Hello, and call me Pinetrees. This is the Hunger Games themed sideblog of @winterpinetrees. I am most fascinated by the districts and characters that comply with the system, whether that’s because they truly believe in it, or just feel they have too much to lose. In other words, I think a lot about the careers, and my headcanon for the upper class of District 3.
I draft and daydream about fanfic but haven’t posted any yet. Anything I do write will be centered around two characters:
Quarrel Mastiff, Victor of the 69th Hunger Games from District 2, who won by default because Titus obviously couldn’t.
and Emmitt Aizen, Victor of the 71st Hunger Games from District 3, who is as charming and beloved as she is brilliant, and played her whole games without the slightest touch of rebellion. On purpose. So she could get away with more later.
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The Supporters - my headcanon for the elites of District 3.
The Supporters (often shortened to just “Supports”) are the most hated group in District 3. They aren’t just wealthy and well-educated, the Supports are traitors who work in the Capitol. Supports are worse than the Careers. At least Careers sacrifice themselves for a Reaped kid. The Supporters just follow orders and smile.
Though, if Supporters-in-training did volunteer for the Games, they’d stand a decent chance. They are clever, stealthy, and ruthless. Above all, all they are charismatic, and know exactly what the Capitol wants.
Their training very explicitly indoctrinates them to not volunteer. It would be a conflict of interest. The Capitol wants these servants alive, and without any reason to seek revenge.
What do Supporters do?
Tech support for the Capitol. The Capitol is hideously over-engineered. They must need an army of workers for all of their showers alone. No Capitol citizen would submit to the level of harassment that I imagine a repairman fixing a television on the opening day of the Games would face. Avoxes have nothing left to lose, and so are too great a risk of sabotage. The solution, to me, are the Supports, who have so much to lose and so will tolerate anything.
Capitol citizens trust Threes to fix their tech more than Capitol workers. Why else would they let Beetee design tech despite his rebellion unless they thought it was leagues above their own? As a result, Supports are employed just about everywhere, including for Gamemakers and politicians. A pissed-off Supporter could break an arena or stage an assassination. The Capitol makes sure they don’t.
In order to be tolerated in the Capitol, Supports are trained to be personable as well as good at technology. They are charming, calm, and seemingly impossible to insult. They face constant abuse without flinching or fighting back. They are smart, but know not to make a Capitol client feel stupid. They are almost always pretty.
Supporters walk on eggshells for months on end while working in the Capitol, with no contact home. They face the same hazards as any desirable Victor, and without the safety net of cameras watching. In exchange for this abuse, they earn unbelievable amounts of money. It’s not an easy life, but the Supports are proud of it. They chose this.
How are they perceived?
In District 3, they are hated. The hatred is powerful and nearly universal. As I have discussed before, District 3 is cartoonishly rebellious. Everybody is a genius breaking arenas and dying for the cause. The fact that 1, 2 and 4 are careers, but not them, implies an intentional rejection. So the Supporters, who serve the Capitol directly, are seen as traitors. Supporters are cowardly, privileged, selfish. A gifted child who accepts an invitation to train as one becomes an instant pariah.
The Capitol views Supports kind of like pets. They’re helpful, beneath notice, and honestly adorable. Oh no! A tech issue! Then a polite District 3 subject in a nicely ironed uniform fixes the television like soooo fast. The security risk is not acknowledged, because the system has worked for decades, why would it stop?
How are they trained?
Most Supporters come from families and neighborhoods of Supporters, because many outsiders refuse to interact with them. Unofficial training starts early. They learn to walk quietly as soon as they can walk. They speak eloquently and efficiently with minimal accent, but also learn Avox-sign. In school, they are sent to the fastest of the fast tracks. Every Support is a genius. Kids from Supporter families who can’t make the cut simply do not train to become them.
Full training kicks in around Reaping age, in a parallel to the career programs in 1 and 2. Their academy is laser-focused on what they’ll need to survive the Capitol. It teaches how to repair and code a thousand machines, but also how to redirect a Capitol citizen’s anger, pick locks, and lie. To prepare students for tours in the Capitol, they are taught how to work while exhausted and hungry, how to keep their hands steady through terror and pain. Supports can fall asleep anywhere, and they never show their true emotions. There is something almost robotic about them, if you look past the personable facade.
On Emmit Aizen, the one Supporter-turned-tribute
Supports never take tesserae and make up a vanishingly small percentage of the population. There are less than a hundred Supporters-in-training in the Reaping at any time, out of over twenty thousand eligible kids. To avoid security risks, or just by chance, no Supporter was ever reaped until the 71st Hunger Games, when the name of sixteen-year-old Emmitt Aizen was called.
