (and district partner) after she sacrifices herself for him.
District 6 is without a Victor (even a dead one like Duronda from District 12) until the 52nd Hunger Games, meaning they spent over a hundred kids to die in the Hunger Games before getting their first one back.
Caesar's wife dies of an illness while he is being forced to continue his role hosting the Games and is forbidden from visiting her bedside.
The suicide or murder of Haymitch's "loaner" mentor and eventual friend, District 2 victor Drake, and how even raging Jerkass Brutus (Drake's other mentee) is in deep mourning afterward, talking about how Drake was a community home kid who volunteered to get food for the younger kids there.

These are the Names

Effie being introduced to baby Madge Undersee and Madge's mother begging her to never say Madge's name again (given how Effie calls the names of the generally doomed tributes), asking if she can promise that and not feeling reassured by Effie's reluctantly neutral reply.
A few months after the death of tribute Babra Kennedy in the arena, her only sibling dies of measles, and Haymitch spends the next sixteen years avoiding their parents due to wrongly thinking they can and should blame him for not saving one of their daughters.
The Gamemakers deliberately starve the tributes of the 63rd Hunger Games to the point where Jack Anderson pushes his ally/new boyfriend over a cliff during a fight over their remaining food, causing Jack to spend the rest of the Games in a Heroic BSoD.
Finnick's second kill is Poppy, a girl who had just convinced her Cultured Warrior district partner Swather and their ally D'Arcy to offer Finnick a chance to join them, but he panics when she suddenly appears, making her allies furiously attack him, although they don't kill him even when they might have been able to press the fight on. Even sadder, Finnick wants to be part of an alliance, but the other tributes he approaches attack him.
- All of Finnick's subsequent kills are portrayed as having a hard effect on him and making him mentally shut down by the end of the Games except while fighting. His final fight is with Rollin, an even more feral tribute who has nonetheless made it through the Games without a kill and seems to give up moments into his duel with Finnick.
- One of the saddest deaths in that Games doesn't even have anything to do with Finnick, but comes when D'Arcy eats a poisonous fish and slowly dies in Swather's arms.
As Haymitch and Effie argue about their shrinking sponsor base before the 61st Hunger Games, tribute Donkid overhears them, expresses his belief that District 12 tributes are always doomed anyway, and asks them to stop yelling at each other because they sound like his parents.
Effie reaching out to her father and half-brother emphasize the emptiness of life in the Capitol as they maintain little contact after adolescence due to Capitol social norms that leave a gap in their lives that they lack the context or will to understand or resist. The way Mr. Trinket talks about how he always misses fatherhood when he finishes feels especially forlorn.
Butterfly Skaggs asks Effie if she was deliberately reaped as punishment for her and her father's anti-Capitol politics and (relatively mild) acts of defiance. Looking at Butterfly's face, Effie suspects that a "yes" answer might upset her but that a "no" wouldn't be comforting either.
It gives them a sense of control, even where there is none. Being reaped becomes an act of rebellion, or an act, at least, of recognition that they've caused trouble. It proves to them that something they or their parents have done has been so powerful that it's caught the attention of the government and the Gamemakers. I think of Haymitch dismissing their window-breaking and slogan-writing as "calling each other rebels." It's all they can do. And to tell her that I doubt the Capitol even noticed a tiny disruption like that would be devastating. She needs to believe that what she's done is important.
After getting a cute Defrosting the Ice Queen arc and being District 12's most promising tribute in years, Butterfly is infected with the bubonic plague and spends days wasting away.
Johanna is portrayed as someone who had a breakdown and began lashing out at the other tributes (several of whom have treated her badly) to survive rather than someone who was faking weakness and plotting to be a killer from the start. What sets her off is watching her close ally River die in a fire, and then having someone River saved Speak Ill of the Dead and then attack her.
Both of Haymitch and Effie's tributes getting into large, close-knit alliances during the 70th Hunger Games would be a good thing... if not for how those two alliances end up attacking each other, with both tributes, Olla and Briar, falling in the same fight at the hands of each others' allies.
The melee between the Careers in the 71st Hunger Games (ending with implied Rebel sympathizer Otho Magro from District 2 as the Victor) takes place after they spend days huddled together to conserve warmth while waiting for everyone else to freeze to death in the Arctic arena. The ordinary Inevitable Mutual Betrayal nature of Career alliances is bad enough, but having to fight your allies after all of you go through that together rather than hunting and fighting other kids for several days feels especially grim.

