Et Tu Brutus?

et tu brutus?

in a constant state of nostalgia for december 2023 at the peak of the tbosas fandom when i was desperate for content and kept the lamina tab on ao3 open on my phone, checking it maybe 13 times a day, and the scene of treech pulling lamina away from the bullets was my lifeline, when they were little people on my screen who i didn’t really have personalities for but was obsessed with anyway

i raise you: double down and get us to 420

pack it up boys our work here is done

being friends with fellow writers is desperately trying to pawn off au’s on each other like a tennis match

nurse she’s out again

I’ve been thinking a lot about who Treech and Lamina are and their relationship to each other and mostly the downfall of it. I wanted to put all those thoughts down into one place and I always enjoy reading character analyses so I thought I’d share!

To preface, this is my own personal take on them and an insight to the way I write them in fics. This is entirely the movie side of them. I enjoy their book versions, but the movie created a very compelling relationship that I have yet to move on from. I would love to hear other thoughts and opinions so please don’t hesitate to share if you feel the need to!

To start, I view them as childhood friends. There are a few options of how I think their relationship could have gone (that is to say developing into a romantic relationship or staying friends) pre-hunger games, but I know that in all of them, they care deeply about the other.

Individually, this is how I write them:

Treech:

To me, Treech is the oldest of two younger sisters and the burden of that is a defining part of his character. His entire family is still intact and that also weighs heavy on him. I think he lives in fear of what could happen to him, his family, and everything he cares about. This leads to an attempt at trying to care about as few people as possible. He tries to keep his head down and mind his own. He keeps everyone at arms-length. He has friends but they are shallow relationships and only viewed as people to spend time with. He will not do anything to put his life and his family’s life at risk. They get by and in that world, have a good life. He is not going to be the one to ruin that. He has not lost anything of value in his life and in turn, that makes him terrified.

Treech has never lost anyone. He doesn’t know how he would react to grief. It terrifies him because he’s never done it. As much as he tries not to he loves deeply, but he is so afraid of loving more than necessary because he has never lost, and when you live in the world they do, losing is inevitable and simply a matter of waiting.

I view him as a slave to self-imposed duty, someone who would sacrifice anything for the few people he loves (*cough cough* his own innocence), as well as someone with an unhealthy dose of self-hatred.

I think Treech is constantly fighting with himself. His dislike for himself, his inability to allow himself to be close to people and his unwavering kindness and sense of duty are in direct opposition of each other at all times. Everything in him is always fighting to gain the power and it really is just a matter of what day it is as to which trait is the strongest.

He is not consistent with his thoughts and feelings and switches up very easily. He’s hard to get a read on because you think you understand him and you do but only for that moment because the next minute he feels the opposite way.

I think Treech views himself as uninfluential and not really someone of any consequence, which to me is why he becomes so infatuated with Lamina.

Lamina:

Lamina lost a mother during the war, and later two older twin brothers who were rebels and died because of that. It is just her and her father (which in my head also meets the headcanon of why she is better dressed than Treech; family of two vs. family of five). Where Treech has never lost anyone he’s loved, Lamina has lost nearly everyone. While a lot of times this would make someone cold, it makes Lamina even more determined to relish in the things she values. She loves, and she refuses to lessen that love just because she may lose it.

I think when you lose someone, it forces you to face not only your own mortality but also everyone else’s. Lamina takes that mortality and instead of being scared of it promises to make the most of it. Not only that but I think it makes you even more confident in your own strength. If you can get through the loss of someone you love, I think there are very few things you can’t get through. Lamina knows this and she knows how she reacts to grief. She trusts that she has the strength to love and lose because she has done it— multiple times— and she has survived.

I think Lamina is wickedly smart and enjoys learning. I view her as someone who is extremely emotionally intelligent and mature, but for all her confidence in her strength, I think she is also insecure. Typically, I find that people with that kind of maturity at such a young age are ostracized because their peers simply aren’t at that level yet and most of the time what kids don’t understand they label as weird. I think Lamina became very used to the feeling of being alone and at times fed into the notion that her differences were bad. I imagine Treech was the first person to ever treat her intelligence as something that is simply “cool” and not something that makes her incapable of being a kid.

