A thing I really love about TBOSAS is its exploration of human nature through the characters, using the ideas of philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rosseau. In fact, it's so important to Suzanne Collins that you make these connections that their most famous works are quoted in the novel's epigraph.
Gaul represents Hobbesian thought in the story, believing humans are hardwired to be cruel, selfish, and willing to kill each other to ensure survival. She tells Snow that the arena is "humanity undressed" and that even Snow, who had the right upbringing and education, quickly becomes a murderer inside the arena (tbosas 243).
It's always been interesting to me that she likens the arena, an environment controlled by the Capitol, to the State of Nature Hobbes writes about.
First of all, the State of Nature is supposed to be a place without any sort of interference, and in an arena, that's just not true; the Capitol controls weapons, food supply, and dangers like mutts. Secondly, the State of Nature was never a real place but more of a thought exercise, but Gaul seems to take this exercise at face value.
In Leviathan, Hobbes says that in the State of Nature, there exists a perpetual state of war, with no moral right or wrong, and to escape this "nasty, brutish, and short" life, humans must create a strong central state to impose order.
Snow's journey in the novel is to decide which worldview he ascribes to, which makes the arrival of Lucy Gray Baird into his life even more important.
Now, Lucy Gray is more in line with Rosseau's view that humans are naturally good, but society is the one that changes that. This is her line of thinking when she tells Snow: "People aren't so bad really[.] It's what the world does to them. Like us, in the arena. We did things in there we'd never have considered if they just left us alone," (tbosas 492).
What I like about TBOSAS is that unlike other prequels centered on the villain, it's not preordained by fate that Snow was meant to be an authoritarian dictator. He has a choice. He meets Lucy Gray when he's leaving childhood, stuck between two forks in the road, and he can choose whether to stay on the right side of the line, as Lucy Gray later mentions. But he decides not to.
He chooses wealth, fame, and power over love and goodness.
It's very telling to me that out in the woods with Lucy Gray, before their relationship quickly sours, he wonders what they should do after they meet their most basic needs. What would they do without books or music? What's the point of survival for its own sake? He even discounts having children with her because he says it would be "too bleak" to condemn a child to such an existence (tbosas 496).
Love is not enough. Not if you subscribe to a worldview where individuals are inherently cruel and if you think control is the only thing preventing chaos. When he turns his gun on Lucy Gray it's the ultimate rejection of her worldview, and his complete turn into Gaul's influence, one where it's every man for himself.
