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stay_alivePlayer's Name: Rei
Are you over 16? Yes
Characters Played Here: Rumpelstiltskinworsetodie, Frances Owens get_thebook, Mozenrath deadsand
Character: Haymitch Abernathy
Series/Canon: The Hunger Games
From When? Toward the end of Catching Fire, after Katniss has been picked up but before she's woken up.
History: Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Link to Haymitch's blurb on the wiki, because it specifically details his experiences in the 50th Hunger Games
Personality: Haymitch Abernathy at first glance can be seen as little more than a drunken, self-destructive layabout, often accompanied by the unmistakeable stench of liquor (and sometimes vomit), and before the 74th Hunger Games was at best to most people a laughing stock and a burden (or a non-entity at best) to any tributes so unfortunate as to call him a mentor. He is rarely seen sober, is often quite unfriendly unless he's too drunk to know better, and at his most sober is morose, sardonic, and unfortunately riddled with little (and big) quirks and tics that are symptomatic of PTSD and alcohol abuse.
Haymitch carries a lot of guilt, not just the survivors' guilt that seems common of many victors, the guilt that comes from killing other children, but also for every tribute that's died under his watch, because he likely gave up hope very early on, and the books suggest he hasn't really been trying since either Katniss or Peeta have known of him. Whether he'll admit it or not he thinks the lives of many children are at least partially on his head.
An important thing to be said about his drinking habits is that he does display some amount of control at times for how much he imbibes and seems perfectly capable of slowing his consumption enough to keep him lucid for the Games. He has also been through full detox at least once and has gotten back on it by the end. I believe this comes for two reasons. He does have a dependancy on alcohol to a degree -- his violent bout with withdrawal in the second book showed this -- but once he's completely clean he makes the conscious decision that he wants to keep drinking. Even when the war is over, the life behind him is still one of horror, degradation, and loss. There are situations that he has openly chosen not to go into and has said he won't do it without a bottle. Drinking is just one of many imperfect ways that victors have at their disposal to help them mask and handle their pain. He believes these are a victor's personal choice and ought not to be interfered with (shown in his approval of the morphlings' chosen coping mechanism and his own violent reprisal toward people that try to take alcohol out of his hand).
At the age of 15 he was reaped into the 50th Hunger Games, the second Quarter Quell, and the experience left him highly traumatized. The Games themselves took an enormous toll, though he spent more time fighting for his life against the elements than the other 47 tributes, his surly attitude left him with no sponsors to help stave off the dangers of the arena, and he sustained grisly injuries before his own cleverness ultimately landed him as the victor. Less than two weeks later his entire family, and his girlfriend, were executed because said cleverness embarrassed the Capitol and lost a lot of people a good deal of money. Whatever other punishments were heaped on him in the interim, as the Capitol saw it as important to make an example of him, are not specified within the text, but the toll this entire experience took on him is obvious. He doesn't like to sleep at night, because he has nightmares of all the dangers he faced in the arena -- killer hummingbirds, carniverous swarming quirrels, for instance. He always sleeps with a knife. He drinks constantly, copiously, and never keeps his home or himself clean. Given that the Capitol tends to ask for much more of Victors than a smile and a wave and mentorship, it is very likely that his drunkenness and unkempt stature are deliberate, not just to soothe his own mania but also to repulse his betters from demanding anything more of him. He has no family with him and doesn't establish strong friendships aside from the occasional drinking buddy (and these are often other victors because they're less useful as leverage), because he doesn't want the Capitol to take anything else from him.
What can be said positively of Haymitch, when he's lucid, is that he understands the Games -- not just the arena, but the Victory tours, the interviews, the costuming, getting sponsors, etc. He knows this because at this point he's been playing the game for 25 years. Only in the last two, however, has he extended much effort. He's watched enough to know what people are looking for and mentored enough tributes to know that most of the time, they didn't seem to have it. It's possible that some of what he knows was passed along by other, older victors, maybe even his former mentor (likely the LAST winner to come out of District 12), perhaps in some vain effort to get him to try harder to help his tributes. Haymitch knows how to work with people. He knows the show and what the audience wants, and he hates the mendacity of it all -- openly hates it when he's sober enough to show it -- but he knows how to make it work.
Some of it comes from his own failures as a tribute, which made him a very unlikely candidate for victor. I'm assuming that when he warns Katniss about certain things early on (like to not resist the stylists), it's because he knows firsthand they can go bad. His interview showed him to be disinterested, rude, and despite not being at all unattractive, he refused to even attempt to be charming. He behaved as though he was offended by the whole process and was pessimistic about his chances -- very honest, but not what Capitol audiences want to see or here. He was expected to die early on.
