omg…just read ur pilar fic and i LOVE it. the way you built the tension throughout…ugh it’s so well done. i loved the way things are hidden between the lines and the way we don’t actually get an insider POV to pilar’s head after she returns to the capitol—it’s all back to her script and performance! the interview was Chilling and very in contrast to the way robin’s interview with her is withheld from the narrative. leti reveals too much of pilar to everyone around her: the breakdown at the celebration/funeral, the talk pilar gives to the career girls, and the way she begs snow to help. and so after she is gone, pilar returns to her script and performance. soooo good im going to be thinking about it forever and ever.
i do want to ask though, since i loved all the victors you’ve made for four: if by a miracle the victors had survived the purge, what would they have done during and after the war? leaving it up to u to choose if u want to talk about all of them or just some!
thank you 💜💜💜 it was a story I felt very passionately about telling and I’m very glad you enjoyed! one of Pilar’s struggles in that really is trying to connect with her community and express vulnerability at the lowest point of her life and not knowing how, so she reverts to what she knows, and I think you picked up exactly what I was putting down there, so yay!
WONDERFUL question okay so you technically all have only met three of my OC victors (Pilar, Eric, and Robin). I have three others, two of whom I’ve worked with since the beginning, but I’ll leave them out for now from this. Eric was always going to die before the Quell, he commits suicide to protect his family, but I’ll add what his family does as they do survive.
Robin: Robin is the most outwardly rebellious of all the D4 victors. she would absolutely have been involved in the war effort, most likely on the front lines just like Lyme, if she’d gotten the chance to (I hc that they rounded up most of the victors and killed them immediately after the Quell, I don’t think that’s confirmed). if she had survived the war, I think she would not move out of the house she and her wife share in the Village, at this point they’d lived there together for decades. Robin would be in her late 60s at this point and I think she would get really into native plant regrowth and expand her garden, and just turn the remnants of the Village (because only she and Annie would live there) into a huge tangle of wild plants. she and Annie would reconcile.
Pilar: so this has some overlap with my Paylor fic but I think that community leaders would be incredibly, incredibly important in designing the new system of governance and maintaining stability, and Pilar would naturally slot into that role of a community leader. she’s comfortable performing that figurehead position and it gives her direction, which in turn would give her some space to just. decompress and begin to heal, in the moments when she’s not performing in this role that she loves because at heart Pilar really is a performer and she struggles a lot with authentically connecting after so many years pretending and playing the game. so finding a position like this where she’s able to serve the community she loves but slowly deconstruct those walls would be really fulfilling for her. she would also travel extensively!
Eric’s family: they do survive the war, because they’re forced out of the Village after his suicide right before the Quell, and are overlooked in the purge. Mariela (his wife)’s family are absolutely ravaged by the war, the way I write Finnick’s extended family to be…so many deaths, so many injured or disappeared, and there’s a lot of healing to be done there. Mariela also has four children at this point under the age of 10 which. fucking yikes. anyway her guiding principle is to give the kids a normal life, at least as much as she can, and at the same time she really pushes them. Nyla, the oldest, ends up becoming the district’s first veterinarian (<- a fun fact I’ve stored forever). Jamie, the boy, works his way up to harbormaster, and Tabitha, the baby, goes to university to become a historian. Mads ends up hard of hearing because of the diphtheria’s effects and becomes a sign language interpreter and teacher. they all maintain a relationship with Annie and her son. Annie and Mariela recognize that their kids are in unique but similar situations and want them to have each other to lean on when things get rough due to their fathers’ identities and legacies (and for Annie’s son in particular, they certainly do).
