#oceans-bluem

[ongreenergrasses]

take this as an invite for your rant on odesta construing safety? 👀

odesta construing safety…

I think the thing about it that gets to me. like truly gets to me. is that they’re not safe. they’re never once safe. precanon, they are surveilled constantly, even in their own home, and Finnick is basically living a double life (not by choice). in canon, they are both used as pawns and have to very consciously manipulate the narrative around them, as well as use what’s been most likely a dream that’s just for them (and their relationship previously being the only private thing either of them have) as a very public propaganda tool in a war machine. they never get the chance for privacy together. they never get the chance to enjoy a feeling of true safety. so they have to make safety with each other. I think that’s so sweet and such a powerful concept, and I think they construe it in terms of the physical and emotional, but from the angle of defending each other from external factors and the rest of the world, which we see a little bit with the way Finnick reacts in the cafeteria scene.

in terms of the physical, I think they’re both reliant on their physicality, but they have most likely got a lot of trauma around that due to killing people. at the same time, even though it seems counterintuitive, I think having that knowledge of what the other person is capable of physically settles them and makes them both feel safer. I hc that before they even get together, if they’re sleeping in the same room (casual sleepover as friends do) Annie will sleep on the floor in front of the door, so she’ll wake up if anyone comes in, and even though obvs nobody’s going to come in, it really shifts Finnick’s perception of her. I think she also sleeps between him and the door (if applicable) once they get together.

in terms of emotional safety, I think it’s less that they construe safety to be openness and the ability to confide in each other, because again, we know the victors’ houses are bugged. they can’t fully confide in each other. but I think they both defend and support each other emotionally in other ways, and primarily it’s through supportive continuity. obviously Finnick is a great support to Annie as her caretaker, and having that in a nonjudgmental and unconditional way makes an enormous impact, but I think she feels safe with him emotionally not because of that, but because he shows how dedicated he is to caring for her and protecting her. on Finnick’s side, I think Annie goes to bat for him a lot. there’s no way he’s not getting flak for how he’s perceived to treat her (because who’s going to know about the trafficking. it looks like he’s caring for her and then immediately going and sleeping with a bunch of other people) and I think while maybe she doesn’t always defend him aggressively, because maybe he doesn’t want that, the fact that she simply ignores it all and continues to be with him is very meaningful to him. with that continued presence, I think it both makes them secure and comfortable with each other, and that in turn makes them feel safe.

I just think it’s very interesting that their sense of safety most likely isn’t found in openness with each other, but is instead constructed defensively and as a clear reaction to constant surveillance and pressure. they don’t have a concept of safety that’s reacting logically to or even that influenced by their surroundings, they have an “us against the world” mentality and are carving out moments of peace despite always being on high alert.

[ongreenergrasses]

may i ask for your impassioned treatise on finnick being Not White :0 huge fan of ur writing btw!

here it is, belatedly! it is pulled a lot from this post but I’ve changed my mind in the wake of sotr about some things, so! read this one instead lol.

it’s a staple of YA to describe how characters look. SC has to and that’s fine, however! she doesn’t describe the skin tones of all her characters, and the ones she does across now five books are the not white ones. Finnick’s skin tone is described as “golden” (cf, 208), so that right away made me go hm. he’s not white. this distinction was made especially clear with sotr, where the way SC ensured Haymitch’s whitewashing was to make sure that he was not physically described. this to me is basically proof that SC sees whiteness as default and something she doesn’t need to describe for the reader, and if she describes specifically a skin tone, that character is not white. and yes, maybe Finnick could just be really tan, but!

i also think about the way he’s described vs the way Cashmere and Gloss are. Cashmere and Gloss are “classically beautiful” (cf, 191). Finnick is “extraordinarily” beautiful (cf, 208). and the fact that she did that in particular immediately makes me think okay, classically beautiful is beautiful in accordance with mainstream (white) beauty standards. if Finnick is extraordinarily beautiful, he’s falling outside of those standards somehow.

he’s also being trafficked really heavily. this is something I do want to treat delicately but we know that tributes from One play up their beauty, and i have to imagine the volunteers are getting selected for that district in part because of that beauty. if Finnick’s (by his own admission!) more popular in the Capitol than the victors from One are, i think that’s because in the Capitol’s eyes, he’s got something they do not, and it’s most likely because they’re really heavily fetishizing him, which yes, could happen to a white dude, but happens a lot to men of color. traffickers also play on the multiple marginalizations that people are experiencing to keep power and control over them, and I think it’s not a huge stretch to say that Finnick being a man of color is one of the marginalizations they could be preying on to further victimize him. (In thg class differences are a far more pronounced marginalization, but SC is the one who brought up racial divides as a tension in Panem even if she wants to retcon that now, so I’m going to include it.)

tldr, based on the way Finnick is physically described and the way the Capitol reacts so strongly to him, i think he’s not white and as disgusting as it is the Capitol sees him as quote unquote exotic. and that is part of why the demand for him while he’s trafficked is so high.

