What Makes Snow Such A Formidable Villain Within THG Universe Is That Nothing He Does Was Set In Stone.

Katniss described Peeta as a dandelion in the spring. Lucy Gray described Coriolanus as pure as the driven snow.

Rick: *actively puts Percy through more perilous situations by writing more pjo books*

Percy: RICKY WHEN I CATCH YOU RICKY

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

pure as the driven snow is such a cunty song cause imo lucygray did not in fact need, love or trust snow and the whole song is a way for her to kinda assure the readers that she will be completely fine on her own.

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.

hello dark mode users :)

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🔭

noticing trends in your own ocs personalities can make you stare at your keyboard like. okay motherfucker take it to the therapist office not the toyhouse profile.

So we all know the 75th Quell wasn’t just for Katniss now, right??

It was - get rid of Finnick, people tell him too much and like him too much

It was - get rid of Mags (she’ll volunteer to save anyone), she’s always been too much of a rebel and cares more about the tributes than the games (i.e. hiding Finnick from cameras)

It was - get rid of Beetee, we’re finally done with him (I want to know why he’s suddenly disposable though). But let’s make it as awful as possible and remind him every day what his son was feeling in his own last days

It was - get rid of Wiress (and also show the world what she’s become) because she never should have won (and we’ll show people what happens when you think you’re smarter than the Capitol)

It was - get rid of Johanna Mason, we killed everyone she loved and it didn’t break her enough so now we can’t control her

And of course, it was - get rid of those rebels from 12

But it wasn’t just punishment for Katniss. She had no idea how influential and volatile of a group they were.

Honestly, I feel like the 3rd Quell might have actually worked if the Capitol hadn’t decided to just send all the most rebellious and threatening victors into them. You can’t put 10+ people who rebelled in their own games back into an arena (and this time they’re all together) and expect it to go well for you???

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).