THG fic: "Spin Control" [23/24]

[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

[roguedemon]

I LOVE YOU AND YOUR AWESOME BRAIN. Seriously, I have read this through a few times and I'm honestly kind of speechless. I'm not shocked at how it went down because I was aware of the warnings and I knew Caramel's advice would come into play here. But actually reading the words is a whole other thing.

Finnick and Haymitch made me tear up. You built up to their emotional climax so beautifully throughout this fic, all the themes and issues and emotions just came together and my throat closed up when I read it. It was just a glorious moment of catharsis for them.

When reading this I kept thinking that you really wrote this story outside the box. You really circumvented a lot of conventions and looked at the issues in an unusual way. You went deeper and came back up with something new. A lot of people wouldn't consider this a happy ending, but it is. I'm not explaining myself very well. I guess I kept thinking that Haymitch thinks outside the box, Trovia writes outside the box. And here, Finnick breaks out of the box he's been in because his love for Haymitch has given him the motivation to do it, and he's taking Haymitch along with him. There have a been a lot of boxes in this fic, and I feel like this was sort of a final definition of what they are and how and why Finnick and Haymitch are going to live their lives outside of them. Which leads straight back to the original Caramel scene.

Having Thresh win was pretty awesome, and makes a lot of sense. A sentimental part of me is sorry that Peeta died, because I loved the way you wrote him. And having him as a lone victor is something that I find very interesting. But Thresh's win is a twist that works beautifully with the themes of the fic.

Well, I will definitely sit down and start picking this apart later in the week when I have time. I actually have stuff to do tonight and tomorrow, damnit. But wow, this was worth the wait. I'm just trying to deal with all my Haymitch/Finnick feels. That is what I consider romance, and I fear I am going to be listening to love songs tonight. You broke me. :D

[trovia]

!!!

Like always, you were one of the people whose comments I was looking forward to with the most excitement. :D Thank you, also as always.

I'm so glad that the pay-off is working for you after all the waiting and metaing about it. Sometimes, that can build up expectations and make it a let-down. And you know, it's so interesting right now to me that you call it a moment of catharsis, because there's this moment in the story - which I used as a chapter summary for AO3 even - where Finnick thinks about catharsis too. But he thinks of it in conjunction with Haymyitch's proposal to change the rules and bring two tributes home. He thinks of it as cathartic because it's this idea of, "If I give absolutely every last thing I have, then I will have that one moment where I didn't do anything wrong and I don't have to wonder if I'm a bad person and I don't have to feel guilty, for once in my life." But then of course he decides against doing that because he recognizes he has a choice to put his happiness first, and that realization lowers the impact of that guilt too. Because it's not really catharsis, it's just lack of guilt and self-flagellation.

I'm not interested enough in Peeta to let him live on alone. ;) I actually do think the most interesting thing about him are his feelings for Kat, although to be fair, he also doesn't consist of much more than that technically. I wanted Thresh to win partly because Chaff is the punching bag of the story :p and partly because it bugs me that there are so many fics wherein twelve-year-old Rue wins but barely any where Thresh does.

Do the stuff! Do it quickly! Come back and meta with me quickly! :D (hah, seriously though, my woman will sadly fly home tomorrow, so I'm gonna be a bit of a lost puppy for a while and I wouldn't mind the distraction)

ANYWAY, I love your musings about Finnick breaking out of the box because that is so very spot-on from my point of view too, and excellently phrased. There really have been a lot of boxes in the fic. Thinking about your comment through today, it really struck me - how it's really a story about all those standards Finnick carries around, about "being a good person" and "doing the right thing" and how he eventually, slowly learns that those are not standards that actually matter. He starts out so ashamed of himself that he can't even stand to be with his friends and family anymore because he can't look himself in the eye. But then he learns to want things and to make choices and to accept that that's okay. He has to make up his own standards, because normal people's don't apply to his life.

[roguedemon]

But then of course he decides against doing that because he recognizes he has a choice to put his happiness first, and that realization lowers the impact of that guilt too. Because it's not really catharsis, it's just lack of guilt and self-flagellation.

