YMMV / The End of the World (FernWithy)

• Catharsis Factor: After Ausonious Glass spends all of his page time in The Hanging Tree being a horrible sadist who revels in the Hunger Games, seeing him get impaled like a tribute in These are the Names is no cause for mourning.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Has its own page.
• Fanfic Fuel: The stage guide for The Musical based on the 74th Hunger Games (included in the Archive of Our Own version of The Golden Mean as Chapter 28, an appendix) has song titles but no lyrics, while the colorful descriptions of what happens as each song is sung make it tempting to speculate on lyrics.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • Madge Undersee's strong and long development as a character make it even more tempting than in canon to disregard her fate in the District 12 bombing, especially since that isn't referenced in these stories.
  • The deaths of several popular Victors during the Rebellion but outside the 3rd Quarter Quell arena are also tempting to ignore.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Many past victors are shot right before Haymitch goes to rescue Katniss and the others from the arena, but the words "kill" and "dead" are never used, the building most of them were in quickly gets burned down as a cover-up, and an offhand comment from Plutarch implies that the few survivors of the incident he lists are just "the ones we know about", leaving open the faint possibility that some of them may have survived and been discretely taken in custody or gone into hiding. This can also extend to a few survivors of that battle who aren't brought up again afterward but are believed dead by the war's end, and a young District 1 victor who was shot by Peacekeepers back home without a specific mention of whether it was fatal.
  • So many stories of sympathetically developing the merchant class of District 12 can make it tempting to hope that more of them survived the bombing but just missed being taken to District 13.
  • In The Golden Mean, after meeting the crowds of District 12 survivors, Haymitch comments that he doesn't see many of the families of his past tributes However, he could have easily missed several faces in a crowd of nine hundred people (some in injured or disheveled states), and it's mentioned that Haymitch avoids at least some of the families of kids he can't save (many of whom have kids who might look different all grown up).
• Magnificent Bastard: Harris Greaves is a District 4 career tribute who competes in the 59th Hunger Games while his mother is being held for questioning over the murder of a Capitol worker. Harris wins the Games with his no-nonsense leadership of the Career pack, shrewd swamp survival tactics, willingness to kill dispassionately (including drowning a District 12 tribute), and combat skills that let him win the Games without a single injury even when he fights multiple human opponents at a time and is repeatedly attacked by aggressive mutants. In his time as a mentor, he is willing to accept his tribute's premeditated betrayal of her district partner Finnick. Still, he later becomes friendly with Finnick after he becomes a victor. The Capitol's evil eventually causes Harris to rebel, and he gets along well with Haymitch and helps implement his strategies as they mentor together during the 3rd Quarter Quell and plot to help people escape from the arena. When the rebel plot is exposed, a bare-handed Harris holds his own against armed Peacekeepers before being shot In the Back while making a Tactical Withdrawal.
• Moe:
  • Wiress is an awkward, autistic girl who is deeply loyal and affectionate to her allies, and it makes her one of the most endearing of the victors.
  • Solana "Solly" Vole, the youngest of a group of Capitol street kids who sponsor Katniss in the Quell. She is endearing, with her bright and eager awe of the people of District 12, her closeness to her sister, being Wise Beyond Their Years and the way she's so eager to help Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch despite her young age.
  • Many of Haymitch's tributes can really bring out protective instincts in readers, which is unsurprising given how he and Effie often try to dwell on their bright and endearing Too Good for This Sinful Earth qualities to get themselves more invested in saving the kids and then to keep their memories alive.
    • Ginger McCullough, who needs a crutch to walk, sings commercial jingles as a coping mechanism and tries to find comfort in hoping the advertising sponsors this gets will help District 12 girls.
    • Ronka Berry spends a lot of her free-time before the games trying on wigs with Effie.
