more, more, more

That’s what I was thinking about when reading A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Not when it comes to Snow, who could have chosen so many times to be good, yet always prioritised himself over everyone and everything. But with Lucy Gray.

Lucy Gray saved Coriolanus in the arena when she could have run instead. She had a chance at freedom, but she went back for the Capitol boy begging for help because that’s who she is. That’s Lucy Gray.

But what would have happened if she hadn’t gone back? Maybe Snow would have died under a burning bit of rubble that day. Lucy Gray would almost certainly have died in the games then, without his interference with the snakes or the compact for the rat poison. Or maybe she would have been gunned down with the other tributes who ran and her body would have been dragged through the streets.

But maybe the Hunger Games would have been a failure and would have been cancelled after their tenth year. And even if they continued, Snow would never have been alive to turn it into a horrific game show. There would be no tesserae, no quarter quells, no career districts where tributes volunteer to murder other kids in exchange for food and money.

And in that world, what becomes of Katniss? Of Peeta, who is never trackerjacked? Of Annie Cresta? Of little Rue? Of Finnick Odair and all the other victors who were forced to sell their bodies? Of Mags and Wiress and Beetee and Johanna and Enobaria and Glimmer and Cato?

Without the Hunger Games, it’s possible that the Capitol’s control over the districts falters way sooner. It’s possible that hundreds of lives are saved.

And maybe that’s dramatic. Maybe one Capitol boy dying early wouldn’t so drastically change the course of Panem history. Maybe others would dream up some of the same horrors Snow used to control the districts and the people would suffer in other, creative ways.

But isn’t it terrible to think that all that pain and all that suffering was doomed to happen because a girl, sentenced to death by the Capitol, was kind enough to go back for a Capitol boy who was in pain?

Lucy Gray didn’t have a cruel bone in her body. She never could have done anything else. If she hadn’t saved Coriolanus Snow, she wouldn’t be Lucy Gray. And if she hadn’t saved Coriolanus Snow, so many people would have been spared the torment of the Hunger Games.

Which I could get into how I absolutely hate that style of media critique because it so often boils to asking "why is this story happening at all!?"

"Why does gothel keep Rapunzel so close to her kingdom why not run away to a different country" because then this story wouldn't be happening at all, man. I don't know what to tell you.

But to keep this focused on Sejanus and how so much criticism is just "he's too irrational" I think miss completely miss the mark. Obviously I think there's a lot of misinterpretation of characters (their motivations, emotions, intent and so on) due to Coriolanus beings an incredibly unreliable narrator, and people tend to just skim over how young and vulnerable Sejanus is. (He is 17-18 and actively suicidal to say the least.)

But Sejanus isn't irrational, or well, he is, but no more than anyone else in the story. I often see "he should have changed the system from within" as a critique for his character, and sure you can absolutely think that. But the issue wasn't he wasn't thinking ahead or that he was just too emotional and irrational to see the merit in that. Thinking he couldn't understand the value of playing along fundamentally misses what asking to play the long con is asking Sejanus to do.

He would have to stomach going along with the games, staying silent, working in a city with slaves, and watching every year as children get massacred. Asking him to wait it out until he has enough power is asking him to not just stomach capitol cruelty but actively participate within it. Sejanus doesn't make choices out of just pure emotion but a sense of right and wrong. He is a character completely guided by his morals, and one that is constantly punished because of it. People say "He should have used his money to change things" He tried to, in the story, explicitly. And Coriolanus killed him for it.

(Tbosas 121)

She shows us that Gaul chooses Coriolanus, picks this one child out, and then is "playing" with him to break him to the form she wants for an heir for the rest of the story.

Collins emphasizes this by having Coriolanus remember childhood callous disregard from adults in the scene where Gaul chooses him. The audience is also shown that he cannot currently comprehend her logic and cruelty. And Collins has Gaul call him a child (and touch him possessively) as she claims him.

(Tbosas 66)

And once she's claimed this child, what does that look like? Traumatizing him and telling him he's bad and needs to be controlled.

(Tbosas 247)

Despite moments of protest, Coriolanus has a deep incapacity to recognize his own helplessness and abuse when even other kids involved can see it. He's very good at silencing his own inner voice and forcing himself to comply.

