Discussion: Tesserae and Districts One and Two (and other districts too)

[finnickodair]

Okay, so I've been working on a Cato fic on and off for a while now, and I'm at a point where I'm hammering out some more details of how District Two, and to a lesser extent District One, function.

So, tesserae. What we get from the books is that (at least for District Twelve):

1) kids of reaping age can claim tesserae to receive an extra portion

Comments

[jocelyncs]

I doubt it's free, but since we can assume both districts encourage aggression and infighting among the population, so a child needing tesserae is probably a pretty severe badge of shame. A family needing rations would also have an incentive to put their children in tribute training.

[marble_sharp]

Hmm, it's definitely a plot hole in canon. Either the Career districts manipulate the system to take as much tesserae as they want, or there's some stigma toward that as suggested above, or they're required to work for it since the extra risk doesn't matter in their case.

With your theory, that creates more of a push for Careers than just embellishing the Games into serving one's district/the Capitol. I rather like that idea - it depicts how the Career districts are just as desperate as the non-Career districts but just have more opportunities.