I do want to say that with the new context from sotr, it has also been made clear to me that SC never intended to actually commit to writing characters of color, and that she would not have done any sort of this type of analysis around Finnick. I think if she ever writes about him again, he will also be whitewashed and his skin tone left out of any descriptions.

[ongreenergrasses]

ok now i feel like i HAVE to ask about ur thoughts on finnick and annie’s forced assimilation and ruptures from their cultures. i love hearing ur thoughts on fleshing out d4 and annie as a character, so thanks for answering these!!

doing this as a 2 part ask, here is Finnick’s

so I think that the Capitol as part of its authoritarian regime is forcibly imposing a white supremacist hegemony on the districts. as victors, they are put in this social in between space, and the Capitol, by virtue of trying to uphold the status quo of white supremacy, has a vested interest in forcibly assimilating the victors to make them more “palatable” (read: desireable) to the Capitol audience, and as an added bonus it alienates the victors from their home communities and cultures and makes them more vulnerable.

I think Annie is from the main town in D4, and she is generally speaking pretty assimilated into the Capitol’s idea of “district society”. by virtue of spending so many years in Career training, she’s also pretty indoctrinated into the Capitol dictated headspace around the Games, which comes with very specific constructs around how she, as a young woman, should move through the world, but she also has been pretty removed from her ancestral culture in general. obviously she’s from D4 and very proud of that, but because she’s in the main town where there’s way more eyes and a stronger Peacekeeper presence, and thus the Capitol has a lot more control there, she does already feel a disconnect from her culture, because she spends so much time trying to emulate what the Capitol’s ideal for her is (which of course is never going to be attainable).

after her Games, though, she really struggles with feeling disconnected from everyone and everything. she starts a slow process of trying to reground herself, not just sensorily and health wise but identity wise as well, and so she leans more into what it means to be from Four and spends a lot of time with the victors she sees as epitomizing what that means. and then after Finnick’s death, she’s in a tough spot. she’s been relatively left alone to go on this journey of reconnecting with herself, whereas Finnick has been in the spotlight and violently forcibly assimilated, and so she’s trying to keep in mind who he was, who he wanted to be, and what she wants to pass onto her son of him. so that’s when I think she starts learning more and connecting with Finnick’s culture as well as her own, because I think postwar in general there’s huge amounts of cultural revival - arts, language, social structures, traditions, customs, etc - because that’s pretty much all she’s got left to share of him.

but to Annie it never really feels like her culture. maybe they’re both from the same ancestral culture, but Annie was already very assimilated and removed from it even as a child before training, so she always feels like a little bit of an outsider, even though she knows it’s hers. and so there’s always this tension within her that isn’t helped by a lot of Capitol propaganda that I think she never fully shakes.

[ongreenergrasses]

is there a reason why you named annie’s son the way you did? i’d love to hear more about your reasoning behind that choice!

sure!!!

so when I named him I knew I wanted his name to be Spanish. notably, he is named after someone else so that doesn’t necessarily indicate his family background, but he is Latino to me and I wanted a name that was unmistakably Spanish in origin to remove doubts around that. I think that postwar there would be a huge shift in terms of cultural revival, people would be connecting more with their ancestral cultures and moving away from the forced assimilation and erasure that came under the authoritarian regime, and that includes reembracing names in different languages and traditional naming conventions, so I thought about that contrast when naming the kids that were born postwar (Saoirse and Luis) as opposed to the kids prewar (Matthew and Peter). obviously when naming characters I have a variety of different languages I draw on but I think that element of assimilation into English and particularly WASP naming conventions and then deciding if you’re actively bucking that in writing is a contrast that’s worth looking at in terms of worldbuilding.

