The Bun is Really in the Oven - Cherrypit8 Request

In any fandom, there always seems to be that one nagging 'What If' moment that seems to latch onto any and all reader's and fanfiction writer's minds. In THG fandom, we've got a lot of them. For example, we've got the 'post-Mockingjay epilogue fill in'; we've got the 'Prim in the Games'; and we've got the 'nobody dies', to name a few.

All of these 'What If' moments have a plethora of stories that are magnificent, practical, and filled with detail that we, as reader's, felt were moments of particular interest.

So when Cherrypit8 came to us at Nightlock and asked, "What about the 'Katniss is really pregnant fics' like KaKaVegeGurl's?" - we thought, huh, now there's a 'What If' that's hard to track down.

With that in mind, we went on a mission: Find the Katniss-is-knocked-up stories that give depth, quality and justice to a storyline that can be a pretty difficult one to write simply because, well...


Hormones. Characters change with hormones, okay?

Now, I'm not saying this mission was easy. There's a lot of fic-diving going on when you're looking for a particular story angle. We trudged through a few difficult-to-read stories and by no means should this list be considered the final word (*cough* We are open to suggestions!)

Without further ado, here's some completed "Katniss is really pregnant" stories, just for you Cherrypit8:

Title:  Running Right Into the Fire

Author:  Julia101

Summary: "You could live a hundred lifetimes and not deserve him you know." Haymitch is right. What other boy could still love me after what I've done? What other boy would still stick by someone pregnant by another? Katniss/Peeta/Gale

Rating: M

One Line Rec:  Taking a spin on the Gale train, this fic takes the 'What If' and turns it around a bit, leading the reader down a pretty heartbreaking road.

Title:  Missing a Part of Me

Author:  lovelyladybug5

Summary:  One night before the Quarter Quell changes Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark's life forever. When Peeta is captured by the Capitol, Katniss turns to Julian, Peeta's brother, for help getting the boy with the bread back, and for help with two big changes.

Rating: M
One Line Rec: Though I'm not a fan of the formatting (warning, italics in use), this story has a pretty decent plot to follow, using Peeta's brother as a significant character to add depth and a creative twist to the general idea.

Title:  Will He Remember - WIP

Author:  batbaby

Summary:  What if when Peeta is rescued, he finds Katniss to be pregnant and draws out his memories?

Rating: M
One Line Rec: A good story with solid follow-through, it's still a work in progress so we'll have to wait to see how it ends.

Title:  It Isn't a Trick FF.net  / AO3

Author:  lollercakes

Summary:  It isn't a trick, she is really pregnant. A spattering of ficlets around the idea that Katniss is indeed knocked up. Launched from a prompt by lillian raven over at the kolms Girl on Fire ficathon.

Rating: M
One Line Rec: This story takes a variety of POV's and uses them to provide a full-circle telling of a pretty tragic event that spans not just the Quell but into the Epilogue as well.

Hope you enjoy these and please, let us know if you have any others you'd like to add to the list!

Much love, Polkapop


Post-script: I'll do my best to link up any recs I give with AO3 or other sources due to the crackdown on M rated fics over at ff.net, just an fyi. I could only locate It Isn't a Trick on AO3, please let me know if any others are cross-posted. 

February's Author of the Month: be-nice-to-nerds

Hey, guys! Sorry for the lateness of this post... but I do have a great author to recommend to you all, and that is the marvelous be-nice-to-nerds!

Looking over BNTN's work, the first thing that strikes me is how detailed her version of Panem is. This author knows exactly who each tribute was in the 74th Hunger Games, how many victors District Three has had and exactly how they won their Games. These details give BNTN's stories a lot of depth. Also, she is amazing at delving into characters' emotions in a subtle but touching way. To show you what I mean, here's an excerpt from Beetee and the Bomb, about the famous D3 victor after the end of Mockingjay:

They say that there are only seven Victors left. Beetee refuses to believe it. Doesn't want to. Wiress is dead, he can accept that. He saw her die. But Johan? Marchessa? The other two District Three Victors are far too smart to not find an out.
They have to be. 

…

When no one else knows what you've been through, the Victors form your family.

Wiress and he were incredibly close, in a purely platonic way. It was just the two of them for a decade before Marchessa won her Games, and something like that forms a lasting bond. She was bursting with ideas but wasn't able to express them properly. They all learned how to fill in the gaps she couldn't put to words, but Beetee better than all of them simply because he has (had) known her the longest.

Johan (is? Was? He doesn't know) the youngest of the four. He was the only one to bring a non-Victor into their little circle of houses in District Three's Victors Village. Mac fits right in with the rest of them, and while Beetee can't really judge, the two females say they can easily see what Johan sees in him. 

Not many outside of District Three know that Johan's gay. He doesn't mind telling people but doesn't bring it up unless they ask. His reasoning is that specifically stating his sexuality leaves more room for prejudice than if he just treats it as normal. None of the others go around telling people that they're straight, do they? 

