porchwood:

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.

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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?

katamount:

lovely-tothe-bone:

iliveilaughiloveiread:

“Most businesses are closed by this time on reaping day, but the black market’s still fairly busy. We easily trade six of the fish for good bread, the other two for salt.”

Does good bread mean bakery bread? I’m assuming yes since she explained the difference between their typical grain ration kind and fine bakery bread a few pages earlier. If it is bakery bread does that mean someone from the bakery is regularly making deliveries to the Hob or that one of the Mellark boys sells there? I’ve totally missed that until this reread.

Arrrrgh I reblogged with all this stuff written and it disappeared. Let’s try this again.

@porchwood@katamount@shesasurvivor@everlarkedalways?

It’s interesting that all of us have just kinda glossed over this tidbit without wondering how. Especially since we were just discussing it the other day and it’s mentioned in @porchwood Toasting Theory. I highly doubt it would be deliveries or them selling there. My guess would be either someone has some kind of trade setup with the bakery or someone is able to make a decent bread by creating other types of flour/possibly mixing with tesserae. This has been widely fanoned in Panem AUs for Peeta.

I could see someone ekeing out a living as a baker with a stall in the Hob, @lovely-tothe-bone. It sounds like a lot of children took tessera rations and not everyone is a baker. (And doesn’t Katniss mention making drop biscuits with the tessera grain at some point?) With all that grain making its way into the district on a monthly basis, it’s easy to see how there’d be demand for a skilled baker (who might have a bigger/better oven at home) to turn it into something tastier, probably by mixing it with better flour. Come to think of it, measures of tessera grain probably became a de facto currency in the barter economy in the Hob. 

@lovely-tothe-bone, thank you for the tag!! I haven’t been glossing over it, honest! I in fact have many thoughts on this topic, especially as concerns the beginning of THG! Bread is mentioned several times in an interesting (and ultimately puzzling) progression:

Gale holds up a loaf of bread with an arrow stuck in it… It’s real bakery bread, not the flat, dense loaves we make from our grain rations. […] Fine bread like this is for special occasions. (p.7)

On the way home we swing by the Hob… […] We easily trade six of the fish for good bread… (p.11)

Gale and I divide our spoils, leaving two fish, a couple of loaves of good bread, greens, a quart of strawberries, salt, paraffin, and a bit of money for each. (p.14)

Now, are you ready for your head to split?!?

The fish and greens are already cooking in a stew, but that will be for supper. We decide to save the strawberries and bakery bread for this evening’s meal, to make it special, we say. Instead we drink milk from Prim’s goat, Lady, and eat the rough bread made from the tessera grain, although no one has much appetite anyway. (p. 16)

Does this mean that:

a) There was some “fine” bakery bread leftover from her breakfast with Gale and that’s what they were saving for supper?

b) The “good bread” from the Hob is true (Mellark) bakery bread (day-olds, bakery outlet, etc)? I’m thinking even stale bakery bread might be considered superior to tessera bread…

c) (suggested by @ghtlovesthg when I brought this up with her) Katniss considers any bread not made by her family/at home to be “bakery” bread, so she’s referring here to the “good” bread they bought at the Hob as “bakery bread”?

Help meeeeeeeeee!

Furthermore, if “good flour” is so tricky to get hold of, does this mean their drop biscuits (the baked good representing Twelve in the breadbasket during tribute training) are usually made of tessera flour (hence “ugly”)?? And why are they the characteristic bread for Twelve (when I can’t recall them being referenced except in this scene)? They’re typical miner lunch pail fare?

