#director!ash | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moreespressoformydepresso · 9 days

Note

re: ask game

⭐️ i would love to read your director’s commentary on When The Clock Stops Ticking (We'll Be Painted Red) :D

Oh boy what have you unleashed? I hope you have some time because I will not be able to contain myself to one thing this time.

I spent months on this fic, there is so much.

Instead of the doomed endeavor that is organizing this mess or singling out a single topic to talk about at length, I'm gonna go through the fic chronologically and pick the things most important to me. If you want more afterward, don't worry. I will have more.

So the opening and closing lines mirror each other, and fragments of it come back periodically so we'll start there. There's a lot of red imagery in here for fairly obvious reasons and some hidden double meanings. There will be a lot of that tbh. The more explicitly stated meaning is, of course, the usage of red as a euphemism and/or metaphor for blood. It's a way to show Treech's changing perception of the world as everything he's living through starts to affect him in both big and subtle ways. Hence why parts of that opening line keep popping up throughout the fic. While we're talking about that line, lets actually take a look at the wording:

"Blood coated the iron, colored the floor and the rubble, splattered his clothes."

The way it's written isn't really how a normal person would think on a day to day basis, is it? It's a lot more flowery, especially with the euphemism. It's almost like he's thinking about paint on a canvas in an art studio rather than Teslee's blood, which is intentional. He's using this language, this metaphoric description, in order to avoid acknowledging what it actually is. He doesn't want to think about the fact that he just killed someone or that he's about to kill someone else. Originally the fic was supposed to start a little later, right before he kills Lucy Gray, but I decided to move it back a little and start by introducing his current state. The first few paragraphs are slow, with Treech mostly considering his survival options and the unbearable heat. It's in part to introduce where we're at in the games and in part a way to show he's distancing himself from what he's about to do, which only becomes apparent at the mention of footsteps. It's only then that we realize he's about to attack Lucy Gray, who's introduced by her fluttering dress rather than her actual name or face. She's the rainbow songbird, a stage sensation, rather than the actual Covey girl who made it to the top 3 in the games. It's easier for Treech to reconcile killing someone whose face he can't see or whose identity he doesn't think about than it is to kill someone who he knows had a family waiting on them, and it's only later on that he lets go of that mentality, which we'll get back to.

Red comes back later when he drags Lucy Gray to Reaper's morgue, as it's the color of the flag. Treech doesn't explicitly call it out, but he does refer to the color of the flag as blood red, so that in combination with the euphemistic usage from earlier leads to imagery of the flag being a literal pool of blood. Panem is literally built on blood to the point where it's represented by it. It's symbolized by it. It's celebrated by it, as the anthem is sung to the flag, which is hung at every national celebration. Then we get another glimpse of whose blood is being spilled as Treech sees Lamina's body, from her red hair to the blood that spread out from her stab wound over the floor after her death. In turn, that red reminds him of Teslee, someone he killed himself. It's a chilling reminder to Treech that he grieves for Lamina over what happened to her, despite having done that exact thing to two other children, strengthening the guilt he already feels but is trying to ignore. Thoughout the entire fic, Treech consistently sees red as the color of blood and it haunts him, illustrated by the last sentence of the story:

"Blood coated the iron, colored the floor and the rubble, splattered his clothes.

It drenched his hands, too."

