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Player Information
Player name: trace
Contact: yep
Are you over 18: yep
Characters in The Box Already: yep

Character Information
Character Name: katniss everdeen
Canon: the hunger games
Canon Point: Catching Fire, end of Chapter 26 (shooting the forcefield)
History: her wiki page. note that i'm taking her characterization/history from the books rather than the movies (not that they're horribly different - the books just have more, is all).

Personality:

OVERVIEW

Katniss Everdeen is a girl built entirely on necessity and the consequences thereof. 'I act or die,' she once thinks to herself in the first set of Games she's forced to take part in, and though it really just referred to that particular situation, it's more or less her life in four words.

When her sister Primrose was drawn as District 12's next female tribute, it flung Katniss's life into a whirlwind of politics and deceit and killing for sport, and her experiences since then have definitely impacted her - some for the better, most for the worse - as have the people she's known along the way.



SURVIVALIST & DETERMINATION

'Besides, it isn't in my nature to go down without a fight, even when things seem insurmountable.' It's an offhanded thought as she reassures Prim in the wake of volunteering as tribute, but it shows that even from the start, Katniss is a survivor. Which makes sense, really. Her father died in a mining accident when she was just 11, and her mother essentially shut down into a grief-stricken catatonia, so before she was even old enough to have her name in the reaping pool, Katniss was forced to take care of their family almost entirely by herself. And damn it, she did. It was difficult, especially in the few months between the cut-off of her mother's grieving pay and the day a dandelion in the schoolyard reminded her of the bounty awaiting them outside of the fence. In fact, she likely wouldn't have made it despite her best efforts, if it weren't for the help of the baker's son - when, after digging through trash bins all day for food that only her family would be desperate enough to eat, she finally collapsed against a tree with intent to starve to death right then and there, he managed to subtly toss her two loaves of burnt bread. (Which was bad enough without contemplating the possibility that he burnt it and faced a beating just to be able to feed her. As is common for those who live on next to nothing, Katniss can't stand to be in someone's debt.)

Shortly after that, though, she took to the woods. And it was hard work, sure, but even more than that it was dangerous work, between the wild animals and the risk of getting caught slipping out and poaching. But it was worth it. From then onward, she could keep her family alive. But they never did achieve any kind of prosperity. Even as Katniss grew more and more skilled with a bow, learned more snares, found more plants which could be eaten or used in her mother's medicine, they were still just barely better-off than those worthy of starvation. She still was vehemently against any kind of 'waste of food', like Buttercup, the hideous kitten Prim fell in love with and raised for herself. Literally, Katniss tried to drown him. The last thing she needed was another mouth to feed. This kneejerk disgust at all forms of waste is still absolutely intact despite the fact that her family has spent quite a few months on a Victor's pay, enough to feed themselves and even quite a few others easily. When she and Peeta go to the Capitol a second time, there's a feast at President Snow's mansion, and she wants to try everything but forces Peeta to eat the rest of each thing she's tried, because 'the idea of throwing away food, as I see so many people doing so casually, is abhorrent to me'. It's pretty much the cardinal sin, in her book. Let's not even get started on the pink liquid used to vomit recreationally so that Capitol feast-goers would have room for more. Even Peeta was disgusted by that one, and he never quite knew starvation like Katniss did.

Before the Games, Katniss really didn't much care about anything that didn't help those she cared about survive. 'I know there must be more than they’re telling us, an actual account of what happened during the rebellion, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it. Whatever the truth is, I don’t see how it will help me get food on the table.' Relatedly, there was less than no time for hobbies of any kind. She honestly can't imagine doing something simply for recreation, as shown when she's supposed to choose a Victor's talent to work on and they were largely too pointless for Katniss to find it in her to care. Every skill she really has, at this point, was learned in some form of survival situation. Take her long list of food-gathering skills (archery, trapping/snares, fishing, knowledge of plants, etc) as a perfect example. She also knows how to barter well, and to maintain good trade relations among a Black Market sort of trading ring. In contrast, things like art or writing or music are beyond her. Rue, the District 11 tribute in her first arena, claims that music is her absolute favorite thing, and it bewilders Katniss a bit. “Music?” I say. In our world, music ranks somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness. At least a rainbow gives you a tip about the weather.

Meanwhile, even during her stints in the Capitol - a place where not a single individual can even begin to comprehend necessity - she can't help but think of things in survivalist terms. She looks at the feast for dinner and mentally dissects it, thinks of how to recreate it with what District 12 had available. Where to get ahold of each of the supplies. How many days of hunting she and Gale would have to trade to afford even a single plateful of this feast-substitute, one which even still pales in comparison to the one before her.

Katniss looks at others through 'survivalist goggles', so to speak. She's slow to trust, and once that trust is broken, she's even slower to forgive. And though she has an increasing number of people that she cares about as the first two books go on, no matter who she cares about, her first reflex is always always always to think about herself. At first, she doesn't even quite realize it. Then, she feels an increasing amount of shame each time she catches it. For an example, up on the roof the night before the first arena, she tells Peeta she couldn't turn her mind off. He asks if she's thinking about her family, and she admits that she isn't - she's just thinking about the arena tomorrow. As another example, they end up having to flee from a pack of wolf-like "muttations", and... 'Peeta! My hands have just landed on the metal at the pointed tail of the Cornucopia when I remember I’m part of a team. He’s about fifteen yards behind me, hobbling as fast as he can, but the mutts are closing in on him fast. I send an arrow into the pack and one goes down, but there are plenty to take its place.' She took off running and only belatedly thought about Peeta, the boy she was so adamant not to lose. And as an even more extreme example, when the two-victor rule is rescinded and Peeta goes to draw his knife to throw it into the lake in refusal, she instantly assumes he's going to attack her and has an arrow trained on his heart in a split second. As soon as she realizes she's wrong, she drops her weapons and her face burns with shame. By the second book, that reflex has finally passed as far as Peeta's concerned, but he and her own family are quite possibly the only exceptions.