Emmitt proceeded to get charm the audience, deliver arguably the best interview of her year, and score a seven (despite being 5’1”). When the audience saw that her arena was an urban one, and she killed someone in the Bloodbath with a screwdriver, the sponsor money poured in. In the end, Emmitt would win in thirteen days, with a total of six kills, and not the slightest touch of visible rebellion.
Like the Support she should have become, Emmit was despised in Three and every rebellious district, but adored by the Capitol. She would still become a rebel. She always had been a rebel in spirit, but she decided living was better than painting a poster. A victor, trusted and loved by the Capitol, could do more than a corpse. As all Supports know, there’s no better place to work than right under the Capitol’s nose.
So I asked this question on my other blog but I want to ask it again
What do you guys think happened to the first 9 victors, because there is so much possibility
they Lucy grayfied and disappeared
they demanded to get rewarded for their survival
none of them were alive by the time of the 11th games
the capitol wanted to bury them
capitol tracked them down and forced them back
Voting ended onApr 16
Part of me feels like the capitol wouldn't want to acknowledge them because they would think they would get in the way of making the games more entertaining
My thought is that the Capitol retroactively offered victory prizes (and mentorship responsibilities) to the first nine. However, some were dead by then, and the Capitol had utterly lost track of the survivors. In the end, only one or two allowed themselves to be found. They are long dead by the 75th.
At the end of Sunrise on the Reaping, Beetee's wife is pregnant -> if the child survived, they would have been 23 at the time of Katniss' games, and 24 at the time of the third Quarter Quell -> the child would only be eight years older than Katniss herself -> if Beetee's kid was reaped, Katniss would plausibly have been old enough to remember it -> in the trilogy, there is no mention of Beetee having any children, but Katniss does mention that the children of Victors tend to end up in the arena, so she likely witnessed this in at least one Hunger Games -> that kid definitely died in the Hunger Games as further punishment for Beetee
The careers don’t win nearly as often as they would if the Hunger Games were truly competence-based. Yes, they win half the time, or maybe a little more, but that’s isn’t even remotely close to what you would expect if the Games were actually fair. How often do you think a randomly selected teenager would beat a D1 recruited collegiate athlete at their sport? The answer is realistically basically never, unless you happened to select someone who happens to be reasonably good at the same sport, in which case they might stand a small chance (e.g. Katniss). Just being big or strong is not enough to overcome an elite trained combatant in a fair fight.
I fully believe that the gamemakers interfere EXTENSIVELY to get their desired outcome. If there is a popular tribute, they will do everything they can to keep that tribute alive in ways that aren’t immediately obvious to the audience. Like, that tracker jacker nest that just conveniently happened to be there when Katniss was cornered by the careers? Sure, that’s not suspicious at all. Sometimes their methods are probably even more subtle. Keep in mind that they are in full control of the broadcast, so people only see what the gamemakers let them see. They can manipulate terrain and sounds to lure a tribute onto the path of another tribute. Or maybe they decide to attack a tribute who’s a threat to the favorite with mutts, and no one ever has to be any the wiser. They can even control who is likely to survive the bloodbath through strategic arrangement of starting positions. Yes, there can be situations where tributes behave in unpredictable ways that are outside of their control, but I’d bet they have at least an 80-90% success rate of getting the victor they want in years when there is a clear favorite (which is by no means every year).
The career advantage, at least past the initial bloodbath, is more so a product of the fact that they LOOK like winners than it is their actual skill. Tributes who look like they can win get support and sponsors, so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. But the careers winning all the time would be boring for the Capitol audience, so they’re quick to latch on to other tributes who look like reasonable contenders, even though on a truly level playing field, they wouldn’t be.
The really ugly part is that I think the trainers in career districts even know this some extent (and victors certainly do). They know deep down that they would probably have better odds of winning if they selected their tributes based on physical attractiveness rather than combat ability. BUT they don’t actually care that much if they win. They just need to convince kids to keep volunteering so everyone in the district can take tesserae without fear of being reaped, and the best way to do that is to make it into a competition where winning is an honor and they feel like being the best will save them… even though it won’t.
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Do you think that district 3 is forced to make technology for the games?
Like we're the ones that had to develop the censor that triggers the mines of the platforms? We're the ones that developed the force field? Or the controls and holograms that the game makers use?
I'm surprised that this was never brought up or even speculated , like we know that beetee and wiress invented things for the capitol but could this happen for everyday people in 3 ?
