I just finished The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and holy crap, it is so good. Suzanne Collins basically went, "I see you misinterpreted my first Hunger Games books, so let me fix that for you." Highlights include (no spoilers):
Snow literally refers to pre-Panem North America as "a land full of Capitols."
Prior to all the pageantry and excess of Katniss's day, everyone in the Capitol sees the Hunger Games as horrible and cruel, but no one does anything about it. The only person who gets angry about them and wants to stop them is treated as an embarrassment at best, a potential traitor at worst.
The main female character repeatedly asserts that she's neither Capitol nor District. She's part of a nomadic minority that got stuck in a district during the war. Almost as if dividing people up by geography and then acting as if everyone in each region is the same is a terrible idea.
Corruption is a huge theme, from rich people buying their kids' ways through life to a mayor rigging the reaping and sending a girl he doesn't like to the Hunger Games. NOTHING SCARILY FAMILIAR HERE.
Snow habitually treats people, even those closest to him, as commodities to be used and discarded. Every time he does this, we're treated to some mental gymnastics to explain how he is, in fact, the victim in all this.
Appearances are everything: the Snow family is destitute, to the point of perpetual food insecurity. However, since the family still owns their penthouse, they do everything in their power to appear rich. A major part of this is to maintain their superiority over a District-born family who actually earned their wealth, but who are, of course, Inherently Inferior.
Sidenote: it's implied that Snow's cousin had to resort to sex work to maintain this illusion. Snow figures this out and then basically refuses to even think about it, because it doesn't fit in with the story he tells himself.
So we all know that Snow will turn out to be the villain in the end, but one of the first real indicators in the text? He repeatedly refers to the girl he likes as "belonging" to him. Hmm, could it be that misogyny is an indicator of cruelty and violence???
Tl;dr Suzanne Collins is not remotely in the vicinity of playing around, and you should read her newest book if you're okay with the sort of torture and murder typical of Hunger Games books.
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