acknowledging that mrs. everdeen fell into a catatonic depression after her husband died that complete incapacitated her can coexist with complete condemnation of her leaving her children to fend for themselves. i’m really freaking sickof the “she could have done something/ she could have tried harder” argument because that’s not how it works. at least not entirely. you are completely responsible for her actions, mental illness or not, but it is still an illness. the woman was sick. would you say the same thing of katniss when peeta is captured by the capitol? when she straight up tries to kill herself by self starvation? when she’s living in that house and doing nothing for months? no, you don’t.
katniss and her mother are mirrors of each other. when they both lose the one they love they completely fall apart. but mrs. everdeen’s choice of taking her medications and forcing herself to keep going (even though it takes a while) is completely ignored while katniss’ choice to keep going is celebrated.
an illness is an illness and both katniss and her mother have undergone severe trauma. it isn’t suddenly easier just because mrs. everdeen is an adult. trauma, ptsd, depression doesn’t discriminate. i completely understand katniss’ anger, and i have a post hereabout attachment theory in regards to her and her mother. it’s not fair that she had to provide for her family. but they live in a world where nothing is fair, where their lives are not fair, where they cannot get help for both sickness and starvation.
the point is that both of them are incapacitated, both of them suffer, and yet both of them make the choice to live. katniss doesn’t see that from her mother because she herself hasn’t experienced it yet. mental illness isn’t just feeling bad, it completely takes over your mind, your body, your life. you see nothing else. and for both of them to pull themselves out of that darkness, that’s full of so much bravery and hope. one of their choices isn’t better than the other. have y’all considered that mrs. everdeen’s taking of medication is her doing something? is her “trying harder?” just like katniss’ choice to live, as much as she doesn’t want to. that is her “doing something” and her “trying harder”.
both of them suffer. both of them become sick. both of them survive. that’s the whole point.
part of the reason why i resonate so deeply to katniss figuring out her relationship with her mother is that she’s still a kid.
our parents are our firsts. first understanding of the world. first look of people. our first reference point. katniss mirrors her mother in a lot of ways, and she runs from that mirroring throughout the course of the story, often anchoring herself to her father because 1. love and 2. the mind makes a perfect image out of anything.
she wants stability, she deservesit, and she didn’t get that as a child with her mother. it personally just baffles me at times how the possibilities of their narrative (mainly from what i’ve seen in fandom at least) just stops at mrs. everdeen (frankly) screwing up in her choices and actions as a mother and “that’s it no more chances!”
katniss needs peeta. she needsfamily. to make her own. but not at the expense of letting the only one she, biologically speaking, has just fade into nothing. i don’t think that’s in her character at all. not for the long haul.
added thought: the way that we are never given mrs. everdeen’s first name. she’s either motherormrs. everdeen. often times that’s used as a way of stripping characters of their identity and agency. (daphne du maurier does this in her book rebecca, we never know the narrator’s first name nor does anyone address her by it).
in katniss’ mind (given she is the narrator) the box she has put her mother into is that of, frankly, being a bit of a burden. she flat out says she doesn’t care that her mother didn’t have medicine before when she got sick. granted this is a part of her anger and hurt, but it’s still interesting. it’s a way of distancing herself, a form of conditional proximity.
So we know that Mr and Mrs Everdeen had known each other since “apothecary times” and I think that they were talking a lot about herbs (at first) and literally everything (and became closer and closer and… you know). So I think that “courting” was very much based on this talking until one day she heard him singing and BAM.
Oh, and I have this angsty head canon that it was Mr Mellark who introduced them to each other. The situation: it is May and she complains to Mr Mellark that it’s season for one particular herb to bloom and how helpful it would be to collect it and make a decoction. And how the woods are full of those blossoms now and how easy it could be if it was not a fence around the woods. And Mr Mellark (who was trading with Mr Everdeen for some time already) gets this brilliant idea to introduce them to each other so she can describe the blossom and he can gather it for her. And it all goes oh so well and she is happy and grateful and he’s very pleased with himself and… yeah. Yeah. Ugh.
Thank you my dear for this request, this generation is such a pleasure for me to explore ❤️
Disclaimer: I’ve never taken part in any official THG reread/discussion and I essentially read the book in isolation, so anything I say in these posts may well have been discussed and dismissed years ago.
The first people who come to see Katniss post-reaping are, of course, her mother and Prim, immediately followed by Mr. Mellark. Whether you believe the baker was involved with Katniss’s mother in their youth or simply that he admired her from afar, I feel like something happened when they passed outside the room, even if only a significant one-sided gaze. Was Mrs. Everdeen surprised that Peeta’s father came to bid her daughter farewell? How did Mr. Mellark respond to seeing the woman he (had/perhaps still?) loved having to send her eldest daughter off to the Games? Did he want to comfort her in their mutual grief - did he try? Did he reach out to her afterward, and not merely on the pretext of looking out for Prim?