Let's not forget her determination. This, in a lot of ways, ties into her survival - how she refuses to go down without a fight, refuses even to go down at all unless it's her own conscious choice. But in Katniss's mind, there's almost no such thing as impossible or inevitable when she sets her mind to it. A huge example is at the end of their first Games, when she and Peeta find out there can only be one victor and she adamantly refuses to kill him just like he won't kill her. There's no concept of a 'no-win scenario' for her in that moment. She absolutely has to find a way to 'win', to get them both out. That's all there is to it. Even if it means risking the both of them dying. Even if it means setting in motion what later becomes a full-blown rebellion against the Capitol, though she doesn't realize it at the time.

Her determination (or obstinance, more like) shines through in plenty of other scenarios, from her ability to legitimately empty herself of sentiment for those she cares about in the name of accomplishing a goal, to even things so simple as the sheer length of bullshit she can physically endure (starvation, dehydration, pain, etc) before she lets herself drop. When it comes down to it, if Katniss wants to do something, you'd better have Peeta present an extremely compelling rationale on why she shouldn't, because otherwise she's making it happen even if she has to fight every single one of you to do it.

'I really think I stand a chance of doing it now. Winning. It’s not just having the arrows or outsmarting the Careers a few times. Something happened when I was holding Rue’s hand, watching the life drain out of her. Now I am determined to avenge her, to make her loss unforgettable, and I can only do that by winning and thereby making myself unforgettable.'




STRAIGHTFORWARD & CLOSED-OFF

While she isn't horribly forthcoming, what you see still manages to be pretty much exactly what you get, with her. She's godawful at lying, a fact that both she and Peeta bring up at different points, and only manages to be good at acting once she's in the Capitol and her life depends on it. By the second Games, she's actually not half bad at faking a smile or a sweet tone, though by then they've also given up the personable act either way, opting instead for 'dangerous and unforgiving' (which Katniss says is 'finally something she's good at').

At the start of the books, the world is almost entirely made up of black and white to her, so to speak. Something's either good or it isn't. Necessary or useless. Right or wrong. She never wants to have kids because they could one day get reaped and she can't fathom a worldview in which it's 'worth it', and she even snaps at Gale for posing a what-if about it. Really, she's downright awful at what-ifs for this reason - there is no 'what if', it either is or it isn't and if it isn't there's no use thinking about it. Also, before the Games, Gale tries to say that hunting other Tributes should be just like hunting game if she can forget they're people. She thinks, 'The awful thing is that if I can forget they’re people, it will be no different at all.' When she's thrust into the Games, though, things suddenly begin to exist in shades of grey. Cinna quickly proves that not all Capitol citizens are bad, as an early example. Then in the arena, she begins to falter on the 'these Tributes aren't people, they're simply enemies and targets' philosophy that allowed her to fight. These and many more shades of grey are a struggle for her, because rather than accept them for what they are, her mind at first tries pretty hard to classify them as either black or white themselves.

Katniss doesn't beat around the bush. Like, at all. When Haymitch asks if she can hit anything with her knife besides the table she just stabbed in a fit of frustration, she doesn't answer in words, instead snagging the knife and in one smooth movement throwing it at the wall, where it sticks in a seam between two boards. She doesn't mince words, either, even with those she likes. As kind as she tries to be to Peeta in the last stretch of their first arena, suggesting they take their shoes off in order for 'the both of them' to step lighter despite that it's only him, she turns right around and almost directly tells him that if she leaves him alone, Cato will come and kill him. As if he doesn't stand a chance without her protection, which might have been true in his condition but it also wasn't the best thing to say.

The one thing that really trips Katniss up, as it turns out, is honest-to-god emotion. Like, it's funny because she thinks she understands things perfectly, the motivations of others and how she's meant to feel about them, but into her life marches Peeta Mellark. And though Primrose is by far the one she loves most in this world, her love for Prim and Prim's love for Katniss right back are an inescapable fact of life and hardly count as sentiments in her mind. Peeta, on the other hand, really begins to confuse what she knows about the world. He begins to say and do things which have no rational gain to be had. Take, for example, how unfathomable it is to her that he intentionally burnt the bread to save her from starving that day. In her mind, he clearly just made a mistake and happened to throw her that mistake rather than the pigs, and that in itself was enough to owe him for in a way which she couldn't repay. Really, it's not just Peeta, either. Whenever anyone goes out of their way to care for her, she's always confused as to why. After throwing a frustrated fit and breaking all of the dishes in her quarters in the Captiol, an Avox girl ('Avox' being 'slave whose tongue has been cut out') came to help her clean up. Then, 'She comes back with a damp cloth and wipes my face gently then cleans the blood from a broken plate off my hands. Why is she doing this? Why am I letting her?' She just doesn't get it.

