#kittymalicious

[ongreenergrasses]

Slap us in the face with a 💫 pls

The hush that settles over the Village the day Finnick comes back is uncanny.

The way the other victors look at Annie makes her want to scream. She does, sometimes. She fills the sink with water, submerges her face in it, and screams. She doesn’t swim much any more. She doesn’t have time.

That day, the other victors hover around the edges, lurk around the doorframes. Robin’s front door stays firmly closed. Pilar sits on her porch swing, her toes dragging along the planks of the wood beneath her, slowly sipping at something like it’s a challenge. She’s the only one who’s brave enough to sit outside.

As soon as the thought comes into Annie’s head, she knows it’s wrong. It’s not about bravery.

Annie hears the window slam shut upstairs, where Aunt’s been cleaning. The house immediately becomes stuffier, somehow.

“Don’t go outside,” Aunt says shortly as she comes back down the stairs. “You stay put.”

If Annie strains, if she really listens, she can hear the creak of the chains as Pilar rocks her swing, back and forth.

send a 💫

[ongreenergrasses]

What's something Annie/Johanna/Finnick each have to do that still makes them feel like they're the worst person in the world? Any time period post their Games. Just thinking through what they're inured to and what still hurts.

this is a great question…had to mull it over for a while and still am not sure if I love my answers, so I turn this loose! here are my thoughts. everyone feel free to share yours

Finnick: one of the things that I liked most from mj pt 2 is that in the movie, Finnick clearly knows how to physically contain someone who’s agitated and sedate them. this is a skill that he isn’t just going to have, this is one that he has learned, and the obvious answer is he’s learned it from living with Annie and sedating her. I think a) that’s a fire addition to canon. was it intentional? probably not but I love it. and b) I think he is extremely conflicted about his capacity to do this. I think he generally speaking feels like shit putting his hands on her in any capacity (even if it’s to help her!) if she doesn’t know what’s going on, and of course she’s like. a trained fighter. so she’s going to fight him like crazy and even if Finnick can contain her most of the time, there’s still probably times where they’ll overbalance, knock things over and break them, everyone ends up with bruises, and it makes him feel terrible. plus the fact that she’s so agitated that she’s trying to physically fight him off her and he has to overpower her always makes him feel like the worst person alive, even if she’s decided and communicated when she’s lucid that it’s what she wants…theory is one thing, the actuality of that situation and the toll it takes on both of them is another.

Annie: Annie is the hardest because she’s got so much self loathing and disappointment knotted up in just this wad of rage (at least in the way I construe her. <- not normal) and it’s hard to tell what actively makes her feel worse sometimes. my very controversial response to this is that I think she actually feels like the worst person in the world because she doesn’t push back more on Snow over Finnick’s situation. this is very complex and I can elaborate more in another ask but I think Snow has a vested interest in making them both think they have way more control over Finnick’s trafficking than they actually do, as it’s easier to control and manipulate them that way. so Annie thinks that she can do something to influence Snow or help somehow, and even though that’s not true, what she sees as her inaction makes her feel horrible.

Johanna: to me the longer I think about it the less likely it seems that Snow went and killed her whole family in one swoop. She never directly says that, and he already did that with Haymitch and it backfired massively. so I do think while Snow killed a lot of her family, I think Johanna is also so smart and so calculating that she decided to drive the rest of them away and sever ties with the community. and for a district as small as Seven is (according to the wiki, which I take as gospel for population sizes and not much else) that was devastating to her. I think she really felt like a horrible person because I don’t think she told anyone what was going on and instead used her intimate knowledge of her loved ones to blow their relationships up beyond repair, and I think she really hates herself for it and can’t really ever convince herself that hurting them that way was the right thing to do. because at the end of the day, in her mind she was kind of only protecting herself (although that’s not objectively true).

[ongreenergrasses]

Would you ship Blight with Johanna? Johanna with Cashmere or Gloss? What does she even think of the Careers in your version of their world?

this is two very separate questions I love it

so for shipping I’m someone who will give most things the good old college try and think about it, lol. it’s about having a good writer behind it, or if not a convincing fic, at least meta, if there’s nothing there in canon. I think Blight and Johanna could be super interesting because I absolutely love the “he wasn’t much but he was from home” line, I think it’s incredibly telling and there’s a myriad of fun ways you could interpret it. with Cashmere and Gloss there’s nothing there which means the field is wide open for creativity. I can’t say that I’ve ever dwelled on any of these possibilities before but again if someone makes a good case, I’m totally open to it!