It's the exact same sentence, with two key differences. Firstly, there's the adition of it drenching his hands, an obvious play on the saying "to have blood on one's hands" due to the three deaths he mentally attributes to himself. Secondly, there's no longer a euphemism. There's no more paint imagery, erasing the distance between Treech and the events of the story. It's a show of his loss of innocense (as he's no longer capable of making himself see it as just paint) the same way him no longer swinging his legs on the beams was. Reaper actually calls him out on the second one, playfully calling him a child, but that's why it's so important (to me) that I specifically call out that he no longer does it when he climbs back up after Reaper's death. Treech didn't know Teslee or Lucy Gray, but he did know Reaper. He didn't witness Lamina's death, only the aftermath, but Reaper died right in front of him. That combination kind of shatters him mentally, hence why he spends the last parts of the story so aimless and unfocused. I'll get back to that. Regardless, the one thing more powerful than a euphemism here is the lack of one, especially because Treech is very metaphorical in his thought process. He's an art kid who writes the plays his theater group performs, he even got his hands on some pre-Panem works, and I tried to let that be reflected in the way he thinks about the world. He draws lots of parallels to District 7 and there's lots of metaphors and euphemisms in his inner voice, that's just his usual way of being which he uses to deal with his situation. So when that all falls away for the hard truth, it shows he's lost part of who he is. There are metaphors in the ending paragraphs because it's such an integral part of who he is to describe the world like that, but in the end it's not how it used to be. There's a rawness now and while most of him is still him, in the end he's not the same person he was hours ago.

Now, aside from this obvious euphemism, red also has a symbolic meaning. It's a little dark in context to the story, but it's there. Red is, after all, the color of passion. The color of anger. The color of love. And these three things come back in the story quite a lot. Yes, Treech has killed Teslee and kills Lucy Gray, but he did it with as much compassion as he could. Both died quickly, with one life-ending strike of the axe. In the end, none of them deserved to go home any more or less than the others, and all of them fight just as passionately to get home. Every single tribute was trying to get someone home, whether that's themself or someone else. When Reaper lays dying, Treech tries everything to keep him alive despite knowing it's useless because he doesn't want to let go. He still has that drive to try, even when he knows it won't do anything. Treech is literally drenched in red in that scene as the blood seeps into his clothes and stains his hands and arms, which is both incredibly traumatizing imagery to him and a metaphoric representation of what he's feeling in the moment. He's too filled with passion to keep someone alive to really accept that he has to give up. He's also too filled with love. It's not very explicitly romantic between them, not like Meet Me In The Stars (When There's Nothing Left) was, but the undertones are definitely there. Think to the hyacinths Treech uses for Reaper's figurine. Specifically the myth of Hyacinth and Apollo. In that final scene, Treech loves Reaper too much to let him go and accept that he'll have to die. Several times, he basically begs the universe to give them even just a second longer together. Life is leaving Reaper's body and it's fueling Treech's fiery desire to keep fighting because to love is to lose and he's lost too much already. You can see it as platonic love or ignore the red metaphor entirely, but I won't. These two have my entire heart and they can keep it because I'm writing the Vipsania POV rn to create some setup for later.

Red is also the color associated with anger, which comes back in the fic too. Because while Reaper and Treech hide the bodies of the dead beneath the red flag as a show of respect and care, and while they spend their happy moments separated by it (one on each side of the flag, literally two kids and the love between them), they also rant over it. They sit on the beams, high above that sea of red, and spew venom at the unfairness of it all. At the pain they've had to endure. They fuel the flame of love in each other just as much as the flame of hate, because they understand each other. Treech bitterly talks about Vipsania the way he's wanted to all week, but didn't know who to talk about it to. Lamina's mentor was nice, and she'd been having a hard enough time already so he didn't wanna burden her with it. But Reaper? Reaper gets it. And he can see that Vipsania cares at least a little, but he doesn't push it because he understands. Just because she changed her mind doesn't erase the terrible way she treated him, and Reaper gets it. They understand each other's anger and they love each other all the more for it.

