#fuck now i need a book from Lucy Grays perspective

[uh-velkommen]

Every time I think about Lucy Gray Baird I get so sad. She was truly a victim in her relationship with Snow. I don't think she actually liked him because she really didn't know him well enough. I think it was circumstantial infatuation. It's kind of the same as Katniss where she knew being in love with Peeta kept her safe, sane, and alive. Back in 12, it felt like everyone was out to get Lucy. They wanted her dead and they sent her to the games for it. Then came Snow who, as far as she knew, was the only boy who wanted to help and save her unconditionally. Not even Billy Taupe cared enough to treat her right so I think she mistook the act of Snow keeping her alive as him having no ulterior motives but pure kindness and consideration. In her eyes, Snow truly cared about her, when we know that Snow only needed her alive to beat poverty. When I think about how she was only sixteen and I know when I was sixteen I fell head over heels for anyone who was nice to me. Being young and in danger, of course you're gonna cling to the one thing that kept you safe. But my heart truly breaks when she starts talking about trust. Because how can you trust someone you hardly know? And I can say this knowing what was truly going on in Snow's head. Lucy Gray, you're a victim. You were used. She learned in the end how quickly he was to turn on her and yet again, another man in her life proved he couldn't be trusted. She learned that she can no longer give away her trust. The poor child.

Now as for Coriolanus Snow. What stakes did he having in loving Lucy Gray outside of the Hunger Games? He and Lucy Gray got along and the kissing was nice? That could've happened with anyone. Again like Katniss, who thought kissing Peeta wasn't too bad and if it was gonna be anyone, at least he was funny. But he and Katniss shared an upbringing, a traumatic experience, secrets, and equal desire for keeping each other safe, in and out of the games. Snow hated music, he hated the covey life, he hated living like the poor, he disagree with Lucy Gray on so many things because his brain and ideologies were pure bred Capitol. What really did they have in common? They were just too different. I think his choosing to Peacekeep in 12 was a moment of him thinking that his Capitol status was gone for good. If he was going to be a Peacekeeper, an unnamed nobody in the filthy districts, then he might as well have a lover to live beside. Except now, there was no convincing people that Lucy Gray was Capitol. Rather than boost her status to justify their relationship, he accidentally lowered his status to hers. Because the minute he got the opportunity to raise his status back up, Lucy Gray was no longer important to him. No longer needed.

#tbosas #lucy gray baird #coriolanus snow #sorry this was a bit of a ramble i just have so many thoughts after reading the book i need to organize them somehow #fuck now i need a book from Lucy Grays perspective

[bigdreamsandwildthings]

Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Suzanne Collins)

Rating: ★★★★★/5

"It's sooner than later that I'm six feet under. It's sooner than later that you'll be alone. So who will you turn to tomorrow, I wonder? For when the bell rings, lover, you're on your own. And I am the one who you let see you weeping. I know the soul that you struggle to save. Too bad I'm the bet that you lost in the reaping. Now what will you do when I go to my grave?" I wasn't sure how I'd feel about reentering the world of the Hunger Games, but my god, I enjoyed it immensely. I'm so pleasantly surprised. Coriolanus Snow has lived through the war with the districts. He lives in a penthouse suite, he goes to school at the Academy, and he has a bright Capitol future ahead of him. When he's assigned to mentor the girl from District 12 at the 10th annual Hunger Games, Coriolanus sees it as a challenge, and his ticket to university - because underneath the facade he presents, the Snows' money is dwindling, and his future could very well be at stake. But Lucy Gray may be more than he bargained for, and his future even less certain than he already believes it to be. The thought of a prequel novel about Snow, of all people, left me feeling very lukewarm when I heard about this one. Yes, he was a decent villain, I hated him SO MUCH, but was he interesting enough to warrant an entire novel? Turns out: fuck yes. Oh my god. I love how Suzanne Collins can work such structure into her novels and mixes the familiar with the new. We know Panem from the 74th Hunger Games 64 years in the future - this is the time of the 10th, and so much is different. This novel really bridges the gap between what Panem becomes and where it started, namely as North America as we know it. So, we know the format of the Hunger Games from the series, and that is indeed present here, but it's done in such a different way. Without the glitz and glamour of the future, without the mandatory watching and spectacle of it all, it somehow hits so much harder, knowing where it's all heading. This is a punishment for the districts, and it's horrible, but at the same time, no one seems to know what happens beyond the reaping. Fascinating. I thought I might find it hard to read from Snow's perspective, but I empathized with him more than I wanted to, and maybe even more than I should have. He's a vain person, very concerned with status, but he grew up in a war - he has faced hardship in his life, and his reaction to that has been to control things. To make it so that he can't be hurt again, no matter what that costs him. And I just...I get it. It's so wonderfully conveyed here that even when the eventual twist came and I had to hate him, I still just understood, and I can appreciate him so much more as a character in the original trilogy now. As for Lucy Gray and the Covey, what a wonderful addition they made to this otherwise quite beige/gray/bland world. They were the colour that this story needed. Lucy Gray's songs are also an absolute highlight of this one for me; I felt like I could hear them when I read those lyrics, and it made it so very engrossing and atmospheric. And the Hanging Tree! I got full body goosebumps at the scene of her writing it. She is lovely, and motivated so differently than Coriolanus that the balance was almost a relief. Their relationship was sometimes hard to read, but I believed it. What drives this from an engrossing, intense read up to the level of a fave for me is the moral philosophy that Collins weaves through her words. How she presents us with this character who has to choose control, has to fight the chaos, in order to move on in life because he is so convinced that human beings are ultimately selfish and no better than animals. That we'd all kill each other without some kind of overarching controlling figure to tell us not to. The path that Panem has taken to reach Katniss's time is now just so much clearer; it's because of Snow. At the end of the day, I just really enjoyed this. I know others have said it's meandering, dull, etc. but I truly never found myself bored. I wanted to read this, and when I wasn't reading, I was thinking about it. That is enough for me as a reader, but this book goes above and beyond that to being actual quality in terms of writing, plot, and characters, too.

