Sotr - Blog Posts

NEVER MIND I MANAGED TO WORK THE NEW LORE INTO UNTO THE LABYRINTH

WE ARE SAVED

So, upon reading Sunrise on the Reaping, I’d like to congratulate Unto the Labyrinth for officially now being canon-divergent and an AU.

I’m a little pissed that SotR messed up UtL’s story trajectory so bad, especially with Beetee, but whatever.

I’ll release an official statement when I post the next chapter of Unto the Labyrinth

So, upon reading Sunrise on the Reaping, I’d like to congratulate Unto the Labyrinth for officially now being canon-divergent and an AU.

I’m a little pissed that SotR messed up UtL’s story trajectory so bad, especially with Beetee, but whatever.

I’ll release an official statement when I post the next chapter of Unto the Labyrinth

IM SOBBING CRYING THROWING UP

"You're not going home, Silka."

I will kill her, and Snow will kill me.

These Games will have no victor.

Because to Snow, Lucy Gray is an ideal. She's a picture perfectly representing what Snow should have had, what he deserved. And that's what still haunting him. The thought that the same picture may be forever unattainable.

But to Haymitch, Lenore Dove is everything. She is his age, and she grows and morphs as he grows and morphs. She is his other half. She's not a picture, no, she's a book that keeps growing.

To Snow, Lucy Gray is forever the same 16-year-old girl who ~betrayed~ him, and she haunts him accordingly. But Lenore Dove ages and grows gray alongside Haymitch, like she’s walking next to him through the years instead of lying in her grave. If you even care.

Madge: *thinking about the Mockingjay pin* I'm gonna give this to a girl, then MAYBE she'll like me and realize how fucking gay I am for her. also haha screw you Gale she didn't wear anything you gave her

Katniss *thinking about the Mockingjay pin*: Wow this was Madge’s aunt’s, what a precious and valuable family heirloom, it must have been special to her, I’ll treasure it forever.

Maysilee *thinking about the Mockingjay pin*: this bird is ugly and stupid I’m literally never going to wear this.

Haymitch being all "I'm an ally" and Clerk Carmine being all "you're a loser" lol

Sardonic, snarky, arrogant, rascal, bad boy Haymitch (that it turns out was mostly a product of propaganda), you will be missed.

But lover boy, older brother, guilt ridden, failed rebellion igniter Haymitch, you will be loved.

my fav thing about sunrise on the reaping was when haymitch was like yeah caeser i'm a lone wolf 😏 i'm with the newcomers but i'm not WITH the newcomers, yknow? they call me a rascal. a rebel against the gamemasters. I scored a ONE and that is a THREAT. you do not want to mess with me 🙅

cut to him with like 20 kids following him around like ducklings, him hiding in his t-shirt, him letting a bunny guide him to safety because it reminded him of his girlfriend, and him making nightlights out of potatoes.

hayffie was a really fucking surface-level relationship. Like, Effie Trinket is not the absolute queen you think she is.

“But they really are for a greater good. The Hunger Games.”

-Excerpt From Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins

Lenore Dove is rescuing us from Hay-fie and for that alone I love her

i hate you. just so you know that

“Can you imagine [the sun] rising on a world without the reaping?”

it will not save you it will murder you, blitz you up into hundreds of thousands of tiny pieces, pick out your heart and then throw it in a high speed vacuum cleaner while it taunts you

sunrise on the reaping save me

“and while lenore dove will forever be my true love, louella is my one and only sweetheart.”

that line hits so hard when you realize how quickly he was calling katniss sweetheart. through katniss’ eyes, it seemed insincere at first, almost like haymitch was mocking her. but now we truly know haymitch wouldn’t just throw that around. he truly cared for her from the start.

