The whole songbird and snake part of tbosas is interesting to me. Because when you start reading the book you’re thinking ‘oh, sure, so the guy who’s been consistently associated with snakes in the trilogy is going to be the snake, and his love interest is going to be the songbird’. Snakes eat songbirds, easy symbolism all around.
And then you meet Lucy Gray, and she’s just put a snake down someone’s dress. And immediately you have to reassess. And you figure out that it’s a little more complicated — they’re both the songbird, and they’re both the snake, but whereas Lucy Gray is associated with wild animals she befriends in the woods, Coriolanus is associated with Capitol mutts he first meets in a lab. Gaul’s rainbow snakes, the jabberjays.
And then the plot thickens even deeper, right, because it turns out the snakes represent their methods. They’re both cunning, good at improvising, not apposed to lying and performing when need be. They get each other! They click with each other, really well and really easily, because of that synergy in how they work with each other! SC isn’t saying that being ‘snakelike’ is bad or evil in and of itself. She’s cautioning you to think about what you’re using those methods for.
Because the songbirds, those are about their ideals. Lucy Gray, like her songbirds, wants to sing what she likes, treasure her freedom, and care for her family and whoever else she can in Twelve. Those are her highest ideals. But Coriolanus? He’s like his jabberjays. Free him, put him in the wild where he has the space to think for himself, and he’ll still only want to sing what the Capitol tells him to. He’ll still fly for a Capitol cage at the first opportunity. And he’ll still use his voice against the people living in Twelve at every chance he gets. It’s what the Capitol made him for, after all, and old habits die hard.
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