On a sidenote, I can’t believe he was unaffected by the sight of Katniss looking so much like her beautiful mother at sixteen. (I don’t mean attracted to her but rather moved, maybe even shaken.) I headcanon that Katniss inherited her father’s coloring but her mother’s features, resulting in a striking Seam version of young Mrs. Everdeen, and here she is with her hair braided up by her mother’s deft hands (in what, I presume, was a style Mrs. Everdeen had worn herself as a young woman) and wearing one of her mother’s dresses. The sight of her would’ve brought back memories, whatever you think transpired between Mr. Mellark and Mrs. Everdeen in their youth, and (assuming the baker knew of his son’s unrequited love) surely deepened his grief for Peeta. No wonder “he [had] no words at all.”
He rises and coughs to clear his throat. “I’ll keep an eye on the little girl. Make sure she’s eating.”
[Later, in the Games]Prim has my mother and Gale and a baker who has promised she won’t go hungry.
I find it fascinating that Katniss, who bristles at any kind of debt - particularly when it’s owed to a Mellark - actually takes comfort in the baker’s promise, to the extent that she recalls it in the arena. This is almost certainly because said promise involves taking care of Prim, but nonetheless, it’s interesting that she responds so positively to it.
And on a related note: was this kind of thing - looking after the family members of tributes - typical? I can’t recall if it’s mentioned in canon or just in @ghtlovesthg‘sCinders:
It was common for the families of tributes to receive gifts of condolence during the games. Merchants would present carefully prepared dishes to the unfortunate families in town. Seam families offered whatever supplies or food they could spare to the neighbors whose child had been unlucky enough to take out one too many tesserae. Usually, the gifts were given in the evening in a vain attempt to help bolster the family through the prime time viewing of the night. Those were the hours in which a tribute was most likely to die.
Even in the Seam, where charity was synonymous with weakness, these gifts were accepted graciously, as a funerary gesture of mutual grief.
Or was Mr. Mellark’s offer, which sounds more comprehensive and long-term, an exception to this tradition? If Katniss had died in the Games, would the baker have continued to look out for Prim until she married/became self-sufficient?
Finally, Mr. Mellark makes way for Madge, with her pin and instructions and her kiss, and then who arrives but Gale! While I’m fully aware that these two have much more urgent matters on their minds at the moment than each other, at the very least, some kind of glance must have been exchanged, however meaningful/meaningless. Did they interact afterwards, as in @titaniasfics‘ bittersweet Strawberry Sunday, drawn together in their mutual anger and grief? Did Madge, so fierce and determined to send her aunt’s pin back into the arena, finally break down when she left the room, only to find herself face-to-face with Gale Hawthorne?
And why on earth aren’t there more fics about these intriguing encounters in the hallway? Or have I simply missed them somehow?
@mtk4fun - thanks so much for this comment! I have ridiculously extensive headcanons for Mr. Mellark and Mrs. Everdeen, but even if they never had any sort of relationship, I’m willing to bet that 16-year-old Katniss in her mother’s dress, with her hair done by her mother (perhaps in a style her mother had worn at that age) at least caused a flicker in his heart/mind. And if Katniss does resemble her (canonically beautiful) mother in features, it would present an even more striking image (in a bittersweet fashion, of course, since her dark coloring comes from Mr. Everdeen, the man chosen over him).
And let’s not forget: he’s waiting outside the room when Mrs. Everdeen and Prim come out! What looks or words might have been exchanged? Did Mrs. Everdeen and/or Prim then feel the need to go and see Peeta (for any number of reasons)? I’ve never thought about that before!
Something occurred to me on this reread that I haven’t thought of before. While I would never dream of suggesting that Katniss led a “comfortable” life before her father died, I can’t help noting that she grew up with a world of advantages not shared by her Seam neighbors (or even some of the merchants!), and it’s interesting when you start to pull it all together.
Her father was a skilled (maybe expert) hunter and forager, so she certainly ate better than the rest of the Seam (especially that all-precious protein - including fresh fish for brain and vision health - as well as fruit, wild greens, nuts). Her mother was a trained apothecary/herbalist, so she had some of the best available medical care (Since no one can afford doctors, apothecaries are our healers - p.8) under her own roof for injuries and illnesses, and her mother probably taught her good hygiene practices from the start.
Her mother knew the herbs to use for everything and her father could and would go beyond the fence to retrieve them. However Mrs. Everdeen ended things with her parents, she still ended up with their priceless handwritten materia medica.
Aaaaaaand, now I need a Jack/Alys/Raisa Rapunzel retelling where pregnant Alys desperately wants her katniss tubers (actually, didn’t I tease that much in an aside in WtM a loooooong time ago??) and Raisa is the unloved witch with three little sons and no daughter/no hopes of having one. Jack adamantly refuses to give up their baby but desperate, miserable third-trimester Alys is willing to broker any deal (heck, maybe witch!Raisa even shows up to serve as midwife because Alys is struggling). Raisa disappears with Katniss, and Jack, assuming the worst, goes to the ends of the earth in search of his daughter, only to find her her cherished and adored by her stepmama in Milk-Daughter fashion…
Katniss’s father took her to the woods, occasionally giving her lungs a reprieve from the sooty air of Twelve, and gave her expert survival instruction that would have served her well even if she’d never gone to the Games. He taught her to swim - something I doubt anyone else in Twelve had the opportunity to learn, let alone practice (unless they were sneaking off to the woods as well) - a very beneficial form of exercise for her little body, and to climb trees.
