Fanfic / The End of the World (FernWithy)

I don't know if all of this is withdrawal, or if I've actually gone crazy. If I have, it's long overdue. All I know for sure is that I'm in a constant nightmare, and no matter what I try, I can't seem to wake up.

— Haymitch Abernathy, Chapter 1 of The Narrow Path

The End of the World series (alternately referred to as The Narrow Path series) by the author FernWithy is a The Hunger Games series scattered across FanFiction.Net here, LiveJournal here (deleted and purged), and Archive of Our Own here. The series follows the author's version of the Hunger Games through a series of Perspective Flips, Prequels, and the occasional sequel one-shot, most of which revolve around Haymitch. The stories in the series (all of them told in the first person besides a few one-shots) consist of (in approximate recommended reading order):

1. The End of the World: The Second Quarter Quell through Haymitch's eyes.
2. The Rites of the Fall: Covers District 12 in the months after Haymitch's victory, as the Peacekeepers beat down rebel sentiment. Told through the eyes of Haymitch's friend Danny, the father of Peeta.
3. The Hanging Tree: Haymitch's first decade of mentoring, Descent into Addiction and making Rebel contacts.
4. These Are The Names: Follows Effie Trinket through fifteen years as District 12's escort before Katniss, grappling with concerns about both her job and her relationship with Haymitch.
5. The Tesserae Coalition: A one-shot story narrated by Peeta. Set the day before the Reaping, it shows him and his friends taking tesserae and donating the grain to those locals in need.
6. The Last Tribute: The first Hunger Games book told through Haymitch's perspective as he fights hard to manipulate the rule change, while dealing with his emotional investment in both tributes.
7. The Final Eight: Follows the people of District 12 watching the 74th Hunger Games once Katniss and Peeta make the Final Eight. Narrated by Peeta's friend Delly Cartwright.
8. The Golden Mean: Haymitch's perspective of the second book, both the rebel landscape that Katniss and Peeta are unaware of and his stress at seeing so many friends (as well as the two children he's saved) put in peril by the 3rd Quarter Quell.
9. The Narrow Path: Haymitch's perspective of the third book and the Rebellion, as well as the lingering safety and sanity of those who remain from District 12. Focuses a lot on Haymitch's forced sobriety, and then attempts to stay sober after the Rebellion. Also gives more detail to the aftermath of the Rebellion.
10. House of Cards: Narrated by Peeta while he's a prisoner of Snow in the first half of Mockingjay, being subjected to Mind Rape while struggling to fight back and make sense of what's going on.
11. The Big Empty: An unfinished and currently unavailable prequel, following ancestors of Haymitch and Katniss (along with the girl who will become their District's first Victor) journeying across Panem during the end of the Dark Days Rebellion.
12. The Four Decisions: A one-shot following Katniss and Peeta after the war.
13. Songs of Victory: A one-shot featuring the other Victors prior to Katniss's trial in The Narrow Path.
14. Real Friends: A one-shot following Peeta before the Victory tour, wrestling with feelings about Katniss.
15. Challenges/Stops on the Way to the End of the World: A series of mostly uncollected LiveJournal and Archive of Our Own vignettes, mostly prompted by requests from the reviewers. They cover a variety of topics ranging from the backgrounds of characters like Lyme and Coin, to alternate universe scenarios like Haymitch going into the 3rd Quarter Quell instead of Peeta or an alternate 3rd Quarter Quell twist denying the Rebellion its spark, or at least delaying it (where District partners are forced to kill each other at the start of the Games), to the perspectives of people like Enobaria throughout the Rebellion. Most of these stories may be lost, though (although some remain on Archive of Our Own) as the author's LiveJournal account is inactive and has since been deleted and purged.

This series contains examples of:

• The Ace:
  • Harris scores an eleven in training and is able to kill countless mutts attacking him (the Gamemakers have it in for District 4 that year due to their new escort, Ausonious Glass, being murdered by someone in the District), two other Career tributes at the same and even a tribute (Trill, Haymitch's male tribute) by drowning him before they even get to the weapons and walk out of the arena without an injury. He also teaches the other careers how to best survive in the swamp and catch food there.
  • Finnick, as per canon, is very lethal once he gets his net and trident.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: Twenty-five years of hard drinking's effect on Haymitch's liver (plus the regular detox pills he takes to try to counter that) make it hard to poison him in a way that will look like a natural death from drinking too much, as both Snow and Coin discover.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • While Thresh is hardly a bad guy in the original book, he did show some hesitation and reluctance before sparing Katniss for Rue's sake. Here, he's even less hostile to the other tributes, deliberately allowing Finch to take some of his food.
  • While Plutarch was implied to have helped Coin with the bombing that discredited Snow and killed Prim in the books, here he is innocent. He proposed to Coin that they film dropping genuine aid packages to the Capitol children, but Coin thought up the idea of dropping bombs instead and framing Snow herself.
• Adapted Out: In-Universe. Peeta's brothers weren't featured in the musical based on him and Katniss's Games. A bonus chapter of The Golden Mean found only on AO3 mentions this bothers him.
• Agent Peacock: Zigzagged with District 7 Victor Jack Anderson, who has a live-in boyfriend and a taste and appreciation for fashion and flamboyant hairstyles. During his games in These are The Names he only won because the careers lost count of how many tributes were already dead and all killed or mortally wounded each other thinking there was no one left while Jack was hiding nearby. However, after a decade of involvement in the Rebellion, he Took a Level in Badass, and strangles a Peacekeeper who came to arrest him with his tie in The Golden Mean.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
  • In The Narrow Path, Dalton mentions that before fleeing to District 13, he was a licensed wedding officiant before showing up drunk to preside over Victor Kate Markez's wedding.
  • Ausonious Glass delights in setting Haymitch to get caught in humiliating situations (peeing on Snow's prized rosebush, etc.) when he's drunk.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The Out-District Raiders, who live outside the walls of the Districts in roving bands and are never portrayed as anything but ruthless, power-hungry scum.
• Amicable Exes: The Final Eight has Jemina Kingery, a girl Peeta went on one somewhat bad date with, actually happy to tell the reporters that he spent a lot of the date talking about Katniss, having no hard feelings and knowing that saying so will help them get sponsors.
• Anachronic Order: The Tesserare Coalition and The Final Eight were the first two stories written and are both set during the first book. The Narrow Path and House of Cards (Perspective Flips of Mockingjay) came out next despite being the last chronologically besides a few oneshots (with the series sometimes being called The Narrow Path series as a result of it being longer than any of the earlier stories). The Golden Mean (retelling Catching Fire) came next, followed by The End of the World, The Rites of Fall, The Hanging Tree, and These are the Names to flesh out Haymitch's backstory before The Last Tribute became the final feature-length story completed to date, retelling The Hunger Games. The author then revised the earlier-written stories to mention more events and characters from stories written later but set earlier.
• Artistic License – Child Labor Laws: A justified example, given the dystopian setting, but it's heavy implied that children in District 1 are forced to take Career training and do labor for the District trades. In The Hanging Tree, Majesty Gillvray comments that she doesn't miss the smell of tanning hides she grew up working with, and in one LiveJournal one-shot, Miracle Brea references working in a perfume factory where the windows were too dirty for the sun to get through.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: These are the Names has some fun with this when the Peacekeepers come to investigate some of the Mentors they (correctly) suspect of rebel activity, and find them gone. Brutus (who has no clue about the Rebellion) invokes this when they ask where Haymitch took Johanna.
  "Oh come on. He's got a little girl who follows him around like a little puppy. What do you think he's showing her, the art museum? Oh, I know, the library." He makes an unpleasant face. I doubt he's covering for Haymitch. I'm pretty sure Brutus actually believes that Haymitch is off seducing a sixteen-year-old girl. But whatever he's doing he's keeping the Peacekeepers occupied.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Gilla, to the other District 12 Second Quarter Quell Tributes. At age thirteen, Gilla is the youngest of the District 12 tributes and the others dote on her slightly and encourage her despite knowing she stands no chance of winning the Games.
• Badass Bookworm: Haymitch's combat skills and bravery during the Rebellion remain intact and are amped up here, but are emphasized less than his fondness for literature and poetry. After Snow kills his loved ones, one of his first acts is to write a book of seditious poetry distributed underground that helps inspire a generation of Capitol dissidents.
