Chapter 8: Hippolyta Anderson

Rachel Maddow the Third: Good evening, Remus, thank you, my friend. And thanks to you folks for joining us this hour… Maximus Meridius had a problem. And he had a problem because at the conclusion of the recent, record-setting 7th Hunger Games the previous summer, his successor to the role of tribute, his successor whom everyone expected to win… he actually lost. Badly. It was a really close Top Two that year in the Capitol Arena, before the days of exotic outdoor arenas with little waterfalls and temperamental volcanoes to go along with many of the temperamental tributes that commonly came out of District 2… Kovu Theseus was one of those types. He was brash, he was arrogant, he was ruthless, and everyone from his homeland, including the very first Victor ever, Maximus Decimus Meridius, expected that this was it, this would finally be the year that Two – or any district – would finally notch a second Victor, but really, they all knew it was going to be Two, and it was going to happen with this guy. And, you know, that seems a little presumptuous, don't you think? The first decade of the Hunger Games isn't even done yet; there are districts who haven't even nabbed their first Victor – close to half the districts, in fact. No less than five districts were then on a seven straight-year losing streak. Look at the poor little graphic showing empty Districts 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12. They seem to be saying, Where's our Victor? Why don't we get a Victor too? Can we just have one? Pretty please? [smiles broadly]

Kovu Theseus was expected to become the Victor of the 7th Annual Hunger Games in a walk. After an actually surprising Reaping where his name just happened to be pulled. But Kovu Theseus gets tapped as tribute – you can see him there, in the old footage… And he is genuinely excited! He is pumped to go in there and win it for District 2! Yeehaw! But then, miles away on the opposite end of the southern half of the country…. this happens:

ARCHIVAL VOICE OF WOLFMARK REDPATH: I volunteer as tribute!

Rachel Maddow the Third: "I volunteer as tribute" – the first time that any child in Panem had ever said those words. And it… kinda knocked District 11 and Panem as a whole directly on its behind. Right? I mean, who would actually want to commit state-sanctioned murder and get absolutely no consequences for it, but also really no rewards either? Gee golly wiz, that looks fun! Apparently, Kovu Theseus thought it might be fun, except he wasn't the one who volunteered. Wolfmark Redpath did, and subsequently gets a lot of attention. There are postcards made and commemorative plaques and little plush dolls that bellowed, "I volunteer as tribute!' when you squeezed them…. [laughs] And ultimately, Wolfmark Redpath becomes the Victor of the 7th Games, the first Victor from District 11, delaying the possibility of a district getting their second Victor for another year. Which brings us back to Maximus Meridius. When he sees young Kovu Theseus just get used over the course of twenty-five grueling minutes only to get cut down at the end… Maximus is pissed. Remember, this is the man who personally killed twenty of the twenty-three other tributes in the inaugural arena. He doesn't like to lose. So he makes a decision – he vows to never lose again, vows that District 2 will never lose again… at least, for lack of doing anything to try and stop it. So, rest of that summer and into the autumn following Wolfmark Redpath's Victory, Maximus Meridius decides to try something that has never been tried before. He begins to brainstorm the first-ever… essentially, what amounted to a Hunger Games training program. We have historians and scholars who have studied Maximus Meridius's diaries, currently on display in the Hunger Games National Memorial Museum of History and Perpetual Shame, where we can see he is conceiving in his writings these ideas – ideas that would eventually become many of the staple concepts we see in more modern editions of the Games.

But first things first: Maximus understands that if he wants to build a tribute… bootcamp, first he has to determine if it's legal. And he can't really tell if it is or it isn't – the Treaty of Treason is largely silent on the question. Can a tribute enter the arena with professional guidance? Could that technically be called cheating? And even if it isn't…. how to go about that training? Who is supposed to do the training, and when? If a tribute is ready for the arena, how do you ensure that it's that tribute's name that's called at the Reaping? You might remember that in those days, previous Victors didn't mentor. No one did. Previous Victors weren't even allowed into the Capitol until after the Games were over! Essentially, a previous Hunger Games winner's…. job, back then, amounted to: come to the Capitol to welcome the newest Victor, what we would today refer to as the 'Victors' Vigil,' and then…. just go on home. Go back to your ordinary lives, go back to your knitting [chuckles].

Maximus Meridius goes into this mission with essentially no roadmap, but decides to make one up as he goes along anyway, without entirely knowing whether or not what he's doing is running afoul of the law. He still tries to be scrupulous about it, he still tries to make it aboveboard, poking along the explicit powers laid out in the Treaty of Treason… which by that point, were actually being amended. There was a special tribunal in the Capitol that fall to discuss amendments to the Hunger Games Charter within the Treaty of Treason to allow for things like… alliances, after the partnership between Kovu Theseus and two other boys proved so popular, as well as a team-up with Shrimp Pescal and the kids from District 4 the year before that. District tokens were also officially sanctioned for tributes to take into the arena with them – you might remember this guy… his name is Guernsey Hyde, the first ever Victor from District 10, who, almost three years before, brought a Kermit the Frog doll with him to the Capitol, the Peacekeepers tried to take it away, but he threw a big tantrum and so they gave it back, and then the plush toy ended up saving his life [circles something on her paper].