The flag here also encapsulates Treech's feelings on Vipsania as a whole, specifically the dichotomy between his care for her and his utter disgust and pain at what she's put him through. She let him starve to win the prize and Treech will never know for sure how much Vipsania did for him and how much she did for herself even when she did start to care, because not even she knows that. In everything I write, Vipsania has a long road of becoming a better person and most of it is spent convincing herself she's not doing it for him. In this universe, it's actually only at the end of the games that she admits to no longer giving a damn about the prize. It takes her watching him face death for five days straight to fully realize that over time it stopped being about winning and it started being about getting him home alive. The only real sign we get in the games is the water she sends him to stop Reaper from killing him, and that's entirely between the lines. He's not in the headspace to consider things and realize that Vipsania would have won the prize regardless of whether he lived or died. As Highbottom said, their survival isn't a necessity. Vipsania could've sat back and waited it out but instead tried what she could to save his life. The prize was hers, Treech had more sponsors that Reaper and has been far less controversial, and his beautiful singing won a lot of hearts, but Vipsania would have burned that prize if it got Treech out of the arena alive. It'll become more clear why she didn't do so again in that Vipsania's Version fic I'm working on. Regardless, Treech doesn't know that she cares about him, at least not for certain, so he's feeling very confused about her. He can acknowledge that she's changed over time, but that doesn't mean he has to like what she's done to him.

Red means a lot of things, and that contrast between the different interpretations that all work at the same time felt very fitting for me. It's kind of the theme of the whole stor, something can be beautiful and ugly at the same time. After all, the story is about love, romantic or not. Red is everywhere, and it's both the best thing in the arena and the worst thing. Love can be wonderful and it can be horrible, it hurts but it's worth it until it isn't. You wish you'd never felt it so the end wouldn't be so painful but at the same time you don't know how you'd have lived without it. If Treech wasn't so attached to Reaper his death wouldn't have hurt so much, but their time together meant so much to him. It showed him life's worth living, even if the loss that followed left him unsure of how to continue on. We live for the good moments, but they're what makes it hurt so much more when they end. That's honesly Treech's experience in a nutshell.

I can't believe I've gone this long just talking about a color what is wrong with me? I had a lot more to say but this is stupidly long so I'll go to the things I've already mentioned and try to wrap this up. I was gonna talk about my choice of timing and the stupid amount of foreshadowing in Reaper and Treech's conversation or the stuff I cut out but uhm... Maybe another day. I need to post this eventually after all if I discuss everything this post will take me as many months as the actual work took me.

So I mentioned before that Treech starts out removing himself from everything surrounding him by seeing everything in terms of the games and only the games. Lucy Gray is the rainbow girl, the girl from 12, the songbird, because that public, manufactured perception of her is a façade and he knows that. When he kills her, he's even further removed from reality by relating the snake she throws at him back to an everyday scenario back home. It's just another block of wood he's gotta hit, and Lucy Gray herself is just the lumber he works with on a daily basis. It's only when she's dead that he gets away from that thinking just enough to try and give her memory as much respect as he can, but despite that his descriptions of everything are flowery like he's writing a poem or a script to a shakespearian play. It's still doing it's damnest trying to avoid the harsh reality, even when he's face to face with it. It's a sort of shield he's built up over the course of the games that really solidified when Lamina died. If he goes cold, he can't break. However, once he and Reaper enter their awkward truce that ice he's grown around himself starts to melt and things get difficult, because as he lowers the shield he's gaining a friend, sure, but he's also leaving himself vulnerable. Reaper lets him forget the reality of their situation, but that means that when it comes crashing back in it's all the more painful. Over the course of his conversation with Reaper, the metaphors and flowery language stop being a constant shield and starts becoming an attempt to put into words all the ways in which Reaper makes him happy. So when Reaper dies, all he has left are his raw feelings with none of the pretty words to make them seem softer. He uses metaphors, but they're not artsy or pretty. Instead of kids games and the everyday life he found joy in back in 7, it's ice cold rivers and harsh winters that can easily take one's life. Instead of having fun climbing trees it's drowning in a frozen lake. And there are far fewer metaphors than before because Treech is too emotional to make it sound fancy. He's trying to process this but he can't and it's literally taking away who he is.

