#enobaria

[brucelinas]

Enobaria

[igibbydotcom]

Now that SOTR exposed a huge discrepancy between Victors games and their portrayals to the public, there seems to be a pattern. And following this pattern, we can safely assume that a vast majority of Victors are forced to go against everything they stand for. Which I know, duh. But this shows that they’ve already given us the blueprints of who they used to be.

Katniss is forced to be a lovestruck teenaged girl, eager to marry and have kids. But we know Katniss was fiercely independent and down-to-earth and was blatantly against having children because she couldn’t subject them to her cruel world.

Haymitch is a raging alcoholic, who used to be quite the rascal but is now a shell of a man and accepts that death is inevitable. But we know Haymitch was full of love and full of life, he didn’t like drinking and he didn’t just dream of a hopeful future, he fought for it.

Wiress is twitchy and neurotic and often can’t finish her own sentences. But we know she was very well-composed and an intellectual genius, who managed to go an entire games without killing because she outwitted the arena.

Finnick is a deviously charming playboy, infamous sweetheart of the Capitol that only cares for himself. But we know he’s warm and friendly and down to earth, he’s funny and can be trusted with anything.

Peeta managed to get through the games without sabotaging his personality in the process. But then he gets kidnapped and tortured. And then Peeta is angry and overemotional, he’s hateful and scared and doesn’t know what’s real anymore. But we know Peeta is kind and genuine, he’s gentle and he never wanted to be just another piece in their games.

The Johanna we know is angry and loud. She threatens the Capitol with no fear of retaliation and hasn’t loved anyone openly since her games. But we also know she still misses home and depends on drugs to escape reality— she doesn’t search for it like many characters. We hear that she pretended to be weak to win her games via surprise talent. What if she wasn’t pretending, and she really was a scared, emotional kid? What if she faltered once on camera and had to stick to the persona? Maybe she was just another kid the rebellion used. Maybe she was trusting and loving and quiet, and she lost all of that to the Capitol.

Annie is twitchy and anxious and overemotional, to the point that she can’t be trusted with secrets. They all said she lost her mind when her district partner was beheaded. She plays “real or not real” before Peeta does. I wonder if she used to be self-assured and brave and maybe reckless. Maybe the Capitol was taking away her signature ability to see how the world really worked and be someone people relied on.

I’ve seen people speculate that Enobaria filed her teeth into fangs to make herself less appealing, not just because it’s a mark of her signature kill. She voted yes for the games including Capitol children and we never get a read on her character except for her spite. Before the games, was she perhaps an approachable person, someone with empathy and a face that was easily read by others? A teeth-to-throat kill is a terrified, losing animal kill. Maybe she had to throw away all her humanity to survive her games and could never find herself again.

And what about the Victors with Morphling addictions? They were nameless and their identities were stolen entirely by their addictions. But in the girl’s final moments before death, she paints on Peeta’s arm. I wonder if she was an artist, full of wonder and deeply aware of the system she was trapped in. Maybe she loved life and went into her games unwilling to let people make her into a faceless dead tribute but she lost herself by winning.

How much was a cover up? How many Victors lost their lives long before they died? Probably all of them.

[kald-dal-art]

More Victor art woohoo. Technically all cannon victors this time even if one of them didn’t really do anything except be in the background (and have the most horrfic death in the series). So might as well tag it as being an OC ✌️

[thefloatingwriter]

the victors as complex characters will always be more interesting than making them amazing people.

like these are people who did absolutely everything in their power to survive something as traumatic as the games. most of them probably sleep with weapons in their hands. the thought on the forefront of most of their minds is survival. everything else—anyone else—can wait.

they sacrificed everything to crawl out of a killing game. their mental stability. their innocence. their childhood.

and after all of that, they realized that the games never really end. that they would sacrifice ever having a good night sleep without being plagued by nightmares. they would sacrifice their brains to help the capitol. they would sacrifice their bodies, something that should have always been their own, now snatched away from them. all for surviving a killing match that twenty-three children didn’t.

no victor is immune to this either. do you think cashmere doesn’t regret being so excited to go into the games after her brother after staying the night in a strange man’s bed that she doesn’t know? do you think gloss doesn’t regret not warning his sister about the horrors that await her after she wins? do you think brutus doesn’t sometimes wake up in a cold sweat after having yet another nightmare about being on the receiving end of his weapon, just as all of his victims were before everything faded to black? do you think enobaria doesn’t run her tongue over her sharpened teeth and wonder if it was worth it?

