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[deathmallow]

Gacked from redbrunja

Give me a fannish topic and I'll meta for at least 100 words. Then I'll give you a topic to meta on for at least 100 words.

(Fandoms include: THG, ATLA/LoK, BSG, Spartacus, LotR/Tolkien, Neverwinter Nights 2, HP, GoT/ASoIAF, Breaking Bad, Homeland, some Marvel and DC, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, Les Miz, PotC, or historical)

Comments

[marble_sharp]

All sound thoughts. I definitely agree people's hesitation to ship him with anyone is stemmed from their discomfort in acknowledging that he's an actual (okay fictional) person and not just someone to attach the snarky lines to.

Interesting you brought up his lack of bathing obsession. I commented on trovia's Spin Control pointing out that Haymitch doesn't bathe religiously like it was written in the story. Her reasoning was the same as yours, and you're both right that he should be obsessed with cleaning. So it's such a telling, shocking detail that he isn't.

Now, to answer your question: can I say all of them? ;) If I had to pick one, I'd say SC should have fleshed out D12 better. We still don't know how far they are technologically or what life outside of the Seam was like. It's said they have a district doctor (I assume the apothecary serves for treating minor ailments or Seam customers) but where was he/she trained? They mine coal but from only one mine? Why do they have coal-burning stoves (even in the Victors' Village!) yet batteries for flashlights? Katniss wears pants - is this denim? Do women normally wear dresses? Do men wear suspenders and waistcoats to fit the coal mining time period SC based D12 off of or do they all wear basically what we casually wear today?

So my headcanon is that it's a strange, stark mismatch of old-for-us, current-for-us, and future-for-us-but-modern-for-them. Obviously the Seam is still impoverished and backward and the Town is nothing like an average American town today, but they recognize that. They know what computers and cars are, for example, they just don't have them. Town people wear modern-for-us clothes whereas people from the Seam wear secondhand stuff of everything/anything, from old cotton dresses and overalls to shirts and jeans and sweatshirts. They have old-for-us cameras. Businesses are inherited, and people are trained through apprenticeship. The future-for-us stuff is like the screens used for mandatory viewings of the Games or presidential speeches or whatnot. So the quality of their technology depends on the Capitol's priorities, basically.

Admittedly, I haven't thought a great deal into this because I haven't written anything that really explored the district, and what I'm writing right now is dealing with post-war Panem where all those D12 headcanons are kind of, um, gone.

[deathmallow]

I do think there's a tendency to treat him as either the "funny drunk" to laugh at, the "snarky asshole" for Katniss to scream at and even physically beat up "because he deserves it", or the "fortune cookie wisdom" just there to make someone else's romance happen.

In other words, he's never there for his own sake, usually just as a tool in making Everlark come to pass, and in doing so, people don't see him as a person in his own right, just what service he can do. And once it's done, his reward is to continue to be involved in the relationship to the exclusion of anything else. Ugh. :/

I think Trovia and I had discussed the issue, actually. I have him as fairly obsessed with bathing earlier...if you read NTS where he's showering obsessively after appointments with patrons, for example, or I even slightly indicate it in the HID/AFAF callbacks to when he and Johanna slept together that his first suggestion to her afterwards is to take a shower, probably because a.) yes, he's practical enough to realize she's supposed to be a virgin still until the next night and her smelling like sex walking out of there is not bright, but b.) also because he's likely projecting onto her with this as her first step towards prostitution, and thinking she must want to do nothing but get clean.

The fact I have him not bothering to learn the Capitol shower buttons after all those years, even if Johanna doesn't quite pick up on it yet and he's glibly dismissive and joking about "It's Capitol shit, I didn't want to bother", is probably because he was in a habit of just rushing there and pounding the buttons at random in a desperate hurry to get clean.

So the fact that by THG he's totally given up on that to the point where Katniss picks up on his smell (although of course she doesn't remark on Peeta's three-weeks-unbathed stench in the cave in THG, go figure...) really says a lot that his depression and alcoholism has so totally overcome his trigger/compulsion.

Interesting thoughts on Twelve, and I like them! I don't think there was a doctor, though, just the apothecary...? But yeah, there's a lot of inconsistencies, and unfortunately, that's probably just shoddy worldbuilding again on SC's part.

ETA: Further on the "sex=dirty MUST SHOWER" thing, I think in HID, he's still a bit messed up from the water torture, plus the first couple of nights they kept each other up late enough to just get exhausted, and also he was probably more afraid of showing that kind of weakness, and also if he left the bed to shower she'd basically expect him to sleep over in the other bed.

But it does say something that eventually he's to the point where he can have sex with her and if he feels too grungy to let it go, it's probably more of a normal "Eh, I'd like a shower now" rather than a freaked-out "GOTTA GET CLEAN NOW." Plus her sharing the shower with him on that probably helps it turn into something more pleasant than embarrassing.

[marble_sharp]

I will always side-eye the hell out of people who use the 'freely beat Haymitch up because he deserves it and there's no consequences since he's drunk anyway' trope. Like I literally don't care that these are flawed fictional characters, or that it's fan/fiction, that is just so reflective of how some people view addicts I can't even.

The relationship you've established between Haymitch and water is really cool. He's almost always in conflict with it in some way. And didn't your last chapter have him realize that he is more like water than a phoenix/fire? That's after he didn't have access to it in the arena so he was compelled to always clean afterwards, yet it was used to torture him so then there's this fear of water itself instead of the fear of feeling unclean and eventually he doesn't need to rely on or fear water when he becomes his own person alongside Johanna and this is like pure symbolism just give me a moment omg

[deathmallow]

I will side-eye them too, absolutely. Haymitch is not there to be abused. Nobody is. I'm still pissed that people don't think Katniss did anything wrong in attacking him and trying to blind him. I can understand she was traumatized and angry and that was why she did it. But you know what? She was still utterly fucking wrong to attack him with the intent of badly hurting him. Stop trying to make excuses for her, people. And of course nobody ever calls her out on it, and she never thinks badly of it or regrets it for a moment, giving the impression it's justifiable and Haymitch deserved it.

SYMBOLISM FTW. He really is in conflict with it one way or another for a good while--lacking drinking water in the arenas, the dangerous salt water of the Quell arena he could drown in, desperately needing it to get clean after killing and whoring, drinking "water of life" (whiskey) obsessively to drown his traumas, being tortured with it.

Water has been something he either needs desperately, or fears. It's only when he starts to get that inner balance again, and basically undams himself and gets flowing again, that he's not inclining towards either extreme as he was before.

His fear of fire, from having people he loved suffer and be burned by it, kind of goes along with the notion that fire can basically make water disappear by evaporating it. Get too close to the fire and he might vanish completely.

Likewise, Johanna's fear of water kind of parallels her fear of her own drive and will going out if she gets "soft" somehow, like water getting thrown on a fire.

SYMBOLISM YAY?