#about haymitch

[fallsekings]

One of the big things that is left out of the HG’s is Haymitch’s trauma... or rather we all know he was a former tribute, and all tributes have trauma, but it goes a bit deeper than the movies suggests that it does... or how much his own story mirror’s Katniss’. Haymitch came from a home without a father present, possibly also killed in the mines since he was a “Seam kid”, which left him to sort of be “the man of the house”, in the sense of being a “provider”, to his mother and his younger brother. He also had a girl friend, although not much about her is known in the books.

With that out of the way, during his own games, he mostly stayed out of everyone’s way and got into a few fights, eventually befriending the girl from his district... who eventually died in his arms... which mirrors Rue. His initial goal was to find the edge of the arena, which he eventually does and his final battle takes place there and he used the forcefield around the arena to his advantage to kill his opponent.

Snow took this as an act of defiance, I guess because he didn’t use his own hands to kill the other tribute... or do what was expected of him. Nonetheless it really ticked Snow off enough that... he had Haymitch’s family and his girlfriend killed.

This causes him to have a lot of problems with PTSD, in addition to what he had to face in the arena. For example, he won’t sleep when it is dark out, and he sleeps with a knife. When he is detoxing from his alcohol usage he will also scream and yell and see things that aren’t there (which I know can be standard but), the alcohol usage come from trying to become numb and not think about his trauma. He would be a train wreck with or without it... just in different ways.

Not ONLY does he have the trauma of losing people and PTSD from his own Games, but... imagine being a mentor afterwards.... each year losing a boy and girl from his district over and over and over again. Haymitch has lost a lot of children he has mentored to the games to a point where he gave up and stopped caring, because they weren’t going to win anyways. It was always the “career tributes” that won. The District 12 kids were always weak and malnourished and rarely had a chance to win... So he gave up caring because it became harder and harder to become attached to kids he knew he would lose. I believe the number was 48 kids?

And then in comes Katniss and Peeta... at this point he is pretty jaded... what makes them any different than the other 48? Remember I said that Katniss’ story mirrored his own and she had a spark of defiance in her that he once had in himself. She REMINDED him of himself when he was that age and that woke him up again and gave him hope that he could save one of the children he was mentoring and he was damned sure going to do it.

Essentially, Haymitch pushed EVERYONE away, because he had lost so many people. Everyone he ever cared for was taken from him... but then Katniss woke him up and gave him courage to fight back again... because she gave him hope.

[vivicendium]

i think something that elevates the hunger games franchise is not just the quality of writing but the integrity of it. tbosas isn’t just a cash-grab by suzanne collins in the age of sequels and reboots (though i won’t pretend that didn’t play a part), it’s a character study of the main antagonist with a different structure than the main trilogy. and importantly, it doesn’t just re-hash the same old themes and beats the main trilogy had, it expands on not just the world of the hunger games but the themes as well, it actually has something new to say about the trilogy’s themes about class, capitalism, power, and control, in a way that couldn’t be explored with the main story because the protagonist of that story simply did not have access to the world that’s being explored in tbosas.

i understand the people who call for books/movies to be made about haymitch, finnick, johanna, different years of the games — we love those characters and want to see more of them! i’d kill for a novella on finnick’s days mentoring tributes, or katniss’s parents falling in love. but at the end of the day we probably wouldn’t be very satisfied with those stories being fleshed out if they had absolutely nothing new to say about the world, they’d be enjoyable, but not as interesting and engaging as tbosas has been.

[fictionadventurer]

Personally, it's always a bit wild to me to see commentators interact with the Hunger Games franchise as if Collins were writing science fiction stories instead of essays with faces. She's just not that interested in fleshing out side characters or digging into the details of the worldbuilding. These characters are concepts and symbols before they're people. There's an almost mathematical precision to who and what she explores and how deeply she does it. This is a step or two away from pure allegory. If she were writing a couple of centuries ago, she'd have named her characters things like Innocence and Anger and Watch-Carefully-Your-Soul-Lest-Ye-Be-Damned, but since she's writing for modern audiences, she has to settle for puns and allusions. If she has another essay to write, she'll assign some faces to it; she's not going to look into backstories or other eras just for the sake of storytelling, and it's not a failing as a writer that she doesn't.

[itsajollyjester]

Family Portrait

The only family he has.

[insignificant457]

[mikonez]

I like them a normal amount.

[madeofjules]

Katniss and Haymitch have such a love/hate relationship and people always idealize the love aspect but I absolutely adore the hate. This is a teenage girl acting like a teenager and a grown ass man also acting like a teenager. He is hardly a father figure to her; they are both immature children who bicker constantly but protect each other like family when it comes down to it. They love each other but do not like each other because they're the same person and neither of them likes themselves. They are downright nasty to one another but the trust between them is strong because they know the other will never hold back how they really feel. I just love their relationship, even the ugly parts.

[radiant--as-the--sun]

do people really just wanna be fans of the hunger games and not mention palestine at all? like honestly? do you really wanna just support fictional uprisings and fighting back against fictional oppression but don't actually give a shit about it in real life? did y'all genuinely learn and internalize nothing from this series????

[charlunday]

Like everyone else I immediately drew Haymitch and Lenore Dove (even though we literally have no idea what she looks like yet)

I can't wait another DAY for sotr guys I'm gonna chew through the walls

commissions open!