The Final Eight

Several times, Delly and Ed feel upset about how as much as Delly and Ed want Katniss to live, there are several moments when it is painful watching for them to watch many of their friends and the Capitol media alike ignoring Peeta and his odds of victory to focus on Katniss.

The Last Tribute

Danny breaks down sobbing after Peeta's reaping, begging Haymitch to bring Peeta back and admitting he wants Katniss to die right that moment and hates himself for it, but he thinks that is the only way his son might come back. Even worse, he is convinced that since half the District once thought that he was Prim's father, then for both Prim and Peeta to be reaped at the same time, it must be a deliberate effort to punish him for smuggling rebel messages.
Haymitch throwing up on the tribute train when he first comes to talk to Katniss and Peeta gets a Cerebus Retcon, being motivated by how he sees Katniss wearing the mockinjay pin of his long-dead friend and ally Maysilee, who he had been in deep thought about.
When the girl from District 8 is reaped, another kid wants to volunteer to go in her place ... but that kid is her boyfriend, and only volunteers of the same sex are allowed, so he has to helplessly watch her go.

The Golden Mean

Right before the 3rd Quarter Quell, Haymitch visits a street fair where an artist who got to thinking about the cruelty of the Games has drawn (undisplayed) pictures of what the dead District 12 tributes would look like if they were still alive. Haymitch stared at pictures of people he went to school with, dated in one case, or tried to assume a parental role toward in mentoring, all of them drawn with families and/or signs of comfortable middle age they never got to experience in life.
Each death in the 3rd Quarter Quell, especially when Chaff and Seeder (who have been like a Family of Choice to Haymitch), and Blight die. In Blight's case, it happens while Haymitch is asleep, and he only learns about it when Toffy Taggart wakes him up to tell him, leaving him to absorb the blow in shock and run through his fondest memories of Blight.
Gloss and Cashmere's parents and Gloss's girlfriend are described as being overcome with grief and exhaustion while watching both siblings compete together in the Quell. Gloss's girlfriend is pregnant at the time, according to one of the LiveJournal stories, as Gloss knew he and Cashmere faced a rigged reaping due to the secrets they knew about Snow's backers and wanted her to have Someone to Remember Him By.
Haymitch talking to Sergius, a member of Peeta's prep team in The Golden Mean, is solemn in so many ways, between how Sergius has just been tortured by the Peacekeepers (weakly saying his bruises are from an accident), is Doomed by Canon, and briefly mourns Cinna with Haymitch.
Haymitch: Sergius, Cinna's dead.
Sergius: I thought he might be. One of the... accidents... said something about no more pretty dresses. He laughed about it.
Haymitch tries to save Peeta from the arena after Katniss and Beetee destroy it, but has to watch him get captured.
The rapid deaths of most of the Quell mentors at the hands of the Peacekeepers when they come to arrest Haymitch and his alies at the viewing center, as well as several other deaths among the victors who stayed home in the districts. Within just a few hours, the number of dead victors who avoided going back into the Quell is more than the number of victors who've died in the arena over the last three days. Haymitch and Plutarch feel utterly defeated as they take in the news.
- Perhaps the saddest of those deaths is that of Jack Anderson. He makes it out of the firefight at the viewing center alive and makes it to the arena with Haymitch to try and rescue the remaining tributes, only to be devoured by the arena's carnivorous insects after almost getting Johanna to safety before she is recaptured.
- At least two of the few Victors present during the battle who survive the massacre once the Peacekeepers take control not only support the Capitol despite all of that (and the Quell twist) but are apparently willing to actively fight for them. One of them is mentioned as training to fight alongside the Peacekeepers and the other shoots one of his fellow Victors (Cool Old Guy Toffy Taggart, who won just one year after his shooter according to FernWithys currently unavailable complete list of Victors on LiveJournal) during the battle itself.
- Two of the Victors who stayed back in District 1 during the Quell remain loyal to the Capitol even after Snow's regime is responsible for the deaths of more than half of District 1's Victors in the Quell, the viewing center massacre, and a shooting back in the District when the district's youngest Victor tries to interfere with an arrest. The loyalist Victors are even willing to duel two other pro-Rebellion Victors from their own district over their divided loyalties, leading to all four of them being killed, horribly wounded, or arrested.
The deaths of thousands of District 12 residents in the books is a dark and tragic affair, but it is much, much worse in this series. In this series, District 12 feels much more alive than in the books, with hundreds of named characters Haymitch has spent five stories living alongside of. These are people he has grown up with, survived the brutality of head Peacekeeper Beckett with, chatted with at the marketplace, or mentored the children and siblings of, and so many of them die by being burned alive due to President Snow's sadism, with Hamymitch having to watch on TV. And if that wasn't bad enough, Katniss's line from Mockingjay about how "fewer than a dozen" of District 12's merchant class survived feels far more agonizing after seeing so many of Peeta and Delly's neighbors and their moments of kindness, loyalty, or comic relief in The Final Eight and The Tesserae Coalition.

