THG fic: "Spin Control" [21/24]

[trovia]

Title: Spin Control
Pairings: Finnick/Haymitch, Kat/Peeta
Characters: Finnick, Haymitch, Chaff, Peeta, Gale, Kat; plus appearances by Mags, Johanna, Caesar Flickerman, President Snow, Effie, Claudius Templesmith, Beetee, Prim, Thresh, Rue, District Twelve ensemble and various OC
Rating: adult
Warnings: forced prostitution & non-con; people dealing

Comments

[trovia]

I have also started using my Tumblr account a bit, which means I will probably never get anything done ever again.

Hah, yeah, it's terrible in that way.

I love your musings on scents! I absolutely love the idea that Finnick would like smelling of mint, and that Cherry would have a signature scent designed for him, like she's doing olfactory branding. (my girl looked over my shoulder at upcoming events of my work place yesterday and she asked, "What's ego marketing?" and I said, "Ego marketing is when you sell Finnick Odair instead of chocolate cookies." :p Cherry does visual branding for Finnick, putting him into signature outfits, it would make very much sense for him to get his own scent as well. Poor Finnick would probably start hating coconuts in no time.)

And what with smells in the Capitol being so overpowering, it must be hell for Haymitch. Although I did state somewhere that Haymitch uses strong, typically Capitol, often flowery perfumes to drown out the sensory memory of the arena and body odors. I figure that during a Games as a mentoring, he often doesn't have much time to shower a lot when at the same time, that's exactly what he'd like to do all day long, so he just drinks a lot and lathers himself in whatever has a very piercing smell. It's not so much about liking it, it's just about not smelling the other way. (you stop caring after a while. I got like that about work clothes the last time I was depressed. Who cares about expressing your own style; it fits, it's adequate and it covers up your arms and you just cease to give a fuck about the rest. In the end, it proved rather liberating)

[roguedemon]

I love the whole ego branding concept. Olfactory branding is exactly what I was thinking of, except it sounds a lot smarter when you describe it. ;) I feel so sorry for poor Finnick, being forced to smell like coconut oil all the time. I also have all these gruesome scents in my head that his clients could request -- I imagine some teenager requesting strawberries and vanilla.

I think I'd forgotten your thing about Haymitch and flowery perfumes. I guess that by the time he had his accident he'd stopped paying as much attention to smells because I think he was written as having bad body odor in canon. I think you covered that in a comment once, that he had stopped paying attention to keeping the lights on and showering frequently because the alcoholism had overridden his other coping mechanisms. (I believe his house was dark when he was found at the beginning of SC?)

One thing that makes me wonder is that his arena had a lot of flowers and probably had a strong floral scent in places -- I don't have the book with me to check. So I'm not sure that he'd be into the really heavy Capitol scents because that might also remind him of his arena. I'm sure that he could find a happy medium, there are some lighter floral scents that are quite nice if you like that sort of thing. And once he was sober he'd probably get even more into showering and exploring all the scent possibilities, there are a ton of different scents out there. I like scents, and I'm generally into the more unisex ones, so I guess I've thought more about this than I realized. Also, you mentioned that Finnick finds Haymtich's smell comforting because he doesn't smell like his clients. If H smelled like really strong Capitol stuff it would probably bother Finnick as much as the smell of sex would. I just imagine Finnick limping back to the training center,reeking of some vile musky/floral scent and sex, hating his life. :D

I have definitely gone through periods like that. I went through a long period last year when I completely stopped wearing makeup because I was too worn out and depressed to bother. Normally I like fooling around with makeup and it was definitely liberating to just not care if people could see how shitty I felt.

Say hi to your girl for me. I am really looking forward to the next chapter of her fic and meeting the young, swinging Beetee. There really should be a lot more people reading that fic. I think it's especially hard to sell anything in this fandom that doesn't have a strong romantic element, because so many readers are teenagers hung up on star-crossed romances.