YMMV / Cheating Death: Those That Lived

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Does Snow really think that Head Gamemaker Toot is The Chessmaster who organizes outstanding Games? Or is he merely toying with his subordinate while knowing that Toot cannot maintain control and is merely The Fool and a Beleaguered Bureaucrat presiding over unorthodox, but acceptable Games?
  • On that note, following Toot's retirement, the next Games is the disastrous 57th Games in which the tributes mostly froze to death and viewers claimed it boring. Was Toot's retirement a lucky bullet dodged from having to manage that series of disasters, or did it just open up for an inexperienced Head Gamemaker to cause the fatal blizzards that left the tributes on their own without sponsors and freezing to death?
• Awesome Ego: While Jack can barely go a chapter without referring to himself as a "master thief", it's a boast that he's fully capable of living up to.
• Catharsis Factor: Bronze Marley is a sociopathic victor with no redeeming qualities. He also started the victors' prostitution ring just for a shot of having sex with Crimson. Those who reviewed Finnick's chapter all agree that his mutilation and death at the hands of Crimson was well-deserved.
• Crazy Is Cool: The author really enjoys having eccentric, whacky, or plain crazy tributes dominate the Games in impressive ways. Such victors include Dollar (a doomsday prepper who believes in zombies), Pasture (who has a... unique speech pattern and beats twelve opponents to death using discarded shoes after one of them insults her during training), Dragon (who breaks his own arm before the Games start for the challenge of playing with a disadvantage), and Chaff (who tries to be a Teacher's Pet and Control Freak well into his Games).
• Fanon Discontinuity: The deaths of various popular victors aren't really dwelled on by many fans, but the Capitol Games happening despite Coin's death is something some people would really like to ignore (although, based on the reviews, fans feel that if the author was insistent on having those Games happen, they were written decently well).
• Harsher in Hindsight: Rook's feud with his mentor Olga and Trolling of her is a humorous Running Gag that loses some of its mirth with the reveal that Olga killed him on behalf of the Capitol during the Rebellion, but now feels horrible guilt over doing so.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Even though Word of God and/or other characters say that Dollar, Ron, Lyme, Jack, Stallion, Boulder, Rook, Mercy, Honorius, Yohan, Magnus and Dragon did in fact die off-screen in the Victors Purge, some fans like to hope that some of them might have survived, especially Dollar, due to her survivalist skills and how she dies in a way that doesn't leave behind an identifiable body.
  • In the 31st Hunger Games, the Capitol conducts a frantic search of the caved-in arena to try to find a survivor to crown victor (and it's mentioned the trackers are all smashed), but they still haven't found the bodies of the girl from District 8 or boy from District 1 when they find the living Chassis. The search seems to have been called off afterward, making it vaguely possible they Gave Up Too Soon and there may have still been a living tribute or two alive to slip away.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Thanks to The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
  • While talking about Haymitch, Katniss comments that each Victor from Twelve wins their Games because of a trick they weren't supposed to use. In this fic, it was with Duke's cave that he hid in. In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, it was with Lucy Gray contaminating the water pools with a smuggled compact containing rat poison.
  • In this fic, Librae is presumed dead after going on an expedition to deal with the Peacekeeper pirates. In Collins' prequel, Lucy Gray is also presumed deceased.
  • In this fic, Rhonda (President Snow's granddaughter) is killed in the Capitol Games, and the narration says that "the Snow bloodline was ended". In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, it's revealed that Tigris is President Snow's cousin.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Jack Tylos is a self-proclaimed "master thief" who engages in this trade out of necessity, thrill-seeking, and altruism at various points. He's forced to volunteer for the 21st Hunger Games after trying to steal the head peacekeeper's wallet. He steals a taser which he uses against his opponents in the arena and constantly and publicly brings up the circumstances behind his volunteering as a successful gambit to get the head peacekeeper arrested or executed. After winning, he gloatingly reveals his use of the taser, but is horrified when several innocent residents of District Seven are executed. Despite Panem's status as a heavily surveilled police state and his own open ties to the underworld, Jack continues stealing and is never caught unless it's on purpose for a Batman Gambit. He is a devoted mentor and will rob banks to get sponsor money for tributes he feels especially attached to. During the rebellion, Jack supplies the victors caught in the Capitol with a stash of guns he stole and hid over the years and goes down fighting so his allies can escape.