I honestly think Johanna doesn’t think much about the Careers until after she’s won. Katniss knows very little about them from pre Games, just the basics of that they train, and she fixates on them in her Games because she needs an enemy to defeat to mentally make it through. in contrast, I don’t think Johanna ever needs that. she probably goes into the Games with the same base knowledge Katniss does, but because of her strategy and her personality, I don’t think she lets herself spiral about them or see them as anything other than an extra challenge to overcome if she wants to get home.

post Games, I think there’s a little animosity. I think she and Finnick have a rocky start, which I’ve written a little bit about, but she respects how intelligent he is. outside of Finnick, I don’t think she builds close relationships with any victors except maybe Blight (in large part because she hasn’t been a victor that long by the time we hit canon, but also because I don’t think the victors see each other often unless they’re being trafficked together) and I think she recognizes that the Career victors are doing what they need to to survive, just like she is. I don’t think she particularly likes or respects them, and she doesn’t get the training aspect at all, she thinks it’s messed up, but because I don’t see her having that direct conflict within her Games with the Careers I don’t think it’s as necessarily charged conceptually for her as Katniss’s thoughts towards them are. there’s a brief interaction between her and Cashmere in one of my fics and it’s something I’d like to someday maybe return to.

[ongreenergrasses]

17. Past or present tense? Why?

23. Dialogue or description? Why is the other one so hard?

33. Give your writing a compliment.

17. great question…it all depends so much on the story, I think I flip back and forth between them a lot. you can do some really interesting things with both. probably I have more stuff posted in present tense but I think that’s because it’s a fanfic staple is to write in present tense…in the end I enjoy past tense more because of the inevitability of it all. the story gets constructed very differently if it’s already happened. sucks to write smut in past tense though!

23. my dialogue is peer reviewed to be better than my description but I don’t find either to be particularly harder than the other, it’s just different skill sets. I think that it is easier to fix bad dialogue than it is to fix bad description, though, because dialogue you can always just read out loud.

33. you sure are creative and doing things like nobody’s done before. we’re gonna say that’s a good thing

yet another writing ask

[ongreenergrasses]

a delightful @kittymalicious question and then I’m going to bed, from this post (nsfw)

Come to think of it, how does Annie learn to navigate these scenes [referring to D/s dynamics] with him in your canon? (X)

trial and error…in some ways. I think Annie has become very attuned to Finnick’s reactions in general, although he tries to hide anything besides I’m Perfectly Fine from her. ideally he’s not going to be reacting in a way that is indicative of him experiencing a trauma response in a sexual situation, but a) that definitely happens. that definitely happens to the point that she clocks it more than once and b) she is going to be able to tell when he’s feeling vulnerable, and that’s something that she’ll want to chase. having those metrics helps her navigate this all a lot.

I think that Annie isn’t a stranger to the concept of very explicit verbalized consent with frequent checkins, because this may be my bias but I feel like that’s a pretty run of the mill thing. the issue is more that Annie is very insistent on providing the reassurance that she won’t be upset if Finnick tells her to stop, and Finnick’s like yeah whatever but she just keeps hammering it. I don’t think he ever internalizes that she won’t be upset if they stop (one reason why they are not practicing safe sex) but he does feel more comfortable at least with the option of stopping/recognizing it’s an option with her.

but it is precarious. I think Annie really does the best she can in the sense that if they do have sex, she clears her schedule. she’s not super spontaneous about it. she knows he’s going to dissociate afterwards no matter what, there’s nothing she can do about that, but she makes sure that she’ll be there so even if she pushes (and if he wants her to push), if he drops too far, there isn’t anything else they have to do that day so she can bring him back up safely. she is thinking about it in those terms, because that’s how in one of the very rare discussions, Finnick verbalizes it to her – it comes up because someone who’s as familiar with dissociation as Annie is going to notice Finnick dissociating and slam on the brakes and try to talk it out once he’s back with her.

but he does drop too far! in the behemoth, that scene you mentioned, he’s very close to dropping too far, and in brio, he gets pretty deeply in his head. it’s very difficult to navigate because something that I always take into account is that Finnick is actively going through prolongued sexual abuse the entire time precanon, which means his triggers and responses are going to be shifting and fluctuating even more, to a point that he himself may not recognize them until they hit them because it’s just so in flux. the thing is that he loves doing this with Annie, he really loves the psychological component of it in particular but he loves getting to be so close to her, and so he’s very enthusiastically consenting and does initiate and ask for sex (even if that’s infrequent, ymmv). while by nature it’s fraught, I think they navigate it together as best they can and enjoy it as an expression of their care and love for each other.