I picture Lamina as someone who is cohesive and a flowing picture of all of her different traits. She accepts each one for what it is and allows it to do its job in her life. She tries to always be better but she doesn’t drown in her faults.

Notice how above I say often “this is what they think about themselves”. They think certain ways about themselves when the opposite is true. Perspective!

In actuality, Treech is strong in his devotions and uneasily swayed from them. He views himself as weak-minded when really he is so stuck in his views he cannot change. He believes that keeping everyone at arms length will keep his heart safe when in reality it does more harm than good. He thinks he is of no consequence to anyone, tries so hard to not cause any trouble, yet makes an impact on every person he’s come into contact with. I believe Treech’s number one character trait is that he is kind. It’s in his nature to help and I think he physically cannot stop himself. It’s just something that happens. It’ll be one instance that he thinks means nothing but means everything to someone else (i.e. being kind to Lamina as children is something he doesn’t even think of because “anyone would do this” yet none of their peers had ever done it before). He thinks he’s inconsequential but he impacts people without even knowing it.

Lamina believes she is unnerving to others when in reality she has that kind of spark that makes it hard to look away. Think about those people who are inexplicably infatuating. So yeah, in a way she is unnerving, but only because you can’t help but notice her. She’s an enigma who’s been labeled as weird.

However, I don’t think they are that different from each other. Instead, I think it is the way they go about those similarities that make them different.

For example:

Treech is kind and he wants so badly not to be. Lamina is kind and wishes she were more so. Where she sees her kindness and empathy as a strength, Treech views his as a weakness.

I think they both are intense about their love, but where one runs from the strength of his love, the other does everything she can to make it stronger.

They both are fiercely loyal. Treech tries to limit that loyalty to his family, but Lamina wishes to give it to everyone.

The ironic part about this is that the traits Treech sees as faults in himself he sees as otherworldly in Lamina. (Perspective 😍)

I picture Treech to have almost in a sense placed Lamina atop a pedestal. She is everything he wishes he were; open, free, and believing in good. Lamina in his eyes is something he is unworthy of, but also something he thinks would ruin him should he ever lose it. She is something to be protected but never touched.

This is so unhealthy though, because it’s impossible to be in a relationship with someone you don’t view as an equal.

Lamina, however, grounded sweetheart that she is, views Treech as human. She adores him for all that he is— good and bad. She adores him for his kindness and for his fearfulness. Lamina values Treech because she values every living being. But she loves him because he is Treech.

However, the downside of this is that I imagine she lets him get away with many things because he was the first person outside of her family to be kind for the sake of being kind. I think Treech would reject a lot of her attempts at getting closer and refuse to admit how much he cares about her. I think Lamina, who is so declarative with her love and wants the same back, is only able to look past this because she convinces herself that the only thing that matters about him is his kindness. Kindness she has been a firsthand witness to and kindness that impacted her at a young age. She’s seen the good in him and refuses to let that good be outshined by all his bad, even if that means becoming a bit of a doormat for his bad habits.

Lamina grows to love Treech over a period of time as she forces herself to push past all his flaws. Treech loves her in an instant because he can’t help himself.

This plays into the part above where I talked about how Treech thinks he doesn’t impact anyone when in reality it’s impossible for him not to and how Lamina has that quality about her that forces everyone to at least look at her.

When Treech shows Lamina that first act of kindness as kids, he impacts her life in a way that makes it impossible for her to not want to know him. Lamina inherently has that quality about her, the quality that makes people want to know her, and Treech, guarded, closed-off Treech, is unable to escape her pull.

In my head, there is literally no world where they don’t immediately mean something to each other, because it is literally engraved into who they are. Treech impacts everyone, Lamina forces everyone to impact her.

In a perfect world, Treech goes to therapy for his self-hatred and Lamina gains a little bit of self-worth (i.e. tells Treech to figure his shit out instead of taking it out on her) however they live in Panem and that is not possible.

Thus their downfall.

i raise you: double down and get us to 420

pack it up boys our work here is done