#booklr #book photography #book reviews #a ballad of songbirds and snakes #suzanne collins #the hunger games #thg #ya fiction #ya dystopian #bookworm #bibliophile #my photos #my reviews #mine

[vonlipvig]

Ok, time for my thoughts on The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, now that I’ve finished it! This is probably gonna be long, probably gonna be incoherent, so under a read more it goes!

Alright, overall? I had fun! I really enjoyed the book! I mean, I love the Hunger Games, I love the universe, and I’m always gonna be excited for more content, whatever it is. But I really did enjoy the book! It was interesting, engaging, and ok maybe it had it’s ups and downs, but it was a fun read, and it gives me a lot to think and talk about, so I consider that a win in my book.

I also didn’t have any expectations going into it, so I guess that helped, too. I honestly only found out this book was out by chance while I was reading the HG wiki (and kinda spoiled myself about the rebel bombing, I was like yo did I miss this in the books or movies, whaaa?), so I really didn’t have all that time to get my hopes up or anything. Do I want a Haymitch book? Yeah, for sure. But I think the idea of focusing on Snow was pretty interesting. I love a good villain backstory, getting to see the journey and the evolution (de-evolution?) of that character, seeing them slowly transform themselves into the version we all know and hate. So when I found out the book was out, I was sold!

Story

Going plot-wise, or story-wise first, I think the first two parts of the book were fun overall. It’s pretty cool we get to see a Capitol perspective, which we’ve never really had before (and to see the aftermath of the war, even there, that was pretty interesting). The whole school thing was cute, and felt kinda like, IDK, anime-ish, or something? Does that even make sense? But yeah, it was fun spotting all the ancestors of characters we know, it was cool to see the shaping of the Hunger Games we saw in the future, and although the stakes were high for Coriolanus, I felt it was more chill than the trilogy (I mean, duh, Katniss was fighting for her life). Not that it wasn’t exciting, cause it was--and a lot!--but it was a lot more relaxed, I think.

The Games itself were super fun, as always. The third part was unexpected, and it did slow the story a lot, I felt, though I guess it makes sense. It...did confuse me a bit, at times, like I felt I didn’t exactly know what Coriolanus was gonna do or think--Is that a flaw of the story? Or is it because he himself is conflicted and even lying to himself? I’ll leave it up to you--, but some all the things I thought were gonna happen happened, and I really enjoyed the ending.

Characters

This being Snow’s book, I definitely knew most of the characters were just gonna be pieces that make up his story. I also had the feeling that not many were gonna have a happy ending, and yEAH yeah I was right! While I wish that some had had a lot more depth and autonomy cough LUCY GRAY cough, this was Snow’s story, so it was what it was.

So, Coriolanus Snow, huh? For a while there, as I said, I really wasn’t sure where they were gonna take his character, and it really confused me. We know President Snow, and all the time we’re waiting for him to make the choices that man would make. Sometimes he does, then sometimes he doesn’t...and then comes around to it. Either it’s pretty “realistic”, or kinda confusingly written, but I wasn’t that disappointed, I’ll tell you this.

