thank you @districtunrest / @marmorealwit
🔎 What detail(s) in the story are you particularly captivated with? Is there any behind the scenes info or backstory?
fuse was written in a borderline fugue state over the course of about a week after a good month or two of bitching me trying to analyse why Mockingjay's second half doesn't work. i fully have a list on my phone from this time called "Mockingjay criticisms" most of which are centered on Haymitch. quite a few of those made it into the fic, the most explicit being the line: the threat of it all, the arena and the dead children and the Capitol, loom as large as ever; has finally made good on its promise to snatch him back up, in fact, swallowing him into its gaping, infested mouth instead of forcing him to watch from the sidelines which is a direct reference to SC's interview statement: The arena transforms but it's never eradicated; in fact it's expanded to include everyone in the country. she's referring specifically to Prim in that quote, but Prim wasn't at risk of going back inside the arena in Catching Fire where Haymitch was. the list goes on: i have issues with the scene where Finnick and Katniss realise the map of the Capitol is like an arena, and then Haymitch comes in "not thinking about arenas" like that man hasn't spent his entire life thinking about arenas. once they're inside the Capitol, Katniss makes direct reference to the meal he sent her in the first book without mentioning him directly, and then there's the fact that every other parachute in the series was sent by Haymitch, but the final ones are sent by Coin/Plutarch (which either frames his drunken relapse is guilt over his complicity, as is his caring for Katniss, and voting with Katniss is atonement, or it breaks the pattern without fully acknowledging Haymitch's absence in the decision making hierarchy). i could go on because, if it wasn't obvious, i still have a lot of thoughts on this. so the intention of the fic and a lot of its plot was to try and "correct" that by showing how, structurally, it would have made sense for Haymitch to be there.
smaller moments from the actual fic i still think about are Haymitch talking to an imaginary Katniss in his head, which is the equivalent of her hearing his voice in his head but slightly different, and his relationship with Cressida and Pollux. i think it's really interesting that Katniss likes her camera crew and thinks of them as allies, but Cressida explicitly says Plutarch is thrilled by the footage when he's - what, two days away from airing a bunch of children and medics being massacred? so Haymitch has a much more fraught relationship with her where she's more explicitly linked to the Capitol, and he views her statement about Plutarch as being either an outright lie or a blatant condemnation. Pollux saluting him was once again indicative of my agenda to link Haymitch and Avoxes for reasons i don't fully understand myself. a lot of this fic was me trying to shove a ton of characterisation into a handful of lines, honestly.
🏴☠️ Were there any points in which your characters tried (or succeeded) to commit mutiny against your planned plot? Where did they most want to rebel?
originally the fic started out primarily as an evelark critical piece that was centered a lot around Katniss' collection of items in the parachute and how they related primarily to Peeta and Haymitch. and then i started thinking about home and exile, partly because what came through in my rereading of MJ was just how badly Katniss missed D12. so the fics ended up getting combined, which i think (hope?) works better than i thought i would. that said, it was supposed to be about, hmm, 15k words max, and now it's the third longest thing i've ever written, and i literally don't know how that happened.
i don't usually have characters mutiny, partly because i'm more of a pantser than a plotter (the closest is when Haymitch stopped speaking in fuse and i was like '?????' and didn't even remember Katniss stopped speaking at the end of MJ). Katniss was the closest though. i knew she would avoid Peeta after his act of arson, and i can list ideas without being able to provide a concrete answer as to why. i also didn't know she'd fall into depression quite so hard, though i think that makes sense given the change and loss and repeating cycles of it all.
oh, i didn't know Haymitch would immediately try to simultaneously retaliate against Plutarch and bond with Peeta via political sabotage, but that's my bad. Haymitch gets bored easily.
🥇 What scene were you most excited to write? Did it end up being the one you enjoyed writing the most?
this was another fic that flowed out over the course of about three days and i had no idea where it was going for most of it. i had fun with it though, partly because i get to be really self-indulgent because i increasingly take up a good portion of the Haycinna tag and it's my party and i'll be silly if i want to. most of that manifested in the fic linking itself to fuse. e.g. having Haymitch start exercising when he can't sleep, a thing i think he did in that fic and is part of the reason he can complete Beetee's makeshift training course and why his going with Squad 451 isn't as much of a suicide mission as Plutarch would like to think. but i'm inclined to think it comes off as quite cliche and pretty Hollywood, so i tend to save it for my mental TV adaptation instead of my fics.
but! even though i very much envision Cinna as consistently thirsting over Haymitch during the 74th and 75th games, i haven't actually put that down on paper much. so both Cinna and i enjoyed watching Haymitch get all sweaty while he throws knives at training dummies, which is a slightly different iteration of what i would have written for fuse but still similar. Cinna seducing Haymitch was also fun, partly because Haymitch put up way less of a fight than in lost and found, and it was nice to write a bit of humour in what was otherwise quite a bleak fic. Cinna being a freak but having to patiently spell out, "You have use of your hands. I have use of my mouth. We're both frustrated. I think we can work something out," still amuses me tbh.