• Badass Pacifist: Finch/Foxface gets this more explicitly than in the original book, surviving intense situations but being utterly traumatized by thinking she killed Cato (not realizing that his armor saved him).
• Be All My Sins Remembered: During Katniss's trial, Plutarch talks about the mental strain he put on her both on his job as a Gamemaker and while making her a propaganda icon for the Rebellion, and says that it's too blame for pushing her to kill Coin (although this is meant primarily to win sympathy for Katniss).
• Bearer of Bad News: The mentors and escorts call the families of their slain tributes to break the loss to them within minutes of it happening. Most of them do this solemnly and try to bring up good memories or sincere condolences in the process. Ausonious Glass makes a show of taunting the families whenever he does it.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Heavily implied to be among the list of Capitol Secrets that Finnick reveals on air in The Narrow Path.
  Egeria Daby, head of the genetic engineering lab, has done things with mutts that I really wish Finnick would stop describing.
• Big Brother Instinct: Peeta's brothers get this treatment, in a downplayed fashion, with one of them working to send him sponsor gifts during the 3rd Quarter Quell and the other having been in a pillory when the District was firebombed for angrily picking a fight with a Peacekeeper.
• Bolivian Army Ending: One of the one-shots is a What If? story where Haymitch went into the Quell instead of Peeta. While initially somewhat more positive (more tributes apparently survive the opening bloodbath) the ending has Katniss wandering into the sector of the arena that the tidal wave strikes, right as the wave aims back and prepares to launch, with her ultimate fate being unrevealed. A comments chain in the story had the author say that it would be extremely hard for Katniss to survive something like that but that FernWithy wasn't completely adverse to the idea of continuing that storyline (although she never did).
• Boring, but Practical: During the 71st Hunger Games (and its blizzard arena), Otho and his allies simply huddle together until everyone else freezes to death rather than hunt down the other tributes, and then have a "teeth-chattering melee", which is fairly practical in terms of survival but hardly entertaining for the Capitol audience.
• A Boy and His X: During the 2nd Quarter Quell, Haymitch says that three years ago, a tribute befriended a mutt dog in the arena. This got some attention before it turned on him, presumably due to Gamemaker programming.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Heavily implied to be among the list of Capitol Secrets that Finnick reveals on air in The Narrow Path.
  General Hadrian Fife and his sister are somewhat closer than is expected in polite society.
• Bullying a Dragon: In Chapter 25 of The Golden Mean, President Snow sends Peacekeepers to arrest Haymitch and a few other Rebel mentors, only for some of the other mentors to grow alarmed at their weapons, vague explanations, hostile manner, and how they've cut off all the phones to the outside, leading to a fight breaking out with all sorts of improvised weapons and hand to hand combat.
  Haymitch: What happens next has nothing to do with the Rebellion. It happens because Snow has forgotten one simple fact: everyone in this room is a Victor. Cornering Victors is a universally bad idea.
• But What About the Astronauts?: In-universe; The Final Eight mentions that one of Finch's favorite books is about four astronauts who return from a space mission after the disaster that killed 99% of humanity and experience culture shock while adjusting to the new Panem.
• California Doubling: In-universe. While watching a Capitol soap opera about a detective in District 4, Haymitch notes that the seashore looks suspiciously like the Capitiol lake.
• Cartwright Curse: Haymitch has this pretty bad. Maysilee, who was reaped with him and who he may have had platonic feelings for, dies while they're in the Hunger Games together. His actual girlfriend Digger is murdered by the Peacekeepers shortly after he gets home. Three years later (when he's almost nineteen), he has a couple of dates with the local tailor's seventeen-year-old daughter, but she breaks up with him for his drinking and then is reaped into the Games anyway to torment him. A Capitol woman he dates ends up committing suicide and his attempts at relationships with canon characters Effie Trinket and Hazelle Hawthorne experience a lot of bumps, although he does ultimately end up with Effie.
• Caustic Critic: At the end of The Narrow Path, Haymitch starts writing a series of mystery novels, basing the main characters off of his girlfriend Digger and Danny Mellark. One of the Challenges one-shots is in the form of a review of the third book by a snooty Capitolite, which is pretty unfavorable (claiming invokedSequelitis is in play), and Entertainingly Wrong about Haymitch's source of inspiration (believing the main characters are based on Katniss and Gale).
• Chekhov's Gun: In The Golden Mean, the double dose of detox pills that Effie forces Haymitch to take before the party at the Presidential Mansion during the Victory Tour end up saving his life after Snow tries to poison him during a private meeting.
• Child by Rape: Duronda Carson, District 12's only previous Victor, had a daughter as a result of being raped by the Capitol escort Ausonious Glass.
• Chessmaster Sidekick: Haymitch is not the senior member of the Rebellion, or the most respected, but he's good at thinking out long-term strategies that play on the actions and reactions of people, such as the idea of using emotional attachment to the tributes to force the Capitol to change the rules. The fact that he often plays chess adds to this.
• The Coats Are Off: When the Peacekeepers arrive to arrest the Rebels in the Viewing Center, as everyone else is grabbing any weapons handy, District 4 mentor Harris Greaves simply takes off his jacket and flexes his muscles before charging into the fray.
• Combat Pragmatist: Several of them. Notably, Philo requests a blow gun for his final fight with the Action Girl District 7 girl to avoid facing her head on. Brutus sends him a close quarters weapon instead.
• Composite Character: Johanna Mason is seemingly combined with the unnamed male Victor from a few years before the 74th Hunger Games who scored a 3 in training. She scored a three and the only male Victors in the last 15 years of the Games are her mentor Jack (a popular tribute with some good skills), Peeta, and six boys from Career districts.
• Conflicting Loyalties: Whenever a District doesn't have a Victor of its own to mentor, one of the Career Victors is assigned to fill that gap. For instance, District Six's first Victor ever is Berenice in the 52nd Hunger Games, with Mags and Drake serving as the mentor at different times; after Duronda died and left 12 without a Victor, Albinus Drake from 2 served as 12's mentor for the 2nd Quarter Quell; during the 3rd Quarter Quell, Lyme, Philo, an unnamed 3rd Career Victor and Toffy from 10 all volunteered to mentor for one of the four districts with only two Victors. Haymitch questions the reliability of having your life in the hands of someone who comes from the same district as people they'll be going against. That being said, all such mentors do their jobs diligently as far as shown.
• Copied the Morals, Too: Subverted with Martius Snow, President Snow's alleged "son" and illegal clone, who was described to have "failed to actually duplicate Snow in any way beyond the physical".
• Country Mouse: Beech Berryhill, one of Haymitch's fellow tributes is a good-natured big guy with no real ambitions who can't figure out how to work a shower on his own.
• Courtroom Episode: Chapter 24 of The Narrow Path follows Katniss's trial for shooting Alma Coin. Among other things Plutarch testifies about the mental pressure both he and Snow had put on Katniss in both arenas, Dalton about the proposed Capitol Games and Gale and Beetee about how it was Coin who used the double-exploding bombs.
• Creepy Crossdresser: While recovering from his Games, Finnick is nearly molested by a man who snuck into the hospital in a nurse's uniform he took from his sister.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Several Victors, including Berenice and Paulin the morphlings. Berenice rips the venomous fangs of a giant spider mutt in her Games and uses them to poison another tribute. During the Quell, Paulin marches over to Enobaria, a younger career in better shape, as she's fighting Cecelia, grabs her and throws her to the ground.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Digger is halfway up the electrical fence when the Peacekeepers turn it on and she is cooked alive. Her body breaks apart in Haymitch's hands as he attempt to remove her from the fence and he discovers the metal has fused into her skin. The people of Twelve have to cut the fence to get her down.
• Cue the Flying Pigs:
  • These Are the Names (the story Effie narrates) ends in the months after the 73rd Hunger Games, with Effie reflecting on both her personal and professional relationships with Haymitch in the following monologue.
    He has his world, I have mine. As far as I know, these worlds will go on forever, circling each other like the binary planets in Erastus's book, locked in a tidal stare, with nothing short of a catastrophic asteroid hit to move them. The next spring, I reap Primrose Everdeen.