One day, Peeta empties our breadbasket and points out how they have been careful to include types from the districts along with the refined bread of the Capitol. The fish-shaped loaf tinted green with seaweed from District 4. The crescent moon roll dotted with seeds from District 11. Somehow, although it’s made of the same stuff, it looks a lot more appetizing than the ugly drop biscuits that are the standard fare at home. (p.. 97-98)

And@katamount, I agree on tessera becoming a hot commodity!  In the next chapter of Strawberry Time I need to properly introduce the Hob to the Mooniverse, so it got me thinking about what “black market” stalls might be vs “public market” ones. (I’m still perplexed by the latter - is it the “sidewalk sale” for the merchant shops? Is it regulated by the Capitol, so you apply for a booth/table permit at the Justice Building and there are only certain things you can sell there? Is it primarily for Merchant customers and the Hob is more for the Seam - and Merchants looking for stuff like white liquor/moonshine?) To my way of thinking, tessera (grain and oil) would be in particular demand by people too old to qualify for it themselves (from 19-year-old newlyweds to the “elderly,” whatever that looks like in Twelve :/), parents of children too young to qualify for tesserae, and the childless. 

porchwood:

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.

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Gale always says I remind him of a squirrel the way I can scurry up even the slenderest limbs. Part of it’s my weight, but part of it’s practice.

~ Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Ch 13

One of the things I absolutely adore about Katniss - that, alas, rarely seems to cross over into fanfic and fanart - is how gosh-darn little she is. :) This struck me back in my very first reading when she compares herself to the Careers:

I see nothing but contempt in the glances of the Career Tributes. Each of them must have fifty to a hundred pounds on me.

[Later, escaping up the tree] I must weigh at least fifty or sixty pounds less than the smallest Career. 

Now, we have no idea how accurate these estimates are, but if the smallest Career is, say, a 150lb female, that leaves Katniss at a meager 90-100 little pounds, maybe less. And if the smallest Career is a svelte 120lbs, that makes Katniss no bigger than Prim and Rue (”Neither of them could tip the scale at seventy pounds soaking wet”)!

She also reveals, “I’m small enough to tuck the top of the [sleeping] bag over my head” - an adorable image indeed (and one I didn’t catch the first time around)! But my absolutefavorite indication of Katniss-stature has to be -

But because two can play at this game, I stand on tiptoe and kiss his cheek. Right on his bruise.

- because, as you’ll recall, this is the bruise resulting from Haymitch punching Peeta in the jaw, and Peeta is “medium height.” And Katniss is standing on her tippy-toes to reach his jaw. 

So perhaps “smol Katniss” would be more appropriate? (Hee hee!!) But as it is, I’m rather partial to “little Katniss.” Blame WtM!Peeta and his endearments. ;)

I’ve been waiting for the post-parade kiss to reblog this!! 

I had a dental cleaning today - a genuinely unpleasant experience - and it made me wonder for the first time whether anything was done to the tribute’s teeth in the Remake Center (whitening, straightening, etc.). I know it’s a ridiculously superficial detail, but the Capitol is a ridiculously superficial place, and considering all the other “prettifying” they put the tributes through, it seems impossible they wouldn’t at least have whitened the teeth.

Katniss doesn’t mention this in the account her remake, but maybe - being better-nourished than the average tribute from Twelve - she had decent enough teeth to avoid this step. Thoughts? 

I’ve been in the Remake Center for more than three hours and I still haven’t met my stylist. Apparently he has no interest in seeing me until Venia and the other members of my prep team have addressed some obvious problems…primarily, ridding my body of hair. My legs, arms, torso, underarms, and parts of my eyebrows have been stripped of the stuff… I don’t like it. My skin feels sore and tingling and intensely vulnerable.

I stand there, completely naked as the three circle me…

I look at the cold white walls and floor and resist the impulse to retrieve my robe. But this Cinna, my stylist, will surely make me remove it at once. […]

He walks around my naked body, not touching me, but taking in every inch of it with his eyes. I resist the urge to cross my arms over my chest.

~ Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Ch 5

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(TW: Sexual abuse, sort of?)

One of the most disturbing parts of this book for me is the waxing sequence, and not simply for general cringe factor. Reading between the lines, it appears that Katniss endures not only face and body waxing but pubic hair removal as well - which I would consider somewhere between sexual abuse and sexual assault.

This appears to be the “kickoff” of her Remake, so is this the Capitol’s neat way of “breaking” the newly arrived, acutely vulnerable tributes - especially the female ones? Violating their private places (not in an outright sexual fashion, but we’re talking about non-consensual touch and inflicting pain in intimate areas) and then leaving them naked for dispassionate examination?