District 12ers very rarely have winners. In the 75 years of the Hunger Games, only four came from District 12, two of them in the same year. They have a certain image: they're underfed, dirty, not well educated, generally among the underdogs in the competitions, even among those that don't generate career tributes. They are no match for the tributes that get the sponsors, that everyone bets on. Haymitch displayed none of these traits -- he was physically strong for his age, clever to a fault and resourceful, too, and beyond all else: insolent. The word "uppity" feels almost approrpiate here. Haymitch Abernathy had zero hopes about his chances, but he went into the Quarter Quell determined to do it his way, which suggests a strong sense of self, if nothing else. He lost a lot of people a lot of money.
That sense of self had to be broken down, and for a long time, it was. Haymitch, until the 74th games, became exactly what the Capitol wanted him to be, if they were to suffer him as a victor: while not quiet, his squawking is ineffectual and amusing at best, he's weak and quick to capitulate, and drink makes him stupid. He's walking squalor to them, and that's the face of District 12. During the 74th Games, he came out of the shell he built around himself. He was making himself seen and heard for something other than a smelly buffoon. He advocated for his tributes. He brought two home, and I have no doubt that this earned some form of retaliation that the audience, seeing from Katniss' point of view, never got to see. This, coupled with his faith in Katniss and Peeta and his determination to protect them, turned his mind toward rebellion.
He is in many ways very similar to Katniss Everdeen, which in turn perhaps led to him taking such a liking to her. The things that are precious to him are things he's either already lost or are not shared easily. His attitude is often a defense mechanism as much as anything else, and he has a lot of reason for this, as the Capitol has shown time and again they will take away anything he loves if he doesn't tow the line they shove into his hand. He sees a lot of himself in the girl, and this inspires him to try to push her to not make the same mistakes he made when he was a tribute. In his own way he genuinely seems not to want to see her lose everything the way he has. Having Katniss and Peeta in his life has also meant that once again, without his wanting, he has something to lose again.
His motivations for coming to New Dodge are simple: His tributes are there, and where they go he feels driven to follow. If it means they decide they want to stay there after six months and forget about the districts, that's their decision to make and he'll stand behind them. If they decide to go back and travel to District 13 and take down the Capitol, he'll be there, too.
Why do you think your character would work in this setting? Haymitch accepted the offer to be with his tributes, but he's also not going to say no to a 6-month vacation away from the Capitol and the Districts in what appears to be a lush, thriving area with okay people and good booze. If things work out the right way he might not hesitate to imagine staying there permanently or at least retiring there if he survives the rebellion. The place has pretty much everything he thinks he would need to be comfortable, but not necessarily happy, because Haymitch is not a very happy person. He'd interact with people, but saying he'd interact well suggests he's friendly, and he's really not, unless you're already accustomed to surly people and their bizarre forms of not-hating people that still seem to resemble hating people.
What will your character do for work?
I'd like to start him out working the stables. He seems to understand his way around animals in a general sense (at the end of the series he's bides his time between supply shipments taking care of geese, for instance).
Inventory: Basic furniture from his house -- chairs, a table, a sofa, bed, bed dressings, etc, shelving, etc.
A small collection of books.
Two trunks of clothing.
Several flasks.
A few knives.
Some basic kitchen amenities, simple pots and pans and mugs and dishes, etc -- some of which have never been touched by his hands.
A few valuables -- jewels, rings, etc that he's acquired over the years and may or may not be intending to hock if he has to.
Some starting funds.
Samples: And now for the hard part! If you need a prompt for your samples, refer back to the Applications Page.
Third-Person Sample: When the blast of cold water struck his back and the top of his head, Haymitch jerked to life in a single, panicked spasm. Immediately a weight on his back, something hard and metal braced against the base his neck to keep him steady, and his arms flailed at his sides in futility, the knife clutched in his right hand finding no fleshy purchase. For just a moment, as thought began to intermingle with reflex, he was fifteen years old again, somewhere in the arena, and he had been caught. Somehow, in between paranoid cat naps, the Careers had made it from the mountain all the way to the forest, and they got the drop on him. Dead. He was dead.
But fifteen was twenty-five years ago, now, and this truth came crawling into his liquor-soaked mind as his struggles fitfully died at the persistent but gentle shushing in his ear like that of a Capitol wrangler calming one of the chariot horses. There were, of course, less condescending and dehumanizing comparisons to be made, like perhaps that of a mother comforting her child, but by the measure of as little as a week and as much as three years, Haymitch had been forced to associate that noise with a certain sort of person much more recently than any memories of a mother both loving and living.