  • In the following story, The Last Tribute when Prim is reaped, Haymitch's Perspective Flip gets a brief moment of this as he ponders her fate.
    It's always the same. I try to think of some way this tiny child is going to survive, and can't think of one. There's nothing anyone can do. "PRIM!" I look up. The girl I noticed earlier runs forward, surging towards the stage. "Prim!" She screams again.... I sit forward, the brandy haze lifting a bit. There is something that can be done for Primrose Everdeen. It's never happened in Twelve, at least in my memory. Something that's utterly insane. "I volunteer[,]" the older girl gasps. "I volunteer as tribute."
• The Dead Have Names: A recurring theme. Every tribute Haymitch mentors before Katniss and Peeta is named, and often gets some characterization, and many get referenced multiple times in the following years. Haymitch and Effie make it a point to know the names of most if not all of the tributes from the other districts as well. At one point in The Golden Mean, Haymitch finds a street fair artist in the Capitol who went one better on that and is drawing pictures of his tributes, aged up the way they'd look if they were still alive and had families, something that makes the impact of their loss a lot more real to both Haymitch (who was already pretty broken up over most of them) and the reader.
• Dead Guy Junior: Defied. In The Four Decisions Katniss mentions that she thought about naming her first child after Prim, but a letter from Finnick's son Finny talking about how he always feels like he has to live up to him convinces her not too. She names her Pearl.
• Death Notification: There are phone booths in the mentoring center for the mentors to call the families of dead tributes and let them know their relatives are dead (although sometimes the families see it live on TV first). Most mentors and district escorts view it as a grim but vital chore. Ausonious Glass finds the process fun and loves to mock the dead tributes to their loved ones.
• Defiant to the End: When Haymitch watches the televised execution of Peeta's stylist, Portia, she insults Snow and his leadership to her last breath.
• Defrosting the Ice Queen: Effie's relationship with surly tribute Butterfly Skaggs in the 69th Games.
• Didn't Think This Through: Snow, when he thought up the twist for the First Quarter Quell: most of the people the Districts voted in were kids perceived as being loyal to the Capitol.
• Disney Villain Death: Tributes fall to their deaths on occasion.
  • Dibber, Chaff's Tribute in the 51st Hunger Games, commits suicide by pretending to fall out of a tree due to depression over having given Ginger a Mercy Kill.
  • Nehemiah Blythe, one of Haymitch's tributes in the 55th Hunger Games makes it to fifth place (the further any of his tributes get before Katniss and Peeta) before an earthquake causes his campsite to fall into the ocean.
  • Albinus Drake supposedly drunkenly stumbles off a cliff during a hiking trip.^note It's far more likely that he committed suicide or was murdered by Snow.
  • One of Finnick's fellow tributes while trying to climb a cliff.
  • Jack Anderson pushed his lover/ally off a cliff in a fight over the last of their food (after the Gamemakers deliberately tried to starve the Tributes).
  • The boy from 10 in the 74th Hunger Games falls out of a tree and dies.
• Divide and Conquer: Head Peacekeeper Beckett undermines the District 12 Rebellion after the second Quarter Quell by sowing resentment among the miners and merchants, giving the former harsh punishments (often for minor offenses) and the later minor punishments even when they publicly call for Rebellion.
• Doomed by Canon: Happens in any Games with a tribute who is an O.C. Stand-in named in the original books. Some of Haymitch's tributes do pretty well, but it's been established that he won't be able to save anyone before Katniss and Peeta. The same is true of occasional other characters like a couple of District 7 girls who ally with his tributes in two Games, given that Johanna is established as the only female Victor of District 7 by the 3rd Quarter Quell. Also Katniss's father, those who die in the District 12 bombing, and Haymitch's family.
• Drowning My Sorrows: After Gloss and Cashmere fall in the 3rd Quarter Quell, Haymitch observes their mentors, Miracle and Wealthy, calling their parents before glumly downing several martinis.
• Dry Crusader: District 2 Victor Saffron Abatty is obsessively against drinking alcohol and tries to ensure her fellow Victors do not indulge. She pulls Haymitch out of bars and away from alcohol multiple times, though she mostly stops being so forceful about it with him after he drunkenly rambles about all the people he lost and describes how Digger's body fell apart in his hands, implying that she's come to understand why he drinks.
• Establishing Character Moment: When Caesar first appears, an assistant of his is double checking the tribute names to make sure he doesn't get any of them wrong, stating he cares about those details. It hints at his status as a Mysterious Backer for the tributes.
• Everyone Can See It:
  • Haymitch notes that everyone who mentored with Finnick during the 70th Hunger Games could sense that he loved Annie.
  • During the 3rd Quarter Quell, Haymitch watches Finnick's face after he saves Peeta's life and takes in Katniss's reaction. Haymitch says that both Finnick and the other mentors watching with him can now see that Katniss really does love Peeta whatever Game and official story they may be stuck with. He then notes that this puts them a few steps ahead of Katniss, correctly suspecting she still can't admit this to herself.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Happens a lot with Claudius Templesmith, such as trailing off in confusion when he sees Katniss and Peeta saving Finnick's life in the arena.
• Fake Charity: Adamaris Brinn runs a debtors relief society that is really designed to get people further in debt, lining her pockets while they get sent to debtors prison.
• Fatal Flaw: Seneca Crane's is a twisted sense of romanticism, with it being revealed that he had hoped to get Cato to kill Peeta (dangling the rule change in front of Katniss) for a romantic "avenging the lover" showdown while avoiding two Victors.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Happens regularly among Tributes, and sometimes Victors.
  • Prior to the 70th Games, the tribute trains attacked by the Out-District Raiders band together for a couple days in the aftermath before they can make it through to the Capitol, allowing various Career and non-career tributes to get to know each other for the first time, with all but one of the tributes in that group either joining the Career alliance or an alliance of their own (led by Annie and her District partner, who the other Careers kicked out that year).
  • A notable subversion comes in Johanna's games. She and her ally (Haymitch's tribute River) end up traveling through the arena with an isolated Career for a while, but only because they're too sick and tired to fight each other at the moment, and the guy remains a jerk to them.
• First-Person Smartass: Haymitch (albeit sometimes as a coping mechanism) whenever he snarks about the Capitol, the Victors he has issues with or just the nature of their Crapsack World. Two examples from The Last Tribute, when either Katniss and Peeta or Cato and Clove being allowed to both win is brought up:
  Crane manages to look offended at the very thought that the Games could be rigged, which must qualify him for some kind of acting award.
  Brutus looks utterly worried by this idea. His idea of a narrative is kill them all.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Fulvia's brother is constantly in debtors prison or trying to pull off con games while Fulvia is sensible, hard-working and a Rebel.
• Foregone Conclusion: The End of the World details Haymitch's backstory and follows Hunger Games canon. It is inevitable that his mother, brother, and girlfriend all die shortly after he wins his Games and indeed they do; his mother and brother during an earthquake orchestrated by Snow, and Digger when the Peacekeepers turn on the electric fence around Twelve while she is climbing it.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: In The Hanging Tree, Glass talks about how he and Snow were both inside a school that District 13 bombed at the end of the Dark Days Rebellion and crawled out over the bodies of kids younger than the tributes in the Hunger Games. Haymitch isn't particularly moved, since Glass and Snow are both obvious sadists who relish tormenting and destroying people on an individual level and can't even claim proper Sins of Our Fathers given how District 13 was acting, without much if any help from the districts actually being subjected to the Hunger Games. Stops on the Way to the End of the World also reveals that Snow nearly smothered a classmate at the age of six and Glass enjoyed torturing and killing animals since what is implied to be a long time before the bombing.
• General Ripper: While the average soldier from District 13 gets more sympathy, their leaders are portrayed as cold-blooded and prone to sacrificing people and committing needless acts of violence against the Capitol during both Rebellions.
• Generation Xerox: The older she gets, Madge comes across a lot like her Aunt Maysilee was.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Peeta does have some decent bonding moments with his erstwhile Career allies in the arena.
• Gone Horribly Right: Blight tries to stop the 70th Hunger Games by making a deal with the Out-District Raiders to stop the tribute trains. Instead, the raiders decide to stop the trains, kill the tributes (which would put a real damper in the Games) and rob everything they can get their hands on. Or rather, they try to before getting themselves killed by the various Victors, Peacekeepers and Career tributes on the trains.