😭😞😥

😀

and it's his birthday my baby boy is NOT a baby boy 😭😭😭

no matter young Haymitch's characterization in Sunrise, I'm always going to be partial to the interpretation that he was a smart-ass punk who thought he knew better than everyone until he was crowned & punished.

the Games changed him, all right. they made him face death and finally flinch, finally see how small & finite his life was and that the world didn't care how clever he was or how above-it-all he acted.

one wrong move, one missed chance encounter with Maysilee, and he would've been dead. and no amount of bravado, or hat tricks, or snarky comebacks would've made any difference.

he went home without the innocence he came with, that he didn't know he'd had to begin with. he'd been so sure of himself. (he'd been so afraid.) he was smarter than the other tributes. (the girl looked like an airhead but she was bigger than him and just as fast, and she'd-)

47 50 other people had to die for young Haymitch to learn he didn't know anything about anything, actually.

because what's more, he had a debt bigger than his own life to pay when he got home. he hadn't expected that. I imagine it took him by surprise. I imagine he felt angry and guilty and powerless, with unimaginable sorrow that cut him down to size... as very small, & stupid, & only sixteen.

imagine that as a coming of age.

fuck you're breaking me

“Haymitch finally joins us, contributing twenty-three years of tributes he was forced to mentor.”

Means Haymitch became a mentor at 17. Means he watched kids his age die. Means he probably mentored people he went to school with. Like Sejanus.

Spoiler Free Review of Sunrise on the Reaping from someone who just stayed up all night to read it and is now broken emotionally

Suzanne is not fucking around anymore. This book is about so many things but the thing that stuck out most to me was the rage I think dominates this prequel more than any other book in the series.

When the news came out a book about Haymitch was coming after years of fan requests (and a film to be developed in tandem) I’ll admit, I had my doubts.

But what Collins delivers is more brutal a gut punch than I think even the most hard core fans of this series were anticipating. In the wake of political unrest across the US and world wide, in an era of disinformation, she tells the reader clearly to look and think for themselves, and shows the atrocities that can come when we do not.

This book is about anger and injustice and it does not try to convince its reader otherwise. At times you can feel Collins shaking the reader by the shoulders: ‘See?! See what happens when you blindly accept what they tell you? See what you let them take?’.

Fans familiar with Haymitch will not be surprised by a lot of the major beats of this story but the focus on propaganda still leads to some interesting reveals. This is the goriest of Collins series and in many ways I think will be the hardest to adapt, perhaps her own rebellion against the industry that continues to profit off her work and contort her message

my girl lenore dove who nothing bad ever happened to...

I think we need to talk about how the Hunger Games series' has no religion in it.

No one prays, no one goes to a church, hell, no one even believes in a higher power! To them, death is just death. It's even more depressing that way, I think.

Because no matter what's going on, at any point in history there was/is always a God or Gods, a "life" after death or something similar, but Panem is so far gone they don't even have that comfort.

katniss describes people as if she was asked by police to describe the person she saw

haymitch describes them as if he has a language speaking exam and he really wants you to know he's good at another language

i say we just call them geese

Snow - all covey girls do is lie and sing songs about their ex, you should be thankful you're going to die instead of being with lucy gre- i mean Lenore dove

Haymitch - L + ratio + fuck you I'm drinking your milk

I desperately needed a visual for the opening chapter of SOTR before reading it.

First chapter in, we're told about haymitch's shorts. In my mind, they are booty shorts that have COURTESY OF THE CAPTIOL right over the ass ✨️

rip miss donnor you would've loved wearing pink on Wednesdays and giving backhanded compliments in Instagram comments

Toxic trait is thinking I could win the Hunger Games

katniss everdeen didnt even tell us the names of her own PARENTS. of course she didn't bring up beetee's wife and child, let alone effie's family in the original trilogy. SHE BARELY TOLD US ANYTHING ABOUT PEETA!!! she basically went through life with survival blinders on, give the girl a break😭😭😭

SUNRISE ON THE REAPING SPOILERS

“I first saw the girl at the Hob when she was just a baby. Burdock was so proud of her, he toted her around everywhere. After he died in that mine explosion, she started coming alone, trading the odd squirrel or rabbit. Tough and smart, her hair in two braids then, reminding me for all the world of Louella McCoy, my sweetheart of old. And after she volunteered for the Games, that nickname couldn’t help but slip out. I didn’t want to let them in, her and Peeta, but the walls of a person’s heart are not impregnable, not if they have ever known love. That’s what Lenore Dove says, anyway.”

When we first meet Haymitch, we can instantly tell that he has made a habit of distancing himself from tributes. That he has nobody left he loves, so he pushes away anybody else that tries to come into his life. But now we know how full of love Haymitch was. How deeply he loved Lenore Dove, how deeply he loved his mother and Sid, his friends, even Hattie. Everything Haymitch did was out of love. He was reaped because he tried to protect the girl he loved. As he was reaped, he did his best to protect his sweetheart, 13-year-old Louella McCoy he grew up with. He tried to distance himself from the other tributes, but eventually he couldn’t help but love them too.