Marchessa is (because really, she of all people would have found a way to stay alive) small, cynical, and chillingly intelligent. She's arrogant about her abilities to the point of alienating all those she believes beneath her because of their alleged idiocy, but the arrogance is often not without reason. Frustration with her situation grew fast on her; she is closed off and slightly distant with the others, but she is still one of them. 

Beetee knows she was spying for the Capitol. He also knows it's nothing personal – Marchessa's too jaded and bitter to believe in the ideology like the other three did, and had been through too much to let morals get in the way of self preservation. 

Seeing what Coin's been doing, he's beginning to think maybe her cynicism was right. The Capitol and District Thirteen are really only two sides of the same coin.

The Ultimate Faves/Rec List: Why THG Fandom Needs To Utilize del.icio.us

Hi! I'm V.

The fact of the matter is this: in most fandoms outside of Twilight, the majority of high-quality fanfiction is posted outside of Fanfiction.net. That is not to say that fic posted to FFn is necessarily bad, or that fic posted to other venues is necessarily good. The real fact of the matter is that there is no surefire way to glance at a URL and tell whether a fic is good.

But the truth is that any fic writer who has come to THG from a path other than Twilight probably isn't posting their work to FFn as a primary source, so if you're not exploring the Hunger Games fic posted to Livejournal, Dreamwidth, and AO3, you're missing out on some of the highest-quality, best-written fic that the fandom has to offer.

And that is where del.icio.us comes in.

Ah, del.icio.us. It's not just what Katniss would say upon sampling Peeta's cheese buns, it is the most useful fandom resource for fic fans... ever. I MEAN EVER. It's like a global Favorites list, an international Memories page, and a universal rec list all in one. And it couldn't be easier to use!

So what is it?

According to Fanlore,

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to save, tag, manage and share bookmarks from a centralized source. A significant aspect of the site is that, like many Web 2.0 sites, its tags are user-generated, non-hierarchical, and uncontrolled. Users create and apply their own tags in one step, and they can apply as many tags as they like to each bookmark.

Fannish Uses of Delicious

Fans who use Delicious use it to save fandom-related links or meta and find recommendations for fannish reading material. Some fans maintain multiple accounts; others might throw fannish and non-fannish bookmarks into one account. The following is a list of major fannish uses of the site:

• Bookmarking favorite fanworks on their personal accounts


• Creating and maintaining their own tags (hours of fun!), using either shared fannish vocabulary or their own system


• Maintaining an easy-to-update rec list for self, friends, fandom at large, and/or specific communities and projects. Delicious is well suited for themed rec list.
  • Keeping track of links for a fandom newsletter community
  
  
  • Providing a searchable archive for Kink Meme prompts and fics.
  
  


• Sifting through a trusted reccer's delicious tags for fanworks to consume.


• Browsing or subscribing to site tags related to certain fandoms, pairings, genres, or other fannish keywords. The number of users who have bookmarked a given webpage displays prominently and can be an indication of its value; using the "popular" function in particular serves as an automatically generated rec list.


• Searching for your own name so you can see how many people have bookmarked your posts or stories and what they're saying about you.


• Other searches?

Looking at tag clouds also allows statistics-minded fans to analyse fannish trends, as well as discover new content.

What does that really mean? It means that any time someone saves a Katniss/Peeta fanfic to their bookmarks on del.icio.us, it gets tallied and added to the universal databank of awesome Katniss/Peeta fics for you to peruse, choose, and consume with some lovely lamb stew. It doesn't matter whether the fic is hosted at FFn, LJ, AO3, DW, a privately hosted site, WHEREVER: if the link is saved to del.icio.us, it gets tallied. And you can tag them and categorize your links however best suits you, so there are no restrictions to the ways you can search for and rec fic.

The del.icio.us account for Nighlock Recs is located here: http://www.delicious.com/nightlockrecs -- it's pretty sparse so far since my fellow Nightlock rec bloggers have largely stuck to FFn for recs, so if you want a more complete example of how a delicious account for THG fandom would look, you are more than welcome to check out mine: http://www.delicious.com/aimmyarrowshigh/fandom%3Athehungergames

See the little blue numbers at the right-hand side of the recs? That is the tally of how many people have saved the fic. The more people save the fic, the higher the number and the darker the shade of blue.

Since THG fandom hasn't discovered the wonder of del.icio.us fully yet, the highest-rated THG fics are in the 20s and low 30s for the number of tallies. But for thriving, fic-heavy fandoms that understand the true power of a delicious account (like Merlin, The Social Network, or Supernatural)?

Imagine logging in and seeing a new fic with 200+ bookmarks.

AUTOMATIC WIN. YOU KNOW IT'S GOOD 'CAUSE EVERYONE ALREADY LOVES IT.