If not - if said waxing is simply intended as an “extreme makeover” (never mind nothing is ever that simple or innocent with a Capitol that cruelly pimps out its victors) - what possible reason could they have for waxing the pubic hair of girls aged 12-18? Is it that any sort of body hair is so utterly alien to the Capitol population that the tributes don’t look human until it’s gone?

In Ch 19, Katniss remarks that Naked bodies are no big deal in the arena, which further gives one pause. Unless the audience is watching the tributes’ primitive ablutions, is sexual activity (consensual or otherwise) commonplace in the Games?

In which case, is waxing the girls compliance with a Capitol fetish for hairless females? (i.e., it would be revolting to watch an intimate situation unfold where the girl has pubic hair) Or is it a desire to make even the older girls look prepubescent - like the children that they still are in so many ways? 

Sorry if I’ve taken this down too dark a path. IHATE -SO MUCH!!! - that they do this to Katniss here (and again at the start of the Victory Tour), but it’s equally disturbing that they do it to all the girl tributes. And even moreso for this to come right after Haymitch’s warning: “You’re not going to like what they do to you. But no matter what it is, don’t resist.”

One more, sorry! :( Because I miss Moustached British Officer!Peeta and Indian!Katniss (The Journey Home), and I really loved this part. (Small edit for length/content.)

It was the rainy season, and she was quickly wet through, her sleek braid plastered to her skull, and she shivered. She did not often walk alone; unless one or another of the maids was spending the night with an officer, they all walked home together. This was a dangerous route for an unaccompanied girl. She wondered if she should move through the shadowed alleys herself rather than wait for whatever might come out of them.

“Wait!” a voice called from behind her. “Please wait, miss!”

She knew who it was before she turned, though she could scarce comprehend the reason for his pursuit, unless he meant to add his tongue-lashing to Mrs. Trinket’s. The young captain stood, flushed and breathless and as wet as she, the basket of naan from the dinner table wrapped inside his scarlet coat.

“I am truly sorry,” he said, and it was clear he meant it. “Forgive me, miss. I was – I just…I wanted to touch you,” he said quietly, and his cheeks flushed darker still. […]

She looked now at the young captain in front of her, his big hands holding his jacket closed around the bread basket, and wondered exactly what he wanted of her.

“Do you understand my speech?” he asked, for she had not yet spoken, and his handsome face grew a little worried.

“I do,” she replied. “The English priest taught us your tongue.”

He nodded, looking relieved. “Then you know I am sorry,” he said. “The fault was mine entirely. I fear I have cost you much with a thoughtless touch.”

“It has cost me little enough,” she told him, and wondered why it mattered so much that he be reassured. “Mrs. Trinket will not dismiss me over clumsiness; my English is too good. I shall simply go a night without supper.”

“You and who else?” he asked softly.

She looked again at the bread basket tucked inside his uniform jacket, and understood at last. Understood why he had taken it, and for whom it was now intended. A smile tugged at her lips. Mrs. Trinket could hardly chastise an English officer for stealing the entire table’s worth of bread.

He smiled in return, but there was worry behind the expression. “It cannot be safe for you to walk this way alone,” he said. “Come, I shall walk with you the rest of the way, and you may have the loan of my jacket.”

He placed the basket in her arms, then stripped off his scarlet coat to hold over her head. She was already too wet for it to make much difference, save that it kept the naan dry and the rain from her eyes. They did not converse on the way, but the warmth of his silence spoke volumes. Her hand never inched toward the dagger in her waistband, and her shoulder was flush against his chest before they reached her home. He smelled of damp wool and sandalwood soap, of butter chicken and fresh bread and hope.

Prim is in my first reaping outfit, a skirt and ruffled blouse. It’s a bit big on her…

~ Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Ch 2 

Entirely serious question (that I shall proceed to approach in a ridiculous manner): HOW IS PRIM **SMALLER ** THAN KATNISS WAS AT THE SAME AGE???