    • 12-year-old Treeza Murphy, due to her Puppy Love gushing over Finnick, who she never gets a chance to actually interact with.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Reviews of The End of the World that mention Albinus Drake are nearly unanimous in condemning his arrogance, apparent apathy as a mentor, and sleazy come-ons to Maysilee. Readers of The Hanging Tree widely agree that the later story does an excellent job of making Drake a likable and tragic figure by exploring his loyalty to the other victors, discussing how a lot of his previous behavior was caused by his toxic environment, and focusing on his recognition of his character flaws and efforts to improve himself while battling growing depression.
• Signature Scene: One of the more frequently discussed moments of The Golden Mean is the battle between the 3rd Quarter Quell mentors and the Peacekeepers, even though it takes up less than half a chapter.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The whole concept of districts with many Victors having to loan their spare Victors to districts with no Victor yet could have been used to explore things like Career mentors being troubled by mentoring kids from unprepared districts, loaner mentors consciously or unconsciously sabotaging their tributes to favor their own districts, or friendships forming between future Rebel outlier Victors and whichever loaner mentor mentored them (Beetee, Blight, and Seeder are all fairly recent Victors at the time Haymitch wins and would had no one from their own districts to mentor them). However, the loaner mentor system has little relevance or exploration outside of Haymitch interacting with Drake and a lot of loaner mentors being needed for the 3rd Quarter Quell (with those scenes being more of an excuse to bring Haymitch into contact with rebellious District 2 Victors who are mentoring Victor-tributes involved in the escape plan).
  • The out-district raiders attacking the tribute trains and being beaten back in These are the Names is a suspenseful sequence, but it might have been interesting to see how the Capitol reacted if they actually had managed to kill or injure a tribute before the Games. Them failing to do so in even one of the six attacks despite that being their main goal and the trains being caught by surprise can feel like a Contrived Coincidence. It would also have been interesting to see the Capitol's reaction if the raiders had killed one of the lesser-appearing Career victors, given how sixteen victors are dead or missing by the 3rd Quarter Quell and only half of those sixteen are dead by the end of The Hanging Tree.
  • Despite Katniss's comments in canon that Victors' children are often reaped, that is never directly mentioned as happening during Haymitch's time as a mentor and the only specific time it's mentioned as happening before them was actually with Duronda Carson's grandchild. Seeing a child of one of Haymitch's peers reaped (albeit preferably as a Victor given the trauma involved) could have provided good moments to motivate potential rebels or have the Victors come together more. This is especially notable since two or three District 9 tributes share the surname of the district's eldest victor, Will Norton, but are never said to be related to him.
  • Many Victors between the two Quarter Quells only have a sentence or two mentioned about their victory, when it might have been interesting getting at least a paragraph or two of information about some of them. Kate Markez is the tribute of Earl and Toffy, two of the non-Rebel Victors who have been the nicest to Haymitch, and is also the first Victor after Haymitch whose mentor he didn’t help out during the Games after losing his own tributes, but barely another word is said about her until the 3rd Quarter Quell. Her district's fourth Victor, Mindwell Larue, who may have even been mentored to victory by Kate just a few years after her own victory, also has nothing said about her time in the arena.
• The Woobie: Caesar/Charlie Flynn's father is murdered when he's nine, his mother commits suicide, and he's emotionally bullied by both adults and children in the community home due to being perceived as an anti-Rebellion defeatist. When he comes around to their way of thinking, they still vote him into the first Quarter Quell and taunt him about it. He loses several allies he is close to before winning and is too traumatized to return to the district that voted him into the quell. He becomes the new host of the Hunger Games to try and protect and comfort the kids, but feels their grief, fear, and deaths keenly. He isn't allowed to take time off from hosting the games to be with his wife on her death bed. His daughter and son-in-law are killed for plotting against Snow, and he isn't allowed to adopt his granddaughter. Finally, he's executed in Coin's Reign of Terror, and an edited videotape is used to make him think that Peeta (who Caesar has been kind and supportive to throughout the story) is reveling in his execution, which causes Caesar's last moments to be sad ones.

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