#traumatising snow since the 10th games

[nainz7]

You'll see my face in every place

[noonemonitorsmyscreentime]

What I think is kind of interesting is that if Dean Casca Highbottom, seeing exactly how good of a student Young Coriolanus Snow was, had taken the boy under his wing instead of despising him and trying to get revenge on a boy that never knew his father (and who only had of his father the words of others about the great man that he was), he might have had a good helping hand in stopping the games he so deeply despised.

It would have been, at the same time, quite a revenge on Crassus Snow to use his son to dismantle the Games the man helped implement. Not only that, but it would have offered young Coryo a person to depend on during his most formative years where he had to grow up under the immense pressure of keeping up appearances, taking care of an ailing grandmother and fighting everyday to keep himself and his family fed.

What Casca failed to realise during the 10th Games was that there weren't 24 tributes, but 25. Snow was fighting for survival just as much as the rest; of course, with the caveat that Snow was never in danger of losing his life. But, for a boy who had for all his life to survive instead of to live, those two might have been the same thing. In saving himself, Coryo would also save Tigris and his grandmother, while all the other tributes were saving mosty themselves since they would be going home with nothing to show for winning the games other than their lives and some (crippling in some cases) trauma.

Maybe things would have played out differently, maybe not, but we have seen time and time again through all four of the Hunger Games books, the power of a kind gesture: Peeta with the bread, Rue healing Katniss, Katniss singing to Rue, Mags sacrificing herself, Boggs treating Katniss like a young traumatised girl when no one else did. Who knows if Snow (and, in turn, the rest of Panem) wouldn't have benefited from it?

[witchofthemidlands]

It is 1 am & I am having thoughts about Mags Flanagan. Everything about her character just absolutely floors me. You have an 80 year old lady, the once 16 year old victor of the 11th Hunger Games (which means she probably absolutely saw the banned 10th Hunger Games 👀 & has been around since the beginning of Snow's fuckery & even the games themselves) at 16 years old, she experiences the harrowing horrors every tribute faces & at 17 becomes a permanent mentor to every District 4 tribute that will have to face The Games until the day she dies. She mentors teen after teen, child after child. She tries, she does everything she can to help them prepare & even sees some of them win. She mentors one teen, a child of 14 & sees them through the games & he does it, Finnick Odair becomes the winner of the 65th Hunger Games. She mentors & sees 18 year old Annie Cresta become the winner of the 70th Hunger Games & she sees how that teenager was left traumatised & so, when the Quarter Quell is unleashed & Annie's name is reaped, Mags volunteers because she was her mentor. Annie went through that once & Mags could not let her do it again. Honestly I think there could have been a dozen female victors for District 4 & Mags still would have volunteered for ANY of them because she had already gotten them through it once & couldn't even begin to imagine letting them face the Games again. She couldn't do anything to save the men she had mentored but she could volunteer for the women but even then Mags goes back into those games for the first time since she was 16 as a tribute again, this time at the age of 80 with a 24 year old, an adult, Finnick but when she walks into that fog to sacrifice herself, she is Mags Flanagan, the mentor, the same mentor who helped that 14 year old boy through the 65th Hunger Games & who she hopes can somehow find a way to survive the 75th.