• Happy Marriage Charade: Invoked by Peeta's parents during the 74th Hunger Games as reporters get to Twelve.
  Danny: They'll want to know how he became such a romantic. So you and I are putting on a good show.
• He Knows Too Much: Gloss, Cashmere and Finnick are deliberately reaped for the Quell because of this.
• Hearing Voices:
  • Rollin, Finnick's final opponent, is talking to someone who isn't there during their confrontation.
  • Annie spends a while talking to herself and eating leaves after her boyfriend abandons her (and then dies) in the arena.
  • During the Third Quarter Quell, after Earl Bates is stung by tracker jackers he seems to be hallucinating the return of the tributes he fought decades ago, yelling at the air, "Come on, if you're coming! Took on a bunch your grandfathers, and I can take you."
• A Hero Is Born: Haymitch knows the parents of most District 12 characters born after the Second Quarter Quell and takes note when their kids are born. He has no way of knowing they'll be heroes, though, so the casual way he discusses some of these births can be humorous at times.
  Ruth has her baby at the beginning of May. I don't visit; I haven't really talked to Ruth in years, and I only see Glen on rebellion business. Glen carries the baby around the square one day, though, singing a song. The baby is a girl. They name her after some plant.
• Hero of Another Story: Plenty of Victors and tributes have interesting past adventures or side stories.
  • In The Golden Mean, Chaff briefly mentions that Earl Bates went crazy for a while in his mutt-filled arena and did an effective job turning the tables on the mutts and giving them a taste of The Hunter Becomes the Hunted.
  • In the 63rd Hunger Games, it's mentioned that the Gamemakers give a lot of attention to the unnamed girl from District 9 trying to avenge the murder of her District partner, but it isn't mentioned whether or not she succeeded, and she isn't the Victor that year.
  • In the 59th Hunger Games, the boy from 10, Gershon Grimm, is part of an alliance of six other tributes that has a melee with the Career pack before he becomes the last survivor of his alliance, and spends the last four days of the Games managing to evade Harris and his two remaining allies before being chased down.
  • Nehemiah Blythe and Nasseh Rutledge, the most successful of Haymitch's tributes, each have only a few sentences or paragraphs describing their efforts.
  • Otho Magro is a Rebel (albeit one who never advertised the fact to Haymitch) who slashes his way through the Peacekeepers trying to arrest the Rebel Victors, goes into hiding within the Capitol, and according to one of the since-deleted one-shot stories, almost made it to District 3 before the Peacekeepers caught up with him, entirely off-screen (with Haymitch not even noticing him during that fight and only learning Otho is at large as Plutarch describes the statuses of the Victors a bit later).
• Heroism Motive Speech:
  • When Haymitch asks his friend Danny Mellark if he wants to keep smuggling rebel messages after starting a family, Danny replies affirmatively.
    "I used to hate the Games because they could take me. But I'm nothing compared to him." He kisses the baby's head. "I don't just want to hope he doesn't get picked. I want to do everything that I can do to make sure no one's baby gets picked again."
  • When Haymitch asks Ed Mellark about his newfound involvement in the Rebellion, he has an excellent Big Brother Instinct-based speech about why he is taking these chances.
    Ed: They hurt my baby brother. They left him in a pile of mud for days, then made Katniss gamble with his life. Then they tried to get her to murder him because they thought it would be great entertainment to watch two kids who love each other fight to the death. They're rabid and they need to be put down.
• Hide Your Gays: In-universe. Jack Anderson, winner of the 60th Hunger Games and his ally were lovers, but because they had so many female sponsors, the Capitol didn't air any footage revealing this. After his Games, Jack lives alone with his male "secretary".
• High-Voltage Death: Digger is electrocuted to death when the Peacekeepers turn on the electric fence around District 12 while she is climbing on it. Her body is so badly burnt that it falls apart when they try to remove her from the fence.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: District 4 victor Benit supposedly died in a heroic battle against marauders living outside the districts, but Mags confides in Haymitch that he really had a stroke from the strain of staying awake for three straight weeks (while also hunting mutts) due to some overly potent drugs he took.
• Honorary True Companion: Toffy's fellow District 10 Victors, Kate, Earl, and Mindwell. Kate and Earl aren't officially part of the Rebellion, but fight alongside of Rebel tributes in the Quell and never betray them. Mindwell is the first to fight the Peacekeepers when they arrive at the Viewing Center to try and arrest Haymitch and the other Rebel mentors.
• Honorary Uncle: Earl Bates's grandchildren refer to his fellow Victor (and presumed mentee) Kate Markez as "Aunty Kate".
• A House Divided: The District 1 victors have many members who, while not necessarily rebels, hate the Capitol, but their community's downfall comes from how not all of them feel that way. Most of the ones who aren't killed in the 3rd Quarter Quell arena or are presumed dead at the hands of Trigger-Happy peacekeepers in the immediate aftermath of the arena plot end up fighting each other due to their divided loyalties. The only uninjured survivor of the melee is arrested for being one of those on the rebel side of it, and despite having one of the biggest populations of victors, District 1 has lost almost all of its victors within 24 hours of the end of the 3rd Quarter Quell.
• Hufflepuff House:
  • District 5 probably has the least Worldbuilding and few, if any, of the District residents have any dialogue besides Finch (Foxface), a couple of Finch's peers, their female Quell tribute and Finch's mentor Faraday Sykes, and a character who's living under an alias and hiding his District 5 heritage for almost all of his page-time.
  • District 9 has fewer characters with dialogue than District 5 (most of the time, Haymitch can't even remember the names of their victors), but the district as a whole gets a decent amount of backstory and prominence during the Rebellion, and several of their tributes do pretty well before being killed.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: While Ruth and Mir (Katniss and Peeta's mothers) were not friends, after the war, when Mrs. Everdeen meets Mir's father, she nearly attacks him over a cruel letter that he'd sent her (as shown in The Rites of the Fall) when she tried to petition for Capitol citizenship and/or connect with him. It turns out that the letter was actually written by Peacekeeper Cray For the Evulz.
• Ignored Expert: In one of the currently unavailable LiveJournal stories, as a Peacekeeper who policed/oppressed District 12 for 25 straight years and had lots of personal dealings with Gale Hawthorne, Cray is summoned to provide insight about Gale's presence and early actions as a part of the Rebel force besieging the Nut. Cray has a suitable Oh, Crap! reaction and instantly predicts that Gale is going to blow up the mountain fortress regardless of the cost of lost infrastructure, and he vainly protests that they need to flee before he does so.
• Illegal Religion: The Capitol has banned religious worship, but several times it's shown that most of District 8 still practices Judaism in secret.
• Implied Death Threat: During the Third Quarter Quell, after having to put up with a fair amount of goading and mockery towards both themselves and their tributes from Claudius, Philo has this to ask Claudius.
  Philo: What about you, Claudius? If you were in there and had to fight against, say, Haymitch and Jack and Harris and me, how do you think you'd do? How long do you think you'd last? What's your kill count?
• Improvised Weapon:
  • During the 64th Hunger Games, Nasseh Rutledge ties a rock to a branch after failing to get any weapons from the Cornucopia. When the boys from 6 and 7 attack him with knives, that improvised club is enough to take them both out.
  • At the start of the climax in The Golden Mean, most of the mentors who the Peacekeepers try to arrest (Harris, Mindwell from District 10, and a few others use their bare hands and/or weapons they take from subdued Peacekeepers) fight back with anything they can grab at the moment, including a workbench, silverware, a Cloth Fu necktie, and a piece of a broken TV set.
    Jack Anderson: Me and Haymitch just got through about a million Peacekeepers, using a tie and a piece of broken plastic.
• Inappropriately Close Comrades: In addition to Haymitch and Effie's constant UST as they work to keep the kids under their care alive, Blight had a romantic entanglement with Gia Pepper and her three successors as District 7's escort, causing Caesar only to assign men to be District 7's escort.
• Innocently Insensitive:
  • Ginger, one of Haymitch's first two tributes, needs a crutch to walk after being shot in the leg by a Peacekeeper. Her District partner Elmer angrily comments that someone with a fighting chance should have volunteered for her, which just gets Ginger more downcast due to emphasizing how she's doomed.
