Slowly Getting Back Into My Marauder's Phase I AM SO BACK WOLFSTAR !!!!!!

what makes Snow such a formidable villain within THG universe is that nothing he does was set in stone. there was no sense of inevitability about his actions and his brutality. Snow had enough perspective of poverty, capital cruelty, district hunger and not to mention his own arena experience’ and yet he actively chose at every moment to stray from natural goodness. its even more terrifying in the sense that he had the ability to care. Snow is not a mindless sociopath, he displays feelings to others such as sejanus, lucy grey and tigris but ultimately he will always choose himself. his ability to betray those he cared about in order yo advance himself makes him so much more than the stereotypical villain who is forced into his actions.

I love the irony of an author making a cautionary tale like "don't you think it's fucked up when society do thing" and then society goes anf just proves their point

Like when Nabokov wrote a book about how a criminal used flowery language to romanticize his crime trying to justify the monstrosity he committed then society went like actually a younger girl being loved so much by an older men is both hot and aesthetic pleasing

Or how Susanne Collins wrote about the horrors of making a spectacle of the murder of children and how Hollywood exploits the young only for people online to be begging for her to write more books about the children getting slaughtered

It's so tragic and so telling I just love it

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes p344 / p504

Edit: I love how ‘clever, devious, deadly’ perfectly applies to Coryo as well. Birds of a feather, for lack of better words.

yess cause finnick knew everyones secrets, EVERYONE'S. im sure snow told him about lucygray without mentioning her name and he talked to mags about it and put two and two together

my boy's smart, thats why he kept pushing katniss

lucygray never died

don’t try to convince me that one of those secrets about snow finnick knew about wasn’t lucy gray. he was so close to mags, who won the 11th hunger games, a few MONTHS after lucy gray’s games. mags definitely remembers lucy gray and probably something about what happened between her and show, and she definitely would’ve told finnick

idc about any plot holes in this theory im dying on this hill ok

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) + tweets

wish I was a teddy bear wearing a raincoat or some shit what the fuck

I want to talk about Gaul and her view of the Games as a representation of human nature, which for her is that human beings are bad at their core, so when they are stripped of civility (even if you can argue the tributes were never treated with any civility at all anyway), they are violent and will do anything to "fall on top".

And that's very interesting to me because as much as Gaul thinks the Games are a representation of that, Leftie (on TikTok) explained very well that the 10th Games are filled with people proving her wrong again and again by showing mercy and compassion in their own ways - case in point, Reaper giving the fallen tributes a proper homage in their deaths, Lucy caring for Jessup, and even Lamina killing Marcus out of mercy.

More than that though, I think it's so ironically dry of Suzanne Collins to put Snow - civil, educated, polite, well-bred young Coriolanus Snow - as the one who actually has those instincts to be violent and do anything he can to win ("Snow always falls on top") in situations which are nothing like the desperate environment of the Games, but in the society they deem so superior - the Capital.

But even more than that, the more I think about the true State of Nature, the more I see Doctor Gaul's beliefs as extremely frail from a biological point of view: when we talk about human's state of nature, the closest we can get to observe that today are native tribal communities, as some scientists do to understand better how our ancestors lived.

But what we can observe from this too is that (and we all learned that before) human beings are social beings - we need a community (or a support net, as we can call them) in order to thrive, but community only forms with connection. If we were selfish, individualist, and violently prone to survive (bad, in fewer words) in our cores, then it'd make no sense for us to be social creatures because we wouldn't be able to form connections deep enough to live in communities.

Not ones that thrived as much as we did, anyway. We'd most likely be lone creatures. Instead, our understanding of community is directly linked to safety, both emotional and physical, to the point where our own language reflects that: the found family trope being so popular in books, poor families being more likely to stick together as an act of self-defense, the fact we love so much to consume friendships in artistic works, the instinctual need to find protection on other people when we feel threatened, and so on and so on.

"A child rejected by the village will burn it to feel its warmth", meaning not only that we need a community to thrive, but its lack leaves deep scarring in a person's character.

So when it comes to the state of nature of men, I'd say I believe much more in societal corruption - like Frankenstein - rather than a violent or bad nature by itself, unless of course, there's a natural precedent for such (like a biological inability to form deep emotional connections).

Something I love about Suzanne is the fact that she leaves so many things for us to pick up on if we pay attention. One of the things I really began to pick up on was just how juxtaposed Peeta and Katniss and Snow and Lucy Gray are. We all know that she created both young Snow and Lucy Gray to resemble Katniss and Peeta, but the way she compares and contrasts them is just *chefs kiss*

Of course, the dynamics between the pairs are vastly different. Rachel said it beautifully in an interview regarding the comparisons between Katniss and Lucy Gray, “Lucy Gray is a performer forced to fight, Katniss was a fighter forced to hunt”, but I’ve heard little about people comparing Snow to Peeta.

My headcanon is that Snow also has a deep disdain for Peeta. Not in the same way that he loathes Katniss, but because he can’t help but see Peeta as a "weaker" version of himself.

Peeta wants Katniss to be free and is willing to let Katniss make decisions for herself. A fantastic example is when she starts her situationship with Gale. Peeta doesn’t force her to be with him. But, when Lucy Gray sings her ballad during her interview, Snow can’t help but feel disgust over the fact that he doesn’t have control over her; that she could be giving her love to someone else when he feels like he is the only one deserving of it.

Peeta cares so deeply about Katniss, showing time and time again that he’s willing to put his life on the line to ensure she survives and I believe that Snow can’t help but hate him for it. He can never fathom caring about someone more than he cares about himself; only caring about self-preservation. Snow may see Peeta's compassion and think it’s a waste of time. He probably believes that at some point Katniss will betray Peeta, much like he believes Lucy Gray did to him.

Suzanne writes with such intention, leaving no loose ends in any of her stories. There are so many comparisons between the characters that it is hauntingly beautiful, but she also makes them very distinct and unique. I can't help but believe that this decision to create these characters in this fashion was not only intentional but extremely implied.

I think the ballad of songbirds and snakes is important bc it shows so clearly the cruelty and unfairness of the games. And that is the POINT. Coral dying and saying “it can’t have been all for nothing. I can’t have killed them all for nothing.”

Dr Gaul telling Snow that the world is the arena and you have to be a victor, because humans are at their base level cruel and vicious animals. They’ll either kill or celebrate your death. Cry for their favorites who die and ignore the games’ cruelty for the ones who don’t matter.

Lucy saying even at the end that people are born with goodness inside of them and the world turns them evil. Who writes songs about what the Capital cannot take away. Whose songs drive snow insane because he can’t make them! He can’t truly understand them! Because what is the opposite of death and cruelty and bloodthirsty spectacle? Life and celebration and the soul. Lucy turns the murder of someone at the hands of the state into a song of rebellion. And that same song eventually brings snow down.

It’s two opposing points of views-what drives the world? Death or life? What is humanity’s base nature?

And snow and the games argue that it is always death, which is why his downfall comes from a girl named after a food source plant, who sings, and a boy who literally gives her the bread of life out of a random act of kindness .

It’s why Gale loses everything too. Because gale in the end sees the world the way snow does. All humanity is about cruelty and survival through more cruelty. And with that attitude you can do anything. You can kill children to make sure more children don’t die.

It’s not about capital and districts or the arena and the world-it’s that all these are one thing-so what are they? What makes up the world? What is humanity?

Collins is once again light years ahead of where anyone thinks she is.