Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Most of us had originally assumed that Wiress became Nuts due to the circumstances of her Games, or at least partially because of that. We learn that instead, she incurs this condition via torture for helping Haymitch with his arena hacking attempt. While this adds to her backstory and connects her to the later rebellion in Catching Fire, the trauma of her Games should not have been minimized in favor of the squeaky-clean image her arena experience conjures.

Haymitch begins with this observation:

How can a girl who follows light beams help me anyway? How can a girl who left the arena without a scratch teach me how to protect myself? How can a girl who has fought no one, killed no one, mentored no one, mentor me? She can’t, that’s all.

Speaking of appearances, controlling the narrative, and propaganda: subverting the notion that Wiress is unqualified as a mentor and that we (Haymitch) can understand anything of the substance of someone’s Games via the curated version aired by the Capitol could have been an excellent opportunity to reiterate the major themes of this book. The suggestion that she suffered more and accomplished more than the editors allowed Panem to witness would have been perfect foreshadowing to the situation that Haymitch will later find himself in. 

The conversation between them could have played out something like this:

“What do you remember of my Games?” she asks.

I tell her about her act with the mirrors. 

She listens and offers a slight nod. “Appearances aren’t everything, Haymitch. Remember that.”

We would then be left, throughout her time with the tributes, to wonder what it is that she really faced in her arena, offering foreshadowing for the differential between Haymitch’s reality in his Games and the crafted story that Panem witnesses. After all, Wiress’s mirror arena is a literal metaphor for the idea of misleading appearances.

However, in opposition to the tone of the original series, (and a series, no less, that has gone to great lengths to be upfront about victor trauma and PTSD) Sunrise on the Reaping really downplayed that nuance and obliterated any parallel there could have been between the lie of Haymitch’s Games and the lie of Wiress’s. 

In her arena, Wiress essentially rode her Games out unharmed with no direct participation and no meaningful trauma, other than the passive trauma of being in the arena at all and watching/hearing people die around her. And sure, while the structure of her arena is a fascinating idea, and her exploiting a loophole in the design by approaching it like a puzzle fits her character, this ought to have been developed into something more substantial. An opportunity to demonstrate that not all violence is physical, that not all deaths are perpetrated by “shedding blood,” that trauma comes in many forms. Nope. 

Sunrise on the Reaping chooses instead to emphasize her innocence and harmlessness; to compare her to the doves within the Newcomers (which is mostly comprised of people with strengths and disadvantages like hers), to reassure us that the weak, innocent, and sweet can sometimes prosper. And while that’s a heartwarming message, it’s not The Hunger Games. It feels cheap, a cop out. 

In other words, it’s an easy shorthand for how we’re meant to view the good guys and the bad guys. Compare this to the one-dimensionality of Panache, the ruthlessness of Silka. The Careers are unequivocally positioned as despicable, the loathsome cruel tributes who deserve to die. Not Wiress, or the Newcomer doves. They wouldn’t harm a fly and are therefore unquestionably good.

Another aspect I find troubling about this portrayal is that, given that Wiress is strongly coded as neurodivergent, it plays into the disability stereotype wherein such characters are depicted as childlike, innocent, and pure. Whether you interpret her as disabled through her torture trauma or inherently neurodivergent from birth, she should be capable of making the same moral calculations as everyone else. Per her description in the books, there’s something about Wiress that makes people inherently uncomfortable (certainly in universe, if not in the readers). And this innocence is an attempt to offset that, an attempt to make her more palatable, at the expense of her truth. We’ll accept Wiress’s off-putting, bizarre nature only if we get the palate cleanser of her immaculacy. And this, to me, is a tragic reduction of her personhood.

Don’t take this as me saying I expected more gore from her Games. Absolutely not. I envisioned her much the way she was portrayed in Sunrise on the Reaping, and her arena itself was fascinating. But she deserves respect and dignity that I do not feel the narrative affords her by flattening her into a token of purity. I can imagine there are many people who connect to this image of her moral impeccability, but again, it denies her complexity and reduces her to an ideal rather than a full human being facing the most horrific of circumstances as so well illustrated by Katniss. It suggests that, were she to have paid admittance to the brotherhood of blood the way the other victors had, she would somehow be stained in character. Why does she get this treatment when no one else, not even Rue, is denied moral agency in this way? Would it make her a lesser person, a bad person, if she’d had to make some difficult choices in her arena? 

The series has always emphasized moral grayness, on doing what has to be done, even when it’s not in the character’s nature. It’s one of the themes I connected to the most strongly. We trust that Katniss and everyone else in the rebellion are good people fighting on the right side even though they have a kill count. That’s part of the nuance. It drives Katniss’s internal battle. In every sense, the victors must contend with what they had to do in their respective arenas. And while not all of them were brutal killers, and some of course survived due to luck, chance, or the circumstances of their specific arena, they all carry trauma from the Games’ central dynamic: kill or be killed.