  • Plutarch is a dedicated reformer and effective Big Good, but he has difficulty grasping the severity of the suffering in the districts and can come off as pompous. At one point after seeing a Victor fleeing the Viewing Center massacre Philo shot just before making it onto the hovercraft, he simply makes a curious note that he hadn't known that man was one of their allies. To quote Haymitch in the epilogue of The Narrow Path, "Plutarch still has no idea how he sounds to other people."
• Inspirational Martyr: Maysilee Donner comes across as both this and a Doomed Moral Victor when she's reaped for the 50th Hunger Games shortly after engaging in various acts of Rebellion against the Capitol. Haymitch (the narrator) and various other characters remain certain that she was sent in deliberately, but in one of the spinoff one-shots, years later Maysilee's sister confesses that she'd rigged the reaping bowl, dumping lots of slips of paper with her name on it near the top, in the hopes that being martyred might spur the District into action and/or give her a chance to speak her mind on a Capitol stage, having short-term success with both goals.
• Interrupted Suicide: At the end of The End of the World, after the Capitol kills his girlfriend (on the heels of killing his mother and brother), between that, all the death he saw in the 2nd Quarter Quell and the life of mentoring ahead of him, Haymitch is prepared to hang himself from an old tree that was once used as a gallows, when he hears screaming and sees a friend being whipped in the distance, in the town square. This snaps him out of it, and he sets the tree on fire instead, to make sure he isn't tempted again and to distract the Peacekeepers from their whipping.
• Internal Reformist: Various Capitol dwellers local to the Rebellion and/or against the Games are both this and La Résistance — including Cinna, Portia, Caesar, Snow's alleged son Martius, Plutarch, Fulvia, the head of the Mutt Appreciation Society, a few apprentice Gamemakers, Aurelian and his group of street kids, etc.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Several characters, but most notably Drake, who isn't that caring of a mentor but bonds with Haymitch afterwards and is revealed to have volunteered to win money for the orphanage he grew up in, spending half his Victors Salary on gifts for them.
• Jumped at the Call: Within hours of the escape from the 3rd Quarter Quell arena, it's mentioned that Lucanus Bazzett, a (very) minor District 2 Victor, is not only supporting the Capitol but is training for war with the Peacekeepers to fight on the front lines.
• Karma Houdini Warranty:
  • All three of the District 12 Head Peacekeepers over the years (Beckett, Cray and Thread) are sadistic, exploitative figures who make people suffer horribly for no good reason. One of the LiveJournal stories shows that Thread was left behind and died in the bombing of District 12, while Beckett and Cray are in The Nut when Gale bombs it (with Cray having an Oh, Crap! moment as he realizes exactly what Gale will do but can't convince Beckett of the need to evacuate) and get buried alive.
  • Rapist, thug, mocker of the dead, and anti-District bigot Ausonious Glass is murdered by Rebels in District 4 shortly after his second transfer out of being District 12's escort.
  • Adamaris Brinn, a Capitol Corrupt Corporate Executive, backer of Snow and regular participant in the Victors Sex Slave trade has all her money looted by Capitol rebels in the Mockingjay Rebellion.
  • After decades of reveling in the deaths of the Hunger Games and smugly defaming the Victors, Claudius Templesmith is exposed as a pedophile during Finnick's airing of Capitol Secrets in The Narrow Path. Although his fate is ultimately not revealed, he would probably be ostracized at the very least for his crimes if he survived the riots in the Capitol that followed the airing.
  • As per canon, Jerkass loyalist Victor Brutus gets killed by Peeta, a fellow Victor he'd constantly mocked and not taken seriously.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover:
  • Beech mentions that he'd like to have a cat someday if he lives long enough.
  • Nasseh Rutledge had a stray cat he'd feed and makes a speech on behalf of stray animals in the interviews, which get over a hundred cats adopted in the Capitol.
• Kindly Vet: Toffy Taggart is implied to handle his own livestock care, missing Haymitch's Victory Tour because one of his cows is giving birth.
• Leonine Contract: During the 51st Hunger Games, Haymitch makes some concessions to the Capitol to get a crutch for Ginger (which she's doomed in the Games without) and gets some cold looks from the other Victors for giving the Capitol that extra leverage. Toffy Taggart tells him not to dwell on it, saying that almost everyone there has made a similar deal they regret.
• Let the Past Burn: Haymitch is shown helping demolish the old arenas at the end of The Narrow Path.
• Loophole Abuse: Blight gives a sponsor donation to Finnick indirectly (as a rival mentor, he's not allowed to do so unequivocally) by buying an expensive fish from Mags.
• MacGyvering: In Finnick's Games, Vannar, a District 5 tribute, makes a climbing rope out of shoelaces. It doesn't come out very sturdy and he ends up falling to his death.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe:
  • There's a lot of gossip in District 12 that Prim is Danny Mellark's daughter, although both Danny and Glen (Prim and Katniss's father) dismiss this. It's noted that Glen's sister (who died as a child) was also blonde and his grandmother was a merchant, making it less surprising that the genes got through to her.
  • Peeta's mother (and possibly his aunt) are actually the daughters of a Peacekeeper stationed in District 12.
• Man of the City: In the years after winning the 2nd Quarter Quell, Haymitch seems to know most of the people in District 12. He works hard to try and save his tributes and limit the amount of abuse that the Capitol heaps on District 12. However, this lessens a bit as he becomes more cynical and withdrawn later in the story.
• Marriage of Convenience: Done on a societal scale, likely as part of the Capitol leaders designs to make their citizens more selfish and less sentimental about things like the Games and their effect on families. Capitol citizens are encouraged to think like this, having marriage "contracts" they can choose to renew (but often don't) as well as often having no contact with their parents and siblings.
• Meaningful Rename: According to Chapter 6 of the collection Stops on the Way to the End of the World, after the Second Rebellion, there have been discussions to rename the Districts because "[n]o one is really attached to the numbers, and all they really do is remind people of life in the Before Time, with everyone identifying themselves by how long it took the Capitol to build them."
  • There have been attempts to rename at least the towns and villages: Four apparently has continuous and periodic arguments about names, Seven has mobile logging camps and thus find the discussion hopeless, Nine has villages named after elders, Ten's main town is apparently named 'Dalla' after what it used to be called before the Catastrophes, and Twelve's town is nicknamed "Resurrection City" (by people not from there, who just refer to "the Seam" as per canon).
  • District Thirteen intends to take on the name 'Lakeland', but no one likes it. Meanwhile, the Capitol has considered reverting back to 'Salt Lake City', which Enobaria doesn't like either. The new District Fourteen, split from Eleven, is unanimously nicknamed "Hell" by its residents for its climate and wildlife.
• Miles Gloriosus: The District Two boy in the 70th Hunger Games brags about killing two raiders who attacked the tribute train, but his district partner's eye roll suggests "this may not be entirely true".
• A Million Is a Statistic: Often referenced in various ways in relationship to the Games. For instance, during the Victory tour, one of Finch/Foxface's teachers is mentioned as trying to get an invention she was working on patented and Haymitch silently reflects that it won't happen (at least not under Snow's reign) because the Capitol government won't admit that the tributes they murder had potential to do something truly useful and good with their lives and don't want people thinking about that.
• Morality Pet: Brutus is a complete jerkass to every other character in the series (even the three Victors he mentored) with the exception of his mentor, Albinus Drake, whose death he deeply mourns, leaving whiskey on his grave every year.
• Murder by Inaction: After a moment's hesitation, Finnick stands by and allows Swather from District 11 (his second-to-last opponent) to drown after the older boy is caught in a riptide while they stalk each other.
• The Musical: In-universe; a musical adaptation (with subtle Rebel sentiment) of the 74th Hunger Games is released shortly before the Quarter Quell. One of the tie-in one-shots is a guide for it, which also notes various changes made after the Districts overthrew Snow and censorship became less of a big deal.
• Mysterious Backer: Caesar Flickerman is in this role, with him providing every kind of support he can to each and every tribute, and being quick to do favors for the Victors (even ones designed to undermine the Games) despite being uninvolved in the Rebellion with it eventually being revealed that this is because he is a mostly-forgotten Victor who reinvented himself and knows exactly what they're going through.
