#district+3

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.