Finally, I want to point out that I put plenty of thought into all the times Treech nearly got himself killed in this story, because it will come up in that (far shorter) Vipsania's Version. Most of it will be focused on her complicated relationship with Treech and the guilt she feels for how focused she was on herself and stupid High School drama when she should have been worried about the literal child whose life she was responsible for, but the rest will be showing a more complete version of what happened than Treech can give. Specifically in regards to all the times he nearly got himself infected with rabies due to not being aware Reaper has it. There are moments where Treech nearly drinks from the same bottle as him and when they're sharing the apples one gets Reaper's saliva on it. It's only his insistence that Reaper keep it after his stomach growles that saves Treech. These moments go together with the slowly escalating symptoms Reaper is showing to make Vipsania tear her hair out worrying about him. Treech didn't know rabies was even in the equasion, so he's having a severe case of observer's bias here. Sure, Reaper is starting to behave a little eratically, but that could be the dehydration and heat. Treech has never experienced such severe heat before, so it's probably just something he doesn't understand. The loss of focus and confusion definitely tracks with Treech's own experience in this case, and the irritability... Well, they're in the hunger games. Of course Reaper's irritated! So to him nothing particularly bad is going on until the hallucinations because he doesn't have the information available to make rabies the most logical explanation, especially since that means Reaper is going to die and as I've explained Treech is having quite a case of denialism here.

The denial is part of the grieving process, which he's already going through at the start of the story and which he goes through again with Reaper. Once he's gone through the stages of disbelief, denial, anger, and bargaining (least explicit, it's the part where he's going through all the things he would do to get Reaper to stay with him), he ends up at depression. There's inklings of acceptance in the part where he starts singing, but after Reaper finally dies he goes right back to depression. Just mixed in with the guilt that's been popping up all throughout the story but has now involved into a whole state of being. It's not helped by the fact that he has enough grounds to blame himself here. Lamina, he couldn't have done much about without an alliance. Teslee he didn't know, so he can cling to the fact she'd have to die for him to live anyway no matter how guilt-stricken he is, but Reaper is the final straw. Because he didn't kill Reaper, but his friend killed himself specifically to protect him. So basically the guy did die because of him, even though he would have died anyway. That's a hard reality to accept, so Treech sticks with the part where Reaper's throat gets slit and doesn't have the emotional energy to think of much else. It's all too much for him. These past few days have been so draining on a deep emotional energy that his only relief was Reaper. Now that Reaper's gone, Treech now not only has a massive heap of extra guilt to deal with, he also has to deal with the many regrets he can't fix anymore. For example, the implied feelings Treech has for Reaper won't be resolved (in this timeline) and he's coming to terms with the fact that he'll never get to admit them and get closure. Reaper literally saved his life, by sacrificing himself but also by stopping him from accidentally catching rabies several times without knowing it. And Treech will never be able to thank him for it because Reaper is gone. All these kids are gone, and there's nothing Treech can do but wait to go back home and try to move on, so he kind of aimlessly wanders through the arena figuring out any way to give them respect because what else is he supposed to do?

His conversation with Reaper reminded him of all the ways in which these kids deserved to live, but it's too late. They're already dead, and all he can do is try and make sure they're remembered. So he uses every district funeral practice he knows of in an attempt to show them the respect they deserved, but also in a way to try and fill the void in his heart left by the loss he's just faced. To distract himself from the confusing emotions grief, guilt, and the general stress of the past few days have caused him to feel. His time with Reaper made him feel literally warm, and now that he's gone and night is falling, he's cold and going numb with shock as he's screamed out the emotions of the moment. He doesn't know what to do as he literally freezes up both physically and mentally, leaving him to try anything to pass the time in hopes he'll have figured it out once he's done. Spoilers, he doesn't figure it out. At the end of the story Treech is kind of out of it, almost more of a wandering ghost than the literal ghosts surrounding him.

Oh yeah btw if you really wanna hate me, there's some minor implications of ghosts. Reaper's when Treech cleans him up in the morgue and Lamina's when he's sitting alone on the beams and talking himself out of contemplated suicide.