• Named by the Adaptation: Multiple characters are given full names here, including and not limited to Dannel "Danny" Mellark (Peeta's father), Mirrem "Mir" Mellark née Murphy (Peeta's mother), Ruth Everdeen née Keyton (Katniss's mother), Edder "Ed" and Jonadab "Jona" Mellark (Peeta's brothers), the unnamed tributes from the 74th Hunger Games (the girl from 4 is named Charlotte, etc.), Winnow Robinson (Thresh's sister), the unnamed Victor-tributes from the 3rd Quarter Quell (Faraday Sykes, Thalis Drogan, Berenice Morrow, Paulin Gibbs, Thelma Cotton, Hector Whitting, Kate Markez and Earl Bates), and Prisca Snow (President Snow's granddaughter).
• Naturalized Name: District 13 appears to mostly enforce this for administrative reasons for Rebel refugees and defectors, often without the person's knowledge or express consent.
  We go along the row of beds, each with a clipboard hanging from the end, with the seal of District Thirteen and a name imprinted on it. We pass Harrison, Walter and Mullis, Olive is awake and gives us a drugged wave. Bernays, Bonnie has a cane beside her bed, but cobwebs twist around the base of it. Frisch, Tillie. Pride, Archie. The names march on.
  Mason, Joanne is about halfway down the ward. "Why did they change her name?" I ask.
  Prim snorts. "They only have a little pool of names here, and you have to pick it off a list on the computer. They can add stuff if they have to, but they usually don't bother. If the person isn't awake to complain, they just pick what seems closest."
• Never Accepted in His Hometown:
  • District 9 loathes their Victors, particularly because their eldest, Will Norton, is an Insufferable Genius obsessed with bettering the District through labor projects (and cooperating with the Capitol in the process) and blaming them when things go wrong, while the younger Victors credit Will for coming home and follow his lead, thus absorbing his unpopularity. That being said, they apparently make an effort at mentoring, as District 9 tributes often make good showings in a surprising amount of the Games (such as the girl in the 63rd Games and another girl who made it to second place in the 72nd Games before losing a final battle with Ravish, the boy from District 1).
  • Finch provides a downplayed example, with a one-shot saying she was largely overlooked by people besides her family and a friend until she started doing well in the Games.
• No Bisexuals: This is discussed when Haymitch worries about how Jack (who has a live-in boyfriend) is seen being squired around by rich Capitol ladies who can afford to pay Snow for Victor-Sex Slave privileges. Effie says she assumed Jack just "likes everyone. People do sometimes, you know." Haymitch remains worried, though. Snow does soon officially re-open the Victor sex trade, but it's unclear at that point whether Jack is a victim or not.
• Non-Indicative Name: In The Golden Mean, District 2 Victor Philo finds the "Career tribute" label confusing, pointing out that while they do train for the Hunger Games, they tend to either die young in the arena or retire in comfort after a few years of mentoring, rather than make their whole life about the Hunger Games (with Brutus being a rare exception).
• Noodle Incident:
  • Haymitch mentions that during the 73rd Hunger Games, Brutus's reunion with Livius (the Victor he'd mentored) went even worse than his reunion with Otho Magro two years earlier (where Brutus was yelling at Otho for his Boring, but Practical survival strategy) but it's never revealed what made things go so poorly between them, as no details are mentioned about the Games other than that Livius was the Victor and that both District 12 tributes died in the bloodbath.
  • Cashmere is reaped for the 68th Hunger Games (as opposed to volunteering) the year after her brother wins. This is heavily implied to be a fix but it's unclear why she was sent in.
  • Haymitch mentions that Faraday Sykes from 5 despises him for reasons he himself isn't quite sure of.
  • Diamond from District One (Victor of the 63rd Hunger Games) is mentioned as surviving the fight at the Viewing Center, but is the only Victor to do so who doesn't have it revealed which side he fought on.
• Nothing Personal: During Haymitch's Victory Tour, none of the District 1 Victors besides Wealthy Gibson (who briefly encounters him after his arrival) and Majesty Gillavry (who shows up at the banquet held for him in the town hall) show up to meet Haymitch. Wealthy tells Haymitch that it isn't a slight against him (something Miracle Brea also says when she and Haymitch mentor together half a year later) but rather against his escort, Glass, who made such a bad impression when he was District 1's escort the previous year that the Victors unanimously petitioned to have Glass reassigned, with Miracle threatening to kill him if Snow didn't.
• "Not So Different" Remark: In one of the one-shots, Seeder tells Miracle that Career and outlier Victors don't always mix well. Miracle replies that they're all in the arena together. Seeder reflects that Career tributes tend to "gleefully hunt" her tributes (although it isn't specified if Miracle herself did that) but also reflects that she herself did some hunting of other tributes and might have been happy with the confidence and security allies provided.
• Odd Friendship: There's quite a few between the Victors (Seeder and District 1 Victor Miracle which started from them both enjoying ballet, Finnick and Haymitch, etc.).
• Offing the Offspring:
  • Ausonious Glass (who goes out of his way to torment 12's Victors) never invoked deliberately reaped his Child by Rape, but he did reap her child, who died in the Games.
  • President Snow also has his son murdered for scheming to force him out of power and end the Games. Although it's complicated with the reveal that Martius was his clone rather than his son.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse:
  • Simon Drear, the boy from from District 6 in the 51st Hunger Games, is a small 14-year-old with acne and a stammer but manages to kill a Career during the bloodbath.
  • Cecelia won her Games at the age of fifteen, killing several bigger tributes in fights, with Effie observing she never started fights but always finished them.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • During the 64th Hunger Games, Haymitch sends his tribute, Nasseh Rutledge, and his ally (the girl from 5) a shield with a metal surface to use for reflecting the sun so they can communicate in Morse Code while planning to ambush the career pack. Nasseh mistakenly believes that the shield is a sign to go charging into the Careers' camp, swords flashing. He and his ally are dead within minutes, and Haymitch is nearly Driven to Suicide as a result.
  • During Finnick's Games, when three outer-District tributes approach him for a possible alliance in the arena, he thinks that it's meant as an attack and kills one of them before they can say anything.
• Prelude to Suicide: An ambiguous example. Right before going on the hiking trip where he somehow fell off a cliff, Albinus Drake gave his Victory Tour plaques to Brutus, and his record collection to Cinnamon Calabry (a minor District 2 victor). Drake had been depressed about the Games in the months before his death. Brutus seems to think it was suicide (and blames Haymitch for it), while Mags speculates that Drake was murdered by the Capitol for his Rebel sympathies, in which case his giving away stuff was because he expected to be murdered soon.
• President Evil: Here, Snow is portrayed as the creator of the Hunger Games (when he was a kid) and utterly obsessed with making the Districts suffer.
• Psycho Psychologist: Dr. Meadowbrook, who tries to convince people (like his own sister, and Effie) suffering from guilt about the Games or doubts about President Snow's leadership, that they're suffering from mental disorders.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Some of the Careers (emphasis on some). Aside from a handful like Brutus, most of their Victors are fairly laid-back outside of the arena, not particularly happy with the Capitol and generally affected by the arena deaths, with some not seeing themselves as particularly different from the other tributes and just happening to have an advantage that anyone would use in their place.
  Catawba^*District 1 female tribute, 58th Hunger Games: I get it, but everyone wants to go home, Harris, and only one of us is going to.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
  • A few, such as during the 51st Hunger Games, where there's Pint-Sized Powerhouse Simon, Badass Bookworm Wiress, and Action Survivor bookworms Elmer (Haymitch's tribute and former classmate) and Ikris (Wiress's District partner)... although Simon turns out to be an untrustworthy schemer who murders Ikris.
  • Charlie Flynn (The Social Expert from District Five) wins the 1st Quarter Quell while allied with his blind district partner, a terminally ill girl from District Nine, a one-handed boy from District Seven, two merchant kids from Twelve, two kids from Eight whose district held a reaping of their own to decide who to vote for, and a nondescript pair from Eleven.