But if you think sentiment trips her up, romantic sentiment messes with her even worse. Which is kind of hilarious, because her survival in the first arena hinges on convincing the masses that she and Peeta are madly in love. But even after all that Peeta did for her in the first arena and the preparation prior, she still ended up asking him why he'd thrown her that bread all those years ago. He tells her she knows why, but she shakes her head. She really and truly doesn't know. Then, for the cameras (at least as far as she knows), she gets Peeta talking about when he supposedly fell for her. He tells the story, complete with all of these details like he's truly starstruck by her, and in her mind she's thinking, 'I’m almost foolishly happy and then confusion sweeps over me. Because we’re supposed to be making up this stuff, playing at being in love, not actually being in love. But Peeta’s story has a ring of truth to it.' She's 100% confused by the fact that aspects sound almost true. It legit doesn't even occur to her that he's in love with her for real. But that's almost for the better, when you look at how shitty she is at knowing how to respond to romantic intent. When he finds out some of her romantic behavior was just for show, he asks how much, and she says that she doesn't know. That the closer they get to District 12, the more confused she gets. He immediately goes cold there, and at once she feels a pang of despair at how she seems to have lost him already. 'I want to tell him (…) That it’s no good loving me because I’m never going to get married anyway and he’d just end up hating me later instead of sooner. That if I do have feelings for him, it doesn’t matter because I’ll never be able to afford the kind of love that leads to a family, to children. And how can he? How can he after what we’ve just been through? I also want to tell him how much I already miss him. But that wouldn’t be fair on my part.' Even worse than that, though, is when she asks Gale to run away with her after all in Catching Fire. His response is essentially 'hell yes', followed by a mutually overjoyed hug... And then he says he loves her. 'I never see these things coming. They happen too fast. One second, you’re proposing an escape plan and the next… you’re expected to deal with something like this.' She has no idea how to even deal. She says she knows, but when he pulls back, she tries to fix it with, 'You know what you are to me.' He knows, even if she doesn't know for herself. But when he pulls away more, she tries to explain: "Gale, I can’t think about anyone that way now. All I can think about, every day, every waking minute since the day they drew Prim’s name at the reaping is how afraid I am. And there doesn’t seem to be room for anything else." And that right there, really, is a perfect summation of Katniss's limited ability to love another. She even calls it that later in introspection, something about 'loving him, even if it's only in the limited way I can manage.'

But just as much as Katniss is straightforward, she's also closed-off in a big way. 'I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.' Her emotions, too, are largely under lock and key until she trusts you. From anger (His rages seem pointless to me, although I never say so. It’s not that I don’t agree with him. I do. But what good is yelling about the Capitol in the middle of the woods? It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make things fair. It doesn’t fill our stomachs. In fact, it scares off the nearby game.) to misery (With every camera gleefully trained on Haymitch, I have just enough time to release the small, choked sound in my throat and compose myself.). She's acutely aware, at least through her first set of games, when it is and isn't okay to cry. Not when any of the cameras might see her, but alone in bed at night or under the cover of her hood. The only thing she doesn't tend to keep under wraps is her anger - though more on that later.

A lot of her ability to pretend she doesn't have emotions seems to come from a sense of almost subconscious denial, in the form of rationalizing not having the emotions to start with. Take, for example, her brief distress at seeing Peeta picked as the male tribute the year she volunteered for Prim. '“Why him?” I think. Then I try to convince myself it doesn’t matter. Peeta Mellark and I are not friends. Not even neighbors. We don’t speak. Our only real interaction happened years ago. He’s probably forgotten it. And later, when she's mulling over her confusion at Peeta letting her off the hook from helping him bathe poor drunk Haymitch: 'It’s because he’s being kind. Just as he was kind to give me the bread. The idea pulls me up short. A kind Peeta Mellark is far more dangerous to me than an unkind one. Kind people have a way of working their way inside me and rooting there. And I can’t let Peeta do this. Not where we’re going. So I decide, from this moment on, to have as little possible to do with the baker’s son.' Even later, she blames her companionship with Peeta in their first carriage ride as nerves keeping them from acting sensibly, and her relief at his survival on the fact that rationally, if she herself doesn't win, his winning will benefit her mother and Prim the most. Peeta even calls her on it in their cave during the storm. '“I can see why that day made you happy.” “Well, I knew that goat would be a little gold mine,” I say. “Yes, of course I was referring to that, not the lasting joy you gave the sister you love so much you took her place in the reaping,” says Peeta dryly.'

Relatedly, she rationalizes others' sentiments that exact same way. All through the first arena and the preparation beforehand, every time Peeta was nice to her, it was clearly an attempt to get her guard down so he could kill her easier when the time came. When he made a comment she didn't understand ('She doesn't know the effect she has.'), she immediately assumed it was meant as an insult. When the Avox girl came into her room, Katniss was deep in self-loathing anger, and all she could think about was how years ago she let the Capitol capture that same girl: 'I hate her, too, with her knowing reproachful eyes that call me a coward, a monster, a puppet of the Capitol, both now and then. For her, justice must finally be happening. At least my death will help pay for the life of the boy in the woods.' The girl was thinking nothing of the sort, it was all Katniss projecting.

As a final aspect of being closed-off in general, she's also really shitty at nudity, of all things. I wouldn't even bring it up, except for the sheer number of times she mentions it. Hoping her stylist won't think nudity is the way to go. Assuming later that when he says their costumes will be unforgettable, he means naked and covered in coal dust. Really, she just feels way too exposed with even a shorter skirt than usual, let alone naked itself. But others' nudity bothers her, too. She hesitates for a moment to help a barely-conscious Peeta wash off the mud he used to hide himself because what if he's naked? Later, she gives him a pack to cover himself with so she can wash his undershorts and though he says he doesn't care if she sees him, she's just like "I care, alright??" In the second book, she also gets hella uncomfortable when Finnick first talks to her because he's wearing way too little to be quite so close to her.

