Thanks for commenting on this, especially since you beta'd this for me and have already seen and discussed it plenty of times.
Mags was a lot of fun to write, and a welcome chance to dip into my heritage in a very superficial way. I feel like a lot of my conception of her actually came out of your stories and our many discussions of her. I love your idea of how she created a Games training school in District Four, and I just kind of transplanted that idea of her as an organizer, a galvanizer onto this thing we know about the Mentors being friends. I love the idea that it was her masterplan to get the victors working together and thinking of themselves as stronger united.
And I'm glad you could see how I tried to show the different causes of Haymitch's isolation, and how this wasn't just a case of poor Haymitch, the world is so mean to him, but it's a combination of people being caught up in their own stuff they're trying to deal with, and Haymitch being the closed-off person that he is, even at this age. I like my angsty, dumped-upon characters, and Haymitch certainly fits that bill for me; but I also like getting to see the character flaws (even when they're understandable flaws) that contribute to that character's situation.
And yeah, it absolutely makes sense to me that without someone to unite them, that the victors would so easily fall into a benevolent form of "every man for himself" disinterest in each other. After all, Haymitch has a point: from a limited point of view, it makes sense not to help each other. I like the idea that the person who united them was Mags.
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Mags was a lot of fun to write, and a welcome chance to dip into my heritage in a very superficial way. I feel like a lot of my conception of her actually came out of your stories and our many discussions of her. I love your idea of how she created a Games training school in District Four, and I just kind of transplanted that idea of her as an organizer, a galvanizer onto this thing we know about the Mentors being friends. I love the idea that it was her masterplan to get the victors working together and thinking of themselves as stronger united.
And I'm glad you could see how I tried to show the different causes of Haymitch's isolation, and how this wasn't just a case of poor Haymitch, the world is so mean to him, but it's a combination of people being caught up in their own stuff they're trying to deal with, and Haymitch being the closed-off person that he is, even at this age. I like my angsty, dumped-upon characters, and Haymitch certainly fits that bill for me; but I also like getting to see the character flaws (even when they're understandable flaws) that contribute to that character's situation.
And yeah, it absolutely makes sense to me that without someone to unite them, that the victors would so easily fall into a benevolent form of "every man for himself" disinterest in each other. After all, Haymitch has a point: from a limited point of view, it makes sense not to help each other. I like the idea that the person who united them was Mags.
Thanks again, love. *hugs*