At the time of Katniss’s first reaping, she was coming off about three months of severe malnutrition/starvation - almost dying from it! - followed by maybe a couple of months of rebuilding her diet on a small scale (dandelions, tessera bread, the occasional rabbit - I’m assuming she wasn’t bringing home feasts before her first reaping). And we know she’s smol at 16, so she would’ve been a littlepin at 12! (Peeta should’ve put her in his pocket that day in the rain and brought her home to sleep in a matchbox by his bed and eat smuggled crumbs of bread!)

Now along comes Prim, who’s been drinking goat’s milk and eating goat’s cheese (and the real bakery bread that she trades for it!) for the past two years, not to mention eating strawberries and fish and greens and everything else Katniss has been bringing home for roughly five years… But at 12, not only can Prim “[not] tip the scale at seventy pounds soaking wet,” but she’s smaller than recently starved Katniss at that age??? (And Prim’s birthday is at the end of May, so it’s not like Katniss had extra months on her at her own first reaping.)

I mean…#actualpicture of Prim, or…?? 

“I sometimes wonder if Dad found me out in the woods on one of his foraging ventures,” she says softly. “Maybe in a mossy little hollow where truffles should be, and brought me home as a plaything for Katniss.” 

(Gratuituous Strawberry Time reference there, sorry! Couldn’t resist!)

[Gale] could be my brother. Straight black hair, olive skin, we even have the same gray eyes. But we’re not related, at least not closely. Most of the families who work the mines resemble one another in this way. (p. 8)

“I thought he was your cousin or something. You favor each other.” (p. 84)

In a district of 8,000 people, where new blood hasn’t been introduced in who knows how long (unless we’re talking about Peacekeeper-fathered children, in which case I have a whooooole can of worms we could open up), I find it inconceivable (pun somewhat intended) that everyone wouldn’t be at least distantly related to everyone else. So it’s curious but not surprising that Katniss throws in that “at least not closely” bit (though they simultaneously deny that they’re cousins in MJ, which I’d forgotten), and I’m assuming that she physically resembles Gale in more than coloring.

I’ve never understood degrees of cousin-ship (”once removed,” et al), but my personal headcanon is that Katniss and Gale have a common great-great-grandfather (Galen Greenbrier, if anyone cares), whose two daughters produce the Hawthorne-Everdeen fork. (Aisling’s daughter Wren is Hazelle’s mother, Elspeth’s daughter Ashpet is Mr. Everdeen’s mother. Or, Jack and Hazelle’s grandmothers were sisters.) I like the idea that Gale’s mom and Katniss’s dad were the hunting cohort, if you will (I actually think Hazelle was a snare-master rather than a bow-hunter, but anyway-), especially as Hazelle and Katniss seem to share some commonalities and Katniss holds Hazelle in a certain esteem.

But aside from the Hawthornes and Everdeens, other residents of Twelve mustbe related - especially among the smaller merchant class - and I’m curious if others have meta’ed this or what headcanons they’ve formed. Everyone must be aunt/uncle/cousin to someone. Mortality rates were obviously very high in Twelve, but I find it difficult - no, impossible - to believe that no one has living grandparents and everyone’s parent was an only child, which raises all kinds of interesting questions:

Are Mrs. Everdeen’s parents still alive? Did they have other children? Are any of her immediate family still alive - and if so, where were they when Mr. Everdeen was killed? If they were still around and simply refused to help her/the family, why doesn’t Katniss ever mention her merchant grandparents/aunts/uncles, even bitterly? She was so desperate on the day of the bread scene, she would’ve surely appealed to them if they were still living. (There’s a reference to the apothecary in CF that I believe has to be a glitch on Collins’ part, unless it’s been pared down to a basic dispensary by that point - just a place to buy bandages and rubbing alcohol.)

My headcanon: The Ebberfelds (the apothecary couple) only had one child, Alyssum (Mrs. Everdeen), as they had they best knowledge/resources to control their number of children, and they both died fairly soon after their daughter ran away to the Seam, at which point the apothecary shop went defunct.

Did Mr. Everdeen have siblings? Or aunts and uncles, giving Katniss actualSeam cousins??