  • Porsche London is an orphaned District Six tribute who survives by working as a runner for a brutal drug gang. She is a morphling addict who is underestimated in the buildup to her Games, but dominates it without ever using a weapon. Porsche is a camouflage expert who hides herself in the gymnasium during the training sessions, reveals herself to the Gamemakers and dictates the training score she wants — respectably high but not high enough to invoke Tall Poppy Syndrome — as they gape in shock. During the Games, Porsche initially tries to protect her district partner then sets out to avenge him. She spends days using her camouflage skills to live in the Careers camp and steal or ruin their food without being found. She uses mathematics to monitor the train schedules of the railyard arena and diverts the train tracks at just the right time to run the Careers over. Afterward, she becomes part of the victors sequel, before being reaped for the 3rd Quarter Quell and performing a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Moe:
  • Harp Victory, Crystal's girlfriend and a lifelong friend of Crown. Despite her obliviousness to the world she's in, she's sweet, innocent, and cannot conceive the idea of harming someone. She also makes good cookies!
  • Arendellian is a perpetually sunny cloudcuckoolander who doesn't even realize what the Games are and is always have cheery conversations and foot races with her Imaginary Friend.
• Narm Charm: Several scenarios behind various victories are intentionally absurd and/or cheesy in places, and for the most part, fans love it.
• The Scrappy: Olga is probably the least popular victor who isn't a deliberate Hate Sink due to being an expy of Boudicca from The Victors Project but lacking Boudicca's competence and better qualities. Common things fans hate about her include her vindictiveness, her incompetent training methods, her Lack of Empathy for her dead tributes (save one of her relatives), her nastiness toward so many of her fellow District Two victors, her constant Ignored Epiphany moments, her murder of Rook during the Rebellion, and how she hypnotizes Lyme into becoming a killer after she denounces the Games. While some people argue that she is Rescued from the Scrappy Heap following her Heel Realization and Character Development, others feel that it's too little, too late, and loathe how Olga is one of the few surviving victors.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Even the author admits that Beetee and Boulder don't affect the story or appear enough to reach their full potential. He also mentions that he should have killed off the latter instead of Vercingetorix Carnby during Neon's chapter to make that lack of full potential less obvious.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The series has a wide variety of non-Career district tributes who become Career allies, with this happening several times per decade on average, but not even one of those tributes becomes a Victor despite the interesting story potential and how at least one person in that situation winning could have made it more believable for other outlier tributes to keep joining the Career pack.
  • Functional Addict Porsche, chronically depressed Brilliant, but Lazy District 3 Victor Yohan, and socially awkward Hunter of Monsters Skinner have little to nothing said about their time between the Games and the Rebellion when, at the very least, all of them could have had interesting mentoring scenes or been shown trying to navigate away from the Victor prostitution ring.
• The Woobie:
  • Gwenith is a girl with a defect on her face that cause her to be bullied and ostracized by others. She's tricked by the Girl Posse to volunteer for the Games, and while she wins, she lost her two friends that she came to love as sisters. As a mentor, she endures losing her beloved mentor Mizar who saved her, the many deaths of District 9 tributes, and never getting to tell Bear she loved him until the very end. And at the very end, she is the Sole Survivor out of all the District Nine Victors.
  • Pi loses her family due to a combination of factory accidents and Hunger Games reapings. She commits suicide three years after her victory.
  • Vercingetorix enters the arena as a confident and patriotic Career who will bring honor to District Two. He exits the arena as a shell of himself due to a combination of losing his alliance (including failing to protect Amethyst) and most of his outlying opponents being psychotic monsters. He also dies an Undignified Death where he's shot by a rabid Hunger Games fanboy over falling off his pedestal.
  • Crimson is reaped into the Hunger Games after being offered a cushy position at the power plants due to her intelligence. When she makes it out of the arena, she's pressed into being a Sex Slave for over forty-five years because of Bronze's lust towards her. Her family thinks that she's a slut and she's not allowed to tell them about the circumstances lest they get killed. And if she gets the idea to kill herself, they'd be killed either way. She takes a step into Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds territory when she immediately and remorselessly votes to have a Hunger Games with Capitol children and revels in taunting Snow's twelve-year-old granddaughter during the preparations for the event. Many of the other characters disagree with Crimson, but fully sympathize with where her vengeful feelings are coming from.
  • Platinum is an unpopular girl from District One who is thrust into the spotlight after the six girls in front of her bail out or are hospitalized for various reasons. She's made the laughingstock of the Capitol due to her tendency to vomit and only won her Games because of an arena mishap. Following her Hunger Games, she's thrown into the prostitution ring according to Gloss, loses her daughter to the 69th Hunger Games after she's forced to volunteer, tries to commit suicide from an overdose, and only survived the Second Rebellion because of the Hazardous Hooligans.
  • Gloss and Cashmere are homeless orphans who eschew the community home. Gloss volunteers in hopes of receiving a home that would protect them from a deadly snowstorm, and is pushed into the prostitution ring afterwards according to Finnick. President Snow also forces Cashmere to volunteer or she gets shot, just so he can get an opportunity to sell her to the highest bidder.

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