caesar flickerman's hair dye

She smelled like white roses | chapter 9

Chapter summary: Sixty-Five marked a brilliant year in the Hunger Games history. And Virgilia indeed lives in historic times--this year's Games are the first she decides to watch since her youth and it captures her in many different ways.  

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Below the cut is another meme selection. As per usual, if you wish to remain entirely spoiler free, this is something for after the chapter :)

Post anon is referring to:

long story short, I've usually felt more drawn to side characters because there is a lot that remains unknown about them and one can become creative themselves. meaning, katniss, peeta, gale, and haymitch never felt like my characters. when thg released, I pretty quickly hopped into the rp-scene writing and contemplating about those characters that received fairly little information. and for the most part, that's been capitol characters simply because the capitol, too, felt a lot more underdeveloped compared to district 12. sure, there's other districts, but I fairly rarely create original characters, and in the rp scene interactions are important. every major character visits the capitol, so that's the perfect place. besides, the caption feels close to the western society that I live in, so that's been interesting to headcanon, too.

that leaves my choice of characters to enjoy with capitol characters who are not very well developed. at first I really liked caesar, and then plutarch grew on me as an extension to caesar (I headcanon them as friends).

as with many other characters I enjoy -- caesar included -- I like those that do not have much of a backstory except for some pillars that one can work with. plutarch is a mysterious person, and that's cool! you have a lot of wiggle room in how he's supposed to be and that's fun, no? take katniss. the fandom has written an immense amount about katniss. but--unless we go for canon divergent--she will always have a set backstory, a set goal, a set life. plutarch's motivations are unknown to us, we barely know how he grew up and how his life used to be before the 75th. there's so many open questions that we don't have in the same amount with a well-developed character.

specific tidbits about plutarch that I like are

he's central to the rebellion. without him, the whole thing might not have existed. what's his role in there? when did he come up with it and why? how did he find 13? how did he pull off the 75th?

he's mysterious as a character and leaves plenty of unanswered questions. questions that I've mentioned in the first point, but further than that I'm curious about him as a person. he was the CEO of capitol rebellions (tm), but he's had a lot of courage to do what he did. did he have personal motivations? how did he became so knowledgeable about the time before Panem?

he is vital for my other characters and the overall story I want to tell. my first character was caesar and ever since then I've written about caesar a lot in relation to plutarch. for caesar to be a rebel, he needs to know plutarch--and I like to seem them as best buddies, opposites entirely because one thinks with his heart and the other with his mind. there's also my original character, virgilia snow, who is married to president snow and who falls in love with plutarch and thus has a major rebel right by her side. plutarch feels vital for all the stories about rebellion in the capitol and why shouldn't he! he's a major character there.

I approach thg as a dystopian literature, not a ya literature. this feels like a vital difference. ask me what book recommendations I have that are similar to thg and I will probably just list the dystopian classics to you like 1984 rather than divergent. and like in most of these, the character meets, believes in, or founds a rebellion. those characters are usually the main characters. while katniss was important and is a great and well-written and brilliantly conceptualised character, she ultimately was used by the adults around her. but at the same time, plutarch did found something, he created a network of people that made a system possible that could use a figurehead like katniss. to found that system (or join it, but in my hc he founded it), it takes extreme courage and competences to figure out who to trust and who not to trust. it's exciting hearing more about that! and therefore plutarch--and characters like caesar who join the rebellion--are characters whose stories are worthwhile and interesting.

PSH lifted plutarch up. we all sorta know that there's great actors, and PSH was one of them. I at times like his performance even better than how plutarch was written--in the books he feels rather like a know-it-all while the movie!plutarch has a tad bit more empathy and just overall has more emotions--book!plutarch was happily running around 13 before the bombing while movie!plutarch shat his pants, more or less. PSH really gave plutarch more of a fleshed out character.

I cannot say that I really truly want a book from Collins, simply because I have my own thoughts about him and will ultimately be disappointed in small or--worse--big ways. but it is fun to just conceptualise and think about what I'd like to see her write :)

Coin.

Snow was born into a system that was unfair from the start. He continued something horrible that he was neither the catalyst for nor a bringer of more doom. The Hunger Games are horrible. The segregation was horrible. But it's been there before him and it would have been there afterward. We can and should fault him for never attempting to produce a fairer system, but he was very much a child of the society that had already laid the grounds for unfairness.

However, Coin and District 13 could have been the change. They came from the outside with different ideas on how the world has to function. They had their revenge and isolation and ultimately District 13 is a living example of never having let go: They could have moved on, established their own country and lived further away from Panem. They could have still come in to help, could have still aided people wanting to flee. Coin, when given the opportunity to make a drastic change, decided not to change the system. She merely wanted to tilt the power imbalance, not abolish it. The Capitol Games were a living proof of that.

Overall, I think District 13 is not seen enough as entirely divorced from the rest of the Districts. Not in the books and not in the fandom. This isn't about acknowledging that they are outside of the Hunger Games system, but rather that they are the outsider who comes in. They are not part of Panem--they are their own country--and they play a very different part in the rebellion. Meaning, I can see brotherhood between e.g. District 5 and 8, but not between District 11 and District 13. They have suffered, but in different ways to the 12 remaining Districts. It feels rather odd that--even for a brief moment--they are the ones in charge and they are the ones who decide on a revenge that they have little to no pain in. District 13 has never had to send a single tribute into the Games. No one really forced District 13 to stick to their underground bunkers. For all we know, they could have went to live somewhere entirely differently. They are only a District in name, but that does not imply belonging to the rest of the Districts.

Coin's decision for a Capitol Games always makes me think to the phrase "an eye for an eye", but more importantly with the above paragraph, it makes me draw historic parallels. There was a large part of the world who would have wanted to take revenge on the Germans for the Holocaust. Just imagine the USA coming in and deciding to murder six million Germans. How does that provide any peace? How does that provide any moving forward? And how would that NOT sow an ever-lasting chain of revenge?