My headcanon: (does anyone care who hasn’t heard this already?) Jack (Mr. Everdeen)’s father Asa and newborn sister Laurel died when Jack was eight; his mother Ashpet died just after his final reaping. Fun twist: Asa had three little sisters, one of whom married a Tolliver and fathered Micah, who became Rooba’s third husband and fathered Jude and Jenny before dying himself.

Less pressingly but equally intriguing: what about Peeta’s extended family? Grandparents, cousins, aunts/uncles?

(Does anyone actually want to hear my headcanons on this? :(Because it’s loads of interesting, in my humble opinion, but pure speculation.) Basically, Peeta has an aunt - Rooba - and four cousins on his mother’s side and a bachelor uncle, Marek, on his father’s. Peeta’s beloved paternal grandmother Lydda died when he was little, and I’m not quite sure what to do with uncanny Grandma Elske in the canonverse. I’ve assumed she’s dead but I don’t think I’ve ever said so outright, which raises possibilities…) 

In a harsh district like Twelve, I think remarriage after the death of a spouse/ blended families would be quite common, especially when it’s so difficult (maybe impossible without tesserae) to keep a family with only one working parent. I’m a little astonished that Hazelle didn’t remarry, since she’s so dang practical and had three sons (and a daughter about to arrive) at the time of her husband’s death.

Which of course, is (partly) why I headcanon Rooba with four kids and three husbands. ;)

[I may revisit this post later in light of CF and MJ, but it’s ridiculously long already and I really want to stick with THG for the moment.]

I don’t mean this as harshly as it sounds, simply that, to my way of thinking, Katniss depicts - and likely perceives - Prim, especially early on in THG, as a much younger child. I find with older siblings (my own sister and friends that have little sisters), the younger sibling sometimes gets “stuck” in their head at a certain age/stage, and it stands to reason that Prim would be locked in Katniss’s mind by the trauma of Mr. Everdeen’s death, Mrs. Everdeen’s neglect, and the girls’ near-death by starvation as seven-year-old “sweet tiny Prim, who cried when I cried before she even knew the reason.”

When I first started reading THG fic, it bothered me that Prim always came across as so much younger than she’s supposed to be (though I found myself doing the same with her character when I first started writing THG fic). She always seemed to be about eight years old, whether Katniss was twelve or eighteen. And then I went back to THG and really looked at how Katniss presents her:

She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. 

My little sister, Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother’s body, their cheeks pressed together. 

The community home would crush her like a bug. 

Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. […]Prim might begin to repeat my words and then where would we be?

I reach out to Prim and she climbs on my lap, her arms around my neck, head on my shoulder, just like she did when she was a toddler. 

“She’s just twelve.” (not that age twelve isn’t still childhood, but this reads to me like “She’s just seven years old…”)

The woods terrified her… 

…Prim, who’s scared of her own shadow… 

In this way [Rue’s] exactly the opposite of Prim, for whom adventures are an ordeal. 

I’m not suggesting that any of this is negative or untrue, and as I’ll explain in just a moment, as the story goes on, Katniss paints quite a different picture of her sister between the lines. But as I revisited each of these passages (not to mention the “little duck” references on reaping day), I couldn’t help feeling that Katniss is still seeing and describing a sweet, frail, starving seven-year-old. And it’s not hard to see why.

I protect Prim in every way I can, but I’m powerless against the reaping. The anguish I always feel when she’s in pain wells up in my chest and threatens to register on my face. 

Katniss is an exemplary protective older sister - the only thing she wanted in all of this is to protect Prim :_( - and I would never find fault with her depicting Prim as a tiny frightened thing who needs shielding from the world at all times. But there’s a whole lot more to Prim that her sister eventually lets slip out (intentionally or otherwise):

Sweet tiny Prim…who brushed and plaited my mother’s hair before we left for school, who still polished my father’s shaving mirror each night because he’d hated the layer of coal dust that settles on everything in the Seam. (This is that same tiny vulnerable seven-year-old taking care of her adult mother and tending to her dead father’s memory - every single day, even while she’s starving to death! I can’t think of anything I did that consistently at age seven, let alone taking care of another person!)

