What Writers Can Learn from A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
I really enjoyed this book by Suzanne Collins, not only because I'm greedy for content but because it was honestly the best thing the woman has ever written. So what can we learn from it?
Collins has a habit of showing growth through symbolic changes in a character's affect or even through the items around them. She is on top form here especially with Coriolanus growth. She shows subtle changes in him through the items about him.
Coryo carries the compact with his mother's powder with him as a token to calm him throughout the story. He even passes it onto Lucy when he becomes closer to her. By the time Coryo has grown from naive schoolboy to enlightened spectator of the work to player in a greater game, he has thrown away his mother's powder showing he has cast aside the boy he was.
By the end of the book, the narrator in third person begins to change Coriolanus's name to Snow, putting the final nail into the coffin of the death of the boy called Coryo and the emergence of President Snow.
Roses are also a symbol of Coryo, even into the original trilogy. Coryo wants to reject the rose his grandmother offers in the opening chapters. But as we move on wearing the roses becomes less a chore and more a staple of who he is. He might be evil and irredeemable but he does not forget who he is throughout his reign to his death.
Also, probably just me spitballing here, but Tigris's transformation into the Tiger-looking woman we are introduced to in Mockingjay sort of makes sense to me know. She openly states how much she hates the Hunger Games and all it stands for. Though we don't see the rift between Coryo and Tigris on page, it does make sense to consider that perhaps Tigris is becoming her firstname to avoid her surname Snow and all the trappings that comes with it, since she does technically aid her cousin's fall from power in Mockingjay.
I don't know about you guys but I was just eating up the Sejanus storyline. I mean the kid is from the districts and never forgot that, he felt as if he owed the tributes something. He is in a situation that totally floors us from reading the original trilogy, he got out of the districts. The whole internal and external struggle of Sejanus plays out in the background, as vividly as a protagonist's storyline. Sideplots should help distract us from the story's thin points (I mean Coryo's story was interesting but there are times where you just remember he's President Snow and be like motherfucker).
I love villains. I really do. I can look past most their flaws. I did not think Collins could pull off making me like President Snow. Coryo is almost instantaneously understandable. He loves his family, he worries about what he should wear to school, he starve, he suffers emotionally over his experiences in life, he falls in love and has a prick of a teacher. These are common ground and can make for a complex villain. We may never love Coryo but we understand him.
The best thing I loved about the book was the widening of worldbuilding in the series. I personally expect every book to reveal more worldbuilding secrets in a series, like levelling up in a way.
We get more music in the world, at least half a dozen new songs. We learn that Clementine is still sung in Panem, a relic of country it was.
We learn about some of the different the death rituals for some districts.
We learn how the Capitol functions and how run down it is. We are introduced to a glorious city in the original trilogy so it is a slap to witness it as we do in this book, a vestigal empire recovering slowly from a war it barely won. Even Coryo's opening chapters echo Katniss's, down to getting dressed for Reaping Day.
We also learn about the Capitol's opinion on the districts which is an interesting point of view especially considering it to be a decade after the Dark Days. Grandma'am openly treats the Plinths, the District 2 family who moved to the Capitol as inferior and by the end even refers to Ma Plinth as her maid rather than the woman who is financially supporting her. She curses the Tributes when they arrive, openly despising them. Even Coryo's little mention on how he's nice to Sejanus to be polite tells us much and more about how Coryo views the districts and the people.
Characters should learn things
Coryo's growth in the book is an interesting one. As mentioned before he goes from a naive awkward boy into a cold-blooded pragmatist who will do anything to gain power. Coryo learns over the course of the book that his naivety cannot continue nor even the shred of goodness in him. He learns to betray those closest to him, abandon his principles in the favour of accepting the Hunger Games and prejudices of those around him to climb higher into political atmosphere, abandon the idea of love and as we saw above, he begins to shed who he once was and become the man he believes that will win him power.
Bigger Issues in Pretty Wrapping
Of course this was the point of the book itself, to address the Hunger Games as they should be addressed as a dismal, visceral and horrid thing. I stand behind Collins for purposefully stripping away the gilt of the Hunger Games to show the ugliness underneath because it gets the message through to the audience. I have read reviews of fans who hated the book for not being entertaining enough. The gilt and love triangles of the Hunger Games trilogy were pushed by booksellers and the movie studios, so splashed across everything that we forget the message to the story. Here there is nothing to hide behind and I applaud her for this.
There is also an in-world example of Lucy Gray Baird. Lucy is introduced to us as a pretty girl in a rainbow dress with a lovely singing voice. Bit by bit she comes into more complexity to us. We learn of her hardships in in District 12, how and what she had to do to survive and her willingness to kill to save herself and others. We are basically given a character almost as the Capitol and our media have viewed Katniss. As a girl in a pretty dress with a pretty singing voice first, the version all wrapped up pretty and then as the darker, driven and complex character.
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