Postcard Holiday

Memoirs of a Fan | The Hunger Games (Part 1)

Katniss Everdeen flashes the three-finger salute at the camera while local audiences in the districts watch on a screen Scene from The Hunger Games (2012). Taken from Filmgrab.

Part 1: A Tribute to Our Tributes

If you hung out on the Hunger Games archive on FanFiction.Net between 2011 and 2018, chances are you've seen at least one SYOT. For those who haven't heard of it, "SYOT" is an acronym for Submit Your Own Tribute. Readers submit their own characters, and the writer makes them fight to the death. Following the rules of the Hunger Games, these characters (the "tributes") must be 12-18 years old. Each of the 12 districts sends one male and one female. That's 24 people.

Imagine the effort.

Some writers tried to spare themselves by designating certain slots as "bloodbaths" who would die on the first day of the Games. They could just be names and ages who wouldn't need to be fleshed out, leaving room for readers to submit more interesting characters. But even then, the writers still juggled about 16 or so POVs, and the majority of SYOTs I read attempted all 24. Add the fact that most stories adopted the books' first person POV, then consider that many of us were of tribute age ourselves...it's a wonder how anyone could finish at all. Yes, many quit (to the despair of those who submitted), and more than a few (including my own) failed to get off the ground. But a lot of them persevered, and I'm happy for them. Never mind for a second that I had no friend group (unlike many of them, who submitted to each other's SYOTs) and mostly existed on the fandom's fringes. They were creative and persistent then, and they still inspire me now.

I Got New Rules, I Count 'Em

Like any fandom, there were conventions that many of us learned to follow. For example, writers posted the submission forms on their profiles to circumvent the site's ban on interactive stories. We copied the forms, filled them out, and sent them via PM—thank goodness for the 8000-character limit! Sometimes, I ran out of characters and needed two PMs to detail everything.

Some writers posted the forms in the first chapter of the story, but only after writing a few paragraphs of "prologue" to try and stay within the rules. This prologue could show the Gamemakers discussing the arena, or the Head Gamemaker talking to the president (Coriolanus Snow, except in alternate timelines or the earliest editions of the Games), or the victor of the previous Games suffering from PTSD. Of course, there were other variations. The important thing was to downplay the interactive aspect, which was why writers discouraged submitting characters via review. I would say they were trying to prevent spoilers as well—isn't it more exciting to not know your competition until you read their POVs?

Another convention was to try and make the tributes fit their districts. The series didn't provide a whole lot of information about life in the rest of Panem, so people extrapolated based on the districts' main industries and wrote guides for those new to the fandom. For example, District 1 produced luxury goods and sent tributes named Marvel and Glimmer (The Hunger Games) and Gloss and Cashmere (Catching Fire). People saw that and read the guides, so they sent District 1 tributes named Shimmer and Glitter and Diamond. District 8, which produced textiles, had a side character named Twill in Catching Fire. Cue District 8 tributes named Lacey. Not surprisingly, many people took the same lessons from the guides, so others complained that those names were becoming cliché.

The impatience with clichés extended to the personalities of tributes. Writers told readers not to send clones of Katniss (hunters, those who volunteered for younger siblings or other children). They also disapproved of cloning other canon tributes, though to a lesser extent (in my opinion) than the Katniss clones. Over time, the disapproval covered common tropes in SYOT characters, like geniuses from District 3 (the main industry is technology). There was always a bit of an arms race to be original. This was especially true for SYOTs by the most popular writers, who could afford to choose their favorite submissions instead of taking them on a first-come, first-served basis.

Once a tribute has been accepted, his or her submitter would do well to follow the story and leave semi-regular reviews. Doing this will not guarantee victory, but some writers will kill a character early if they believe that the submitter isn't reading. Finally, if your tribute dies in an SYOT, it's generally bad form to submit him or her to another. At least change enough details so it's not so obvious—or better yet, make a new one. Remember the arms race to be original.