On the table, under a wooden bowl to protect it from hungry rats and cats alike, sits a perfect little goat cheese wrapped in basil leaves. Prim’s gift to me on reaping day. (As@ghtlovesthg pointed out - this means Prim must have been up before Katniss!)

“I’ll be all right, Katniss,” says Prim, clasping my face in her hands. “But you have to take care, too. You’re so fast and brave. Maybe you can win.” (Prim reassuring Katniss at the Justice Building! I’d forgotten about that one!)

…When she sells her goat cheeses at the Hob… (Prim is a businesswoman, not just a sometime-trader! Discussed a smidge more in this post.)

Prim milking her goat before school. (Again, uniquely responsible in a child, because this is an every-single-day responsibility, not something you can skip if you sleep in or rush if you’re running late. At least, not if I understand milking correctly.)

What’s funny was, Prim, who’s scared of her own shadow, stayed and helped. (With that miner’s awful leg wound)

That’s another thing about my mother and Prim. Nakedness has no effect on them, gives them no cause for embarrassment. Ironically, at this point in the Games, my little sister would be of far more use to Peeta than I am. (I’m almost 40 and I’m still squeamish about male nudity! It’s part of why I love Katniss so much! And I love Katniss’s admission of sweet, tiny, vulnerable Prim being useful to a mortally wounded Peeta.)

Something that’s only faintly nodded to (and that in CF) is that Prim has been dealing firsthand with pregnancy/labor/delivery, probably alongside her mother - I’d hazard she’s something of an apothecary apprentice at this point - but certainly with Lady, her goat. Lady was a gift for Prim’s 10th birthday (just over two years before THG begins), which means she’s been tended by Prim through at least two pregnancies, as well as the mauled shoulder. I belabored this a bit in WtM, but this also means that Prim had a small side business in goat kids, either trading them back to the Goat Man for the stud service that keeps Lady in milk, selling male kids to Rooba for meat (which would probably break Prim’s tender heart a bit), and/or selling females for a tidy sum as future dairy goats.  

What’s more, if Prim hasn’t gone through menarche herself by the start of THG, she’s surely intimately aware of it (between close living quarters, limited “sanitary supplies,” and her mother’s patients). This is something else I’ve touched on (and will belabor in the near future) in the Mooniverse, but I think menstruation was both a hopeful and a terrifying thing to the women of Twelve. (On the one hand, they would certainly experience irregular/absent periods, delayed menarche, etc due to malnutrition, so the appearance of a steady cycle would mean joy for those who dearly wanted to get pregnant, but there would also be something of Katniss’s “terror as old as life itself” at the prospect of those children who might result.) We never get a chance to see this, sadly, but I’ll bet Prim had a crush (on Peeta’s oldest brother, who was crazy about her in turn). Did she share Katniss’s fear about bringing children into the cruel world she lived in, or was she looking forward to being a mother one day? 

To wrap this up, for a little perspective, let’s take a quick peek at another example of a twelve-year-old female character. Say, an intelligent one with an ugly yellow cat…

(yes, I know Crookshanks comes along a smidge later, but I’m not crazy about movie!Hermione and this gif was too perfect!)

At the beginning of THG, give or take a few months, Prim is the same age as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. 

Please tell me this gives someone else a wee start (and I don’t mean the gif of Captain Kirk)!

Now, I’m not trying to equate these characters by any means, though there are similarities between the two (and I’ve been wondering for days now: if Prim was Hermione, Rory Hawthorne would be Ron, for so many reasons, but who would be Harry??)…The Grangers are dentists, Mrs. Everdeen is a skilled apothecary; both girls have a heritage looked down upon by some of their peers (though it’s interesting that, at least from Katniss’s perspective, Prim is universally adored rather than scorned as a “Seam brat” - and she’s got to look the tiniest bit Seam in someway!). I would hazard that Prim knows the plant book cover-to-cover at this point - and heck, Katniss even describes Prim (and their mother) as “work[ing]magic” in their healing! :)

I freely admit that Hermione had loads of advantages Prim could only dream of (relative affluence in the Muggle world, 20th-21st century conveniences, access to superior education from the get-go, not to mention real magic), but one would expect - and I think, will find - a similar emotional maturity in Prim at that age, if not more weighted to Prim’s side, since she’s living in a brutal post-apocalyptic dystopia where she lost her father (in terrible circumstances) at a very young age and works alongside her mother to tend sick/wounded/dying coal miners - surely a harrowing experience for even a seasoned healer.