That sort of person was precisely the manner of Peacekeeper pinning him to that table in the Hob, now, and the sickly over-strong smell of roses forced his breath to become something normal, stopped his bellow of outrage at being awakened in such a manner.
The Hob had been cleared of people, even Greasy Sae, and was so silent, now, as to set a quiver of unease in the older victor's bones. The shutters were drawn, the room lit by a bulb hanging from the ceiling at the center of the main chamber. Only tiny slivers of dusty daylight broke through the cracks in the walls and the odd missing shingle from the rooftop.
President Snow looked especially out of place, the outline of his deep black peacoat against the icy-white of his hair and beard -- all of him standing in stark contrast to the aged browns of the wooden walls and tables, something too pale and too colorless and too artificial to be real (and therefore a paragon Capitol citizen). His face was everywhere that a screen could project it, but somehow it was only seeing him person that Haymitch caught himself thinking that he looked as though (like Caesar Flickerman) he hadn't aged a day. Not since he met him in person for the first time at the last Quarter Quell -- the first time he smelled that strange, pungent flower smell that now put him in mind of the poisonous blooms in the Arena he would ultimately survive.
And he was poison.
Dread suddenly made Haymitch's mind very, very clear.
The Peacekeeper holding him down at last retreated, yanking him upright with a gloved hand on his shoulder. Haymitch waited for Snow to dismiss him and the other one, standing at the President's left. If he had something to say to him, he'd want to say it in private, surely.
But he didn't send them away.
The Peacekeeper's hand squeezed his shoulder. Haymitch swallowed a shudder of revulsion, swallowed that feeling of being fifteen for a second time, this time an older fifteen, a fifteen who had not a week before known what it felt like to try to scoop his own intestines back into his quivering, expiring body, who had seen a rain of bullets tear through the faces and chests of every person he had ever loved, all as though they were made of wet paper, who had no leverage to be bought by Capital men and women -- and who only knew that shame every halfway comely victor had known because the man standing before him had wanted to see him cry like the child he was at long last.
He swallowed it back, because even addled and hungover he didn't want to think about this man getting what he wanted, or why he'd come to speak to him now, so many years later.
"What the Hell do you want?" he said with surprising evenness.
First-Person Sample: Link to voice test on Dear Mun
Are you over 16? Yes
Characters Played Here: Rumpelstiltskin
worsetodie, Frances Owens get_thebook, Mozenrath deadsandCharacter: Haymitch Abernathy
Series/Canon: The Hunger Games
From When? Toward the end of Catching Fire, after Katniss has been picked up but before she's woken up.
History: Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Link to Haymitch's blurb on the wiki, because it specifically details his experiences in the 50th Hunger Games
Personality: Haymitch Abernathy at first glance can be seen as little more than a drunken, self-destructive layabout, often accompanied by the unmistakeable stench of liquor (and sometimes vomit), and before the 74th Hunger Games was at best to most people a laughing stock and a burden (or a non-entity at best) to any tributes so unfortunate as to call him a mentor. He is rarely seen sober, is often quite unfriendly unless he's too drunk to know better, and at his most sober is morose, sardonic, and unfortunately riddled with little (and big) quirks and tics that are symptomatic of PTSD and alcohol abuse.
Haymitch carries a lot of guilt, not just the survivors' guilt that seems common of many victors, the guilt that comes from killing other children, but also for every tribute that's died under his watch, because he likely gave up hope very early on, and the books suggest he hasn't really been trying since either Katniss or Peeta have known of him. Whether he'll admit it or not he thinks the lives of many children are at least partially on his head.
An important thing to be said about his drinking habits is that he does display some amount of control at times for how much he imbibes and seems perfectly capable of slowing his consumption enough to keep him lucid for the Games. He has also been through full detox at least once and has gotten back on it by the end. I believe this comes for two reasons. He does have a dependancy on alcohol to a degree -- his violent bout with withdrawal in the second book showed this -- but once he's completely clean he makes the conscious decision that he wants to keep drinking. Even when the war is over, the life behind him is still one of horror, degradation, and loss. There are situations that he has openly chosen not to go into and has said he won't do it without a bottle. Drinking is just one of many imperfect ways that victors have at their disposal to help them mask and handle their pain. He believes these are a victor's personal choice and ought not to be interfered with (shown in his approval of the morphlings' chosen coping mechanism and his own violent reprisal toward people that try to take alcohol out of his hand).