"Not Very Bright"

In some ways, joining SYOTs was good practice for creating fictional characters—and by extension, writing. What is the main industry of this kid's home district? How would this character's family life be affected by the working conditions of his or her parents? What sort of weapon would a poor 12-year-old pick up in training, and how would he or she face an 18-year-old who had trained for the Games since childhood? It makes sense to assume that a tribute's traits would flow out of his or her backstory, given how people in real life are shaped by their experiences in early childhood. Apart from the guides for tribute names, there were also those dedicated to character details.

But many of us were kids ourselves, and like kids everywhere, we made mistakes. One girl that I submitted a character to once posted a character detail guide that included average weights by one's age and sex. In a review, someone pointed out that district kids would be underweight and malnourished from their horrible living conditions. Point taken. But the reviewer proceeded to say that most people in the fandom were "not very bright." It seemed a bit excessive to me, considering that the girl who made the guide wasn't bashing anyone or writing at My Immortal levels of bad. She ended up deleting it.

(On a side note, the reviewer ended up getting a thread on Kiwifarms because of her habit of leaving long angry comments on fanfiction she didn't like. That was in 2015. I checked her profile on FFN and it seems that she's moved on to AO3. Look, it's normal to hate some things, but posting thousand-word rants on a 13-year-old's gay fanfic sounds like a huge waste of time and effort. Just roll your eyes and look at something that you actually like).

There were also those who knew little about human psychology. Most of us were old enough to remember being 12, but some of the 12-year-old tributes acted more like younger children. Yet another writer called this out, along with the tendency of tributes to act "too calmly" or "too rationally" for teenagers in a death match. Looking back, many of these people made really good points. We knew that all these things were traumatic—growing up poor in a dictatorship, being forcibly ripped from one's family, having to kill fellow kids for an audience, and then drowning one's guilt in addiction and bitterness. But we didn't grasp the full extent until we had gotten older and either experienced great suffering or known people who did. Suddenly, they weren't just words on a page—and perhaps we were sick because we once thought of it that way.

That's probably how it is when we're young. We don't realize just how bad it is until we're far away from it.

Wonderland

It's been years since I submitted my last tribute. Many of the people who were around at the time have graduated from high school and college, gotten jobs and significant others, and moved on from the fandom and fanfiction writing. SYOTs still exist on FFN, but I don't know how active the readers are. Most of fandom seems to have moved to AO3, which has more of a shipping emphasis. Do they even have a private messaging feature?

My reading habits have drifted back to original fiction and nonfiction—just like before I discovered fandom and the fun of playing in someone else's universe. Elsewhere on the Internet, people have talked about how some modern authors started out as fanfic writers. I wouldn't be surprised if someone out there is ranting that former fanfic writers are ruining English literature. If Shakespeare ever reincarnates, we probably won't find him on FFN.

But a writer doesn't need to be Shakespeare to be loved.

One of the first SYOTs that I read to the end was called The Twisted Wonderland. A fictional version of the 18th Hunger Games, it starts when a Gamemaker named Louise Carroll makes an arena based on Alice in Wonderland, which she reads as a bedtime story to her daughter, Lorraine. The first chapter alone flies in the face of canon:

Some of the characters also fell into types that later fans would consider cliché (granted, the story first appeared in 2012, so maybe they weren't clichés yet). For example, the District 2 girl volunteered for her little sister. The District 1 girl was a teenage mother, and there were two sets of siblings. At least two boys seemed to have mental disorders. One 12-year-old girl volunteered for the Games to get away from the babysitter she hated. I wouldn't call her cliché exactly, but given psychology, she's unusual.

This was certainly not high literature. And yet...I was attached to it.

I loved the idea of a Wonderland-themed arena. The tributes were all fun to read about in their own ways, and I really did feel sad when they died, especially since many made friends with each other. Some even fell in love or something close to it. Chapter 40 consisted of three short stories that showed the dead tributes in the afterlife. Fans had written them for a contest that the author hosted. I can see how some people might consider that cheesy, but I was so attached to the characters that I liked seeing them again. Even now, that story will always hold a little place in my heart.

A writer doesn't need to be Shakespeare to be loved—and a person doesn't need to be perfect to be loved.

Life would be so much easier if we could all believe that last part.