demigod

In two generations, President Snow alienated the Districts from each other so much that Katniss didn’t even care to know all the names of the Tributes sent into the Arena with her, with the exception being those who posed great risk against her safety and those she felt great compassion for (e.g. Cato, Thresh, Rue, Mags, Betee, Wiress etc.). Katniss even went so far as to call the D6 Tributes in the 75th Hunger Games morphlings, for their affinity to imbibe in the drugs that help them forget their own traumas (an incredibly hurtful description, in my own opinion, to be known by the qualities you hate the most about yourself). We never know the real name of the 74th D5 girl, with Katniss only referring to her as Foxface and we don’t even know Marvel’s name until we get to the second book and he was Katniss’ first personal kill. Katniss even kills the D4 girl in the books with the same tracker jacker venom that killed Glimmer and yet still, we don’t know her name. We are so removed from the identity of the other Tributes that we don’t even know what some of them looked like beyond brief descriptions of mangled bodies and dead Tributes in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia.

And, the thing is, Suzanne established the importance of names in the series. Even in real life, we recognize the importance of being named. It is a fundamental aspect of being human. If you’re ever in a perilous situation where a person might be placing your life in danger, we’re told to remind the person that you’re human. “Keep saying your name, how old you are, where you came from. Remind them you are a human being just like them.” Before any propaganda can work against a group of people, refusing to recognize a person’s name is the first step to dehumanization. And just like the people of the Districts, we don’t care enough about the other Tributes to even want to know their names. Their propaganda worked on us, the readers.

And even though we as the readers know that in the future Katniss will succeed where he failed, Suzanne Collins does such a good job still making us feel and understand Haymitch’s despair and feelings of hopelessness. Like there is such a tragic truth in knowing that you’ve given everything and done everything right and sacrificed everything but it’s just going to take someone luckier or with better timing. And yeah it would probably feel pretty impossible to be optimistic about the future and anything changing after that, it makes so much sense why Haymitch hung on but just barely.

It’s a reminder that the perfect Hunger Games we saw in the first hg book was an illusion because we had Katniss as our narrator. We didn’t have Haymitch, hell, we didn’t even have someone like Peeta because these people played the games. Katniss didn’t.

Katniss was introduced to us as a mad, simple, naive girl who literally only survived because of others. She didn’t know how much her taking Prim’s place mattered because she didn’t realise what it meant to everyone who came before her. To everyone who had heard rumours of how the last District 12 victor actually fought his games. No, Katniss had just kept her head down, hunting and providing for her family.

See, she grew up way before the Games got to her. She’d already lived through her dad’s death and watched it destroy her once lively mom. Haymitch didn’t have to go through that. Lucy Gray didn’t have to go through that. They were both angry, yes, but at the Capitol. Katniss? She was first and foremost angry at her mom. At her dad. She knew who was to blame but she had too much to do and deal with to think about that. She was already jaded in a way that the Games couldn’t touch.

Peeta? He was Haymitch. He knew what he was getting into and realised he was just on a chess board with no control. So, he adapted. He played the knight, the rook, the king, the pawn. Katniss? She just… did. Changing directions, not playing the piece she was assigned because she didn’t realise that’s what was going on. Remember her surprise at the crown twisting into two after the Games?? She was so oblivious. Until Catching Fire where everything caught up to her. Where everything so many other people had been waiting and working for caught up to her.

Coriolanus must mute his screen as he hears the sound of the mockingjays sing the fallen tribute girl to sleep. The song is one that he knows has become a lullaby in District 12, but something about this girl singing it today and hearing those mockingjays in the arena gets under his skin. He decides that it’s merely a coincidence and ignores it.

The mockingjay pin. Coriolanus had to do a double take when he got a closer look at the girl and the gold pin that was on her dress. Reminders of his victor continue popping up this year, but he thinks better of it, after all he’s sure there’s bigger things to worry about since the rule change in this year’s Games.

He watches in amusement as Katniss Everdeen is forced to wear her white wedding dress at the interview, just another reminder that her life belongs to Coriolanus Snow, just as another girl’s did 65 years ago. He isn’t anticipating what happens next. Katniss begins to spin, just as she had done during last year’s interview. The white layers of the dress burn away and reveals another dress underneath. Behind the smoke, he can see clearly: The Mockingjay. “It’s not over til the mockingjay sings,” he hears those words spoken from another District 12 girl that came before, his Lucy Gray Baird.