Throughout the story, Treech refers to the arena as a tomb haunted by the ghosts of the other kids, and in the end it's almost like he's the one haunting the arena, detached from his body as he tries to process everything that's happened and come to terms with the fact that it's over now. There's no more maybe's left because everyone is dead. Even him, because while he's still breathing he's lost everything in the span of days and he's so riddled with grief and guilt that he'll have to build himself from the ground back up. Now that there aren't any threats left in the arena to worry about and he's gonna go home, he has to truly contend with the fact that he's the only one who made it out. Reaper, Dill, Lamina, Teslee, everyone, they all had families, and he's the only one who'll see theirs again. In the end the only thing that keeps him going is the fact that he's the soul survivor, so if he dies too it'll all have been for nothing. They'll all have died for nothing. Now he has to take that responsibility, no matter how tempting it is to give up and end himself so he won't have to deal with the emptiness anymore. Even when the what-ifs haunt his every thought and the memories will plague his nightmares, he has to keep going. It's a show that when Treech calls himself a selfish coward he's lying his ass off. Being a scared kid doesn't make him a coward, and while he may be tempted to do the selfish thing, he always chooses the selfless option in the end, which is the important part. He brought Lucy Gray to the morgue despite the dangers, he insisted Reaper take the water and food when he felt the other needed it more, and he stopped trying to save Reaper and instead tried to comfort him when he realized there was nothing he could do and Reaper deserved to be comforted in his last moments. Especially since Reaper didn't mind dying if it meant Treech got to live. And in the end, his motivation to keep going is entirely selfless. Even when he doesn't think he can handle living anymore, he keeps going for his family and for the other tributes. No matter how much Treech self-depricates, he proves himself wrong all throughout the story. I'll cap this post here because uhm... This is a lot, and although I could talk/type about this for ages I do have a sense of when a post gets too long, but as a nice little bonus gift have this cut piece of dialogue that I didn't feel fit quite right into the story, it's right after Treech tells Reaper about his late night sneaking and stealing with his friends:

"One time we defaced the peacekeeper barracks while we were at it.”

“Are you really admitting this on live camera?”

“Oh fuck uhm… Whoops? D’you think they can hear our conversation clearly?”

Against his slightly delusional hopes, Reaper nodded with a certainty that was impossible to go against. Even when, a second later, he suddenly looked a lot less certain for some reason. Looking around slightly dazedly, Treech searched for a little bit before his eyes fell over the camera.

“H-Hey uhm… hey mom, and dad. I don’t know if you’re, like, watching but… Sorry about that. And sorry for worrying you.” He looked away from the camera for a second, contemplating the pros and cons of doubling down, before deciding this was as good a time as any to have a bout of teenage rebellion. “In my defense- The peacekeepers that caught us thought it was hilarious.”

“You were caught?!”

When he turned back to Reaper, he couldn’t help but feel slightly sheepish at the worried and exasperated look. Kind of like the look of a scolding parent, but with some confusion mixed in as a reminder that the other was also a kid who knew what standard peacekeeper behavior was like.

“Ha, yeah, when we were almost finished. Technically they didn’t catch me, but I came out of my hiding spot once I realized they weren’t gonna shoot us on the spot. Solidarity with my buddies and all that.”

“I can’t believe they let you all get away with that!” Reaper exclaimed, with a voice that made it sound like he was having an actual crisis.

“Well this was in the Fringe... It’s not like we were writing anything bad. Call it street-art in an… intentionally unfortunate place.” He smirked slyly. It melted off his face quickly though. “We only did it because we knew who was in those barracks. They don’t mind our antics. If anything, they found it even funnier than we did. If we’d tried it with anyone else…”

“You’re even ballsier than I thought you were. Won’t any of you get in trouble back home since you’re saying this?”

8 notes · View notes