I really have no idea why, but Johanna has hijacked my brain lately. So, uh, Merry Christmas, have really dysfunctional coping mechanisms?

What we do to get by (4576 words) by kawuli
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Johanna Mason, Blight (Hunger Games)
Additional Tags: Drug Use, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, bad coping strategies, Victors (Hunger Games) - Freeform, references to forced prostitution

District Seven is silence, cold and snow and trees and a house that's all too quiet. It's bad memories and bad nights and too-long days all on her own.

It's no wonder Johanna will take any escape she can find, anything that promises to make it stop hurting, even if only for a little while.

The only problem is the comedown.

---

LiveJournal is giving me trouble with formatting and I am too tired to fight it so you can read it on AO3, sorry >>
Feel free to post comments here anyway if you'd rather.

The Arena is only the beginning.


( Out of the Arena but not out of the games )

So today I was harvesting maize (corn) by hand in 95-degree (35-sensible-degree) heat. For my job this counts as a good day, but only because I don't have to do it every day.

Harvesting maize does not require my full attention, so I started thinking about Hunger Games things,like you do when you're avoiding thinking about stressful things (oh, is that just me?). And because of harvesting maize, I was thinking about District 9.

I don't think many people actually think about District 9, just like not that many people think about, say, Nebraska, or South Dakota, or Manitoba on any given day, but I think it could actually be fascinating.

No really, hear me out.

Agriculture in the Great Plains is already super mechanized, there are tractors and combines that are the size of small houses and harvest thousands of acres in a day. Panem has a problem with low population, so I'm pretty sure they've got very good at producing a lot of food with a few people and some very sophisticated machines (this is where, earlier today, I wondered if Panem has sattellites generally and GPS in particular, which is relevant but not critical to this agro-tech ramble).

Which means that District 9 probably has a few scattered crop-production centers with something like 10 people responsible for growing hundreds of square miles/kilometers of row crops, probably with zones for various (rotations of) cereals/legume field crops and some seed-production and research areas (with visiting scientists/geneticists from 3). If those have North-South gradients (which is likely), the settlements might actually move as planting/harvest season shifts from south to north (this is a thing that happens now with custom combine crews). Maybe in the winter they all come to a central town to work. Central town probably looks more like Six than Eleven (where they produce horticultural crops that require a lot more manual labor). No really: equipment maintenance, grain mills, ethanol plants, lots of trains bringing grain from all the far flung outposts. There's probably fertilizer storage (hey, Rebellion, want some ammonium nitrate?). Nine is probably a huge consumer of (expensive, relatively scarce) diesel fuel, unless someone has invented a solar-powered combine (I doubt it).

What I'm saying is that this is actually a much more interesting district than "Grain" seems to indicate and someday I will maybe actually write something about it. But in the meantime, maybe someone else wants to think about a lonely combine driver in the wilds of Manitoba just waiting for harvest to be over so she can go hang out in the booming metropolis in Des Moines (or wherever) for the winter working in a tesserae packing plant or an ethanol refinery and talking to more than like 6 other people. Or not, and I'll just keep this here as a brain-dump for later.