do you think beetee doesn’t flinch every time he sees lightning? do you think wiress doesn’t think of how if she hadn’t learned acrobatics that the 48th hunger games would have gone very differently? do you think finnick doesn’t see nets in the same way ever again, after he saw the girl from nine begging for her life tangled in a net he set up before he stabbed her with a trident? do you think annie doesn’t think about if she hadn’t spent all of that time on the beach growing up, playing in the water, that she wouldn’t have survived the dam breaking in her arena? do you think mags doesn’t think about how she left her district partner to die in the first ever traditional career pack? how if maybe, if she had been there to take the blow for him, there would be a different victor of the 11th hunger games?

do you think that blight doesn’t wonder what would have happened if the boy from two had looked up a little bit sooner, looked a little bit closer at the treetops above him, before the knife previously in blight’s hand found it’s way to the boy’s back? do you think that every time johanna picks up an axe, she doesn’t think about what it felt like to stab someone with it, what blood felt like when it splattered you? do you think she doesn’t wake up in a sweat, thinking the moisture on her skin is blood, that she’s back in the third quarter quell? do you think she doesn’t ever walk into her house in the victor’s village and think she sees a glimpse, a shadow, of her lost loved ones?

do you think that woof doesn’t use real knives anymore because every time he sees one, he remembers how it felt to stab blindly at the boy from seven? that even when he was seventy-five and the male tribute from eight for the third quarter quell, he couldn’t even look at the utensil and had to get cecelia to take it away from him? do you think cecelia can’t look at seashells anymore, that she could barely stand district four on her victory tour, because the girl from four was her last kill? that her necklace, a pretty one her sister made for her with a seashell strung through the string, was what cecelia used to choke the life out of her?

do you think that chaff doesn’t ever feel the phantom feeling of his hand? doesn’t ever touch the stump where it used to be and feel the phantom pain of it being sawed off like it was yesterday, even thirty years later? do you think that seeder doesn’t ever feel the hot sun of her arena on her body, doesn’t ever think she’s back, waiting for her death to come?

do you think that haymitch doesn’t start shaking every time a blowgun is provided at the cornucopia? do you think that he didn’t see the gold pin on katniss’ arena wear and have to sit down, remembering a very different girl with blonde hair and a quick witted humor with the same pin? do you think that peeta doesn’t hear foxface’s voice during her interview, over and over and over, until it’s so distorted he can’t even remember what she had actually said? that he doesn’t ever think of the girl from eight, a girl he might not have even known the name of?

do you think that, years down the line, katniss doesn’t realize the fate that waited for glimmer if she had won? do you think that she doesn’t wonder what would have happened if cato was a little quicker to get to the cornucopia to save clove? do you think she doesn’t wonder what the girl from four was like, what her name was, what her parents were like, what she was like? do you think that she doesn’t think about what would have happened if marvel was just a little bit quicker with his spear than her with her arrows, what would have happened if she was just a little bit slower to get to rue?

the what-ifs plague them. their games will never leave them. they will never escape their experiences. their lives will never be their own, if they ever were, ever again.

[generisydtoo]

Enobaria, anyone???

[ofseaglass]

dude. every time i remember how the victors were treated in the hunger games and everything president snow did in general i start punching the air. its like I’m one of those guys in their cars crying because women get periods.

[lost-in-beacon-hills]

Someone has probably already pointed this out but mentoring is hell. When Snow and all the other kids get assigned to being a mentor for the games they all end up falling for their tribute in a way. Or at least most of them do. They develop soft spots for them. Snow falls for Lucy Gray. Lysistrata fell for Jessup. Even Juno shows remorse over Bobbins death. Nearly all these capitol born children find out when mentoring that the kids they watch die are actually people.

At nearly every turn in the ballad of songbirds and snakes you see all capitol born citizens get personally involved with them. And when they inevitably lose them they all become different. It changes who they were. Each of them gets a little more convinced that their kid isn't district. Snow even pushes the idea that Lucy Gray is practically capitol. Within the mentoring they all view their tribute as the exception. The one that doesn't belong to a district. Their tribute is always better or smarter or kinder than the rest. A few of them even get saved by their tribute. The tribute didn't have to do it but they did. So to them they can't possibly be from a district.

Making the victors mentor the children from their own district is fucked in a lot of ways. Every year they are forced to get close to another kid, knowing their families back home are depending on them to do their best to bring them back. They try their damnedest to save them but the odds aren't always in their favor. It takes away the opportunity for their capitol citizens to humanize them while making them isolated on all sides. They don't want the capitol citizens getting too close because if they do then they'll realize these are people. They allow the winners to go home while being the richest in the district. In twelve, we see that everyone is starving while Haymitch is fine. This helps isolate the victors even more.