(Tbosas 206)

"As if he were more a tribute than a mentor"

And what does he become at the end? "The victor." Tell me - are victors' lives ones of freedom and self-actualization? Is it an experience of being your truest self or being lost to yourself?

And finally. Collins begins the story this way:

(119)

And then look at how his mindset has shifted:

(233)

"Another student, or even the Coriolanus of weeks ago" - weeks before Dr Gaul started in on psychologically breaking him down. "He was just like the subjects of her other experiments."

I'm not prone to manufacture stuff and, in fact, I resisted this reading until I saw the way SOTR functions as a cycle of abuse and how that all fits together.

What she's depicted in tbosas is a pattern of abuse. It's very deliberate and starts after Gaul "chooses" him. Furthermore, she chose to do it to a child without any protection:

(130)

He does his part to help create the future he fears in this child by making a child pay for the sins of his father. Despite his protests, when it comes down to it he cannot resist the tempting logic of the Games he invented. He cannot be an adult, a good teacher, to a child.

Of course, if Collins wrote teen Coriolanus as evil from page 1, as inherently irredeemable in canon, predestined to be just like his father, then Highbottom is the tragic hero of the tale! He's right, and he should have, in fact, gone even harder against that child. Perhaps he should have murdered that child.

If Collins chose to write a book like that, then we'd have to revise our understanding of her themes and morality overall. Perhaps the Hunger Games can be a good thing, if adults could some how suss out these in-born evil children, these kids with bad brain wiring which means they cannot grow and change and don't deserve a chance.

That would certainly be a peculiar thematic and moral vision for her to be arguing, though. A deeply challenging twist on literally everything that came before. For example: perhaps Katniss was *wrong* to prevent Coin's Games for Capitol children? Perhaps Snow's granddaughter and other Capitol kids are some of these born evil children who need to be done away with for the good of all.

This beautiful Katniss quote would be all wrong:

Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like. Snow thought the Hunger Games were an efficient means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen. (Mockingjay 320)

If Collins wrote a whole book arguing that some children are just born evil, doomed to be bad and incapable of changing, then it would have to be that "it benefits us *sometimes* to live in a world where these things happen." Because all the kid murdering must occasionally catch one of the ones like kid Coriolanus who deserves it, right?

And Lucy Gray would be intentionally written as a fool who Collins is sadistically putting with an evil boy who never could have been good to her and then mocking for her beliefs:

She thought it over. “I think there’s a natural goodness built into human beings. You know when you’ve stepped across the line into evil, and it’s your life’s challenge to try and stay on the right side of that line” (tbosas 496)

And Dr Gaul would be the voice of moral authority in the story. She would be the one who is wise and right about kids - not all of them, but the crazy ones who deserve it. The ones who deserve to be thrown into an arena to kill and die because they are "vicious animals," as she tells Coriolanus he is, and a trusted adult should traumatize them and tell them that about themselves. Some kids just deserve that.

Like she's proof that you can value survival like Coryo did at the start of the book, but still believe better for humanity than the fascism of the Capitol.

(that Coryo himself even feared/hated—

—even though he wouldn't admit the Capitol was specifically the problem because he was afraid of what would happen if he did that and opened up that box. Then it would be harder to suppress any guilt because of what happens to his loved ones for his inaction, or worse, his actual actions).

Like he wants to believe that the Capitol's 'order' is the way to make him feel safe and in control and he values that safety and control more than anything else because he's so afraid. Lucy Gray is the opposite of that fear; fiery and willing to kill if she has to. She's a performer, so people would assume she's just weak and frail but in reality she uses her charisma like a weapon and she's bold and brave in ways Coryo could never dream of being. He's able to admire aspects of that because he values/cherishes it, but then simultaneously fears it whenever she's outside of his control because of it.

She's proof that you can believe the best in humanity and not bow down to fascism while still both surviving and highly valuing survival. She doesn't need to control and she doesn't want to be controlled. She's the embodiment of free spirit while he's (what he thinks) is order and control.

