It’s actually fascinating to me that for all the main characters in The Hunger Games (that we truly know and understand) Gale is the only one who never actually experiences his “worst case scenario” come to life.
We know right from chapter one that Katniss’ worst case scenario is losing Prim. She’s still got resentments towards her mother, she doesn’t have many friends at all because if she can help it, she won’t attach herself to people she can lose, and her father is long dead. But Prim is the one person, the one living thing that she undeniably loves without reservations or hesitation. Every single thing she does throughout the entire series can be tied back to her love for Prim.
And then Prim died at the end of the war.
Peeta’s worst case scenario was always losing himself, to the awful world they live in. He refused to just be another piece in the games, and that extended further than the arena. He believed he was destined to die in the games but he always, always tried to keep his purity of self in tact.
And then Snow hijacked him, corrupted his mind and forced him to completely forget who he was, what he stood for and who he loved.
Other important characters had their “worst case scenario” happen years before the books began. Twenty-four years prior to the start of the series Haymitch lost the three people he loved as punishment for his antics. Johanna lost everyone she ever cared for too (presumably for being rebellious or uncooperative). And in the course of the second and third book, in the background of Katniss’ story, Finnick lost Mags who practically raised him and his very vulnerable love got kidnapped and tormented. Yes, he got her back and they had a moment of happiness but then he went and bit the dust so.
But Gale never experiences this. When Katniss tells us in chapter one about Prim and her love for her, she mentions how deeply Gale loves his own family. The Hawthorne’s are sprinkled throughout all three books, more than any other family aside from Katniss’. Why would that be? We don’t know almost anything about Peeta’s family, even though his father and Mrs. Everdeen have some level of history. We know his mother is, best case scenario, sometimes temperamental (to put it lightly) and that negatively affected aspects of his development. Peeta is a much more prevalent character throughout the series, yet we know almost nothing about his family or background. Haymitch is one of the most essential people in Katniss’ life, he’s her lifeline in the games, the mirror image of what she could become in personality and trauma and her overall father figure by the end. Yet we know nothing about his family or his girl. Even though the loss of those people is likely the explanation to why Haymitch ended up the way he did. But we know the names and bits and pieces of the personalities of every single living member of Gale’s family. Why is that? Maybe because Katniss is more familiar with them? But she also went to the same school as Peeta’s brothers and she trades with his father once a week. Mr. Mellark has more of a connection to Katniss than Gale’s family does, through her mother. So, pretty apparently in my opinion, we learn more about the Hawthorne’s as a whole because it’s essential to Gale’s character. Because his family is everything to him. Because losing them would be his “worst case scenario”.
Saying this doesn’t mean Gale had it easy. His life was arguably one of the hardest we saw at the start of the series and he was put in awful positions throughout the books, he was whipped almost to death, he lost a lot that he cared deeply about along the way and he without a doubt suffered immensely. But he didn’t lose his family, in the end he landed a pretty great job, in a fancier district and presumably had his family with him.
I just find it interesting that even though his life was probably so hard, in the end of the story Gale is only main character who didn’t live through his “worst case scenario”.
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