He couldn’t help but call Ampert “Buddy.” He couldn’t help but call all of the district 6 tributes his doves, and mourn all of their deaths, no matter how little he actually knew them. How Louella was replaced, and how he wanted to hate her replacement, but gave her the name Lou Lou and protected her like their own. Haymitch was the one who initiated the hug of all four tributes from 12. He was distrustful of Wyatt, and grew to mourn him like a brother. He carried Lou Lou like his life depended on holding onto her. How he hated Maysilee Donner, and thought of her as the most stuck-up girl in 12. He called her Sis. He grew to love her like the sister he never had. She died as his sister.

All of the love that Haymitch didn’t need to give, and yet he loved so endlessly and so whole-heartedly. And with every person he loved, he lost them, and lost a part of himself. No wonder he didn’t want to let Katniss and Peeta into his heart. He had already tried so hard to push away Burdock, who relentlessly tried to care for him in his despair.

Then, in comes Katniss Everdeen. She carried with her a piece of every person Haymitch tried to push away. She was Asterid, Burdock, the Seam children he grew up with, all in one person. He didn’t want to let her in. He couldn’t have.

And yet, Haymitch couldn’t help but call her sweetheart.

Because Katniss was a woven tapestry of every person he had ever loved. She was his best friend’s daughter. She carried Lenore Dove’s songs. Louella’s skin and hair. Wyatt’s protectiveness. Maysilee’s fight, Maysilee’s resistance, Maysilee’s pride, Maysilee’s pin. And in the arena, she painted the best poster Haymitch and Maysilee could’ve ever hoped for- Rue, surrounded by flowers, her passing in dignity and not as another number in the games. And refusing the Capitol their winner by eating the berries with Peeta.

It’s no surprise that Katniss and Peeta broke down Haymitch’s walls. Haymitch had the flint striker, the spark. And Katniss was the fire that caught 25 years later.

My theory for the next Hunger Games book is that it’ll follow a spy from INSIDE the capitol (who’s actually organizing and failing to start a revolution), and/or a tribute from district 12, who died in the games.

The spy (Plutarch Heavensbee?) sees how the world is build, sees their own position in society and decides to rebel against it since it’s completely wrong. Sure, it may take a while, but in the end they actually do something!

And maybe, the spy tries to make a winner, or a revolutionary, of the district 12 tribute (or any other tribute), but it doesn’t work. They die, and maybe they try another tribute, and that person dies, and it continues until finally they hatch a plan?

SOTR Spoilers!!!

Okay, I'm not sure if this is just me and I'm overthinking it, but I feel like even in the book, no one acknowledges that we don't know for sure that Louella McCoy was really the one to make it home in that coffin. Hell, when Lou Lou dies, Haymitch even takes a moment to think about what will happen to her body, if it will be sent back to District 11 or left in the Capitol, or even if she would be cremated. Now of course we know that at the end of the book, "Louella McCoy" is sent back in a coffin on the train with Haymitch, but for all we know, it could still be Lou Lou. Think about it from the Capitol's perspective: they want no loose ends, no one will ever know about this, and those who do can never do anything. If they want to keep this so secret, wouldn't it make more sense to send Lou Lou back since her body would have the correct wounds from her death in the arena, so if anyone ever opened the coffin, they would assume it was Louella. Of course, they could assume that no one would ever open the coffin, and they would most likely be right, but if someone did, even years down the road, it should be pretty obvious whether this person died from blunt force trauma or poison since those are two wildly different deaths.

Besides all that, I think that it also adds another layer of tragedy to the whole situation. Lou Lou was kidnapped from her home, stripped of her identity, and murdered by the Capitol while brainwashed to be someone else. It feels even more cruel to send her to a District she's never been to, into the home of a dead girl she was forced to replace, and to be buried under a false name, where her body can be visited by people she never knew, all while everyone who loved her (presumably) rest elsewhere. Meanwhile, Louella was kidnapped from her home, died and had her identity stolen, and no one evens knows what happened to her, but we know she never made it back.

*trying to escape the train*

So, Sunrise on the Reaping huh? That was wild haha…

…

*sobs*

*throws book accurate Haymitch at you* whoops