At the age of 15 he was reaped into the 50th Hunger Games, the second Quarter Quell, and the experience left him highly traumatized. The Games themselves took an enormous toll, though he spent more time fighting for his life against the elements than the other 47 tributes, his surly attitude left him with no sponsors to help stave off the dangers of the arena, and he sustained grisly injuries before his own cleverness ultimately landed him as the victor. Less than two weeks later his entire family, and his girlfriend, were executed because said cleverness embarrassed the Capitol and lost a lot of people a good deal of money. Whatever other punishments were heaped on him in the interim, as the Capitol saw it as important to make an example of him, are not specified within the text, but the toll this entire experience took on him is obvious. He doesn't like to sleep at night, because he has nightmares of all the dangers he faced in the arena -- killer hummingbirds, carniverous swarming quirrels, for instance. He always sleeps with a knife. He drinks constantly, copiously, and never keeps his home or himself clean. Given that the Capitol tends to ask for much more of Victors than a smile and a wave and mentorship, it is very likely that his drunkenness and unkempt stature are deliberate, not just to soothe his own mania but also to repulse his betters from demanding anything more of him. He has no family with him and doesn't establish strong friendships aside from the occasional drinking buddy (and these are often other victors because they're less useful as leverage), because he doesn't want the Capitol to take anything else from him.
What can be said positively of Haymitch, when he's lucid, is that he understands the Games -- not just the arena, but the Victory tours, the interviews, the costuming, getting sponsors, etc. He knows this because at this point he's been playing the game for 25 years. Only in the last two, however, has he extended much effort. He's watched enough to know what people are looking for and mentored enough tributes to know that most of the time, they didn't seem to have it. It's possible that some of what he knows was passed along by other, older victors, maybe even his former mentor (likely the LAST winner to come out of District 12), perhaps in some vain effort to get him to try harder to help his tributes. Haymitch knows how to work with people. He knows the show and what the audience wants, and he hates the mendacity of it all -- openly hates it when he's sober enough to show it -- but he knows how to make it work.
Some of it comes from his own failures as a tribute, which made him a very unlikely candidate for victor. I'm assuming that when he warns Katniss about certain things early on (like to not resist the stylists), it's because he knows firsthand they can go bad. His interview showed him to be disinterested, rude, and despite not being at all unattractive, he refused to even attempt to be charming. He behaved as though he was offended by the whole process and was pessimistic about his chances -- very honest, but not what Capitol audiences want to see or here. He was expected to die early on.
District 12ers very rarely have winners. In the 75 years of the Hunger Games, only four came from District 12, two of them in the same year. They have a certain image: they're underfed, dirty, not well educated, generally among the underdogs in the competitions, even among those that don't generate career tributes. They are no match for the tributes that get the sponsors, that everyone bets on. Haymitch displayed none of these traits -- he was physically strong for his age, clever to a fault and resourceful, too, and beyond all else: insolent. The word "uppity" feels almost approrpiate here. Haymitch Abernathy had zero hopes about his chances, but he went into the Quarter Quell determined to do it his way, which suggests a strong sense of self, if nothing else. He lost a lot of people a lot of money.
That sense of self had to be broken down, and for a long time, it was. Haymitch, until the 74th games, became exactly what the Capitol wanted him to be, if they were to suffer him as a victor: while not quiet, his squawking is ineffectual and amusing at best, he's weak and quick to capitulate, and drink makes him stupid. He's walking squalor to them, and that's the face of District 12. During the 74th Games, he came out of the shell he built around himself. He was making himself seen and heard for something other than a smelly buffoon. He advocated for his tributes. He brought two home, and I have no doubt that this earned some form of retaliation that the audience, seeing from Katniss' point of view, never got to see. This, coupled with his faith in Katniss and Peeta and his determination to protect them, turned his mind toward rebellion.
He is in many ways very similar to Katniss Everdeen, which in turn perhaps led to him taking such a liking to her. The things that are precious to him are things he's either already lost or are not shared easily. His attitude is often a defense mechanism as much as anything else, and he has a lot of reason for this, as the Capitol has shown time and again they will take away anything he loves if he doesn't tow the line they shove into his hand. He sees a lot of himself in the girl, and this inspires him to try to push her to not make the same mistakes he made when he was a tribute. In his own way he genuinely seems not to want to see her lose everything the way he has. Having Katniss and Peeta in his life has also meant that once again, without his wanting, he has something to lose again.
His motivations for coming to New Dodge are simple: His tributes are there, and where they go he feels driven to follow. If it means they decide they want to stay there after six months and forget about the districts, that's their decision to make and he'll stand behind them. If they decide to go back and travel to District 13 and take down the Capitol, he'll be there, too.