Essentially, Katniss's thoughts, feelings, and pretty much every other part of her are hers. She's the one who gets to decide who knows and who doesn't, and it's extremely hard to overcome that even to keep herself alive in the Games by opening up a little in the interviews.



A LITTLE SHIT

Now this is the fun part. It doesn't show up nearly as much in the movies, but oh my god is Katniss just such a shit.

For one, she's belligerent, even to the point of being childish or reckless. For example, when Effie compliments hers and Peeta's table manners and compares them to last year's Twelves who ate like savages, Katniss deliberately eats the rest of the dinner with her fingers and wiped her hands and face on the tablecloth for good measure, just because fuck you. And again after a frustrating training session with Effie, concluding with Katniss kicking her heels off, hiking her skirt up to her thighs (Effie repeatedly said to only lift it to her ankles), and stomping off to eat. These examples are just childish, but it doesn't end there. On their individual platforms at the first arena's countdown, Peeta tries to signal for her to run for the woods as Haymitch instructed. Apparently, he could sense that she was going to make a run for the bow and arrow. Anyway, it distracted her enough that she lost her head-start, and while the movies show her running for a bag as a last-ditch effort, in the books it's plainly stated that she runs for a bag just to defy Peeta. That same defiance shows up later, when she's pinned on her back by Clove: 'I won’t close my eyes. The comment about Rue has filled me with fury, enough fury I think to die with some dignity. As my last act of defiance, I will stare her down as long as I can see, which will probably not be an extended period of time, but I will stare her down, I will not cry out, I will die, in my own small way, undefeated. (…) I work up a mouthful of blood and saliva and spit it in her face. She flushes with rage.'

(As a random tangent of that, it's actually Peeta's own display of defiance in painting Rue for the Gamemakers in Catching Fire that really earns her respect and admiration. Like, she thought plenty well of him before then, but she also thought he was the sort who wouldn't dare color outside the lines, so to speak.)

She's also shown to be vindictive. Things like contemplating how making the Capitol servents on the train deal with drunk and vomiting Haymitch might be a small form of revenge, or how it serves someone right if they get killed by their own stupid mistakes. Relatedly, while she's never outright arrogant, she does have it in her head that she's superior to others in a lot of ways. Not even as something she actively thinks about, but like... When she was going to run for the bow in the first Cornucopia because there was no doubt in her mind that the other tributes could be faster than her. And when another Tribute tries to weather the freezing night by starting a fire, Katniss is disgusted. 'I have to bite my lip not to scream out every foul name I know at the fire starter. What are they thinking? (…) And here I am, a stone’s throw from the biggest idiot in the Games.' She even contemplates killing them herself. 'My instinct has been to flee, not fight. But obviously this person’s a hazard. Stupid people are dangerous.'

Finally, she's outright sassy as fuck. 'One time, my mother told me that I always eat like I’ll never see food again. And I said, “I won’t unless I bring it home.” That shut her up.' Another example from her past is when Gale greeted her on their first meeting with how stealing is punishable by death, and then when he asked to see her bow, she reminded him that stealing is punishable by death. That sass has only multiplied with time. When the Career Tributes have her treed, she puts on a friendly tone and asks how everything is going with them. Then she says, "The air's better up here. Why don't you come on up?" I also like the movie version of this scene, in which the arrows they fire are much closer to hitting her but she still has the nerve to say, "Maybe you should throw the sword." Really, the people she doesn't trust seem to get the brunt of her best sass, as shown by the above and the Quell when Finnick asks how a girl from Twelve knows how to swim and she responds, 'We have a big bathtub.' Honestly though, I'm shocked that her sass hasn't bitten her in the ass so far. She outright tells President Snow, as he prepares to threaten her one-on-one, that the Capitol's position 'must be very fragile, if a handful of berries can bring it down'. It comes out of her mouth before she can think of a reason not to. Whoops.

But aside from those less hostile (relatively) aspects of being a shit, she's actually a shit in the less positive sense as well.

For example, she spends a good portion of the books - of her life in general, it seems like - being angry at someone or another. She hated her mother up until the start of the Games for checking out on the family and making her take care of Prim for so long by herself. She detested Haymitch at first for everything he was, a drunk and (as far as she was concerned) the entire reason why District Twelve never stood a chance. She also finds herself furious at Peeta on a number of occasions, from their disagreement on the roof (after which, 'I spend the rest of the night slipping in and out of a doze, imagining the cutting remarks I will make to Peeta Mellark in the morning. Peeta Mellark. We will see how high and mighty he is when he’s faced with life and death.') to the fury she feels at seeing her bow in the hands of the Career Tributes in the first arena, thanks to Peeta's distraction.

She's also pretty easily annoyed. The list of things that I took note of annoying her includes 'annoyed by Peeta's skill at camo through frosting cakes, and the praise it earns', 'annoyed by what-if scenarios', 'annoyed that Foxface had the brilliant thought to hide in the Cornucopia and Katniss didn't', 'annoyed by self-righteousness', 'annoyed by having to console her prep team over her own impending death', and 'annoyed that the rest of the Quell tributes seem to be laughing at her purity'. Some valid, some less so, but definitely a wide range of things that get under her skin.

Haymitch calls her 'hostile', and though she doesn't see herself quite that way, it's the impression she often gives to others. Much of the time, it's thanks to some form of survival reflex - for example, when she runs into Bonnie and Twill at the cabin by her secret lake, and she orders Bonnie to come around where she can see her despite being extremely rickety on crutches on the slick ground. When it comes down to it, she'd rather be hostile and utterly dislikeable than dead - or being the one who let someone she cares about die.