Luis also has two last names, which is another nod to his heritage. traditionally speaking his father’s surname would be first, but I thought his last names sounded dumb in that order and to be fair, the option to have his mother’s surname be first is slowly becoming more common (and legally permitted!) in a variety of countries. I have hc’d that it was legally mandated in Panem for children to have only one surname and it’s in most districts that of their father, but because Finnick’s family is from a less forcibly assimilated and less surveilled region within the district, on paper they complied with that, but in reality he had two last names. I don’t think whose surname families chose was regulated (a way to keep people calm and maintain the illusion of choice) but they were only allowed to have one, so postwar, a lot of people started opting to have two again.

in terms of picking the name Luis specifically, I think I just randomly thought of it. I’d never met a Luis at that point in my life and so I don’t remember if I got it from a name list or just was like oh! Luis! but it made sense to me. I needed it when I started writing the behemoth and I needed it fast, and that first bit of the draft was kind of frantic, so it very well may have been the first thing that popped into my head that I liked.

only other thing is that I was Not going to name him after Finnick in any capacity lol I hate that headcanon and I also think that I wrote Annie articulating it well in the behemoth when she says that Finnick hated being Finnick Odair, and she was glad in a way when he died, because then that image could die with him. she’d never continue that false image with her son and never want to put him under the kind of pressure and expectation that would come from being Finnick’s namesake. I honestly didn’t think for a while she’d even give him Finnick’s last name (and she was definitely conflicted on it!) before deciding that she really wanted to make sure her son was connected to his father’s culture in particular, because that was how his presence could be felt for Luis, and so went with that naming convention and ends up becoming very close and very involved with her in laws to ensure Luis has that upbringing and learns about those cultural elements and that side of himself. I have lots to say about Annie and Finnick’s differing degrees of forced assimilation and rupture from their cultures but I’ll save that for another ask

[ongreenergrasses]

🔥 rent lowering gunshots 👀

some rent lowering gunshots…haven’t said this in a while but it Really pissed people off before and it’s that we need to decriminalize sex work. decriminalize, not legalize, but it needs to be fully decriminalized.

the reason it needs to be decriminalized is that we know the sex work industry has issues with trafficking, as does the labor industry in general, but the difference there is that if you’re experiencing labor trafficking, there are protections for you. you’re usually not going to be arrested* for speaking out and going to the authorities if you’re being labor trafficked, but if you’re being sex trafficked, there is a very real risk that if you come forward and admit that you have been forced to engage in sex work, the police could arrest you. you could be charged with a crime for engaging in prostitution. and all that does is force people who are being victimized further into the shadows, it instills a culture of shame and fear, and allows abuse to continue.

decriminalization would also allow for the legal protections that other workers have, that we do often take for granted, to apply to sex workers as well. right now because it is criminalized in many places, they don’t have access to labor protections as a result. to ensure workplace rights and dignity, it has to be recognized as a workplace first and foremost.

*I recognize that people who are being trafficked are often at the intersections of many marginalizations, and that trafficking rates are much higher among undocumented people, because traffickers prey on those vulnerabilities and use their migratory status against them. in the current climate in the United States, I think there can no longer be the assurance that someone undocumented who comes forward about any type of trafficking will receive protection and not face repercussions.

send a 🔥

[ongreenergrasses]

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).

[ongreenergrasses]

do you happen to have any thoughts on what annie’s primary weapon in the arena would be? i loooove her with a good knife tbh

I do!!! I agree with the knife…I think she likes knives because of the control they have in comparison to other methods. I hc that she and her district partner are very strategic about it, he takes the distance kills and she does the ones that are closer. I also think that she learns to snap necks because she really has a distaste for suffering, she doesn’t like deaths to be prolonged, and so she uses that as well, particularly on tributes who are shorter than her (I hc her as relatively tall).

I don’t tend to talk about my impressions of her and Finnick’s Games but I do think that because of what happened in hers, she actually had either already killed the other Careers before her district partner was beheaded or kills them all in a whirlwind immediately after. otherwise, she absolutely would’ve been hunted down and I don’t know if she was snuck up on if she would’ve been able to overpower them, even if she was extremely reactive. so I think she’s very instinctive both with her physicality and her knife. I also think this bc of my elaborate headcanon around Finnick’s skills with sedating someone who’s lashing out violently and reactive – I think Annie continues to have the fight reaction when her adrenaline kicks in even after her Games.

[g1ngerbeer]

blorbo bingo: han suyeong, ahsoka, and ling yao :>

theyre blorbo…