But there is no mention about making an amendment to the Charter for the Games, the Treaty of Treason, about whether or not tributes can be trained ahead of time. So Maximus Meridius starts his own little shadow campaign to get this approved… but he does so quietly. He doesn't even mount a campaign to get a Training Amendment written into the Treaty of Treason, while the ratification of all these other amendments are still going on. No, instead he writes a letter to then-President Commodus Ravinstill, which you can see up there on the screen. It reads: 'Dear Mr. President: I write to you in the hopes that we can have an audience together, so that I may convey to you some of my thoughts on how to enhance the glory of our penance – the Hunger Games you so wisely implemented' [circles something on her paper]. President Ravinstill never replied to that letter, as far as we know. There is barely any record of him acknowledging receipt of the letter, except for this little, sort of throw-away notation in his presidential diaries during the winter of 7 ADD: 'Was posted a letter from Maximus Decimus Meridius this afternoon – very touching! Wish I had more time for the boy!'

So, after receiving essentially no reply from the President, doesn't even get a chance to… what we can imagine would have been the first Victor asking for permission to potentially train future tributes, Maximus has to decide…. OK, I don't know if this is legal or not, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that it is until someone tells me otherwise. Which, of course, as we all now know, no one ever does. [shuffles some papers]. From what we can tell, Maximus starts out small. He decides he has to be careful – there is, after all, a decently robust crop of Peacekeepers in the region, even though, by then, eight or so years out from the Dark Days, District 2 is on its best behavior! Like one of those little teachers' pets who always brings an apple into class! Even so, Maximus Meridius is very careful, he trains only one tribute – she was a girl by the name of Hippolyta Anderson. [shows a picture of Hippolyta on the screen].

Now, Hippolyta Anderson was a pretty buxom girl, but not necessarily what bodyshamers would term 'fat.' 16 years old. District 2 census records show her father worked as a foreman in one of the larger stone quarries out there. According to her memoirs, which were a Capitol Times bestseller at the time of their release, Hippolyta states: "He [Maximus] and I mostly trained out of his basement at night, after my school hours and shifts in the quarries. His was a pretty ramshackle house at that time; he was leasing it from his mother, because, being a Victor, being a killer, no one in the stone quarries wanted to hire him out for work. And Victors' Villages didn't exist back then. He made do on very little, but he got by – eventually, I learned how to do the same. Maximus taught me everything he knew – the art of swordplay, the practice of using your opponents' weaknesses against them. Even (and here's the clincher to what she says) the art of seduction and of making love."

[circles something on paper] Maximus is training his first apprentice, and apparently as part of her curriculum, he – I mean she – is getting free lays. Talk about tuition, right? [laughs, shuffles some papers]

Hippolyta Anderson would go on to win the 8th Hunger Games, the first time in history that a district would rack up a second Victor. Yes, District 2 was the first. To watch the old archival footage of her arena, Hippolyta is brash. She is no-nonsense. She is, indeed, ruthless. And yes, she is seductive: on two separate occasions, she seduces the boy from 3 and the boy from 10, and then kills them. Hippolyta would later go on to say that she felt disgusted with herself for misleading those boys, to the point where, if we can just turn back to her memoirs: "I returned to the glorious fatherland, my District 2, with the man who had taught me the art of staying alive… and I to some degree despised him for it. I walked right up to Maximus and told him, 'If our native soil is to ever again have another champion, he or she must never again attain it through the dishonest practice of lying in love and passion with another.'"

'Never again attain it through the dishonest practice of lying in love and passion with another…. I despised him for it.' Hippolyta would keep that promise, as it turns out. District 2 would continue to avoid the strategy of seduction in trying to win the Games. Eventually, that was co-opted by the kids sent in by District 1, and future tributes from District 2, under Hippolyta's leadership, would learn to watch for the signs when an ally or another tribute, particularly from 1, might be coming on to them. It was Hippolyta Anderson who would make Maximus Meridius's dreams of a Hunger Games Training program a reality. She would become the first Headmistress of what was known as 'the Institute.' She implemented many of the practices that made it possible for trained District 2 combatants to volunteer to be deployed into the Games. And despite many proposals, even from many prominent Capitol politicians and apparently at one point even from Maximus himself, who was ten years her senior…. Hippolyta Anderson never married. She was sometimes known to have said: 'I am married to the Institute. The Institute is my life and it is my love.'

… Hippolyta Anderson died today, at a nursing home in the State of Rykers, her former and beloved District 2. She was 98. For a long time, many people thought she already was dead, that she had perished heroically during the Victors' Purge at the onset of the Mockingjay Revolution! She was actually able to slip away quietly, when war broke out, and went into hiding. It was actually a big story a couple of years ago, when her nephew came forward and said, basically, 'You know how you all thought there were only seven or eight Victors left? Just kidding, we found another Victor!' [chuckles]. CGN was able to catch up with District 2's Enobaria Gabbro – once thought to be the last living Career, the one who went through two Hunger Games! – and asked her for comment on the passing of this champion:

Enobaria Gabbro: I mean, you know, she was a legend, she was a hero. I looked up to the Headmistress during my years at the Institute. She was my idol.

Rachel Maddow the Third: 'She was my idol.' [crosses something out on papers]. Hippolyta Anderson…. Rest in peace. We've got some more exciting stuff for you this hour. We're going to be speaking with Senator Harvey about the latest push for a hovercar appropriations bill through Congress. And also we are going to be discussing the rumors that the Star-Crossed Lovers of District 12 are pregnant – for real this time! – with a very exciting guest, Mr. Haymitch Abernathy himself. You will not want to miss that. We've got much more ahead tonight, stay with us. Watch this space.