DAMAGED

I'm gonna start this off by saying that while I try not to slap diagnoses on my characters, both of these came up with credible sources, and I put a lot of research into the symptoms to double-check for myself. For that reason, I'm going to present them here, because they explain a bunch of huge aspects of Katniss's character.

Firstly: POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER.

• "FLASHBACKS" - one of the key signs of PTSD are flashbacks to the traumatic event. While most of the examples I have aren't outright flashbacks in themselves (things like 'I can't help but think about the way Cato sounded just before he died'), there are two instances which are absolutely classified as flashbacks. Firstly, in the books. There's a moment in which Prim lifts up on her toes, arms back, as if she's about to lift into flight, and all of a sudden Katniss doesn't see Prim anymore - she sees Rue, who died in her arms in the arena. Not even juxtaposed over Prim herself, either. It's like Prim is Rue, and it's utterly jarring to Katniss. The second is from the movie: She shoots at some form of wild game, but instead of seeing the game there, all of a sudden she sees Marvel from District 1, her very first kill, take an arrow to the chest. It fucks her up, needless to say.
  
• "AVOIDANCE" - (“Trying to avoid thinking or talking about the traumatic event & avoiding places, activities or people that remind you of the traumatic event”, is the official description.) First and foremost, Katniss spends enough of her time utterly avoiding thinking of the Games that it's jarring when others bring it up - like a reminder that it exists at all. 'If it were up to me, I would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream.' And though she's pretty squeamish in and of itself, her difficulty sticking around when someone's injured also seems to stem from PTSD: 'I got a glimpse of the wound on his thigh, gaping, charred flesh, burned clear down to the bone, before I ran from the house. I went to the woods and hunted the entire day, haunted by the gruesome leg, memories of my father’s death.' It's that last phrase that seals it. When she sees any kind of gore, she's haunted by her father's death. And, I assume, by the deaths in her first arena nowadays. It's not just 'this is disgusting, I want to hurl' for her. It ties directly into some form of past trauma. Her dad didn't even burn to death and it still ties in like this.
  
• "NIGHTMARES" - Katniss actually has nightmares more often than nights without. It used to be of her father, and she'd wake up screaming for him to run even five years later. Soon, she has them of the first arena as well. Upon seeing Peeta's paintings for the first time, his depictions of various aspects of the arena: '“I hate them,” I say. I can almost smell the blood, the dirt, the unnatural breath of the mutt. “All I do is go around trying to forget the arena and you’ve brought it back to life. How do you remember these things so exactly?” “I see them every night,” he says. I know what he means. Nightmares – which I was no stranger to before the Games – now plague me whenever I sleep. But the old standby, the one of my father being blown to bits in the mines, is rare. Instead I relive versions of what happened in the Arena. My worthless attempt to save Rue. Peeta bleeding to death. Glimmer’s bloated body disintegrating in my hands. Cato’s horrific end with the mutations. These are the most frequent visitors. “Me, too. Does it help? To paint them out?” “I don’t know. I think I’m a little less afraid of going to sleep at night, or I tell myself I am,” he says. “But they haven’t gone anywhere.” “Maybe they won’t. Haymitch’s haven’t.” Haymitch doesn’t say so, but I’m sure this is why he doesn’t like to sleep in the dark.'
  
• "CLAUSTROPHOBIA" - Put simply, tight spaces fuck her up. When passing through the tunnel into the Captiol: 'I think of the tons of rock separating me from the sky, and my chest tightens. I hate being encased in stone this way. It reminds me of the mines and my father, trapped, unable to reach sunlight, buried forever in the darkness.' And later, after they had to sedate her post-arena: 'I try and sit up, but some sort of wide restraining band around my waist keeps me from rising more than a few inches. The physical confinement makes me panic and I’m trying to pull myself up and wriggle my hips through the band (…)' It usually has to compound on top of something else before it's outward panic, though. Usually she can shove it down inside herself.
  
• "IRRITABILITY, ANGRY OUTBURSTS, OR AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR" - A lot of this was detailed up in the 'Katniss is a shit' section. More can be found in the BPD section below.
  
• "ALWAYS BEING ON GUARD FOR DANGER" - Oh my god, literally always. It's not quite as bad up until post-arena, which is why I don't chalk it up simply to survival reflexes. After that first arena, though, she's jumpy for months. You touch her shoulder and she almost reaches for a knife, or an arrow.
  
• "OVERWHELMING GUILT OR SHAME" - Katniss feels guilty over so many things... Most of which weren't even in her control to have changed. For example, when apologizing to the Avox girl: 'I’d set out to tell her I was sorry about dinner. But I know that my apology runs much deeper. That I’m ashamed I never tried to help her in the woods. That I let the capitol kill the boy and mutilate her without lifting a finger.' There's literally nothing she could have done to save them even if she'd tried. Nothing. And yet it's All Her Fault. This is a common theme throughout the books... And it's one of the neuroses she's actually somewhat self-aware about. When Peeta tries to bleed out at the end of the first arena, she tells him he can’t leave her alone. 'Because if he dies, I’ll never go home, not really. I’ll spend the rest of my life in this arena trying to think my way out.'
  
• "TROUBLE SLEEPING" - This one mostly kicked in after the first arena, but ever since then she's had plenty of trouble sleeping. Mostly because she knows that the nightmares await her - nightmares she can't handle without Peeta.



And secondly, Borderline Personality Disorder.