Regarding him being in love, I actually don’t think he was ever in love at all. Not that he didn’t believe he was, that’s the important part. In this book we see his inner thoughts, we see what he thinks about Lucy Gray, and I HOPE TO GOD that was never meant to be romantic, because it really, really wasn’t! It was possessive, and controlling, and isn’t that what Dr. Gaul taught him, after all? During the Games, as he thought to himself that wow, I really need Lucy Gray to win...because I care about her? Hmm, no, actually no, you’re after the prize. You’re telling yourself that you care about her, but I don’t think you do at all. It’s very cruel but also what I expected from him, so I did like that.

I got confused at first when he actually agreed to go away with Lucy Gray, but if we take into account that he really thought he was going to get hanged for treason, then I can see how he’d do that. That ending with both of them in the forest, turning into the Hunger Games in the blink of an eye, THAT was really exciting and intense. Him screaming Lucy Gray’s name while firing blindly, and being surrounded by the mockingjays...yeah, I needed that shit. That’s the good stuff.

His “friendship” with Sejanus...Oh, Sejanus. Oh, poor Sejanus. I get to have one of these per book, and Sejanus is BABY and I love him. Ok, with that out of the way, goddamn I knew this was gonna end this way and it still hurt.

Something that I thought was a bit silly, was that Coriolanus didn’t...consider that by recording Sejanus they’d...surely kill him? Like, that’s the first thing I thought of? But he was like OH THEY’D PUT HIM IN PRISON...dude, no. I think it could have been cool for him to at least think he’s ok with sending Sejanus to his death, and yeah maybe when he’s at the hanging have a bit of remorse or terror as the jabberjays echo Sejanus’ last words, but yeah, Idk. I still loved that we got that tragic ending. I was convinced it was gonna happen, and I’m happy it happened. Well, not happy, it’s gonna haunt me, but you get the feeling. 

As for other characters, I don’t know what to think about Dr. Gaul, tbh? She was weird, the whole applying Hobbesian philosophy to the HG was...like, I get it, but also...? IDK, it was confusing and strange and I’m not entirely sure that worked as an explanation (I don’t think you can put much of an explanation, really), but whatever. I did like Dean Highbottom in the end, I kinda digged him character and the way Coriolanus’ father betrayed him, it was pretty cool. Also, am I the only one who thought he had a one-sided crush on Coryo’s father? And Sejanus with Coryo, as well? I meAAAAN, how well would that work thematically, hmm!

Aaaaaand then, we have Lucy Gray. I...have some things to say about Lucy Gray. First is that I love her a lot and god, how I wish things could have been different. I loved her spirit, and her vulnerability, and her charm and wit and instinct to survive. But...god, Idk, I just think they really tied her to the male characters, and that kinda bothers me. Like, she needs Billy Taupe or she needs Coryo and Idk! They should have let her be more independent! That irked me a bit, not gonna lie. Obviously, as I said, this is still Coriolanus’ story, but it just rubbed me the wrong way. 

At first I thought, I don’t know, maybe when Coryo shows up in 12 she doesn’t actually want to see him, which makes him angry or jealous? I don’t have a problem with her being kinda in love (I mean, she went through a really traumatic experience, it’s understandable that she’d latch onto Coryo), but Idk, I felt a bit disappointed. 

I did love the ending, I’m afraid. It sucks, of course, but if he was to go on to become President Snow, then that was the only way it could have ended between them. I felt such rage when Coriolanus started sympathizing with Billy Taupe, when he knew he had to kill her. What a betrayal, although I always knew it was gonna be like that! It was so tragic, and I feel so sad for her. I’m glad her music lives on, and that in the end, she had her revenge.

And now, for the ONE THING I TRULY DON’T GET...WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED WITH TIGRIS!? I felt so cheated by that! They introduce her as Coryo’s cousin in the first chapter and you go OH SHIT SOMETHING BAD’S GONNA HAPPEN BETWEEN THEM...AND THEN NOTHING. Like, at the end of the story she hasn’t been betrayed! I mean, maybe it was a case of ooh you can iamgine what happened! maybe she found out about him betraying Sejanus or killing/wounding Lucy Graaaay, but like c’mon. They really baited me with that one, and it sucks.

So...I think that’s it! I had a lot of fun!

#this is so loooong dkdjfd sorry #but yeah LOTSA THOUGHTS #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #tbosas #tbosas spoilers

[theballadoffinchesandsaints]

*SPOILERS for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes*

Okay, “Crash” by EDEN is so wholeheartedly Snow’s internal crisis of seeing Katniss and thinking of Lucy Gray. First, links to the song, Second, analysis time.

Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/track/0uxC9yUi8uPtNPo6HRshRM?si=KKAPVc7iTUSDcOEeBbr3tw

Lyrics link (though all the lyrics are cited in order in the analysis below): https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eden/crash.html

Strap in folks, this is going to be a long one.

“It’s been a few years since you’ve been gone/There’s been a few tears, but that was years and years ago” It’s been so long since Lucy Gray left that Snow has been able to mostly bury the memories and emotions, but it was still a heartbreak

“Yeah, I grew up to be exactly what you wanted/Yeah, I’ve been living out the dream that you dreamt up” This line is bitter in the context of Lucy Gray and Snow. In Snow’s mind, Lucy Gray betrayed him first and turned him into the callous dictator he is. In some ways, this was their real dream, though. Snow now has enough power to influence the games and save tributes if he chooses to, he just doesn’t use that power the way Lucy Gray would want him to

“It’s been a few years, but more to come/It’s been a few yeats since I’ve felt sure of what I want/And I woke up today and found that you were waiting here for me and I thought/Woah, old friend it’s bittersweet/How could you do this to me/How could you do this to me?/Yeah” This is when Snow first sees Katniss at the reaping with her big first impression and later as he sees all the other similarities between Katniss and Lucy Gray: the district partner as a close ally, the singing, the rule-breaking. It brings up the part of him that almost ran off into the woods with Lucy Gray decades ago. While most of the feelings that this bring Snow are negative, it’s still a little bittersweet. He can’t deny the couple of happy memories he has of him and Lucy Gray. It’s even relatively safe to assume that they are some of his happiest, if not the happiest, moments in life that were only tainted after the fact. Snow feels betrayed by the world. He has worked so hard to get away from the mockingjay that haunts his past and here comes a reincarnation of Lucy Gray with a pin of the birds as a district token.

“Cause you are not who you think you are/There’s no grain on these brown eyes/But they can be green if they really want” First off, the female singer that starts here is the image of Lucy Gray he conjures in his mind. These lines are similar to Lucy Gray’s Rousseauvian ideals: all people are truly good at heart, and the world may try to make you worse, but you can turn yourself back into a good person if you try. Lucy Gray tried repeatedly to get Snow to understand this while they were together in direct contradiction to Snow’s Hobbesian ideals of a strong and strict government to control the inherently faulty people that make up the world. It is an internal argument now, but Hobbes has won years ago in Snow’s mind. However, Katniss’s similarities to Lucy Gray remind Snow of the other perspective he never quite understood and still cannot truly compete with his Hobbesian tendencies.

“And I can bend your words/But they say exactly what hurts the most/But silence is better than fake laughs/Or faking were always up” This is in reference to the moment in the woods when Lucy Gray realizes Snow is responsible for Sejanus’s death. She tried to find a different explanation for Snow’s “responsible for three deaths” line, to see the good in him, but she can’t. So she pretends she’s still planning to run away with Snow until she finds a good moment to get away.

“loose grip/The world bends around you/And living through cracked screens/We fold down to what we want/Out of love/We talk through lines/We’re made of smoke/And just in time/We drift away/Diffusing light/Confusing times/Growing up/Or cascading down?” these lines are sung by both the guy (Snow) and the girl (Lucy Gray in Snow’s mind). At first they reference the confusion of their final encounter. With the mockingjays singing and Snow firing bullets haphazardly, the chaos could be compared to the world bending, screens cracking, smoke, and all the other metaphors in these lines. Not to mention the internal confusion of making a radical change as to the course of your life in an instant while the person you love tries to kill you. Both are forced to make these changes without much consideration. So they ask themselves, “is this me finally making the mature, correct decision for my life? or am I giving up my one chance at happiness?”

“Cascading down/I’m hurting now” Back to only Snow now. This is just a brief confirmation that he is not over Lucy Gray. It’s quickly replaced by anger in the next lines, but it happens

“But change comes slow/If you hate what’s in your head/The fuck would you speak your mind” All of Snow’s anger at Sejanus comes back at now. Snow always blamed his own misfortunes on a trickledown effect from Sejanus’s revolutionary tendencies. If Sejanus hadn’t gotten involved with rebels, Snow would never have shot Mayfair and felt the need to run away with Lucy Gray. If Sejanus has just stayed in his place, Snow wouldn’t have had anything to turn him into and Lucy Gray wouldn’t have had a reason to run away from him in the woods. There’s also anger towards Lucy Gray here about her idea of intrinsic human goodness that seems absolutely absurd to Snow.

