@sarahwrites1234 | sarahwrites1234 | Sarah
What's your THG origin story?
I started reading THG in middle school when I was obsessed with all things dystopia. My friends and I loved the series and went to see the movies together when they came out.
What are your favorite things about the series?
I really appreciate Katniss’s limitations as a narrator. Rather than info dumping everything about Panem from the beginning, we get to discover it through Katniss’s eyes, with one layer after another being peeled back to reveal the full horror.
I also like that unlike many critiques of authoritarianism, the Capitol is all too recognizable. It’s very easy to write an evil regime as an allegory for Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, etc. and then condemn it without any further soul searching. In my opinion, THG does something a lot more interesting by showing our consumerism and appetite for exploitative entertainment taken to their logical extremes.
What’s something about the series that’s stayed with you or become more meaningful to you over time?
When I first read Mockingjay, it was my least favorite installment of the series. To my preteen/young teen tastes, it just wasn’t exciting and wasn’t what I expected. I wanted action, the Games, Katniss saves the day.
As an adult, I now realize that not getting that is the whole point. Katniss is written as a traumatized teenager who adults want to use as a symbol in their war, not an action hero. THG holds up for me as an adult because I can reread it and see an entirely different story than I did back then.
When did you begin creating? What inspired you to begin?
For fanfic in general, I think I’ve been writing it in my head since before I even knew what fanfic was. I started actually posting it during the Covid pandemic.
For THG specifically, it was when I read SOTR that it really stuck in my head. It struck me just how much about Haymitch we never saw through Katniss’s eyes. Then, I thought about how each and every one of the victors in the Quarter Quell probably has a story that is equally complex and real — including the careers. Especially the careers.
I got to thinking that the books, and even more so the movies, don’t do the careers justice. Katniss is definitely starting to get it by the end with befriending Finnick and including Enobaria in her immunity request, but the waters get muddied by Enobaria voting to continue the Games and the baffling decision to make D4 not a career district in the movies.
I wanted to let a career tell their own story rather than seeing it through Katniss’s eyes. I wanted a story where they are neither cold-blooded killers who think the Games are wonderful and want the glory of winning nor innocent lambs who end up in the Games by accident and somehow have their fishing skills translate perfectly to child murder. Thus began my Finnick fanfic, “Blood in the Water,” which has since grown to 224k words and counting, plus several spinoffs.
What is your favorite thing to depict in your work?
I really like taking people and events that are part of our public consciousness and then depicting what lies underneath what is visible to the public. We generally see a very carefully curated version of public figures, but what goes on behind the scenes for a child star, a tech magnate, or a nepo baby?
What’s your personal favorite of your works?
I really like my modern AU fic, Panemonium, actually. It’s quite unusual for me because modern AUs aren’t typically my cup of tea, but I very much enjoyed translating THG characters into their equivalents in our world. Some of them fit disturbingly well.
If you could recommend just one, which would it be?
Well, I have to recommend my ongoing longfic “Blood in the Water,” but if you aren’t looking for that much of a commitment, I would suggest “First Impressions” as a good starting point. It is the story of Johanna and Finnick watching each other’s Games and the misconceptions they initially had about one another.
What are the main characteristics of your favorite canon characters you always try to maintain in your stories?
Oh, man. How long have you got?
Finnick is always funny, charismatic, and shameless on the surface while breaking underneath. He seems like the most confident person you’ve ever met, but actually he’s dealing with immense shame and is desperate for no one to see it. It’s very interesting to me to explore how much of Finnick’s public persona is an act versus how much is real. I think he is legitimately an extremely outgoing, charismatic, and social person, but then the Capitol takes all those core traits and dials them up to a ridiculous extreme. Finnick has been performing that role for so long that sometimes even he doesn’t know where Capitol Finnick ends and real Finnick begins. He’s also incredibly socially perceptive and intelligent, though he doesn’t see himself as intelligent because school was never really his thing.
Annie is interesting because we don’t get much of her in canon, so she’s kind of a blank slate. My version of her is artistic, observant, confident, unapologetic, and intensely loyal. She’s Finnick’s best friend long before they are romantically involved, and she will absolutely go to war if anyone insults him.
Mags is just about the strongest person to ever exist. She has been there since almost the beginning of the Games and has experienced more personal tragedy than most people can even comprehend. Even so, she has never given up and continues to care for her tributes and victors in any small way she can. She is deeply maternal and loving, but also incredibly clever and strategic. She is loving, but never coddling. You would be a fool to underestimate her.
Katniss I haven’t written too much of because of the timeline I am working in, but she is definitely one of my favorite characters. She can be judgmental and distant at first, but once she decides she likes you, you’re in. She’s intensely loyal to those she loves and motivated to defend the weak. She tends to underestimate herself. She’s very competent and confident in areas she perceives to be her strengths, but often that perception is too narrow and she downplays other areas. She can be very perceptive about systems yet hilariously clueless about people and their motives.
Haymitch is a character who I try never to sanitize. He has a good heart, but it is buried beneath decades of grief, alcoholism, and cynicism. Still, he is clever and can be darkly funny. His care comes out sideways on occasion, and he often manages in his drunken haze to cause trouble for the right people.
Johanna is definitely not everybody’s cup of tea. She is opinionated, blunt to the point of rudeness, and by no means warm and friendly. However, if you take the time to get to know her, you will come to realize that her prickly demeanor is largely defensiveness. Johanna has a strong sense of justice and hates feeling weak more than anything.
Tell us about an OC of yours. What inspired them and what purpose do they serve in your works?
Ovidius Tang has got to be my favorite OC. He’s a horrible person but a very fun character to write. He is loosely inspired by a certain tech mega-multi-billionaire who shall remain nameless. I originally intended him as a one-off character whose main function was to put Finnick in contact with a drug dealer, but he really stuck with me and ended up with a much larger role.
Ovidius is the second richest man in Panem (maybe first by now, IDK) and controls much of the tech infrastructure. He is not by any means a good person, but he also has no real loyalty to Snow or to the Games as an institution — only to himself. He develops something of a fixation on Finnick and comes to be his “least bad” buyer, if such a thing exists. He’s the sort of guy who can work miracles for Finnick, who can make problems disappear — but always at a cost.
My one-shot entitled “Spaceships, Fairy Dust, and a Blue Dog” is the story of Ovidius’s relationship with Finnick as told from his perspective.
Tell us about your favorite relationship (of any kind) in the series. Why is it your favorite?
I’m a big Odesta fan, largely because we get so little information in canon. Katniss is not a nosy person, so her conclusion is just, “Finnick loves her, so that’s good enough for me,” but I absolutely want to know more! There is something so beautiful about these two broken people who are facing every possible barrier to love somehow finding it anyway.
Anyone you would like to shout out in the fandom?
@aliceinthinkland for being my first regular reader/commenter in the fandom and because everything she writes is incredible!