Snow or Coin?
Meta time. Ara I have no idea if this is what you wanted but you got me thinking so here. we. go.
For all that I’m someone who touts the praise of nuance so much, I actually prefer Snow as a villain. Or maybe I’d prefer him to be my nemesis. He is twisted and cruel but at least he’s mostly plain dealing about it. It’s in his name. White as snow. His intentions are clear; they’re bad intentions, but at least he’s forthright about them, even with Katniss.
Coin to me is more unsettling because she’s so duplicitous. At the beginning of Mockingjay I was primed to trust her as the leader of the rebellion but then with her power grab, her proposed Games, we see her true colors, we see the other side of the coin.
If I had to pick one to have tea with, so to speak, I’d probably pick Snow. He might poison me but at least I could go into the meeting knowing he was going to do it.  😆
And I trust Katniss’s judgement. In her fight to maintain her purity, it makes sense she would recognize the cunning Coin as a greater threat. She sees through it precisely because of her own honest personality.
What’s really interesting (and someone wiser than I probably should do a meta on this) is how the respective leaders of the Capitol and 13 contrast with their propaganda prisoners. Manipulative Coin gets genuine Katniss. Straightforward Snow gets sly Peeta.
I agree with this: I’d rather deal with the enemy who is upfront about things than the one who is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I can at least respect Snow’s honesty.
All of this is also making me wonder what we’re going to see in terms of backstory on Coin and 13 in the new book. How old is Coin, anyway? I think she’s younger than Snow was, but maybe we’ll some hint of her or her family.
I already get the vibe that this book is going to be some sort of parallel to Katniss’s (and Peeta’s?), probably in a darker fashion. Like the inverse of them or something. So it makes me wonder if she’s going to use 13 to continue that parallel.
@rosegardeninwinter you said:
That's so brilliant and something I've never observed before!!! That would definitely worth thinking through and studying.
@shesasurvivor I think I'm excited to see those things too. We could really see so many themes and characters that echo and foreshadow what's to come in sixty-four years.
Agree with ALL of this. Snow, at the very least, isn’t going to be the one that ever lulls you into any false sense of security.
You KNOW he is awful, he doesn’t hide it. Where as Coin is so manipulative and so much harder to pin down and defend yourself against. In that way, I think I prefer Snow as a villain. And I am SO excited to see him become that villain in Ballad.
I suppose there was that one time he released Peeta back into the wild to kill Katniss which was kinda sneaky ...but Katniss knew he was out to punish and ruin her with Peeta so it wasn’t that much of a surprise in principle (especially since he’s so upfront about the “please shut up or I’m going to kill your husband” roses) ... and Coin sends him after her too, but in a more underhanded way
BUT IT DIDN’T WORK SO
really the whole series is just Snow and Coin going “you two should kill each other it would make my life a lot easier” “hmmmm yeah that’s gonna be a no”
I always try to think about Coin in the sense of historical context, related to when the books were written.
We spend two books, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, learning about how awful Snow is. How cruel, how unjust, how manipulative. Yes he’s open about it at least with Katniss, but in true villain fashion he believes he is justified in being so. I do think he’s still sly and secretive to some degree otherwise people would not be utterly glued to the television when Finnick is laying bare the depth of his duplicity.
Brief tangent over back to the point. By the time Mockingjay opens, we as readers are incensed. We want the districts to rise up. We want them to overthrow the Capitol. So we are, as @rosegardeninwinter mentions, predisposed to like Coin. Ah here is the noble leader who will guide us into a just future. Except she’s not. She is the other side of the Coin. Thirteen is bare, austere, infertile, highly militarized. They are surviving but is it really living? And there are small hints from the very beginning that Coin’s life in Thirteen with this military mindset has made her predisposed to do things that are morally gray to downright awful in the name of a military victory. Example: having Katniss’ prep team imprisoned and tortured.
I don’t necessarily think she’s all that sly or sneaky about it. She just thinks she’s justified in what she does. Coins choices are logical and efficient to her, therefore they are right in her mind. At one point, Katniss tells us that words are not wasted in Thirteen. Which to me, I always read Coin, not as being sly, so much as she never felt the need to explain herself.
“These are my orders. Go do it.” End of discussion. The why is neither here nor there. It’s a very military commander attitude. She actually gets more creative and sneaky and starts to think and act more like Snow as the book goes on. Maybe the influence of Plutarch? Or the result of coming out of the shadows.
Her motivations are still somewhat murky by the end. Is it a straight up power grab? Or does she simply think no one else can do the job the way she thinks is right and most efficient? Either way, it’s bad news for Panem because the philosophy of “the ends justify the means” is never a good road to take.
I think the argument for her being untrustworthy comes from the fact that she’s presented as the leader of the rebellion, which is meant to be automatically considered morally superior to the Capitol. A lot of that is Collins playing with and subverting reader expectations and preconceived ideas, but there are characters in the book who also outright make this case. It’s the fact that she and her cause are put forward as the “cure” to the corrupt Capitol and Snow that makes her seem more sneaky than Snow.
I also think that a case can be made using context from the book that she was gunning for Snow’s position. Boggs telling Katniss that she’s a threat if she doesn’t support Coin’s bid for leader after the war is a good example. So is the way she just casually declares herself “interim” president before their new election. To use another fictional example, it reminds me a lot of the way Palpatine kept declaring “emergency powers” during the Clone Wars, when all along he was planning to use those powers to declare himself emperor.
All that said, I can see a case made that they’re basically the same kind of person, and their circumstances cause differing behaviors. Snow is already in charge, so other than doing what he needs to do in order to stay that way, he doesn’t have as much of a need to be sneaky and manipulative. Coin isn’t there yet, so she has more cause. We’ll probably see more of Snow being that way in the new book. But with the books that we currently have, I think it’s still easy to make the case that you know what you’re getting with Snow. But this speculation is only going off the point in their lives that we’ve actually seen, since that’s the only information we have at the moment.
Also, thinking something is justified in their heads doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not still being sneaky. Manipulative people definitely justify their actions in their heads all the time. Doesn’t mean the outward behavior is any less manipulative.