The Capitol has Beetee make it’s communications systems and District 2 fill its armies. They are absolutely using district labor for their forcefields and trackers and landmines. The Capitol uses the districts for everything.
I also headcanon that there is a hated upper class in District 3 that is contracted to work in the Capitol, which includes assisting Gamemakers with building arenas and broadcasting the games. Avoxes have nothing to lose, after all, why wouldn’t they sabotage things? Privileged district workers should be more loyal.
after the war, there is a conscious effort to reframe language around the Hunger Games - namely, not referring to people as victors who won, but survivors of the Hunger Games. they are listed on memorials with no asterisk or anything by their names that would set them apart from the other children that were reaped.
and this is all fine and good - until Haymitch absently references something from the year he 'won' and someone comes out of the woodwork to correct him that it's actually 'survived,' you know.
There's an old headcanon that District 2 tributes don't have last names. It symbolizes that they belong to the district as a whole, and frees them from vulnerable family. It's very cool, but I don't quite see the Capitol allowing it.
Instead, my headcanon is that the career program gives out new last names. Children enter the training program as Henrys and Riveras and Ludwigs, then years later Caesar is introducing two volunteers as Ms. Hammer and Mr. Armstrong and that's how it always goes.
Because God forbid a fearless Two has a soft-sounding name, a family, or any individuality at all. They're just tributes. Stereotypes earn sponsors, and sponsors keep them alive.
I’m 100% sure Snow was the one to introduce tokens into the Hunger Games. Going off Lucy Gray telling him that her mother’s dress was the only thing keeping her from falling apart in the Capitol, and later that she clutched his mother’s compact in the arena so hard it left an imprint on her palm. He WANTS the tributes to anchor themselves to something, to find something to survive and fight for. Because a bit of hope turns even peaceful, optimistic folks like Lucy Gray into killers. Because it makes for a better show
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in CF, Katniss said people are assigned houses when they get married. I wonder if they're reassigned to units with more space (key word being more, not enough) for having more children.
say if they have 3 or more, they get a house with an upstairs or something. I assume couples keep the house and it's common for their children to live with them until they marry off or else inherit the house from their parents. we don't hear of another way for people to get assigned houses - this could be an incentive for people to marry and have children. maybe childless adults can be assigned houses but have to pay rent*
also wondering, particularly for young people who age out of the Community Home and don't marry right out of school, if the mines offer dormitories - with predatory work contracts, of course.
People always focus on the horror of titus the cannibal tribute from district 6, but in focusing on that we forget the fact that he’s a child. everyone in there is just a scared, desperate child. the game makers put those babies in an arena with no food and made them kill each other. of course Titus started trying to eat the dead. there was nothing else. if he even wanted a chance to survive long enough to go home, he had to. He’s a child, locked in a hellscape with only one way out. except there is no way out, is there? like haymitch says, you never get off that train. but titus doesn’t know that. none of the tributes in that arena know that there’s no winning the games. There’s only survival. And to survive, you must kill. you must eat. there’s no time to think about the consequences of what you’re doing, because you have to stay alert. you have to stay alive. You have to go home.
So titus kills. and he eats. And he gets closer and closer to going home. But as the numbers dwindle, those consequences that he’d been avoiding come sneaking back in. he’s been eating people, eating children on live television. He’s a monster, and the whole nation knows it now. What’ll happen to him when he gets out? What will happen to his family? His friends? Would he even be allowed around his loved ones now that he’s the most hated and most recognizable boy in panem? So he snaps. Of course he does. No one exits the arena completely sane, and that’s without the trauma of having to turn to cannibalism on the inside.
And then the avalanche comes. The cannon fires. Titus, the mad cannibal, is dead. His body is loaded into that little wooden box, and he finally, finally goes home. i doubt there was a funeral for the male tribute from 6. It wouldn’t do for anyone to be seen mourning the monster. But what about the boy? Titus was a normal child before his name was pulled at the reaping that year. he had friends. Family. He probably had hobbies too. No one will remember that nervous boy taking the stage at the reaping, or his interview with caesar flickerman. he will forever be immortalized as the beast of the arena. One only whispered about in horror. They’ll call him a savage, a villain, a monster. In truth, he was just a terrified kid trying to do whatever it took to make it home from an incomprehensible nightmare.
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The future of the Hunger Games doesn’t have all the concepts that we do now. Hell, until the prequels, it seemed like they had completely forgotten religion. So in Panem, rather than use modern terminology like transgender or non-binary, I like to think people in the districts would just say someone “is only a boy/girl for the Reaping”.
