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Of all the books, Catching Fire is my favorite, so I'm almost vibrating with excitement over the release of a new trailer yesterday at San Diego Comic Con, and the chance to see our named victors in their arena costumes.

Some thoughts I had watching the new trailer:

* The Victor's Village is smaller than I expected, and the houses are much grander than I imagined. Kind of a McMansion development that didn't think hard enough about green space. So, from that perspective, it probably is the Village the Capitol would build.

* The scenes of the Hob burning are very dramatic! What's just an off-screen moment in the book is going to be a very dramatic sequence. I love that the film adaptation gives us the chance to see things outside of Katniss's perspective, and I'm really looking forward to more of these moments.

* That shot of the crowd surging forward during the tour (at 0:53)... is that District 3? Oh, please, let it be so! (Alternately, I'm guessing it's District 5, which I would also not mind seeing.)

* Is it just my imagination, or do the shots of the Capitol look bigger and broader than those used in The Hunger Games? I don't expect Catching Fire has a substantially bigger budget (I think Lionsgate expected THG to be a hit and funded accordingly), so I'm not sure why that would be.

* The look between Effie and Katniss at 1:16 is exquisite.

* OMG, the interview set! Am I the only one tortured by the fact that all the victors are there, but the screen size/resolution is too small to get real detail? (Why does District 6 look like they've escaped from the Matrix?)

* The actresses playing Enobaria and Johanna look fantastic. Not quite what I imagined (I pictured Enobaria with darker skin and a buzzcut), but true threats.

* Following Katniss's lift out of the stockyard into the arena could not be more breathtaking.

The victor posters were originally distributed separately to various websites, but Empire Online has posted all of them. The casting of District 3 is particularly important to me (headcanon, I haz it). I am really pleased with the choice of accomplished character actors Amanda Plummer and Jeffrey Wright as Wiress and Beetee. Plummer seems especially right to me, given the niche she's carved out for herself playing the tiny, soft-spoken women with the crazy eyes (if you have the opportunity, check out her Emmy-winning guest shot on The Outer Limits, "A Stitch in Time").

Re: District Three Headcanon, Part the Third

Date: 2013-08-23 12:34 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lorata.livejournal.com
Ha now I'm thinking about all the Avengers Tower fanfic but I can totally see it like that. Asia has a lot of high-rise buildings with gardens (my sister lives in Taiwan and has a rooftop garden!) so I totally see that.

The culture in D3 may not be big on emotional expressiveness, but if you can rationalize an emotional need as an operational efficiency, it’s perfectly acceptable.

I love this, by the way. Loooooove.

....... huh I hadn't considered the gender disparity stuff but I like that! And I'm all for more ladies in the victor circles, seriously. and lololol Beetee's harem

Yeeeeeah uh I don't see D3's victors being all that celebrated either -- I don't see ANY victors being real heroes outside the Career districts, honestly, but in D3 where they prize intellectualism and all that over most things, I can definitely see how it would come off even worse. Maybe it's just that I like reading fic where the victors/mentors stick together because only they understand each other, but I can't imagine a lot of them have a good time when they go home. Many many many people would rather have a martyr than a victor I think, even if they don't realize it until the victor comes home and suddenly their friend/brother/cousin/girlfriend has blood all over their hands.

BRB CRYING OVER BEETEE FINDING WIRESS' VIDEO LOGS IN HER LAB AFTER THE REBELLION

CRYING FOREVER

FOREVER

FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

(Wiress having a dark labyrinthine Arena is my personal headcanon too)

Re: District Three Headcanon, Part the Third

Date: 2013-08-25 05:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] penfold-x.livejournal.com
I love this, by the way. Loooooove.

Hee! Thank you! :D


....... huh I hadn't considered the gender disparity stuff but I like that! And I'm all for more ladies in the victor circles, seriously. and lololol Beetee's harem

Have you, by any chance, diagramed out the 59 pre-Quell victors are distributed among the districts in your universe? I’d enjoy seeing your breakout.

Maybe it's just that I like reading fic where the victors/mentors stick together because only they understand each other, but I can't imagine a lot of them have a good time when they go home. Many many many people would rather have a martyr than a victor I think, even if they don't realize it until the victor comes home and suddenly their friend/brother/cousin/girlfriend has blood all over their hands.

I haven’t given a lot of thought to the other non-career district reactions, but I think there’s a lot to what you’re saying. Even if a non-career district were prepared to celebrate a victor as a hero, I can see a lot of them being so messed up from their arena experience that they might either actively shun the label (e.g., I think Johanna wants absolutely nothing to do with any celebration of her experience) or behave in ways that make it hard to celebrate them (e.g., the morphlings).

BRB CRYING OVER BEETEE FINDING WIRESS' VIDEO LOGS IN HER LAB AFTER THE REBELLION

Sweet, sweet revenge!

But seriously, yeah, that’s exactly where I’m going with that. In headcanon land, Beetee has sky-drived all the lab tapes. Hundreds of hours worth, which he listens to when he’s trying to fall asleep, or just needs to be with Wiress or his mentor (my D3 OV1). There are also tapes of fun times, like the surprise cake they baked to present his mentor on her 70th birthday, the time Beetee accidentally set his labcoat on fire (which, of course, was only funny for him in retrospect, when he could hear Wiress’s color commentary pompously regurgitating the standard National Science Acadmey speech about ‘the duty of the superior alpha class to use their gifts for the glory of Panem’), or the time his mentor fell asleep over an experiment and the other victors gleefully decorated her with toilet paper, spare wire and a string of LEDs.

Um, I have probably way more of this type of thing than I ought. My first read of Mockingjay, I got a little worried when Finnick was killed almost off-screen and without a lot of fanfare. When Prim died, I threw the book across the room. Eventually I hacked my way through the last couple of chapters, and was disappointed but no longer surprised when Beetee quietly announces that all but seven of the victors are dead. At that point, I can sort of understand why Haymitch wanders off to drink himself to death while Katniss nearly dies of grief, except that he moved heaven and earth to save her in the 74th Games and the Rebellion, so… yeah, I got nothing. The end of Mockingjay seems to be the ritual stripping away of any hope for Katniss beyond Peeta. Maybe that’s realistic, but, it’s just not the type of story I enjoy.

After a few months, when I found myself wanting to re-read the books but put off by the last chapters, I decided that someone who enjoys fanfic as much as I do should just re-write the ending in my head. Working backwards from that, I somehow wound up with a story that starts at Beetee’s reaping and sprawls forward from there. Oops. And, to be honest, although I’m a huge fan of post-apocalyptic stories/fic generally, the way the victors relate to each other is far and away the most interesting part of the HG universe for me, so I find myself regularly putting off plot development to imagine anecdotes of friendship/bonding between victors. But if wanting my coerced and damaged child killers to be one big happy family is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right.

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