She mentions that both her parents sang (though we know less about her mother’s voice than her father’s). Believe it or not, there was once music in my house. Music that I helped make. My father pulled me in with that remarkable voice… (p. 234) That voice was, in my humble opinion, the nearest thing Twelve had to real magic. …whenever my father sang, all the birds in the area would fall silent and listen. His voice was that beautiful, high and clear and so filled with life it made you want to laugh and cry at the same time. (p. 43) And we know this isn’t just Katniss idealizing his memory because we get almost a verbatim account in Mr. Mellark’s “Because when he sings…even the birds stop to listen” (p.300). This may be more of a personal headcanon, but I’m willing to bet her father filled that house with breathtaking tales as well as songs.
She knew what velvet was - granted, from a small sample on the collar of one of her mother’s dresses, but it’s a unique little snippet of luxury for a Seam child to have been exposed to. (This always brings back a fond memory from my own childhood: my mother had a “Sunday sweater” with narrow white stripes of angora every couple of inches, which I loved to trace with a fingertip when I was in her lap.) And as far as I can tell, Katniss had a (largely) stay-at-home mother, since Mrs. Everdeen was “expected to get a job” (p. 26) within a month of her husband’s death - not that she couldn’t have been running her Seam apothecary business before Mr. Everdeen died, but she definitely wasn’t on a time clock and was probably/primarily working from home, which certainly benefited the girls more than having both parents gone for up to twelve hours a day.
Those parents had a tender, loving relationship, and as Katniss remarks in the bread flashback, My parents never hit us. I couldn’t even imagine it. (p. 31) This topic is worth an entire post of its own. I suspect that hitting one’s children in Twelve was a fairly (sadly) common practice, but it’s so foreign to eleven-year-old Katniss that she can’t even imagine it.
As I said earlier, I would never begin to describe Katniss’s childhood as luxurious, but until her father’s death, I’m inclined to think she led a much nicer life than a lot of her fellow district citizens. Thoughts?
So we know that Mr and Mrs Everdeen had known each other since “apothecary times” and I think that they were talking a lot about herbs (at first) and literally everything (and became closer and closer and… you know). So I think that “courting” was very much based on this talking until one day she heard him singing and BAM.
Oh, and I have this angsty head canon that it was Mr Mellark who introduced them to each other. The situation: it is May and she complains to Mr Mellark that it’s season for one particular herb to bloom and how helpful it would be to collect it and make a decoction. And how the woods are full of those blossoms now and how easy it could be if it was not a fence around the woods. And Mr Mellark (who was trading with Mr Everdeen for some time already) gets this brilliant idea to introduce them to each other so she can describe the blossom and he can gather it for her. And it all goes oh so well and she is happy and grateful and he’s very pleased with himself and… yeah. Yeah. Ugh.
Thank you my dear for this request, this generation is such a pleasure for me to explore ❤️
I wake up at five in the morning without the help of the alarm clock. Today, even though I’m free from the daily obligation to wake up early, I can’t go back to sleep. Usually, I get up at five to work at the apothecary my family manages next to the district’s main square. However, the factor that frees me from work today is the same that makes me lose sleep.
Today is the day of the Reaping. Actually, it’s my last Reaping day. Or at least the last one that I have to worry about, now that I’m eighteen. Nonetheless, I don’t see any motives to celebrate because, after all, the next Games are going to be… different.
This years marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Hunger Games. Because of that, today’s reaping will draw the tributes that will participate of the second Quarter Quell, a special edition of the games which occurs every twenty five years under specific rules that make the nightmare even worse to the chosen tributes.
This year’s special rules were revealed some months ago, when it was announced that twice as many tributes would be reaped at each district. As a result, two young men and two young women from each of the 12 districts of Panem will be taken to the Capitol to be prepared to fight til death. For an instant, I imagine myself being reaped along with three of my friends. I shake my head, trying to ward off this thought and I get up. Since I will not be able to sleep again, I’ll look for something useful to do until the hour of the reaping, in the afternoon.
katniss’s relationship with her mother is very important to me. while rereading the hunger games, it makes me sad that there’s no comfort in seeing her mother for the last time before she leaves for the capitol. a lot of katniss’s fears stem from her mother, but I think that, most of all, she fears being alike her mother.
I wish I could give katniss her mother’s love because there is a special feeling in being a daughter craving her mother’s love and comfort, and knowing that she won’t be able to receive it; or to long for it despite how strained the relationship has become.