• "MOOD SWINGS" - You're shown the story through Katniss's eyes, so you have to take a step back in order to pick up on many of the BPD traits she displays - but mood swings are definitely one of them. Examples include (1) the speed with which she goes from plate-smashing rage and yelling at the Avox girl to whispering miserable apologies for not saving her, (2) assaulting Peeta for confessing his love for her on stage, but then after others tell her how irrational she's being, 'I’m embarrassed about my reaction. I force myself to acknowledge Peeta. “I’m sorry I shoved you.”', and (3) the way Rue's death sends her from misery straight into abject fury and then into a numb sort of lethargy in which she has to force herself to so much as get up. The second example is my favorite here, because really, there are just so many times when she reacts on some sort of dramatic mood impulse and feels shameful or embarrassed about it just a minute or so later. Which brings us to...
  
• "INAPPROPRIATE AND INTENSE ANGER, VIOLENT/DANGEROUS EMOTIONAL EPISODES" - On a number of occasions, her narration acknowledges that she's impulsive, but never quite touches on the fact that those impulses she acts on tend to be violent or dangerous to others. For example, she stabs a knife into the table between Haymitch's hand and his bottle of booze in a flash of anger at his drinking on the very first train. Then in a similar flash of anger during her private training sessions, she shoots an arrow directly into the Gamemakers, shooting the apple out of their roast pig's mouth. Not to mention flying into a fury and breaking all of the dishes in her room, then yelling at the Avox girl who did her no harm whatsoever. Oh, and the assault on Peeta after his confession of love - she literally shoves him into an end-table so bad the vase falls off and shatters and he cuts his hands all to hell when he falls into it, and she still keeps on yelling at him over it. Over how weak it made her look, how he had no right. The damage is already done by the time she calms down and realizes he gave them an advantage. Catching Fire also has an extremely prominent example, enough so that I almost wonder if she's getting a little worse. Gale's just been whipped forty-some times and his back is a wreck, but her mother isn't going to give him painkillers, just herbs and sleep syrup. Katniss tries to tell her it won't be enough, but she insists. Katniss interrupts, though: '“Just give him the medicine!” I scream at her. “Give it to him! Who are you, anyway, to decide how much pain he can stand!"' Haymitch and Peeta have to legit carry her out while she ‘shouts obscenities’ at her. They pin her down on a bed until she stops fighting. But that's not her first screaming episode, nor is it her last. As the books go on, more and more of these occur when she’s in danger of losing someone. She just… snaps, loses it, panics because her intense abandonment fear (see below) can’t handle it. 'Peeta’s so pale and still on a silver table, tubes and wires springing out of him every which way, and for a moment I forget we’re out of the Games and I see the doctors as just one more threat, one more pack of mutts designed to kill him. Petrified, I lunge for him, but I’m caught and thrust back into another room, and a glass door seals between us. I pound on the glass, screaming my head off. (…) And they’re taking Peeta but leaving me behind the door. I start hurling myself against the glass, shrieking.'
  
• "INTENSE FEAR OF ABANDONMENT" - This is probably the most interesting of her symptoms because of how much it seems to contrast the Katniss she outwardly projects. The official diagnosis for this symptom reads, “These abandonment fears are related to an intolerance of being alone and a need to have other people with them,” and yet she makes a point to emphasize what a loner she is. After further investigation, I notice that even though she chooses to handle everything alone, it seems more like a lapse in self-awareness than any real ‘this is what helps’. Why? Because as soon as someone reaches for her to try to handle it for her, she crumples into them and lets them do it. Usually Peeta, but also her mother, Cinna, Gale, the Avox girl, etc. Like despite everything she thinks she knows about herself, she really just needs people to take care of her sometimes. This contrast exists because her intense fear of abandonment tells her that the more people she lets in, the more people will abandon her. Like, she trusted her father more than anyone else in the world and he abandoned her. So she adopts this loner façade because it protects her. (This also is reflected in Peeta’s memory of her as a little girl, eager to stand up and sing in class. Not at all Katniss today, because it was before her father died.) Examples can be found with the Avox girl ('I crawl in between the sheets like a five-year-old and let [Avox girl] tuck me in. Then she goes. I want her to stay until I fall asleep. To be there when I wake up. I want the protection of this girl, even though she never had mine.'), with Cinna ('As Cinna turns the doorknob, I stop his hand. “Cinna…” I’m completely overcome with stage fright. “Remember, they already love you,” he says gently.'), with her mother ('My mother’s hand strokes my cheek, and I don’t push it away as I would in wakefulness, never wanting her to know how much I crave that gentle touch. How much I miss her even though I still don’t trust her.'), with Rue ('and the warmth of Rue at my side, her head cradled on my shoulder, has given me a sense of security. I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I’ve been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.'), and especially with Peeta ('His hand brushes the loose strands of my hair off my forehead. Unlike the staged kisses and caresses so far, this gesture seems natural and comforting. I don’t want him to stop and he doesn’t. He’s still stroking my hair when I fall asleep.'). By the end of the first section of Catching Fire, she's come to terms with the fact that she can't sleep without Peeta - not if she wants to be alone with her nightmares. I guess she's not quite as much of a loner as she thought. And as if it's not bad enough already, just a few minutes of separation is often enough to trigger a form of panic, under certain situations. Like in the first arena: 'I realize we haven’t exchanged whistles for a while. When my whistle receives no response, I run. (…) “Peeta!” I call out in a panic. “Peeta!” ' When she finds him, she yells at him so much for wandering out of range of the whistles, mostly to mask how scared she was. In Catching Fire, there's also a point where she doesn't let him shower in his own quarters because she's afraid that if she lets go of his hand, a door will close and lock between them.
  