I was thinking about the whole idea of catharsis in conjunction with this, as in, why was one of the first words that popped into my head re: this scene "catharsis"? I went and looked up the definition of catharsis and came up with "Any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration." I think that definitely describes this scene. The neat thing that you can trace the thought processes that lead to Finnick's emotional breakthrough, which lead to him being able to make the choice to ask Haymitch to stay with him, to tell him that yes, he is loved and he deserves to be happy, which leads to Haymitch's emotional breakthrough. I think of it as catharsis because in both cases they were carrying this heavy burden of guilt and shame that they had to repress to some extent just to get through the day, while at the same time they were falling in love and struggling with the desire to be happy, to feel like they could want something for themselves.

You really showed the steps here, which is what makes the scene so effective. Finnick figured out what he really wants in part by looking at his actions (e.g., why was he willing to chase Haymitch down instead of just doing the safest thing for his family and staying put?) and drawing conclusions from them, which is a neat bit of reasoning by both him and the writer. :) You show the steps he takes to get to the point where he has an epiphany and reframes his desires and choices -- it's a classic bit of problem-solving where someone wrestles with something for ages, and then breaks out of the box by reframing everything. He realizes, as you said, that the normal rules don't have to apply to him. He has another path. That pushes him to explicitly tell Haymitch he loves him and wants him more than anything else. This lets Haymitch break out of the box, he reframes his whole life in that moment and gets what he really wanted but tried very hard never to hope for. So, you have a huge feeling of cartharsis which mixes a massive lifting of their self-imposed internal sentences of guilt and misery with real joy at being able to finally express everything they are feeling and have those feelings returned. Pretty awesome. It also carries through the whole theme of Finnick as a survivor who always takes action in order to keep surviving. His ultimate act of survival is to decide that Haymitch is crucial to said survival and he wins his Games here by taking Caramel's advice. He's ultimately a ruthless badass. Here, he's being ruthless in a way Haymitch can't, and that "selfish" act translates into an act of love that saves Haymitch. I love that. :)

[trovia]

To get even more theoretical here, your musings on catharsis are striking to me right now because another comment I wrote over at AO3 just made me think that the resolution of this story fits the requirements of classical tragedy - Finnick and Haymitch do the logical, healthy, happy-making thing without a way of knowing that it's leading down a path that's terrible for Panem overall. Catharsis and tragedy, in literature, go hand in hand - the theory being that the reason we even like reading tragedy is the sense of catharsis that it gives us. Although the cathartic effect here is prompted by Finnick and Haymitch's in-story sense of relief more than by the knowledge that they just made a bad choice for the bigger context. So I guess it's not your typical tragedy after all. Shame, that would have been cool. ;)

Finnick has spent all of SP and all of his life since the Games trying to play the Hunger Games. He's done it on any number of levels - he's played along with Snow in his post-victor life, but he's also used this empowering memory of winning a Games and framed challenges as Hunger Games to tell himself that he can win those, too. He's an action-taker; that's how he functions. The thing that has never occurred to him before is the fact that he doesn't have to play at all. He doesn't have to act. It's okay to also just maintain. Because as fruitful his approach to life is for me as a writer, needing to tell a story that moves forward ;), it's also very exhausting. And the thing about moving is that you do it to eventually reach a destination. If you just keep moving and moving, you only run away from things; it's pointless.

Haymitch on the other hand has spent all of the story in this fragile state where he learned to accept good things that are handed to him, eventually understanding that he's allowed to keep them, too. His happiness doesn't have to be temporary.

Finnick definitely is a ruthless bastard. ;) Hah.

(I was just pointing out to somebody on AO3 that most of the actions in canon were prompted by selfishness too - Kat collaborated with Snow without so much as blinking, only ever considering rebellion when it was the only way left to keep her family safe. Love, in THG, is always a selfish act, because these are traumatized people desperately holding onto the very few tokens of happiness and stability that they have.)