[ongreenergrasses]

from @kittymalicious, another excellent insight from this post about Johanna

The other thing I was going to say that makes me feel so tenderly about your Johanna is how she's maybe the only person whose dialogue regularly draws out the more raw sides of Finnick. He doesn't see her as someone he needs to protect the way that he does Annie or Mags, and he can't protect her against the Capitol in the larger scheme of things, but they've also probably been so exposed to similar kinds of Capitol awfulness that no one else save the more objectified victors (who could that be outside of Cashmere and Gloss) would get, so across your fic we get more of those intimate scenes where they can be bratty and furious and obsessive and objectifying toward each other without the same baggage that they have with others. (X)

the thing that I actually know people don’t understand is how unbelievably exhausting it is to be in either Finnick or Johanna’s position, but especially Finnick’s. it is thoroughly exhausting being in a situation like that and we don’t know what happens when Johanna goes home, but we do know what happens when Finnick does. he goes home and is a caretaker. and he loves that! we know he loves being Annie’s caretaker and finds deep meaning in that, but that man has got to be so bone deep tired because there is no space for him to react to what’s going on, not really. sure, Annie would create it for him, and I don’t believe in the ever present ableist dichotomy of Finnick being “well” to Annie’s “ill”, but the way their lives are structured, Finnick really doesn’t have that space to just. lash out. be dysregulated. he feels very responsible and protective of the people at home, he certainly doesn’t want to do anything that he sees as taking out his problems on them, and that means he’s going to shove it all down in the Capitol and then go and shove it all down at home and the only person who he doesn’t have to do that with is Johanna.

and not only can he express all the tangled up shit inside him that he feels with her (and he’s often pretty nasty to her in the stuff I write), she just snaps right back at him! he’s not going to hurt her feelings, and that has to be a huge relief. she knows where he’s coming from and why he’s acting the way he is, and she’d rather give him the space to react than be another person he feels like he has to shove things down for. and for me that’s why they do have this really deep, almost disconcerting intimacy (that we see in canon!), because they have those similar life experiences and are peers in that way, and as such understand parts of each other’s lives that nobody at home, and maybe not even the other trafficked victors, can really understand.

I am never not thinking about these lines: Finnick looks at Johanna and raises his eyebrows. He will not go forward without her. (cf, 361) and the depth of intimacy they convey. Annie is clearly who Finnick’s life revolves around but there is Something happening there with Johanna and I do think it’s because you’re absolutely right. Finnick loves Annie, but sees her as someone he has to protect, and there’s none of that with Johanna. he trusts her and listens to her in a way he probably doesn’t Annie. if Johanna isn’t onboard with the rebel plot, he’s out, no matter the consequences for any of them. That’s Crazy

[ongreenergrasses]

so beloved mutual @kittymalicious dropped some questions and insights I found to be so excellent I wanted to post them here separately (and make you all look at them and my replies). number one is from this ask about Johanna

In your head canon, at what point did people realize she was faking being the weakling? Did the Capitol watching or the tributes stuck inside with her realize first? (x)

the thing that I find to be so compelling about Johanna’s strategy (and the reason that she is the only victor I would read the Games of, including if SC wrote them) is because she is never seen as a contender in the Games, and that’s by design. I think part of what unsettles Snow so deeply about Johanna (and she does unsettle him!) is the fact that what made her a victor was her abject refusal to go along with the structure of the Games in any way. she exploited a weakness he didn’t even know existed and played everyone, the tributes and the Capitol alike.

