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Writing Ramblings: The most difficult thing I've written to date(October 2025)

This post is part of Fannish 50 in 2025 series (Masterlist here).

About a month ago, I posted an update where I mentioned that the fic I wrote for fallingforyoufallexchange was one of the most challenging works I've written to date but I couldn't say anything because it wasn't revealed yet. Now that it has been revealed and I can talk about it, I wanted to share a little bit about the process that yielded this fic. Mostly for myself, but also for anyone else who might be struggling with a difficult thing in their writing. on autumn nights, my love turns green again is a Hunger Games fic featuring the relationships between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale. It's a post-canon fic where everything in the books happened as it did, and this story happens before the epilogue. The following post includes spoilers for The Hunger Games, my fic, and discussion of real-life dictatorships as experienced by someone living in a post-dictatorship country.

I don't even know where to begin, so let's begin with the prompt. I picked up this work as a PH when I saw the fandom (a fandom I've been really into the last couple of month) and I read the part of the prompt where it said "I think Katniss and Gale deserve a reunion". I agreed. The movies made a really final cut between Katniss and Gale at the end, but in the books, Katniss was much more ambivalent about letting Gale go. She felt grateful that Gale was the one who stayed away, something that really struck with me the first time I read the books. She knew what Gale had done during the war, but her feelings toward him did not change immediately. His role in Prim's death was muddy, in the way that most things are at war, and she knew this.

Don't get me wrong, she hated this. We know this. Her sister was everything. She was the reason she volunteered, the reason she fought so hard to go back home, the reason she fought hard to survive. Taking her sister away was ripping the world from under her feet.

But when I read the epilogue of the books, I always wondered when did Katniss heal? What helped her move on? And did she ever forgive? There's a saying in my country: no hay perdón ni olvido. It means "no forgiveness, no forgetting". It's usually used in the context of the dictatorship and how people's whose families were made to disappear are never going to find peace until they find their loved ones. I've always thought that saying comes from a place of rightful anger, but at some point, everyone moves on from anger to grief. It's just too exhausting to be angry all the time. There's a song by Calle 13 where Residente sings "perdono, pero nunca olvido" (I forgive but I never forget) (you can listen to this wonderful song here, watch the video as well and fall in love with my beautiful Latin America). He sings it in the same context, he's talking about the Latin American dictatorships of the 20th century, singing about the injustices our people have overcome and the way we can move forward because of who we are.

I've talked to many people about what is like growing up in a country where a dictatorship is so fresh in the collective memory. Our dictatorship ended a little over 30 years ago. Many people alive today were not only alive during the dictatorship, but they lived through the whole thing. The way this changed the relationships between people is astounding, but something that has always made me very emotional is the way that people fought and kept fighting for freedom and democracy. Our people fought and fought and, as we say in my country, they stopped bullets with their chest to get democracy back. And the political Right, the ones behind the military coup, have done the impossible to push us back into that era.

This is to say, the aftermath of a dictatorship is a complicated time. The most important thing is the way you rebuild a community where trust has been eroded. You need your people. And those who ran away during the dictatorship get to come back home.

When I wrote this fic, I was thinking about how Gale went to District 2 to run away from facing Katniss, but at some point, he will want to go back to District 12, whether that's because he misses his roots or because he believes in the importance of rebuilding community after a dictatorship. Perhaps he missed his family, perhaps he missed the woods, whatever it was, Gale was supposed to go back to District 12 at some point. It's not that easy to severe all ties with the past. Least of all when the war meant you lost some important people in your life.

Let's not forget about this important part: Prim is not only survived by Katniss and her mom. Gale was an important part in her life. He and Katniss were close for many years, hunting together to survive and taking care of each other as best as they could. Katniss tried to take care of Gale and his family during Catching Fire. Gale protected Katniss' family while she was at the games and during the bombing of District 12. A bombing where Gale lost friends, coworkers, acquaintances. We get to see a bit of this in the movie in a way that the book doesn't let us since it's from Katniss' POV. When Gale retells the story of the bombing of District 12, he chokes up, he blames himself for not saving more people (he says "some of the kids I could've grabbed, I could've taken them with me"). Yes, Gale and some other people helped save almost a thousand lives. Other nine thousand people died in the bombing. Gale feels the loss of every single one of those people in the aftermath of the bombing.

I'd like to share an extract of an article I read that really struck with me about Gale:

Gale is a perfect example of how institutionalised inequalities can breed desensitisation. He occupies an “ends justifies the means” framework that is true and real to the lived experiences of people who lived under oppressive and authoritarian governments. (...) We see this rhetoric within liberation groups throughout history. When your entire life has been shaped by violence and brutality – even with the point of having televised death tournaments laurelled as glory every year – that then impacts the way you view violence. Because violence is such a hallmark in the creation of the world of Panem following the failed rebellion, to Gale, it is only through violence that they can physically restructure society. Violence in and of itself is a tool for liberation and there are merits to that.