  • Annie's allies in the 70th Hunger Games are her district partner (the two of them were kicked out of the regular Career pack), the girls from Twelve and Five, and the two kids from Ten.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil:
  • A special degree of hatred and disgust from both the readers and characters is reserved for the Capitol citizens who buy victors as Sex Slaves, Ausonius Glass (who Haymitch catches trying to force himself on a sixteen-year-old tribute and who also abused District 12's first victor for an implied period of years), and Head Peacekeeper Beckett (who preys on teenaged boys and has them executed if they refuse her so-called affections).
  • Simon Drear, who is already a murderous False Friend and longtime bully, is implied to have tried to assault his district partner sexually and then scared her into telling their mentor it was consensual.
• Recurring Extra:
  • Three of the six District 5 victors (the ones besides Faraday Sykes, Charlie Flynn, and, to a lesser extent, Thalis Dorgan), are never shown interacting with a POV character. Their final victor, Tanager Lowe, wins during the Time Skip between The Hanging Tree and These are the Names, and is only shown or mentioned two or three times afterward. It isn't even clear whether any of them besides Tanager are still alive during the 3rd Quarter Quell^note Tesla Corven is already very old during the 2nd Quarter Quell, and Gia says that one District 5 died before Haymitch's victory tour, but later on, no one from District 5 is mentioned when Haymitch goes over all of the victors who predeceased Albinus Drake, where the only direct mention of the District 5 mentor or mentors is Haymitch mentions seeing the District 5 and 9 mentors playing cards together as he glances across the room.
  • Mindwell Larue, District 10's last victor (near the end of The Hanging Tree), has a background scene or two in The Narrow Path, and some background moments in The Golden Mean where Haymitch observes her reaction to the death of District 10's male victor-tribute, but she only ever gets one line of dialogue, right before her last and most prominent scene of getting involved in a fight with some Peacekeepers.
• Red Baron: Haymitch notes that several of the recent Victors have been given nicknames based on what happened in their games (although they're rarely mentioned).
  • Cashmere is called "The Fairy Princess" due to the fantasy trappings of her arena.
  • Cecelia is called "The Little Avenger" due to being a Little Miss Badass who only killed tributes who'd already killed other people.
  • Otho Magro is known as "The Devil's Due" for reasons that Haymitch isn't entirely sure about.
• Reformed Bully: Gale's mother Hazelle Hawthorne (née Purdy) used to be an Alpha Bitch who made fun of Haymitch during their school days, but Took a Level in Kindness in the years afterward.
  The cruelly pretty girl she was is buried now under years of hard work and hardship, softened by motherhood and strengthened by trials. She probably doesn't even remember who she was when we were kids. I should probably try to forget.
  [...]
  "Before we talk business," she says, "I have to apologize to you. I was unkind to you when we were kids."
  I think of her standing there on the road, her lackeys holding me down while she ridiculed me for putting on airs, pretending to be quality. "It was a long time ago," I say.
  "I'm still sorry, though." She smiles. "I ended up with a houseful of smart kids, and I wish sometimes they were doing all that fancy stuff. I think it'd be neat if they were. I think I'd brag about it. Gale's sharp as a tack, but he's never had time to use his brain for school things. He gets mad like I used to. I was hoping maybe Rory would, or Vick, or Posy. But they want to be just like Gale. And I just wish sometimes that..." She shrugs. "Anyway, I'm sorry. I'm real sorry."
  "It was a long time ago," I say again. I don't exactly forgive her, and I know she's angling for a job, but it's all right. It's not like it really did me any harm. "Don't worry about it. What are your reasonable rates?"
• Related in the Adaptation:
  • Rooba the District 12 butcher is Peeta's maternal aunt.
  • President Snow's granddaughter's other grandfather is Caesar Flickerman.
  • Romulus Thread is Lyme's cousin although there is little to no affection or familial loyalty between them.
  • Chaff is Seeder's brother-in-law.
• Retired Monster: Head Peacekeeper Cray was the second-in-command of his predecessor, Lucretia Beckett, during the Day of the Jackboot where they starved and browbeat the population of District 12 with nonstop whipping and hangings and occasional other acts of brutality like arson. In those days, Cray also engaged in random acts of cruelty for his own amusement, like when he forged a letter from ex-Peacekeeper Justinian Benz to Mir (Justinian's daughter with a District 12 woman) and called her as a desperate, unintelligent, unwanted bastard who should go to work as a prostitute. By the time of the 74th Hunger Games (like in canon), Cray never bothers to enforce regulations against poaching and other crimes due to laziness and a desire to constantly stuff his face with contraband wild turkey and could almost pass for a benign Punch-Clock Villain if not for his dark past and how he pays desperate women to have sex with him when their only other option is starvation.
• Run for the Border: The oceans of District 4 contain a minefield to keep people from sailing away, but citizens still make it through and flee toward South America semi-regularly.
• Saying Too Much: During his interviews, Haymitch is frustrated about how so many of the other tributes are giving the their competitors and the Gamemakers clues about how to kill them, e.g. what weapons they're best with.
• Scars Are Forever: District 2 Victor Philo takes several disfiguring stab wounds to the face during his final battle, and chooses to keep the scars, because they make him too ugly to be sold as a Sex Slave.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: In The Last Tribute, Haymitch invokes this by having one of his sponsors talk about what a shame it is that they're slaves to the rules that say only one tribute can survive the Hunger Games.
  Haymitch: The notion to being slaves to something as mundane as rules will rankle a certain class of Capitolite, and she knows it.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: The rules allowing District 4 to get two volunteers every year were changed right before Finnick was reaped (when there were three eighteen-year-olds ready to volunteer for him) right after his mother tried to poison The Quisling mayor of District 4.
• Secret-Keeper: According to one of the one-shots Toffy confronted Caesar about him being Charlie Flynn, the first Quarter Quell Victor and agreed to keep it under his belt, while stating that based on his observations, Tesla from 5 and Sandi from 4 also know or suspect this but haven't said anything about it.
• Series Continuity Error: The series is a Doorstopper written in Anachronic Order, so there is the occasional discrepancy even after the author went back to revise the earlier-written stories. Most are fairly small and easy to disregard, but three stories give contradictory information about District 9's victors. The Hanging Tree claims there are only two during Haymitch's Victory Tour, a man and a woman (although a second District 9 female Victor, Etta Bossard, is also mentioned in passing in a later chapter), and implies that Darla the woman is the older one. The Golden Mean and a complete list of Victors in the author's universe temporarily made available on LiveJournal say there are five Victors from 9, all older than Haymitch, with Darla being much younger than both of the men. The Narrow Path claims that there were only four: Darla, a woman who won a year after her, and two older men.
• Show Some Leg: Seeder, at least in her youth. When she tells Miracle she's too tall for ballet:
  Miracle: You just distract them with those legs. They're not thinking straight when they get a look.
• Sibling Team: Besides their role as tributes in the 3rd Quarter Quell, Gloss and Cashmere tend to mentor together.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: When Haymitch wonders if he can pull off a Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing victory and hide until everyone else is dead, Drake tells him that a few tributes try that every year. It never works because the violence-craving Gamemakers use the arena technology to either kill those tributes or herd them toward people who will attack them on sight. While it's possible for tributes to survive a long time without pursuing aggressive strategies, they have to do something interesting that will make the Gamemakers lay off them (stealing food in Foxface's case, bonding with alliance members, etc.).
• Someone to Remember Him By: One of the LiveJournal one-shots is narrated by Gloss's girlfriend and shows that as soon as the Quell was announced, they promptly got to work getting pregnant (she was two months along when he left) for this reason due to suspecting Gloss would be sent back in to ensure various secrets he knew would die with him.
• Spanner in the Works: In The Golden Mean, Finnick sadly laments that many of the victor-tributes who died in the arena, the mentors who died when Peacekeepers came to arrest the rebels, and many people killed in Districts 4 and 12 when the Rebellion broke out might have survived if not for an oblivious Capitol worker spotting the hovercraft meant for the escape and kicking things off early in a desperate scramble.
  Finnick: We had everything so well planned. We were so clever. Secret messages. Bread codes. And we got tripped up by a malfunctioning shield and a worker on a coffee break.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Bonnie and Twill, presumed dead in the books, are mentioned as being alive here, having made it to District 13 and then been locked up in the Districts medical ward for supposed mental instability after arguing against one of Coin's strategies.