Katniss says that Johanna wins by portraying herself as weak so that she would be ignored (cf), which tells me that the districts (and thus the Capitol) did not know that Johanna was actually a contender for a long time. I think if she was seen as a weakling, the Capitol wouldn’t focus on her with airtime, and if she was killing other tributes earlier in the Games, they’d see it as a happy accident of her picking off stragglers, but I honestly don’t think she was killing early on in the Games. the victors win in large part because of luck with the environment of their arenas. if Johanna’s arena was wooded (and I think it was, because how else is she going to get an axe and what else is she realistically going to know how to use), she’s got the skills to get up in a tree and stay there, or keep moving and let as many of the others fight it out as possible, because she’s already established that she isn’t someone to hunt down and if she’s as weak as she’s portrayed herself as, they’ll probably think she’ll just die of natural causes (as we know most tributes do).

I think that the tributes inside probably realized first that she was a contender, but the Capitol was quick on their heels. I don’t think Johanna really started killing until the finale, and then people are moving so fast, it’s so chaotic, that I doubt the other tributes even knew what hit them. they’d written her off, if she sneaks up on them and moves fast maybe a couple of them will realize that they’ve underestimated her but I think it was so shocking that many of them don’t realize at all. at that point, it’s a disaster for the Capitol. they’ve only shown Johanna as a weakling, maybe glossed over her surviving in the woods or killing another tribute before, and this is a huge shock and upset, which is the last thing Snow wants after the 70th. but it’s already over. Johanna’s their victor, and now they have to work with that.

for what it’s worth, I think that Johanna was genuinely upset and crying and very scared when she was reaped. I think that Seven is a small enough district that Blight knew her, had a guess as to what she might be capable of, but more importantly, knew Johanna had the emotional intelligence and manipulative capacity to pull the strategy she used off, and it would’ve been the only way to move forward from something like her being very publically emotional at the reaping. so I think the first time she was crying and upset, it was genuine. I think every time after that, and how she presented herself going forward after the reaping, was not.

[ongreenergrasses]

Tell us more about how you think of sub Finnick! You have him in these d/s (I'm thinking the sun persists in rising) or cuck dynamics with Annie that are so delicious but obviously somewhat problematic with his history. How do you structure or navigate his sub side? Or alternatively 💫

cracking my knuckles. here we go

so the thing about this is that I arrived at this dynamic not because it was something I was dying to write or because I had this vision and knew it was the Correct Characterization ™ (although I think it is) but through of process of elimination. I started writing smut and I was like This Sucks. this is terminally, terminally ooc. something is wrong with this. and so through unpacking that and exploring different options over about a year of writing (in 2023) I ended up landing on the dynamic in the sun persists in rising/the behemoth, which then continued to develop into whatever the hell is now happening on my AO3

the way I navigate this is I think it’s actually flipped from how most people conceive of what Finnick’s reaction to sex is. I think the common conception is that he has to be in control sexually, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but the problem that I run into with this is I think that’s how he navigates when he’s being trafficked, by keeping extremely tight control over himself and his reactions and controlling as much as he can about his partners’ responses. the issue is if that’s how he responds to sexual abuse, if he’s in a consensual sexual situation that he has sought out and he responds the exact same way to that situation, that’s a whole fucking can of worms. it means he’s muscling through or on autopilot, or he’s ended up very triggered by something, or that he’s not differentiating a situation with Annie (or Johanna! or someone else!) from a situation with an abuser. what it all boils down to is that if he reacts the same way, it’s psychologically not good and he’s not having fun and most certainly is not letting himself actually experience pleasure.

so then it gets to the question of okay. how is he actually going to get to a place where he enjoys sex? and that is where I think this dynamic comes in. it’s very, very praise kink heavy because what Annie has correctly clocked (there was no way this is a RACK scenario lmfao there were barely any discussions had) is that Finnick is not going to be able to stop being extremely concerned about if he’s performing well for her. he is never going to move past the idea of sex as a performance and the way that she can make sure that he is able to get out of that headspace is if she’s constantly reassuring him that he is performing well, that he is doing what she wants him to, that he is doing the right thing, and he doesn’t have to guess about it. that will get him out of his head. it then stands to reason that because he’s so concerned about doing exactly what she wants, it just makes sense to tell him up front what to do and make it even less stressful for him. and suddenly this is a D/s dynamic. that was how this conceptually evolved for me anyway.

the cucking thing is such a separate psychological thing (although obviously it also has a huge sexual element) that if there’s interest I will answer a separate ask about that, lol, this one is long enough.