“In search of lost time/Just 21 so I’m young and I’m stupid/Only 16, yeah I think you should’ve known” For a moment, Snow longs for the life that, according to him, he could have had with Lucy Gray if Sejanus hadn’t interfered. 21 isn’t much of an explicit reference to anything in TBOSAS, this is three years after the book’s events. It can be reasonably assumed that, at this point, Snow is really starting to get the hang of poisoning his enemies and allies to gain power, something he might now consider stupid with both the physical and mental ramifications of being a mass murderer. It’s not exactly that Snow wishes those people were still alive, but that he is upset his enemies found out about it and could release the information. As for 16, that is the exact age Lucy Gray is in TBOSAS. In this line, Snow tells his mental manifestation of Lucy Gray that she should have always known he’d be like he is today. He may regret some things, but he must clamp down on the world with an iron fist to avoid anarchy...and to fill his need for power.

“I think you’ve fucked me up/I think, I think you’ve fucked me up/And I’ve got nothing to say to you/It’s been a few years and I moved on/Couldn’t nake it disappear, oh I tried so hard to be strong” Snow is fed up with himself for the flashbacks and romantic thoughts he’s having. He is livid that anyone could affect him this way 60 years after they’d last seen each other. He buried the memories for decades, but a pair of tributes from district 12 have brought them all back up. In that way, Lucy Gray has “fucked [him] up.”

“But I grew up today and faced that I’m not just lonely/Don’t feel much better, but I guess that it’s a start” At the end of Mockingjay, Snow faces the fact that he is going to be brought down by victor from district 12 that reminds him so much of the girl he loved. He recognizes that the problem now goes beyond one of flashbacks and regrets. He knows he’s going to die, so he can just enjoy the show of one last hunger games.

tl;dr The male vocalist in this song is Snow who is forced to face memories of mainly Lucy Gray, but also Sejanus, during the 74th and 75th Hunger Games and the rebel war. The female vocalist is a manifestation of Lucy Gray triggered by Katniss that reminds him of both their happy memories together and their horrific falling out.

#mine #the hunger games #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #ballad of songbirds and snakes #tbosas #tbosas spoilers #tbosas meta #coriolanus snow #president snow #lucy gray #lucy gray baird #peeta #peeta mellark #katniss everdeen #katniss #finnick odair #finnick #Spotify

[theywerero0mates]

An act of kindness

#Nalu #fairy tail fanfic #My writing #fanfiction #stargazer-writes

[longroadstonowhere]

so apparently a couple years ago suzanne collins published a prequel to the hunger games, about coriolanus snow and the tenth hunger games, and since i was in the middle of a hunger games reread when i learned this fact, when i finished the original trilogy i sat down and read the new book

no spoiler thoughts first - overall i liked it! it was a fascinating look at a just-post rebellion panem, and i found snow’s perspective to be very in line with his later character in a ‘oh you’re young so this could go one of two ways but i know the way it’s gonna go’ sorta way

now spoiler thoughts

i really loved the early look at the early hunger games and just how slapdash the whole operation was for the first decade - like the whole spectacle was not born overnight, it took years of dedicated effort to make it as horrible as it became, and the deplorable treatment of the tributes before the games even start was just awful in such an understandable way

there’s something interesting about how violence was much closer to hand for the mentors and the tributes before the games even begin but i’ve restarted this sentence like five times so i can’t articulate what exactly i found interesting about it

i like lucy gray as a character, though her song and dance number at the reaping felt very bizarre after coming straight from the trilogy, where the reaping is so.... restrained? restricted actually is the word i want probably - i kinda wish there’d been a chance for her to go more into how the games fucked her up, but the book isn’t really about her like the trilogy was about katniss, so it’s reasonable not to have that story (would love a novella or something from her perspective though)

there were a lot of things where i was like ‘..... oh wait, you’re trying to connect these things to a larger web? sure, okay i guess, it’s your story do what you will’ - like, my first reaction to tigris being snow’s cousin was just ‘wait hold on what?’ and i’m not sure how i feel about it overall even now (also apparently there’s a not-insignificant number of folks who are like ‘maybe that’s not tigris from mockingjay, maybe there are two characters with the same name interested in fashion and raw meat in this series’ which i’m just like come on folks, occam’s razor this a little)

same with the hanging tree song being written by lucy gray and the events being shown on the page, like on the one hand yeah sure that’s interesting, on the other it feels a little too neat, like any good world should be bigger than just the people you see and making all the songs tie back to this one covey family feels a little too pat

snow was spot on all the way through, though, loved seeing him be like ‘hm.... i really hate what’s happening but for optics i need to seem like this this and this’ and just the absolute disregard he has for other people on a base level is fantastic

what would really be interesting is to see someone read the prequel and then the trilogy, i’d be fascinated to see how their perspective changes from reading the books in that order