By the time he bends completely to Gaul's ideology, he tries to stamp out her memory because any hint of it is the faintest reminder that he and Gaul are wrong and breaking free of the system doesn't mean you have to be just some fool who doesn't care about your survival or 'the betterment of humanity' (what Gaul thought of Sejanus and tried to teach Coryo to completely think of Sejanus, because she saw him teetering dangerously on the fence and caring about Sejanus).

her father was in the military, so she knows what it does to young men (intentionally)- it's valid to find tom blyth hotter with the look -but the *textual point* of being forced to join the military as a punishment and the entire forced shearing of his hair/etc is about how boys are dehumanized into tools to dehumanize others

i grew up near a military base, so i saw it all the time. it's awful and the techniques they use are very deliberate and effective.

it's about a whole young person, whose personhood involved all kinds of traits and possibilities, being "shaved down" into a tool and dehumanized - and when he becomes the mask of his father, that's him colluding and doing it to himself in order to secure a safer spot in this system

the costuming/hair/makeup/behavioral androgyny of his wholeness before all of this is very pointedly in stark contrast to the soldier boy he is made into and the Capitol Man he makes himself

he's *textually suicidal* after the series of violations/acts of dehumanization the military uses on him

and his intimate name--the name he says is for people who love him in the book--"Coryo" dies with the second, willing self-mutilation - no one speaks it anymore. he betrayed the friend who called him that and Tigris refuses to call the person he is now by that beloved name

the visuals are not treating his more masc looks as a "glow up" or him becoming more - they're him becoming less himself. and i think this is important to read in contrast to peeta - a soft boy who Collins depicts as heroic and courageous for fighting to retain his softness and traits associated with femininity.

imo part of why people are so adamant that coriolanus' heel turn is him becoming "his true self" is because it meshes with the narrative that a boy must shear away his softness & anything associated with femininity to become his true self. that it's a good and necessary thing for boys to let go for their wholeness and "man up." Collins doesn't do that with Peeta though

she doesn't push the idea that boys need to cut themselves down to fit narrow ideas of gender, so i think this (and her knowledge of military culture and older discussions about gender re: Vietnam in the US) all fit together for me

what's happened post Vietnam is that the US war machine ended the draft & hid all of this from the majority of Americans - so the post-9/11 wars could go on for decades, killing hundreds of thousands of human beings, eating young people alive, and all of it got a big shrug from the majority of ordinary people

in the past 20 years the largest series of Hollywood movies, the MCU, has actually been *funded by the Pentagon* so - yeah, Hollywood has not only rolled back anti-war/war critical depictions but been paid to promote rah rah war positive depictions

He cannot kill his soft heart and 'be a man' by Capitol standards. So he dies a boy, calling for his Ma*. Killed by the betrayal of a boy who is betraying himself too, to "be a man."

There's no third option in this society - it is brutalize yourself and others to grow up and "be a man" or die a boy.** Either way your wholeness has to die.

Fucking devastating themes

*In the book. I dislike that they changed that in the movie, it's *important* to the themes.

And then you meet Lucy Gray, and she’s just put a snake down someone’s dress. And immediately you have to reassess. And you figure out that it’s a little more complicated — they’re both the songbird, and they’re both the snake, but whereas Lucy Gray is associated with wild animals she befriends in the woods, Coriolanus is associated with Capitol mutts he first meets in a lab. Gaul’s rainbow snakes, the jabberjays.

And then the plot thickens even deeper, right, because it turns out the snakes represent their methods. They’re both cunning, good at improvising, not apposed to lying and performing when need be. They get each other! They click with each other, really well and really easily, because of that synergy in how they work with each other! SC isn’t saying that being ‘snakelike’ is bad or evil in and of itself. She’s cautioning you to think about what you’re using those methods for.

Listen. Here is a boy who has nothing but his last name, posing around pretending like he owned everything while scrambling for a scrap of something. Here is a boy who had to share everything he had ever owned, who was never fully in control of anything except for his words.  Here is a boy, who, due to the lie he's been controlling, can never let anyone in -- not even his pseudo-older sister and not even his most affectionate classmate -- for it poses the risk of being perceived, and potentially punished for his lack of ownership.

And then suddenly this boy -- who's so desperate to own something -- is granted the ownership of another person  a full-pass to control everything about her; her words, her image, her story. And sure, she wasn't his first pick, but the thought of having something gave him a sense of relief and dignity his lies could never give him, and that dignity, that slight restoration of confidence, gave way for that first crack on his chest after being guarded for so long.