  • Mockingjay mentions that a boy mistaken for Peeta was beaten to death by a crowd. That boy appears in person here (and is actually a Rebel) and is revealed to have survived, with the doctor who pronounced him dead being another Rebel.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: Philo kills his surviving allies for mocking his District partner after she died saving his life.
• Stealing the Credit: During Wiress's Games, a boy back in District 3 talks about how she "helped" him with a patent in a way that makes Haymitch realize it was her invention and he stole it. He tells Beetee and they send a model of that invention as a sponsor gift to Wiress as a Public Secret Message to tell her not to trust one of her allies.
• Swamps Are Evil: The theme of the 58th Hunger Games (Effie's first year as an Escort) is a dark swamp filled with monsters.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Brutus is always sneering about how what he considers "manly" is proper and mocking any perceives weakness or femininity among male Victors. He's almost universally viewed with frustration or annoyance by the other Victors, particularly the three who he mentored, and Haymitch.
• Theme Naming: In addition to the established District theme names from canon, several District 5 Victors and tributes are named after birds (Finch, Tanager, Raven, Robin, etc.).
• Took a Level in Kindness: Several Victors are much nicer out of the arena then in it, most notably Harris Greaves and apparently even Seeder and Chaff after Haymitch watches their Games.
• True Companions: Haymitch and the other rebel Victors who regularly mentor (Mags, Finnick, Annie, Chaff, Seeder, Berenice and Paulin the Morphlings, Blight, Jack, Johanna, Cecelia, Woof, Wiress and Beetee). During The Golden Mean, Harris, Toffy, Philo and Lyme (all rebel Victors who haven't done as much mentoring in the past) have this role as their all mentoring rebel Victors in on the escape plan.
• Trust Password: The Rebel Victors mentoring for the 3rd Quarter Quell and Gamemakers identify themselves by wearing accessories that evoke fire imagery, although it later turns out there were at least a couple of Victors present who were Locked Out of the Loop and didn't know to wear any of that.
  Haymitch's narration: When [Lyme] turns, I see her earrings. They are solid gold, out of place with her austere appearance. They are shaped like flames. I look up and down the table. Harris Greaves from Four has flames on his cufflinks (Annie is not present and that worries me). Jack Anderson from seven, always a little flamboyant (so to speak), has dyed his hair red and orange and yellow. Toffilis Taggart from Ten has been called to mentor for Eleven, and has a giant gold belt buckle that depicts a campfire. I glance at the career mentors assigned to District Three and District Eight but they have nothing identifiable happening. The other Victor from Ten, assigned to her own district, is also clear of rebel signs. It's definitely planned. I push up my cuff, and show my bracelet, then hide it again. Plutarch is wearing a vest with a subtle red and orange embroidery on it. He calls the meeting to order.
• Two Aliases, One Character:
  • Ceaser Flickerman is a prominent presence throughout the stories, having an oddly deep amount of empathy for the Victors and the tributes they mentor. It is occasionally, although always subtly hinted that he is also Charlie Flynn, the Victor of the 1st Quarter Quell, who refused to go back home to District 5 after they voted for him to go into the Hunger Games and disappeared shortly after President Snow took power. This is eventually eventually confirmed in one of the final stories, House Of Cards.
  • Haymitch's escort Gia Pepper is forced to go into hiding due to her Rebel ties early in The Hanging Tree (causing the return of Ausonious Glass as District 12's escort). During The Narrow Path, it's revealed that she'd reinvented herself as Carolyn Odair, Finnick's mother, although this was foreshadowed at the end of The Hanging Tree through her letter to Haymitch.^SpoilersIn her coded letter, she noted that she settled in District 4 and had an "heir" as of the year of the 51st Games (Finnick would be born around that time frame, as he won the 65th Games at age 14), and signed off with the initials "C.O".
• Two Guys and a Girl: Chicory, Baten and Eloise, Haymitch's male tribute, the District 8 boy and the District 7 girl in the 65th Hunger Games, form a close-knit alliance.
• Uncertain Doom:
  • In The Golden Mean, after meeting the crowds of District 12 survivors, Haymitch comments that he doesn't see any of the families of his past tributes except for the Everdeens and River Bloodwood's sister, indicating that most to all of them died in the bombing of District 12. 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), so his not spotting the relatives of any other tributes doesn't mean that none survived. Further supporting this is how a recently deceased tribute is named Plonia Fisher, and one of the rare merchant survivors of the District survived because she was making a delivery to a family named Fisher which lives away from where the bombs hit.
  • Many of Peeta and Delly's acquaintances are confirmed dead when Delly says that none of the other merchant kids her and Peeta's age survived the District 12 bombing, and few of the merchant survivors of other ages really know Peeta. However, that does leave the fates of a few Bit Characters slightly ambiguous due to them either being a few years older or younger than Delly and Peeta (such as Elly Breen, Cyprian Murphy, and Suza Pike), not explicitly being stated to be merchant kids despite that class status being implied (like Jemina Kingery, Izzrael Tarpley, Clay Geisler, Leonard Blaney, and Pippa Callahan), or both (like Dianner Teets).
• Unstoppable Rage: When Haymitch tells Ruth Everdeen the truth about the bombing that killed Prim (they were in the Training gym), she grabs a knife and starts stabbing a practice dummy, yelling incoherently before breaking down crying.
• Up Through the Ranks: Plutarch starts out as a waiter for the Gamemakers (which is how he meets Haymitch) but then becomes one of their number and gradually increases in rank over the next quarter-century as more jobs open up.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid:
  • Katniss was a Cheerful Child before becoming the broken cynic that she is in the main trilogy.
    It's [Prim's] sister, I realize. The older girl. The one who used to ride on Glen's shoulders and sing at the top of her lungs. I can't reconcile that child with the young woman I see now. Her face isn't hard, but it's closed off somehow, as cold as ice. Whatever's happened to her since her father died, it's made her tough. Hard.
  • While Plutarch Heavensbee remains a heroic character into adulthood, he is introduced as a determined dreamer who doesn't display the same proneness towards being Innocently Insensitive or justifying morally dubious actions with arguments about The Needs of the Many as he does as an adult.
• Wake Up Fighting: When Haymitch is woken up during the 3rd Quarter Quell by Toffy, another Rebel mentor to tell him that Blight's dead, he nearly strangles him. Toffy, to his credit, doesn't hold a grudge, commenting that he broke his sister's cheekbone when she woke him up after he got back from his Games.
• Wham Line: House of Cards reveals that Caesar Flickerman was born in District Five and received Capitol citizenship later in life. This is shocking enough, but the real wham line is a Two Aliases, One Character reveal as he talks abut his efforts to shed his All the Other Reindeer status when he was a teenager.
  Caesar: And I guess I thought, at the time, that I'd really made it. That they really believed I was one of them. I believed that right up until they voted me into the Quarter Quell arena.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • The fates of several Victors (mainly from District 2) aren't resolved, although the seven Victors shown in Mockingjay are indeed apparently the last ones.
  • The final fate of Claudius Templesmith the Games announcer (and resident Hate Sink) is also unrevealed.
  • Most of the minor District 12 characters have their fates unrevealed after the bombing.
• A World Half Full: A lot of the characters die, but the ending tries to make things as happy as possible for the ones who survive.
• Write Who You Know: In-universe. In the epilogue of The Narrow Path, Haymitch starts writing a series of mystery novels, basing a main character off of Danny Mellark.
  I brought Danny back to life a few years ago.
  I didn't mean to. But Gia — Carolyn — talked me into trying my hand at writing the kind of brainless mystery that I've always read, and my heroine (an absurdly plucky girl from District Twelve who's moved to the Capitol to work for a forensic investigation team) needed a support system. I wrote her an older brother from home who was always there for her, no matter what nonsensical trouble she got herself into. I didn't make him a baker, or even a merchant, but Peeta spotted Danny on his first glance, and when he pointed it out, I saw him, too. At first, I tried to "fix" it, but I couldn't. Instead, I brought him into the main action, and now when I sit down to write, it's like having an old friend at my side.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Suggested almost word for word by the boy from 1 in the 59th Games, after Harris gives the other Careers some swamp survival advice. He laughs and points out that the tributes from 7 and 11 probably know about living in a swamp to and that they'll have an advantage if he's dead.

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