Take this quote in Mockingjay:

I remember something I don’t like to think about. In preparation for the Quell, I saw a tape where Beetee, who was still a boy, connected two wires that electrocuted a pack of kids who were hunting him. The convulsing bodies, the grotesque expressions. Beetee, in the moments that led up to his victory in those long-ago Hunger Games, watched the others die. Not his fault. Only self-defense. We were all acting only in self-defense…

In Sunrise on the Reaping we lose so much of that. The Newcomers are uncorrupted doves, the bad guys are savage and despicable. (Some in-depth character development that we get to enjoy comes in the form of Maysilee and Wyatt, and that’s an example of how people are neither good nor bad, just complex products of their circumstances. Why didn’t the rest of the cast get this treatment?)

Back to Haymitch’s observation of Wiress as a useless mentor. He raises an important question: what good can she be as a mentor if she didn’t actually do anything? She did not pay admittance like the rest of the victors. She can’t understand the mechanics of the Games as they are intended to be played because she didn’t really participate in them. But what she actually did was use the arena as a weapon itself, a parallel to what Haymitch (unintentionally) does with Silka at the end of his Games. A clear and palpable parallel that was dropped in favor of portraying her as a dove. But she can be a good person and also morally complex, I argue. She did what she did in her arena because she had to. Because they all had to. 

When the field cleared, it was down to Wiress and a boy from District 6. Wiress finally stood up, revealing herself, and the boy leaped for what he thought was her, cracked his head, and drowned in the lake.

She knew both how her opponent would react and what would happen to him when she made herself visible, that he would die trying to reach her because he did not understand the structure of the arena as she did. And while she didn’t “shed a drop of blood” in the conventional sense, using the mechanics of the arena against an opponent still counts. 

Then we have this scene:

“No!” cuts in Wiress. “Don’t underrate yourself, Wyatt. No other tribute can do what you just did. Play up how intelligence matters. Reference me. Say Wiress won the Games last year without shedding a drop of blood. Brains matter.”

Do brains matter? Wyatt, someone whose intellect was genuinely valuable, is one of the first we lose. So what is the message here, really?

Her dialogue is meant to offer hope to the Newcomers alliance by being proof that you don’t have to be vicious to win. Part of the issue with the underdog tributes (subverted by Katniss) is their unwillingness and unpreparedness to kill, which was certainly true of Wiress regardless of the outcome of her Games. But given that we know this alliance will fail and that all of these people will die, there’s little suspense in wondering whether brains or kindness will matter enough to get them a win. We know better. Because the Games will continue after this one, and do so conventionally, the message falls flat. Indeed, as Haymitch reflects:

I think back to our conversation in the kitchen, when I said I wanted to outsmart the machine and make the Capitol look stupid. Now that just seems like an empty gesture. Wiress spent a whole Games doing that, far better than I ever could, and what did it get us?

However, Wiress's Games illustrate the possibility of using the arena itself as a weapon, as Haymitch ends up doing in his own. Sunrise on the Reaping would have been stronger if it had accentuated that parallel rather than imposing the moral parallel of Wiress’s purity and innocence with that of the Newcomers. Haymitch, while assuming irrelevancy on her part at first, could have been given the opportunity to see how wrong he was in judging the way her Games had appeared effortless. Her trauma need not have been whitewashed by her supposed virtue because of the way she appeared not to have to lift a finger to win. 

Might we say that, in today’s times, “painting the poster” of the important themes within Sunrise on the Reaping requires the sacrifice of complex characterization? We’re in a very polarized culture; US society in particular reflects a skewed, binary view of morality and goodness. We are funneled from one extreme to another because this is what drives engagement on the social media platforms we’ve come to depend on. Some might argue that Collins’s writing of Wiress, the Newcomers, and the Careers in Sunrise on the Reaping makes it accessible for today’s readers, who expect explicit divisions regarding character morality. But is that a sacrifice she ought to have made? Does making the narrative more “accessible” by forcing a moral dichotomy craft our world as it exists right now into a more thoughtful place? Should we be left as the districts are, pitting ourselves against the ugliness of the "bad" tributes in favor of the most sympathetic? Could this book instead have been an opportunity to remind us that all victors are scarred, and all victors are victims? No one comes out of that process as pure as the driven snow.

I’ll leave us with one final thought:

“You just remember who the enemy is,” Haymitch tells me. “That’s all. Now go on. Get out of here.”