• "A PATTERN OF INTENSE AND UNSTABLE INTRAPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS, ALTERNATING BETWEEN IDEALIZATION AND DEVALUATION" - This sums up her early relationship with Peeta perfectly, in which she can go from basically thinking of him as a perfect precious cinnamon bun too pure for this world to thinking he's a traitor out to kill her in less than a page, then flop back a couple of pages later. Haymitch, too. That one's super love-hate for almost the entire first book.
  
• "IDENTITY DISTURBANCE, UNSTABLE SENSE OF SELF" - Her self-identity comes under question a lot from the moment she reaches the Capitol, but the biggest one comes after she wins her first Games and is on the train home: 'As I slowly, thoroughly wash the makeup from my face and put my hair in its braid, I begin transforming back into myself. Katniss Everdeen. A girl who lives in the Seam. Hunts in the woods. Trades in the Hob. I stare in the mirror as I try to remember who I am and who I am not. By the time I join the others, the pressure of Peeta’s arm around my shoulder feels alien.' She has to force herself to become Katniss again, mentally. Or who she thinks Katniss is, anyway.
  
• "FEELINGS OF SELF-LOATHING" - The list is endless, but one example: 'Because I’m selfish. I’m a coward. I’m the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run away to stay alive and leave those who couldn’t follow to suffer and die. No wonder I won the Games. No decent person ever does.'
  
• "PARANOIA" - This one isn't too bad, but she does leap to conclusions incredibly often - and always the worst possible conclusions. Like how often Peeta's nice to her and that somehow becomes 'HE'S PLOTTING TO KILL ME', in the first book. Before the Quell arena, Haymitch has to specifically tell her to remember who the enemy is. This isn't 100% a negative thing, though. She's near impossible to lead into a trap.



In addition to those two major mental issues, she also falls farther into the pit of forgetting to take care of herself than most, when stressed. Cinna has to take her clothes in around the waist because of how little she eats when she's stressed, her nightmares get worse, and they have to drug her just to be able to get her to sleep.



CARES SO FUCKIN' MUCH

It doesn't seem like it on the outside, but hot damn does she care. About everyone.

In a general 'cares about people' sense, the books make a point of pointing out that it's so unusual that Katniss doesn't want any more tributes to have to die. That she thinks about how they could've been friends. For the Quell: 'And the more I come to know these people, the worse it is. Because, on the whole, I don’t hate them. And some I like. And a lot of them are so damaged that my natural instinct would be to protect them. But all of them must die if I’m to save Peeta.' She knows what she has to do, but it's just - she can't even fathom it, right up until the point of actually having to do it. This is why she doesn't get close to people. Ugh. In addition, as soon as she wins the Games and gets rich via the winnings, she starts making rounds to dish out food to the families who are starving.

But then there are those she loves. Like Prim, and kind of her mother (that one's complicated). Like Gale. Like Peeta. Like Haymitch and Effie, even, and Cinna. At first, it's just Prim, and she protects Prim with everything she's got. Like, every ounce of her is devoted to protecting Prim from any available harm and sadness. But the more people she comes to care about, the more people she has to protect in order to feel okay. Because the absolute worst possible thing, to Katniss, is being powerless to protect those she loves. Whether from physical harm and injury or emotional harm or even simply from the reaping as she protected Prim. This protective reflex is the only one that ever, in any way, manages to overcome her survival instincts. For Rue, she willingly sprinted toward what might have been a trap, and come the end of the first arena, she’d rather Peeta kill her and win the Games than kill him. He tries to get her to do it, but: “Then you shoot me,” I say furiously, shoving the weapons back at him. “You shoot me and go home and live with it!”

Items on your character at canon point:

• one (1) quarter quell uniform, worn and bloody
  
• one (1) mockingjay pin
  
• one (1) capitol-made bow + quiver of arrows (7 total)
  
• one (1) gold threefold locket on plain string, with pictures of her mother, her sister, and her best friend gale inside
  
• one (1) deep silver pearl
  
• one (1) spile, used for extracting water from trees

Abilities:

• ARCHERY -
  before he died back when she was barely 11, her dad taught her archery (he was fantastic at it). she's practiced since then, depending on it to survive almost the whole time since then, both in district 12 and in the arena. suffice to say she's not half bad. in fact, all through the first book it's repeatedly mentioned that she always makes a clean shot directly through the eye, even on something as small as a squirrel.
  
  
• KNIVES -
  a knife is very comfortable in her hand, for things like skinning wild game or carving arrows, but she's also been shown to be able to throw the knives with pretty good accuracy too. on at least one occasion, she threw a knife to kill some form of wounded game. (practice sessions in the capitol also revealed that she's decent at throwing spears, but she didn't really pursue it.)
  
  
• HAND-TO-HAND -
  fighting close-range was definitely a weakness of hers, up until it was announced that they were returning to the arena a second time. then peeta started training her in hand-to-hand combat skills until she could passably win a fight.
  
  
• FAUNA -
  in no small part thanks to her archery, katniss has been able to stave off her family's starvation all these years via hunting. though the bow and arrow are her tool of choice, she's also good at fishing, and even trapping via snares thanks to gale (and furthered by one of the trainers before her first hunger games, who taught her a snare which would lift her opponent upside-down into the air.)
  
  
• FLORA -
  for much the same reason she learned to hunt, fish, and trap, katniss is extremely well educated on which plants are edible, medicinal, and poisonous in district 12 (best guess says the mountainous central part of southern pennsylvania) - as well as quite a few of the plants from district 11 (southeastern states) too, thanks to rue in the first arena.
  
