Sotr Spoilers - Blog Posts

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.

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.

“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.

😭😞😥

😀

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

he really DID huh

snow really convinced himself lucy gray didn't love him (after she wrote a whole song about him and tried to run away with him) and then forty years later told sixteen year old haymitch abernathy that dying in the arena would be dodging a bullet compared to loving a covey girl. top 10 situationships gone horribly wrong

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.

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.