Katniss, to a lesser extent, held herself to this type of apathetic framework before entering the games and falling for Peeta.

— In Defence of Gale Hawthorne by Michelle Chandra (https://www.arc.unsw.edu.au/blitz/read/in-defence-of-gale-hawthorne). Retrieved on October 25 2025.

I do not condone his actions, but I can see how someone can get to say the things he did at the time. Moreover, I do not place all the blame for Prim's death on Gale. Who in their right mind listens to an angry 19-year-old when they talk about killing everyone who supports the dictatorship? What person in their right mind sacrifices children and medical personnel to win a war?

Personally, I believe that something we never got to explore was how Gale dealt with the consequences of his actions, how he had to live after the war. How he had to live knowing the part he played on a bombing that was so similar to the one that killed nine thousand of his people.

Now, I also thought it was important to explore how Katniss would deal with Gale's return to District 12 and what it would mean to her. Who would she be in this post-dictatorship world "I don't forgive and I don't forget" or "I forgive and I don't forget". How do all the year Katniss and Gale spent together influenced her feelings of loss. Because Katniss lost her sister, but she also lost her home district, her people, and Gale. The person she used to trust the most, the person she felt safest around.

There's a song by Winnetka Bowling League and Demi Lovato called fuck it, I miss you. The lyrics are about someone who moves on and makes a new life after their romance and how the singer misses that person. That particular line "fuck it, I miss you" is so raw. It says so much about how you miss a person even when moving on was probably the only way things were supposed to go. There's another line that says "we were so almost, I could almost die" that I feel really encapsulate Katniss and Gale's relationship. I don't know if there's much else I can say about that when that line speaks for itself.

This isn't to say I think Katniss and Gale would work out by themselves or that they would even talk to each other without a triggering event, which is why Peeta's presence is so important.

We all know that Peeta is a dandelion in Katniss' spring, he represents hope and peace and moving on from the atrocities they lived together. But I feel that we constantly forget that Peeta lost everyone in the war as well. Not only did he lose his ENTIRE family, he lost his childhood home, he lost friends (because we know Peeta had friends before the Games), he lost himself when the Capitol tortured him and hijacked him. Who did Peeta have to rebuild for? He says something like it in the 75th Games when he tells Katniss "if you die, and I live, I'd have nothing". But the thing is, they both got to live and Peeta had no one but Katniss and Haymitch. When did he get to rebuild community? When did he get to feel like he belonged somewhere again? Who else did Peeta have to talk to about the war, about his family, about his home district?

The thesis for this fic was simple: what if Peeta and Gale, who fought side by side at some point during the war and both lost more than they bargained for, became closer somehow? What if Peeta and Gale talked and found out they had more in common than just loving Katniss? What if Gale recognized how strong Peeta was? What if Peeta could see the complexities of Gale's character and his loss?

The truth is, writing this fic was not only challenging because the characters felt a bit unreachable at times, as if Suzanne Collins had cased them in amber and I had to break through layers of hardened material to reach them. It was also difficult because the topics are difficult: grief, forgiveness, and moving on after the devastating effects of an authoritarian regime and a war are some of the most difficult topics to write about. It presents us with an important question: who do we become afterwards? How are we changed by our choices and other people's actions? Are we still ourselves afterwards?

Marianas Trench has a line in their song Glimmer that says "can we forgive and forget?" that haunted me when I first read that prompt. Can they forgive and forget? If not, then what happens?

Furthermore, the recipient of this work? Rafa, one of my beloved internet friends, was the one who prompted this. Of course I wanted to make sure they got a work that they would love, something that would move them and that they could reread and feel like every moment waiting for the reveal had been worth it. I saw this prompt, I saw the recipient, and I knew I had to be the one to fill it, no matter the cost.

It took me almost 10k words and over 31 working hours (yeah, I can know how much time I spent on my works thanks to my wonderful automatic writing tracker) to weave the fabric of this story, not counting all the time I spent thinking of it, trying to make sense of it and to make sure I was telling a story that mattered to me, but I feel like every single second was worth it. This story challenged me beyond a simple "how to meet my word count" or "how do I make these characters kiss". It was a labor of love that made me reckon with how I would deal with a similar situation. I don't think I would ever forgive and forget, but just because I can't, it doesn't mean that someone whose feelings are much more complicated would never find themselves living in the contradictions of it all.