Career Districts | Districts 3-8 | Districts 9-12 and the Capitol | Fallen Tributes and District Citizens
The Victors as a Collective
"There's a certain camaraderie one inherits from winning the Games, one that often surpasses anything that may have happened after the gong sounds."
- Action Survivor: Most of the outlier Victors win by killing as few other tributes as necessary and Serendipitous Survival.
- Always Male: The first 10 Victors were all male, leading people to call them "The Old Boy's Club". Ends when Mags becomes the first female Victor during the 11th Hunger Games, and she directly calls out the Old Boy's Club while she was still in the arena.Mags: Hey! Old Boys' Club! How do you feel about that?! You feeling good now?! Suck it, you underbred sons of bitches!
Ahenobarbus: (watching from the Capitol) Oh, I like her. - Badass Teacher: Many of the Victors become dedicated mentors and trainers to future tributes. Ahenobarbus, Boudiccca, Jules, Mags, Mannanan, and Brutus are particular standouts.
- Broken Ace: While chance does play a part in all of their eventual victories, most of them survived their Games as a result of some combination of skill, charisma, wit, and sheer ingenuity. After their Games, almost all suffer varying levels of PTSD for the rest of their lives and find different and often debilitating ways to cope.
- Cursed with Awesome: Having Abusive Parents or a Dark and Troubled Past proves to be useful for tributes, because it teaches them survival skills.
- Dying Race: Old age, disease, injuries, murder (including the Third Quarter Quell) and eventually the revolution and the subsequent and definitive end of the Hunger Games have made Victors a dying breed that will be extinct within the next one hundred years. At the start of the story, there are estimated to be around nineteen or so living Victors, and that number drops by at least one by the end.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Deconstructed. Victors are so damaged by all they must do to win the Hunger Games that they are often quite miserable even after winning.
- Gaining the Will to Kill: All Victors have to develop this, either in their Career training or in the arena. The only exception is Seeder.
- A Hero to His Hometown: Victors are almost all viewed as heroes in their own districts, even if not so anywhere else. Though in a few cases—Matthias, Evelyn—they're not even viewed as heroes in their own districts.
- I Have Your Wife: How Snow generally keeps the Victors in line. He uses the wellbeing of their loved ones as leverage for them to cooperate with his orders.
- Inexperienced Killer: All the Victors who aren't Careers, though some—such as Vera, Ben, and Katniss—do have significant hunting experience.
- Master-Apprentice Chain:
- District 1:
- Luxe → Plat/Gleam/Silk
- Ermine → Jade → Citrine/Cashmere
- District 2: Ahenobarbus → Tiberius → Boudicca → Granyte/Honorius/Virtus/Justus/Antigone
- Granyte → Bartimaeus/Lyme
- Honorius → Ares → Berenice
- Virtus → Brutus → Ferrus/Phoebus/Orion/Creon/Lupus
- Antigone → Dido → Enobaria → Clove
- District 4: Mags → Manannan/Briseis/Cerulea/Lianne/Andromache/Finnick
- Manannan → Thisbe/Halibut/Annie
- Halibut → Odysseus
- District 7: Jules → Vera/Blightnote
- Blight → Connor/Johanna
- District 11: Wren → Seeder → Chaff/Abundance/Rue
- Chaff → Cayne/Thresh
- District 1:
- The Mentor: To the tributes after their victory. This has a negative effect, seeing as watching so many of the children they've bonded with year after year die has softened all but the hardest Victors and made most of them, even Careers, at least sympathetic to the idea of rebellion.
- Retired Badass Roundup: Most of the surviving Victors—Bovina, Emrys, Beetee, Jade, Haymitch, Connor, Johanna, Annie, Lupus, Odysseus, and Peeta—all meet up at Annie's house to plan the Katniss rescue operation.
- Serendipitous Survival: Almost all of them survived their Games thanks to at least one instance of chance and good luck. Even the Careers.
- Sex Slave: At the suggestion of Luster Lancaster, Snow started whoring out Victors to Capitol Citizens in exchange for money and favors. A few manage to escape this fate, though not without cost.
- Luster himself, because he's the one who suggested it to Snow.
- Elena Perez got out of it thanks to her love story with her eventual husband Danny Hooley, which also had the added benefit of gradually healing the rift between the Anasazi and the Settlers... so the Capitol deliberately reaped her children into the Second Quarter Quell instead.
- All of Haymitch's loved ones were murdered by the Capitol due to how he won his Games before Snow could even consider using them to make him bend, both literally and figuratively.
- Blight avoided it by leveraging his insane amount of popularity against Snow to protect himself and his lover Jason. That being said, he still willingly subjected himself to at least one appointment over the years to help out his tributes during their Games, most notably Connor Murphy, the eventual Victor of the 56th Games.
- Enobaria evaded this fate in exchange for serving Snow as his personal assassin. She quickly realized she just traded one hell for another.
- Song Nuo had three things going for her: 1) being overshadowed by both Finnick and Johanna, who won their Games before and after her, respectively; 2) having Capitol heritage; and 3) becoming Snow's willing mouthpiece. Unfortunately, that last one backfired on her when the rebellion started and a faction of the District 1 rebels tracked her down to lynch her for her part in Snow's regime.
- Johanna refused her first appointment and saw her family slaughtered as a result. However, since Snow killed her entire family and her remaining loved ones were all Victors themselves, he had nothing left to leverage against her.
- In his first year as a Victor, back in the Capitol, Odysseus was overshadowed by Katniss and Peeta with their dual victory and love story. It's because of this that he feels indebted to both and joins in on the Rescue Arc to save Katniss.
- Katniss and Peeta themselves. In addition to their love story (the same thing that saved Elena from this fate), they flat-out weren't Victors long enough for Snow to even try selling them, mainly because he was more obsessed with killing them instead in order to stop the impending rebellion.
- Shell-Shocked Victor: With the exceptions of Luster and Eamon, every Victor, even the likes of Roan Tully, suffers from severe PTSD incurred due to the traumatic events of their Games. They usually have some kind of hatch to deal with their issues, be it alcohol, drugs, sex, or even something like cruelty.
- Warts and All: While there are some truly vile Victors, most of them are just people who did what they could to survive while staying true to what values they had.