  
• SURVIVALIST -
  even apart from her knowledge of plants and how to take down game, her survival skills are excellent in nearly any available facet. examples include knowing how to find extremely scarce water, the forethought to belt herself to a tree while she slept so she didn't fall, and the sense to set up her snares at least five minutes from camp. she helped teach beetee how to start a fire with sticks. not to mention the fact that these survival skills remain intact even in extremely dire conditions - she collapsed in dehydration at the edge of a pond in her first arena, the first sign of water in days, but despite the urge to drink as much as her stomach could hold, she carefully scooped some into her water-skin, added iodine to purify it, and waited the full half hour to drink it.
  
  
• REFLEXES -
  her reflexes, especially with a bow in her hand or when survival (hers or someone else's) is on the line, are downright exceptional. refer again to the linked video for archery. she also uses this in fleeing quite a few times in both arenas, letting her dodge things like fireballs or hear the whistle of clove's knife coming at her and hiking her backpack up to block her head just in time.
  
  
  Strengths and Weaknesses:
  
• + DETERMINATION -
  Her determination led her to be the one who essentially broke the Capitol's cruel system of controlling the Districts after seventy-five years of success, among other things. It can also keep her on her feet through so much poison/injury/etc, which I feel like she'll need in a horror game.
  
  
• + POOR -
  Or at least, she used to be. The point being that she's definitely used to hunger, to pain, to working hard for little gain. This is beneficial in a game where scarcity and discomfort are your average weekday.
  
  
• + RESOURCEFUL -
  Not only does she know how to hunt, fish, etc., but she can look at a problem and know in just short minutes how to jury-rig a solution of some kind. Or long minutes, if they're nowhere near the woods, but still. She repeatedly is shown to use items unconventionally to further her and her allies' survival.
  
  
• + LOVE -
  While she doesn't understand love in a romantic sense, she absolutely knows what it feels like to need another person, to care for them so much that their happiness is your own, in a really basic and fundamental way. Whatever you want to call her version of that, it's a force to be reckoned with, as you may have picked up on by now.
  
  
  
  
• - NOT 100% MENTALLY TOGETHER -
  See the above Personality section for her PTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder. It definitely alters how she interacts with the world around her, and only once in a blue moon is that in a positive way.
  
  
• - LEAPS TO CONCLUSIONS -
  Though she may have stopped doing this with Peeta, anyone she doesn't yet trust is still absolutely at risk of Katniss's tendency to assume the worst. To assume they're trying to trick her, or kill her and Peeta, or something.
  
  
• - SHITTY AT PEOPLE -
  This girl can't find social graces with both hands and a map. She's blunt and neutral-to-unfriendly and she definitely isn't good at any kind of words. That's Peeta's job, a fact she acknowledges and falls back on.
  
  
  
  Samples
  Network/Action Sample: ( from a slightly later canonpoint but it should do!)
  
  [ she's never been to district four. not really. the tour took her through the district's capitol, but that's not even remotely the same. this, this is the four that finnick waxed poetic about. it's the reason his stylists have to work so hard to scrub the fish smell out of his skin. had to, rather. part of her sometimes forgets that their assigned stylists, much like most aspects of life as they knew it, are a thing of the past. in fact, she may have been fortunate enough to see hers make it out of the capitol alive, but his are probably long dead by now just by virtue of making a point.
  
  the sun beats down on her here in a way it never quite managed in district twelve. a sheen of sweat rose up on her forehead basically the moment katniss stepped out of the shuttle, and when she periodically smooths stray hair back out of her face, it's the sweat that slicks it back. part of her already looks forward to showering back in thirteen, but she's instantly scolding herself for it. she's here for a reason. no more letting plutarch and coin hide her away from any real danger. no more propos, at least not as the main objective. today, she and a select few of her squad are here to help district four with the capitol's latest tidings: a mutt infestation, this one more lethal than than any she's seen before.
  
  it's snakes, this time. the mutts are part snake, part - well, katniss doesn't even know what, but they masquerade well as human and that makes them horrifying in an entirely unique way. you can't even see them coming. can't tell civilian from mutt, an enemy from someone they're here to protect. and whether they like it or not, the squad falls quickly into disarray, most of them clustered somewhere deeper in town while katniss makes her way quickly and silently to the outskirts to see about routing them at their flank. a well-placed arrow through the skull seems to do the trick, but not much else even slows them - and they're quick. too quick to land the headshot, if the mutt knows it's coming. and what's worse, some of them bear the faces of civilians she's seen get taken down in the heat of the combat. either an uncanny resemblance, or these mutts can do something none have before: they can infect others.
  
  despite all this, katniss feels decently confident in her routing attempt right up until the point when she rounds a quiet corner and comes face to face with four of them huddled around a corpse. there's a definite altercation, is the short story. one which wastes entirely too many arrows, including detonating an explosive bolt much too close to escape without losing some skin. by the end of it, she's bleeding in quite a few places (though nothing critical) and standing in a mess of arrow-riddled corpses, their faces half-shifted and snakelike fangs at ready.
  
  in fact, the last one only just went down when a noise from behind her has her whirling around, arrow at ready. it's a man, his glasses and suit almost out of place in a place like this, and that's the only thing that gives her pause one her sighting locks onto his forehead. ]
  
  Prove you're not one of them. [ it comes out rough but adamant. she's bleeding and sweating and hasn't yet caught her breath, but the fight's left a sharp and almost paranoid vigilance in her eye, in every tense muscle in her body. she doesn't know how he can prove he's not a mutt, but as far as she's concerned he has to try. it's that or she shoots, because right now she can't afford to take any more chances. ]
  
  
  Prose Log Sample: my one linked sample