THG fic: "Spin Control" [21/24]

[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

[seta_suzume]

Augh, the tension builds to see how all this will go...!

(I keep wondering if either Katniss or Peeta will survive or if both of them will die and which outcome would be "best" or "worst" or what, ha ha)

[trovia]

Hahah, you're asking all the good questions! :D

Thank you. :))

[seta_suzume]

You're welcome!

Thanks for making me ponder them!!

[trovia]

Anytime! :D

[roguedemon]

This is wonderful. As always. :) I'm rather brain dead today, because yeah, I kinda crashed. Hypomania is such fun until you don't sleep well and then you pay for it. I've felt a lot worse, though. I'll have better thoughts for you later, but right now I just want to say that I especially loved seeing Haymitch start coming into his own and showing us all what he's really capable of. I loved how Finnick thought it was hot, even while he was freaking out about Haymitch's whole strategy. I want to pet poor Finnick, what with losing Mags, having Snow torture him yet again, and feeling so anxious because he's not sure what to do with this out-of-the-box strategy. And he's right to be concerned, because we all know what happens if Snow decides that he doesn't like it

[trovia]

Hey, I don't have the time right now to reply properly - it's very late here - thank you for your thoughts, of course, as always. :) I'd just been meaning to pick your brain on something, as I signed up for the remix challenge and I'm considering what to write

[trovia]

Finally getting to replying to this, and again, thank you for the wonderful comment. :)

It was very important to me that Finnick should find Haymitch hot when he goes wild with the marketing plan! Because it's hot. ;) And because it's not like Finnick doesn't want Haymitch to start feeling comfortable enough with himself to go there. He just really hates that plan.

I'd lie if I wouldn't say the Peeta characterization wasn't influenced by our conversations about him. :)

I never meant to imply otherwise, I'll have to go back and clarify what I was trying and failing to say yesterday. Oh no, don't panic, I know you didn't mean to criticize

[roguedemon]

Hey, I'm back from my trip, and I'm slowly easing my way back into becoming a productive member of online society, I have also started using my Tumblr account a bit, which means I will probably never get anything done ever again. I still have a lot of things to say about this chapter, but since I am short on time before I have to go do something else, I think I'm going to focus on a fairly trivial matter: smell. I saw your conversation on Tumblr about smell, and it got me thinking. In the sex scene above, you pointed out the smell of the bed sheets as a trigger. I was thinking that I bet Finnick smells and feels different in the Capitol. He's had his body hair ripped off (ALL of it), his skin polished, he probably gets subjected to all kinds of treatments, lotions, etc. every time he is prepped for a client. I bet clients request different scents -- he doesn't even get to keep his own body odor, which is just another degradation. And I bet the Capitol scents are overpowering -- too floral, too musky, too sweet, etc. I'm sure his

[trovia]

I have also started using my Tumblr account a bit, which means I will probably never get anything done ever again.Hah, yeah, it's terrible in that way

[roguedemon]

I love the whole ego branding concept. Olfactory branding is exactly what I was thinking of, except it sounds a lot smarter when you describe it. ;) I feel so sorry for poor Finnick, being forced to smell like coconut oil all the time. I also have all these gruesome scents in my head that his clients could request -- I imagine some teenager requesting strawberries and vanilla

[roguedemon]

A couple more quick comments. This is kind of trivial, but I am interested in Catalina's backstory, because she is the only Victor you have shown with Capitol Tattoos, which makes me wonder about her. You also mentioned that she was sold after her win, correct? She seems to be taking Mags' approach to life as a Victor. I definitely wonder about the D4 victor community, how they all interact, and how Caramel fits in. I was glad to see Caramel, if only for one line, it sort of implied that he in continuing to work on interacting with Finnick without freaking out (and vice versa). Small steps

[trovia]

Calina! Calina is a victor who got a whole characterization paragraph here in my "list of victors" file (most useful bit of background wordbuilding that I ever engaged in). She won the 51st Games - Caramel won the 53rd - and the two of them are said to have started Four's ascension into a power house. She was sold for a couple of years, nothing like what happened to Caramel, the way everybody expected to be the worst kind of prostitution in those days. She was very popular, because she was synonymous with the new Four Career generation. She was the one Mags and the other Four "directors" put on screen to talk about how much she loves the Capitol and how grateful Four is to the Capitol etc. So in that context, she ended up being pushed into getting the Capitol tattoos. Mags very strongly had her back back home, promoting the idea in the district that you get to do whatever the fuck you want as a victor and nobody gets to question it. You just get a moral free pass. They have a saying there, "The sea and the victors get to do what they

[roguedemon]

All this backstory is wonderful. I love the saying about victors and the sea, I like how Mags worked to set up a while D4 culture that would be supportive of the victors. Catalina becoming the face of the new D4 career system is very interesting. It sounds like she has taken Mags' approach to dealing with being a victor, has this helped her find more peace with her situation in the way Mags has

[trovia]

It sounds like she has taken Mags' approach to dealing with being a victor, has this helped her find more peace with her situation in the way Mags has?

They're similar people, yeah. She's a workaholic, she deals by focusing on a mission, and she gets a lot of positive reinforcement about how she's doing important work and she's needed. I picture her as a bit of a golden girl in the Four Games machine. The Lee Adama of District Four! Except less angst. (can't remember if you know Battlestar Galactica and if that means anything to you :p) I think she deals fairly well in that way.

What led him to tell people the truth about his life, as opposed to Finnick who was too terrified and ashamed to tell anyone?His brothers figured it out, or pushed him into telling him what was going on, when they saw what they perceived as totally out of character behavior on tv as opposed to Caramel's emotional problems back home. It's not like with Finnick where you could tell yourself well, he's a teenager, he's bound to act out and also, people have

[roguedemon]

I loved how Finnick recognizes his own self-loathing in Peeta, that was wince-inducing.

And this:
Maybe Peeta hated his life just as much as Finnick had used to hate his, and now he saw a chance to be a hero. Finnick hadn’t been a volunteer in his Games; his name hadn’t been carved into the Monument of Sacrifice, and there’d been a time when he’d been so jealous of those names of those dead people who’d saved somebody’s life. If he’d had a chance of dying as someone’s hero, he would have taken it, two years ago. But that had been then.

It just meant he couldn’t send Peeta in there just to let him die now. Just, the despair... coupled with the acknowledgement that Finnick has made real progress in this fic. He's basically trying to talk Peeta out of suicide because he's been ther and recognizes that it can get better. I wanted to hug them both. I also loved how you acknowledged what a piece of work Peeta's mother is. She tells her son that he's a hopeless case heading for certain death as a way of saying goodbye to him after he's

[trovia]

I really love how you equate Peeta's attempt at martyr suicide with Finnick's decision to go live in Twelve. In a way, what Finnick did was substitute suicide. He did the equivalent of cutting all his ties and moving to a different continent and to a different culture without leaving his phone number for anybody. It's a complete cut. "I can't handle this life. I need another." He went to the shittiest district there is, but it was the only option, and it was still better than leaving everything the way it is. It's not that he suffered in Four for anything that's wrong about Four; Four definitely is one of the better districts to live, where they treat the victors well, they have almost enough food, and Finnick has a family and a mentor who watches out for him and a lot of people who understand what it's like to be him. But that's not why he left. He needed for everything to be just different so that he could be different. What without Annie being in the picture to balance his perception of bad things and good things, it was definitely