Who would want to look at their winner when people are dying and they are doing perfectly fine? Who would want to look at the person that didn't bring your child home? They may know the capitol is to blame but the mentor always shares that responsibility in their mind.

It's part of the punishment for the victors too. It's not enough to force them into prostitution and sex slavery. You need more than bodily control over them to keep them broken and beaten down.

The capitol does such a good job at isolating and punishing victors. You're forced to mentor a child every year that you may or may not know. Half of them are already dying or too weak to fight back and yet you are their only chance of survival. You have to be willing to forgive your fellow mentors for the actions of their tributes because they are the only ones who will ever truly know the hell of losing everything. They are the ones that understand the hate from all sides. The victors are hated by the president, their own districts (outside of the career districts but they have their own fucked problems) and by the kids they have to shepard to death.

Snow's games is designed to make them view the other districts as the enemy and for the most part it works. They want the victors to hate each other but by having control over everything else all they are left with is each other. Even if they wanted to hate each other there would be no point. They have no one else. Their games change them. No one back home is able to pick up their pieces.

In bosbas he reflects that all the capitol mentors now are bonded. It's a club with an unbreakable connection. I think he saw how dangerous it was to let their citizens be too close and just how painful it was to do that job. Imagine being one of the few like Haymitch that had 20+ years of failure to haunt them with a district full of children blaming them for the losses.

[theknifegirlfromdistricttwo]

"We were targeted from both sides. The Capitol killed the victors they suspected of being rebels. The rebels killed those thought to be allied with the Capitol."

[heavensbeehall]

Katniss at the beginning of training in Catching Fire: "I don't trust any of them [the other victors], I can't stand most of them, and I'd rather operate with just the two of us.”

Katniss a few pages later: And the more I come to know these people, the worse it is. Because, on the whole, I don't hate them. And some I like. And a lot of them are so damaged that my natural instinct would be to protect them. 

I would watch a whole comedy movie about the hijinks the Victors got up to during their three days of training.

[mellarkdandelion]

new hunger games stills :D

[atefingersdagger]

Kinda want to headcanon that Enobaria has a slight lisp because of her sharpened teeth

[girlpathetica]

so anyway when anyone holds the belief that the career kids were evil and were natural born killers you are equally dehumanizing them like the systems of training they were put in. you are adultifying children who were brainwashed and forced to learn the ways of slaughter for sake of glory. we could talk about their parallels to war also, but the main thing here are these are children taught that in order to appease their district they must kill ruthlessly and without second regard for anyone else in th equation. their win and their path of success only, even if in the end they're still cannon fodder like all other victors. like how many time does it have to be said that the careers are VICTIMS. not villains like they're portrayed as by the narrative.

[loveution]

simple life is wonderful thing and no one can tell you more about it than the remaining living victors and if i hear anyone say that they wouldn't love that life it is on sight. especially after sotr.

[kald-dal-art]

Second compilation post of my latest victor art. These are a lot fun to draw and think out so appreciate all the feedback I have gotten for this series. We'll see if I end up making all 75 Victors or not ksdjhfa

Part 1 / Ko-Fi

[66bins]

I'm rewatching The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes instead of studying (as you do) and I'm at the part where Lucky Flickerman is getting the Academy Students to sit down before the games start. He tells them, "smile, it's why we have teeth."

And this strikes me because it's ridiculous and so fittingly Captial. I feel like it really hammers home the difference between the Capital and the Districts, especially in this moment.

The tributes are in the arena, about to start fighting for their lives and to them? Their teeth are weapons. It makes me think of Enobaria, didn't she rip someone's throat out with her teeth?

In the Districts, their teeth are for survival too. More basic things like eating, but when we know food is so scarce in the Districts, it becomes that much more important.

But in the Capital? Yeah, teeth are for smiling and looking pretty. There's poorer people in the Capital that are struggling to survive and going hungry still. Coriolanus is a good example of that. But even then he's working so hard to keep up appearances.

The Capital of all places is ironically the place where you functionally need teeth the least, but because of everyone wanting to keep up appearances and putting their best smile forward their teeth mean everything to them and their images. Only the Capital citizens are given this luxury.

I can't remember if it's in the books, but it's such a killer line to sneak in.

[generisydtoo]

Enobaria!!!!!