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

realising what I actually need from Suzanne Collins is just a multi-volume panem history book

[effieotto]

we know so little about Effie’s personality out of her Escort persona and is so funny to me when i see someone saying that she and Haymitch could never work out because of their divergent personalities….

like, girl?? Which personality? we barely know her

I mean, Katniss had a clear beef with Effie during the whole book. She liked her well enough, but her Hype personality made her extremely uncomfortable, mainly because Katniss didn’t understand her -neither knew her. Peeta, in the other hand, had a deep, very sensitive relationship with Effie -he loved her…like he said himself, she was the best escort he could have asked for to support them through it all

So i think if… now that we know for a fact that Haymitch IS NOT canonically the same person as Katniss (deep inside, at least), but rather the lover boy -intelligent and funny like Peeta. Can we still support the idea that their personalities don’t match?

She was a hyper, she had absolutely no idea how to be thoughtful and she WAS brainwashed…but was she just that? If she got Peeta’s heart around her little finger in two years, can you imagine a decade?

[fallsekings]

The 50th Hunger Games: "I don't see that it makes much difference. They'll still be one hundred percent as stupid as usual, so I figure my odds will be roughly the same." ~ Haymitch

So I've been thinking about the Hunger Games recently, especially with the announcement of the new book coming out and it being about Haymitch. I had always wondered why the Capitol saw his win as a defiance, bad enough that it merited Snow targeting his entire family and having them killed as a result of his games. But I wanted to put my thoughts out there and the effects that it had on Haymitch as a person and how he ended up being the mess that he is.

First I want to take a look at his games, which took place in the Second Quarter Quell and how it was "special" compared to prior Hunger Games. The 50th Games took more tributes than average. Normally it is one girl and one boy, but for the special edition, they took two boys and two girls from each district. And it took place in a highly poisonous arena. Lots of plants were poisonous so it made it especially difficult for the tributes to find food to eat.

Haymitch came across as defiant and arrogant in his interview before the game, which we already know that that is a big nono.

The Gamemakers 100% rig the games, at least to a certain extent. They watch everything that they do behind the scenes and they manipulate the events within the arena in the direction that they want the fight to go in. This creates drama, which is good for ratings, which is what they want. We see them doing this in the first 3 books. So they had probably already chose a victor already and Haymitch wasn't it.

Haymitch stayed out of the fighting for most of the match itself. He got into a few fights, but largely he kept to himself, in an attempt to find something and he found the edge of the arena, where there was a forcefield. And he tested it by throwing a couple of rocks to see what happened and they bounced right off. However, Haymitch staying out of the fighting for most of his games, made him a boring tribute for the audience, which is why Haymitch wasn't the victor that they wanted.

The Victor that they had wanted was obviously his opponent, that he had his final showdown with. A more exciting candidate for the audience of the games to cheer for and that was the District 1 career tribute that came at him with an axe at the end of his games. I don't want to go into gory details, because it did get messy. But suffice it to say she threw the axe at him and he dodged it and it bounded off of the forcefield and hit the career tribute in the head. Thus crowning him Victor.

So the point of all of this? Snow wanted to humble Haymitch and his defiance and arrogance towards the Capitol. They also hated him for ruining an extra special Hunger Games by accidentally killing their chosen Victor. He stayed out of the fighting for so long and then he just accidentally won? Boring tribute is boring for the citizens of the Capitol. It all led to the Capitol wanting to make an example out of Haymitch for not playing by their rules. He played by his own rules.

For his punishment, they killed his family. His father wasn't in the picture, much like Katniss's father who died, so we can assume that Haymitch's dad met the same fate as hers did and died in the coal mines. So, he was "the man of the house", taking care of his mother and his younger brother. Snow had them both killed, and his girlfriend as well.

But his punishment didn't really end there. After his Games, that made him a mentor. Each year he had to mentor two children, and since he was from a poverty stricken and malnourished district... the tributes always lost and died in the arena. I think Haymitch probably did try at first, but after a while he did give up. Since his Hunger Games was the 50th, he had to mentor 51-73 Hunger games which roughly leads to 44 children dying under his watch before he met Peeta and Katniss, so you can imagine why he was pretty jaded by the 74th Hunger Games.

Anyways this is what is already known about Haymitch's backstory with the exception of his partnership, with one of the tributes from District 12, Maysilee. It will be interesting to see how this story is fleshed out in more detail tbh.

[pumpkinrootbeer]

Haymitch as a character drives me a little bit insane bc like I always see people say haymitch survived his games bc he outsmarted them or cheated the system which is true, but that's only how he survived the final fight. The rest of it he survived because he never trusted anything or anyone except THE TIME HE DID TRUST SOMEONE she dies. Because of him. because he figured out something he wasn't supposed to know. And then everyone he loved was killed because he had survided. And then he has to escort 48 kids to their death and he knows all their names, and then finally finally they break the system. And then like, they win right? but all his friends are still dead and he's still drinking and like, I don't know! I don't know how you keep living in a world post everything, in a world that is now asking you to trust that things will get better and are better and safe now like how do you get yourself to trust when the only reason you even lived in the first place is because you never let your guard down.

[mariigoldzz]

No offense but I feel like a lot of those pretentious hunger games posts about how the fandom "continues to ignore the message!" and how the movies "are bad representations of a great series and Suzanne Collins is a poor misunderstood author😡" are written to make the OP seem smart. There IS some truth these posts, but don't forget that Sunrise On The Reaping's book and movie were announced the same day. She clearly has SOME sort of contract or wants Lionsgate to make movies on her books. If she was THAT "misunderstood and angry at the film industry." like some people in this fandom claim then Haymitch would only get a book, not his own movie to go with it. Sorry.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. You don't have to like the movies, and you can be mad at the fandom. These posts are starting to get on my nerves though and I needed to rant. (More in the tags)

[thesmallestgir1]

“In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you”

[calliopeos]

I apologize in advance for the person I’ll become when Sunrise on the Reaping comes out