Anyway, I found it interesting to compare the two, however briefly, and consider just how competent Prim totally is may be behind the scenes. I mean, she should have a Time-Turner by CF, at the very least. :)

lovely-tothe-bone:

lovely-tothe-bone:

Based on fanon I was starting to think Katniss’s hair was not straight, because we know she isn’t white, but this jumped out at me. Now I know where I got my original visual from which included straight hair. I honestly got the sense that Seam folks were descendants of indigenous tribes.

Another clue on K’s hair being straight. I didn’t picture it as being glossy pin straight but maybe that’s wrong. Why else would she describe the braids as silky?

ETA: yep, was wrong

@lovely-tothe-bone - Can we collaborate on meta? :) You keep pipping me to the post (pun intended :P) on things I’ve come across awhile back and mean to bring up but just don’t have the time or energy to pounce on fast enough.

I’ve always envisioned Katniss as having straight black hair that lends silky rather than coarse, especially once she has access to Capitol products. That said, she describes the braids her mother plaits as “silky” but in the reaping prep remarks (emphasis mine): I scrub off the dirt and sweat from the woods and even wash my hair. Which implies that 

a) it’s a big deal for Katniss to wash her hair (which makes sense if fuel for heating water is scarce and her hair is long) and 

b) Katniss’s hair is silky even when she washes it for the first time in days/weeks, probably using lye soap or something equally unglamorous/stripping.

So what really splits my head open is the fact that she wears her hair in ringlets- at least TWICE!! - in Catching Fire: 

My hair is pinned back from my face and falling down my back in a shower of ringlets. (p. 58)

Creamy lace and pink roses and ringlets. (from the wedding photo shoot, p. 166)

I’ve known a few girls with straight silky hair and it won’t hold curl whatsoever - sometimes won’t even take a perm! I won’t deny the Capitol’s scientific advancements but…they can make sleek straight silky hair into RINGLETS?!?

porchwood:

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?

Reblogging for an edit of sorts and a couple additional thoughts:

1)@lovely-tothe-bone , you’re going to love/hate this: It was Gale who taught Katniss to fish, not her father.

He taught me snares and fishing. I showed him what plants to eat and eventually gave him one of our precious bows. (THG, p. 110) 

Now, I have a really hard time accepting that Mr. Everdeen didn’t fish, especially when it’s a relatively passive/easy/safe way to catch food - or, for that matter, that he never used snares. Maybe, as @ghtlovesthg mentioned to me in conversation, Mr. Everdeen simply didn’t have a lot of  free time due to his mining work and two little girls at home, so when he did take Katniss to the woods, they stuck to actively pursuing food through hunting and foraging (not walking a snare line/sitting by the lake with poles). Katniss also says (emphasis mine):My father knew [there’s food if you know how to find it] and he taught me some before he was blown to bits in a mine explosion. So I would make a case for Mr. Everdeen knowing a lot more bushcraft than he managed to teach Katniss before his death.

2)@ghtlovesthg also pointed out that one of the biggest advantages Katniss had over the rest of the district was the mental benefit of getting away from Twelve and seeing that the wilderness beyond wasn’t a “Here be dragons” wasteland that the good, kind Capitol is protecting them from. Whereas Peeta’s world/knowledge was effectively defined not by the fence but by the boundaries of the square.

3) And speaking of Peeta:

…there’s something kind of depressing about living your life on stale bread, the hard, dry loaves that no one else wanted. One thing about us, since I bring our food home on a daily basis, most of it is so fresh you have to make sure it isn’t going to make a run for it. (p. 310)