SPOILERS: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
So I know when Suzanne Collins announced she was releasing a prequel to the Hunger Games, there was a lot of backlash that the main character was President Snow. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed TBOSAS and have a lot of thoughts about it. (Bear with me this will be really long)
1. My first thought: Tigris? Like ~the~ Tigris from Mockingjay? They seem so close what happened between them to make Tigris willing to betray her family to Squad 451… obviously she was fired as a stylist for being too altered, but is there more?
2. I find it interesting that some of the improvements to The Hunger Games were Snow’s idea, like the betting and the providing the tributes food to make a better show
3. It’s absolutely horrible to see that the tributes were treated so inhumanely (Kept in the Monkey House at the zoo, starved, and given a veterinarian rather than doctor) but it’s also haunting to see the desensitization that eventually came along when it became more like a sport than senseless revenge in the Capitol. At least the Capitol children saw the problem in the 10th Games compared to the 74th
4. Reaper apologizing for having to kill the other tributes (188) is such a stark contrast to how Cato and Clove relish in killing when Katniss is in the 74th Games, which shows how well President Snow (or perhaps Dr. Gaul) did his/her job in turning the districts’s enemy into the other districts before the Capitol
5. It’s also interesting how Snow’s tribute (FROM DISTRICT 12) won the games because Snow bent the rules and relied on cleverness much in the way Katniss (obviously also from District 12) won her games
6. I LOVE that Lucy Gray wrote the Hanging Tree it must’ve been so haunting for Snow to hear when the propo of Katniss singing aired
7. The similarities between Lucy Gray and Katniss!!!
-Both have a younger relative they take care of
-Only females victors from 12
-Won by using cunning intelligence (Lucy Gray with the poison, Katniss with the berries)
-Singing the Meadow Song and the Hanging Tree
-Both consider running off the escape from 12 and survive in the woods
8. Snow defies the capitol (handkerchief in the snake tank) just like Katniss (the nightlock berries) to help win the games
9. “Some people call them swamp potatoes, but I like katniss better. Has a nice ring to it” (436) oh Lucy Gray! I know Katniss is a plant but it’s so fun seeing the name casually mentioned in the prequel not as a heroine but just as an ordinary name. Little does Snow know, a girl named after that plant is going to be his downfall
10. “What if this was his life: rising whenever, catching his food for the day, and hanging out with Lucy Gray by the lake? Who needed wealth and success and power when they had love?” (438) contrasted with “He [Corionlanus] imagined a group of people in wild animal furs scraping out existence in a cave somewhere. He supposed such a thing could happen, but that life would be a big step down from even the districts. Barely human” (395)
-It’s no wonder Coriolanus wants to marry a woman he detests (516) if loving Lucy Gray made him consider living in conditions he called “barely human”
11. I love Snow’s disdain for the mockingjays obviously because Katniss becomes ~the Mockingjay~, but I also love how Snow hates them because they represent a failure to the capitol, an “unauthorized co-opting [of] Capitol technology” (439), showing that the Capitol is not as necessary as they would believe (which Katniss as the Mockingjay emphasizes in the future when she dismantled the Capitol)
-“Coriolanus felt sure he’d just spotted his first mockingjay, and he disliked the thing on sight” (352)
-“He [Coriolanus] didn’t mind the jabberjays so much — they seemed rather interesting from a military standpoint— but something about the mockingjays repelled him” (417)
12. Do you think Sejanus knew that Snow betrayed him when he mouths Coryo? (470) For his sake, I hope he didn’t so that he could die feeling as though he still had a best friend rather than add more sorrow to his death
13. “Was the goal of survival further survival and nothing more?” (495) —> “but at least he would ensure survival for survival’s sake” (516)
-This reminds me of Gale’s rants in the woods when he and Katniss are hunting, how they’re surviving but not living, and that it’s a cause for rebellion and uprising
-It’s interesting to see Snow’s mindset change, from when he considered survival as the only virtue in his life when he and Lucy Gray were about to run off compared to when he decides he is capable of becoming the president and ensuring survival
-When Snow decides to ensure survival, it seems more as though ensuring the survival of the oppression to maintain his power rather than save humanity, as he claims. He, too, had scorned the idea of surviving to survive earlier (495), so why should he want the people in the districts to survive just to survive? Certainly not for humanity
14. Even the person who created The Hunger Games — Dean Highbottom — thinks they’re awful (515)
15. “Snow had been the ruination of them both” (516)
-Even though Snow doesn’t know what happened to Lucy Gray that day in the woods, I would assume she died because in the Hunger Games novel, “Then he reads the list of past District 12 victors. In seventy-four years, we have had only two. Only one is still alive” (THG, 19). Obviously the victor still alive is Haymitch.
-Although, perhaps she starved because music became outlawed with the arrival of the new mayor.
-I find it interesting that District 12 even knew there was more than one victor seeing as Dr. Gaul destroyed all evidence of the 10th Games.
16. Snow hates the idea of women selling their bodies in exchange for things they need to survive, as he sees it as losing all dignity, (like when he feels disgust at the line in Lucy Gray’s song from her interview on page 175), but then he makes the victors sell themselves once he’s president
17. It’s interesting to see the effect that Dr. Gaul has on Snow, because obviously her teaching is what made Coriolanus’s mindset change
-He calls her a lunatic (114) and agrees with Tigris when she calls Dr. Gaul sadistic (125) and felt horrified at the way Marcus’s body was displayed once caught (206), but he still says that he’ll continue the Hunger Games when he’s the president (516)
-He felt guilty murdering Bobbin (248), but in his reign as the president he was responsible for hundreds of deaths (which he never denied but did not seem to feel guilty for either in Mockingjay)
18. President Snow is known to poison his enemies to maintain his control, so I liked seeing him poison his first victim — Dean Highbottom — with rat poison (517).