Why do you think your character would work in this setting? Haymitch accepted the offer to be with his tributes, but he's also not going to say no to a 6-month vacation away from the Capitol and the Districts in what appears to be a lush, thriving area with okay people and good booze. If things work out the right way he might not hesitate to imagine staying there permanently or at least retiring there if he survives the rebellion. The place has pretty much everything he thinks he would need to be comfortable, but not necessarily happy, because Haymitch is not a very happy person. He'd interact with people, but saying he'd interact well suggests he's friendly, and he's really not, unless you're already accustomed to surly people and their bizarre forms of not-hating people that still seem to resemble hating people.
What will your character do for work?
I'd like to start him out working the stables. He seems to understand his way around animals in a general sense (at the end of the series he's bides his time between supply shipments taking care of geese, for instance).
Inventory: Basic furniture from his house -- chairs, a table, a sofa, bed, bed dressings, etc, shelving, etc.
A small collection of books.
Two trunks of clothing.
Several flasks.
A few knives.
Some basic kitchen amenities, simple pots and pans and mugs and dishes, etc -- some of which have never been touched by his hands.
A few valuables -- jewels, rings, etc that he's acquired over the years and may or may not be intending to hock if he has to.
Some starting funds.
Samples: And now for the hard part! If you need a prompt for your samples, refer back to the Applications Page.
Third-Person Sample: When the blast of cold water struck his back and the top of his head, Haymitch jerked to life in a single, panicked spasm. Immediately a weight on his back, something hard and metal braced against the base his neck to keep him steady, and his arms flailed at his sides in futility, the knife clutched in his right hand finding no fleshy purchase. For just a moment, as thought began to intermingle with reflex, he was fifteen years old again, somewhere in the arena, and he had been caught. Somehow, in between paranoid cat naps, the Careers had made it from the mountain all the way to the forest, and they got the drop on him. Dead. He was dead.
But fifteen was twenty-five years ago, now, and this truth came crawling into his liquor-soaked mind as his struggles fitfully died at the persistent but gentle shushing in his ear like that of a Capitol wrangler calming one of the chariot horses. There were, of course, less condescending and dehumanizing comparisons to be made, like perhaps that of a mother comforting her child, but by the measure of as little as a week and as much as three years, Haymitch had been forced to associate that noise with a certain sort of person much more recently than any memories of a mother both loving and living.
That sort of person was precisely the manner of Peacekeeper pinning him to that table in the Hob, now, and the sickly over-strong smell of roses forced his breath to become something normal, stopped his bellow of outrage at being awakened in such a manner.
The Hob had been cleared of people, even Greasy Sae, and was so silent, now, as to set a quiver of unease in the older victor's bones. The shutters were drawn, the room lit by a bulb hanging from the ceiling at the center of the main chamber. Only tiny slivers of dusty daylight broke through the cracks in the walls and the odd missing shingle from the rooftop.
President Snow looked especially out of place, the outline of his deep black peacoat against the icy-white of his hair and beard -- all of him standing in stark contrast to the aged browns of the wooden walls and tables, something too pale and too colorless and too artificial to be real (and therefore a paragon Capitol citizen). His face was everywhere that a screen could project it, but somehow it was only seeing him person that Haymitch caught himself thinking that he looked as though (like Caesar Flickerman) he hadn't aged a day. Not since he met him in person for the first time at the last Quarter Quell -- the first time he smelled that strange, pungent flower smell that now put him in mind of the poisonous blooms in the Arena he would ultimately survive.
And he was poison.
Dread suddenly made Haymitch's mind very, very clear.
The Peacekeeper holding him down at last retreated, yanking him upright with a gloved hand on his shoulder. Haymitch waited for Snow to dismiss him and the other one, standing at the President's left. If he had something to say to him, he'd want to say it in private, surely.
But he didn't send them away.
The Peacekeeper's hand squeezed his shoulder. Haymitch swallowed a shudder of revulsion, swallowed that feeling of being fifteen for a second time, this time an older fifteen, a fifteen who had not a week before known what it felt like to try to scoop his own intestines back into his quivering, expiring body, who had seen a rain of bullets tear through the faces and chests of every person he had ever loved, all as though they were made of wet paper, who had no leverage to be bought by Capital men and women -- and who only knew that shame every halfway comely victor had known because the man standing before him had wanted to see him cry like the child he was at long last.
He swallowed it back, because even addled and hungover he didn't want to think about this man getting what he wanted, or why he'd come to speak to him now, so many years later.
"What the Hell do you want?" he said with surprising evenness.
First-Person Sample: Link to voice test on Dear Mun