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Another rant.
In a sense I do believe that Snow did love Lucy Gray, but I saw this tiktok talk about how it isn't a love story, it's a tragedy. I have to agree, because Snow was given so many chances to choose the good path, he had people that genuinely believe in him. Tigris, Lucy Gray and Sejanus but Snow is so emotionally stunted and not willing to progress. (At least from my view that's what I concluded)
So many times throughout the book I caught myself smiling or laughing at something he said. And I literally would be like "wtf" but Suzanne Collins is such a genius writer like that, and like a broken clock I'll repeat, she wrote this book so well that, I was genuinely forgetting that this young man will become a man I will hate and wish death upon.
Reading the original trilogy as a pre-teen I never truly understood the gravity of Snow's evil and watching the movies again recently with context from the book, made so many little actions and lines hold more weight.
I hate over-analysing books because of English in school, but books like this remind me why I love to read and get lost in worlds that are are different but the same.
I'm rambling but this book and this whole franchise has been on my mind for a while and I need a creative outlet.
I just finished the book, and people are right, you actively find yourself rooting for Snow, for a split second you completely forget who he is, who he is to become. You want him to be a good person, the moment I knew his humanity was faltering was when he killed Mayfair and Billy Taupe. He excused it as protecting Sejanus and Lucy Gray, but at the root of it, Coriolanus Snow is a product of Capitol brainwashing and taught to dehumanize the people of the districts.
He's so complex and fucked up and sociopathic and Olivia's song is a perfect encapsulation of Lucy Gray, AND Sejanus Plinth haunting him for the rest of his life. Snow can pretend and poison and erase the memory of them but people with unfinished business tend to come back to finish it.
I had refused to read the last chapter holding it off, cause I already saw the mental change in Snow's character, I was invested but I knew my heart will be broken. Because we only ever knew her through Snow's lens; Lucy Gray Baird's fate forever a mystery, just like her life.
Thank you for reading this mini rant, I'll probably rant again after a while.
Just finished The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. What blows me away is how Coryo has all the influences for him to become worse and to become better.
Here's what I mean, he's a mentor, so he has a close view of the games, which could make him more sympathetic with the districts or more cruel to them.
He writes the papers for Dr Gaul and talks with her a lot, their interactions could have made him more pro or more anti Capitol.
Dean Highbottom resents the Snows, which makes coryo anti-whatever-highbottom-believes, but hearing about the origin of the games could have changed his mind.
Sejanus, Tigris, and Lucy are all anti-capitol and they are the greatest influences in his personal life.
Spending time in D12 could have made him sympathize with the people that are the same as Capitol people, but instead he becomes more pro-capitol.
But as the first chapter makes very clear, he's out for personal success. It foreshadows everything. At the beginning he has some sympathy for the tributes but sees them as pawns for his own success. At any point, he had the catalysts in place for him to become anti-capitol. The conversations and family and friends. He could have been.