I am deeply fixated on the Hunger Games rn – more specifically Snow & the TBOSAS cast, but since there are countless essays and posts that say what I think about Coriolanus and Lucy Gray and Sejanus better than I will ever be able to, I turn my attention to Casca Highbottom because he is actually perhaps interestingly tragic – like Greek Myth sort of tragic, which is a very specific flavour of tragic. He’s perhaps the closest thing to something like prophecy – of the self-fulfilling sort – and inevitability we get in this book ,and that’s particularly interesting because this book is mostly that people are not predestined to be one way or another.
We all know the story, Casca Highbottom and Crassus Snow were friends once, close friends, close enough to be notable. Then they were paired together for an assignment to create a punishment for one's enemies so extreme that they would never be allowed to forget how they had wronged them, assigned by Dr Gaul. Casca created the Hunger Games drunk while Crassus got him drunker and writer all down and turned it in for a good grade. Casca got angry and broke it off with Crassus (which,,, okay, a bit of an over reaction for what was then just an assignment. He couldn’t have known that it would turn into what it would be then but I digress.)
Dark Days happen, Dr Gaul introduces the Hunger Games, introduces Casca as the architect of said Games. He becomes an addict. He takes out all his horror and agony and anger on Coriolanus Snow – Crassus’ son, casting the sins of the father onto the son. When Coriolanus eventually cheats for Lucy Gray, he sends him to the Peacekeepers. We know what happens then. Snow comes back, and Casca is poisoned by him.
So let’s get back to the point:
Casca Highbottom is a tragedy, but he is also a cautionary tale.
Casca – alongside Dr Gaul – plays very well against the themes of the novel, namely speaking, as Lucy Gray put it, that “there’s a natural goodness built into human beings.” But while Dr Gaul plays against it in a simultaneously more direct yet abstract manner with her thesis on humanity being inherently cruel and animalistic, Casca plays against it in a more personal manner by assuming that Coriolanus is a bad person, the same as his father, that there is rot in the bloodline. There isn’t, or there may be, but – if you isolate the various protagonists’ stories – Coriolanus is perhaps the least doomed character to exist in the franchise. Katniss was doomed to lose Prim, we see it with the very first sentence. Haymitch was doomed to lose his loved ones, he went through the Hunger Games and was a rebel and Snow has a grudge. Coriolanus is human with human wants and human needs, he could have chosen good, he didn’t in the end, but he could have.
Casca Highbottom is kind of the embodiment of a self-fulfilling prophecy here – to think that Coriolanus is a monster, and then to facilitate his transformation into that monster. He is the Hecuba to Coriolanus’ Paris, the Laius to Coriolanus’ Oedipus in that way, the Amulius to Coriolanus’ Romulus and Remus, to those familiar with Hindu literature he is the Kamsa to Coriolanus’ Krishna. He is cruel to Coriolanus and to try to get rid of him because all he sees is Crassus, the living embodiment of Casca’s mistakes and the cruelty that has been inflicted because of them. In this story, considering what we know of Snow in his future, that is perhaps a good thing at first. And in many ways, Coriolanus’ exile to the Peacekeepers – to Twelve, could have been a good thing, it was where he was most human after all, where there was less Capitol propaganda to influence him, the air is fresh with a freedom that could not be found in the Capitol. But no one could have known what happened next.
So Casca Highbottom sends Coriolanus Snow to the place the human will fully die and the monster will be reborn, and that monster will kill him and move on to the rest of the nation, the cycle of cruelty will continue to greater heights than just two petty people. Casca – someone who deeply hated the cruelty inflicted on the Districts, who is good in some parts and bad in other la – is now an accomplice to the oppression of the Districts . That’s a fate worse than death, I think, to have your name associated with something so horrible, and it's even worse to have been able to go the other way around if only you were kinder.
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