House of Cards

Charlie Flynn's speech about all the losses his family endured and the loneliness and ostracisation he suffered before being voted into the 1st Quarter Quell right when he thought the All the Other Reindeer treatment was finally coming to an end.
Charlie's district partner was a blind girl voted into the Quell for not being able to work in the power plants.
Snow's torture of Peeta includes locking him in a room with the bodies of Brutus (who he killed) and his family, who died in the bombing of District 12. All that is left of his father is a jawbone, and there's even the remains of a baby that Snow gloats is Peeta's niece.

The Narrow Path

Prim being drafted as a Combat Medic and sent to the front lines. Haymitch compares it to her being reaped all over again but not having anyone to volunteer for her this time.
Plutarch talks to Haymitch and admits that for all of his ruthless moments, he has had a Wide-Eyed Idealist Black-and-White Morality schoolboy view (he was just a teenager when he first became a Rebel) of what the rebellion would be like and is bothered by how ruthless and controlling Coin is acting. While Haymitch reflects that Plutarch can get people killed by being too naive about the things people in power might do, the speech does move him.
Haymitch watches Prim go into the blast range of the bombs and, like Katniss, has a horrifying moment of realization just before they go off.
The execution of Caesar, with Coin editing video footage to make him think that horrified spectator Peeta is relishing his death and showing it to him right before he is shot.
Coin’s executions of most of the stylists, escorts, and prep teams. While not completely innocent, many of these people are probably the same Games workers Effie has dealt with (often cordially) throughout These are the Names, and (considering how old Effie and Cinna were when they first joined the District 12 and 10 prep teams, respectively), some of them may only be teenagers.
The final tally of dead from the Rebellion is given as about 1/3rd of the nation's population, or approximately a million people, including 70% percent of the populations of Districts 2 and 8, 90% of District 12's population, and 1/3rd of the Capitol. The cruelty, bigotry, and excesses of Snow and his ilk made war inevitable, and the society that follows the war is nearly utopian, but that doesn't keep that death toll from being solemn.

Tear Jerker / The End of the World (FernWithy)

Previous

Index

Next

Tear Jerker / The End of the World (FernWithy)

Edit Locked

Previous

Index

Next