He’s sitting in his office, exhausted and hoping for a relatively quiet day when he hears the oh-so familiar tune of a song that he hasn’t heard in decades but has never been able to forget. “Are you? Are you coming to the tree? Where they strung up a man they say who murdered three,” Katniss sings. Coriolanus finally lets himself begin to worry that Lucy Gray is truly haunting him. 

He awaits his death among the roses, the ones that Grandma'am loved so much. He hears songs of past in his head while he waits. He sees the girl’s rainbow ruffles as he admires a beautifully covered rose in the greenhouse.

He watches as Katniss Everdeen, dressed in her Mockingjay suit, aims her arrow at him and then moves it upward, toward a smiling and unassuming President Alma Coin. “The show’s not over til the Mockingjay sings,” he thinks as he realizes that no one, not himself and not President Coin, would be able to control this bird, just as Lucy Gray wasn’t able to be controlled all those years ago.

People ignoring the philosophy and Suzanne Collins’s exploration of what it means to be human and what a government should treat its citizens like by calling The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes boring or bad because it “reads like fanfiction” (which it doesn’t) because of “name dropping” is … an interesting take. No Hunger Games fanfiction that I’ve ever encountered has touched on these ideas, let alone let it be its story’s primary driving force. The five quotes Suzanne Collins included before the prologue were very specific and almost like a thesis statement. I can’t believe people are saying Collins didn’t do anything to counter Snow’s views within the text, claiming she’s irresponsible, when Sejanus Plinth and Lucy Gray Baird are obviously meant to not only be foils to Snow but are also her own voice coming through in the text. Sejanus represents the ideas of what a responsible and caring government should do, while Lucy Gray speaks about how people are inherently good and that people aren’t naturally evil or violent, only forced to do awful things to each other when the governing power is deliberately creating situations in which there is no other option or when they aren’t being properly taken care of by the government.

I’m so frustrated about people’s takes on the romance as well. Suzanne Collins didn’t write that in for people to sympathize with Snow or for shipping. Snow’s relationship with Lucy Gray and how he perceives her lines up with his own morals/beliefs. It’s not love that drew Snow to her - it was possession, control, order. He didn’t have much in his life, and less that he controlled, but Lucy Gray was something he “owned” and could exert his influence over. His jealousy over her past lover wasn’t because he was afraid she didn’t love him, it was because he wanted her loyalty to belong only to him and if she loved someone else, he couldn’t control her.

Suzanne Collins wrote a character who believed the world owed him, who wanted everything to fall in line for him because of the privilege of his name, who felt he was entitled to money, wealth, and power. He blamed everyone but the Capitol and his parents for his family’s downfall after the war. He blamed Sejanus for coming in and “stealing” the things he felt entitled to, just because Snow was Capitol-born and Sejanus was an outsider from District Two. He blamed his bad fortune on the districts trying to overthrow a totalitarian government, rather than the Capitol for not taking care of him and his family. The government didn’t care for them during the war despite having the resources to (the frozen turkey, the basket of goods, the electricity “magically” coming on everywhere just in time to watch a parade to promote Capitol propaganda - those came from somewhere). He’d rather be on the brink of starvation and scavenging for scraps than believe it’s the responsibility of the government to take care of its citizens, Capitol- or district-born. Hello? Remind you of anything? Or anyone? But no, Suzanne Collins clearly wrote this book for fan service and to paint Snow as a “good guy” (which is so far from how the book framed Snow’s perspective) rather than commenting on our society and the direction it’s heading in and how valuing law and order over taking care of people with plenty of resources at its disposal is not what a government should do.

On motivation: not every character needs a tragic backstory. Just because Snow’s family suffered during the war doesn’t mean he has a tragic backstory. He was just too busy obsessing over status and power, feeling entitled to wealth and being prideful instead of, you know, reaching out to the government for aid. I’m sorry that Snow’s character doesn’t follow the traditional villain backstory, but his beliefs on order and entitlement are far closer to real-life villains’ “motivations” than characters who are bad because a single event corrupted them and took a hard right turn into villain territory.

http://www.lulu.com/us/en/shop/emmy-cicierega/the-balloon-adventure/paperback/product-3250028.html

I cannot die before book 3 comes out. So now I’m taking account of every possible tiny treat on my life for the next year or so. Like choking on peas, slipping on the floor and hitting my head, being crashed by random anvils falling from the sky.