Trivia / The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

• Ascended Fanon:
  • Countless fanfiction stories from the 2010s (The End of the World, The Victors Project, Johanna Mason: They Will Never See Me Cry, We Must Be Killers, Cheating Death: Those That Lived, Checkmate (Anla'Shok), etc.) imagine that the mentors for the Hunger Games gather together in an official building to watch the Games and mingle with each other, even though it is never said in the original trilogy. This story has the mentors watching the Games together and working out of the same building.
  • While the original trilogy never actually says when 1, 2, and 4 became Career districts, many fanfiction stories assume that they produced some of the first victors and either were Careers from the start or had a leg up at becoming Careers. This story mentions that 1 and 2 tend to have an advantage even at this early point in the Games, and the District 4 tributes in this story are part of a proto-Career alliance.
  • Multiple fanfiction stories went with the idea that the Hunger Games originally had one low-tech arena that was used for the first several Games, and that is the case here.
  • In the vast majority of The Hunger Games fanfics before this book, District 12's first victor was never around long enough to mentor Haymitch in the 2nd Quarter Quell; Lucy Gray flees into the wilderness within a year of her victory in this story and her fate is left ambiguous.
• Blooper: Relatively late into The Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes, the narration addresses a "Barb Ivory", a character who doesn't exist. The context makes it clear that Barb Azure is talking, but it seems like the editor or Collins herself made a typo, mixing up her name with Maude Ivory's.

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