And then the person he "owned" showed up, and she was the most interesting person of the pick. She gave the people a show and she made a song on top of it, turning his confidence to pride. I truly believe that had he been assigned to another person, he would not have showed up to the train station, simply due the fact that they were not interesting enough to warrant his  visit -- or his grandma'am's roses. Him showing up to the train wasn't just done in goodwill; it was also a stake of ownership -- it was him, acknowledging to himself that this was something worth owning, and like other things worth owning, it could be taken away from him if he lets his guard slips.

And that becomes the initial foundation to their interaction; the talking, the bringing up food... sure, Lucy Gray was interesting, but he was detached of her charm in those first meeting, seeing her in the lens of how others might measure her and her worth. his main focus was "taking care of her"; making sure his precious thing survived, making sure his ownership of her -- and thus his pride -- will not dissipate.

And then the tributes started plotting to kill him, only to be stopped by Lucy Gray. Sure, for her, he might seem as if he was doing something a kind -- even if useless -- meeting her in this run-down train station, and that perhaps was part of the reason why she defended him, and part of the reason why she stood by him in that Zoo cage. But for Coryo, his visit was calculated, his rose a chip of bargain, his zoo visit a byproduct of refusing to be caught slipping. For him, Lucy Gray stepping up for him was uncalled for, a surprising kindness.

He tried to rationalize it best as he could, but he was stumped. And I think this was when he started to really listen to Lucy Gray, to stop being detached from her. He was his father's son, and he believed in knowing the things he owned in order to properly maintain it. And it was this desire to know that melted his walls, that made him vulnerable, because to understand her fully he opened himself up to be understood, which had never happened before.

I think Coryo did love Lucy Gray, however tainted and terrible that love was. I think it was the first time of him making the effort to perceive someone and be reciprocated back -- fully, thoroughly, and wholeheartedly. It helped (or didn't help?) That Lucy Gray was a poet, that she fed him with pretty words; the only things that -- up until she showed up -- he'd ever truly owned for himself. For him, that connection -- added over the fact that he had "owned her", as everyone else kept saying -- must have felt like a drug. It must have felt intoxicating, to own something so lovely, something that adored him. It must have been a new, exhilarating feeling for Coryo, who never owned anything but worthless scraps and his pretty, pretty words. And yes, that was such a terrible way to put it, but love is many things; it can be terrible too.

I think Coryo loved Lucy Gray, and had they stayed in Capitol, he would have been able to continue to "love her". Billy Taupe was just some name, the Covey some story. What for Lucy Gray was history, was only pretty words for him. For all he chose to believe in, they could be the same pretty words he said; mostly lie, some exaggeration. In the Capitol, she is his, fully. And Coryo can love only what he owns.

But they didn't stay at Capitol, they moved to twelve. Suddenly, all her pretty words were honest and real, something he couldn't ignore, much less control. Suddenly, there was the Covey, and Billy Taupe, and Mayor Lipp, and even if her eyes were for him only he still had to share the rest of her -- her voice, her charm, her poise -- with other people. Twelve highlighted that he'd never truly owned her, we all know that. But here's another thing that twelve highlighted; it was him who chose to be the soldier in a rundown district, him who chose to follow her. If there was any ownership to be had here, it was her that owned him.

And Coryo? He doesn't share, yes, but worse than anything, he despises being owned.

This is where TBOSAS shone its brilliance; president Snow is the way he was not because he is an unfeeling sadist the was Volumnia Gaul is. He was the way he was because of love. Because of the vulnerability that comes with that love, and the refusal to surrender to it. President Snow would not be as ruthless and despicable had he been desensitized, and it was his feelings, his capability to love, that led him to employ some of the most gruesome tactics to win the games.

Here's the heartbreaking thing; once upon a time, Coryo loves Lucy Gray, and that love was true. Here's another heartbreaking thing; that love was built on poison, and its toxic vines ruined him so completely, decimated him so thoroughly, he was reborn anew evil; president Snow would not have happened without Lucy Gray, without Coryo's time in Twelve.