Villain origin stories are nothing new. The Maleficent movie showed a different, softer side of the famous villainess; there’s an entire Star Wars prequel series about Darth Vader’s rise to power. During Wicked’s two-year box office run, collabs were everywhere from nail polish to snack foods to clothing.
Usually, the point of the villain’s story is to humanize them. At no point during The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, however, did I feel bad for Coriolanus Snow. Suzanne Collins does not pull punches; both the overarching message of the book and its real life parallels are exceedingly clear.
Coriolanus Snow’s control issues are established from the very start of the novel. The eighteen-year-old Capitol resident has lost so much in his short life that he is fighting to hold on to the little he has left. It would have been easy for Collins to make Snow’s a tragic, sympathetic story: He lost his father in the war, lost his mother in childbirth to his would-be sister a few weeks later, watched people scavenge meals from dead bodies on the streets, then lost the entirety of the family fortune with the (supposed) destruction of District 13. Everything he once knew is gone by the time we meet him.
And yet, it’s hard to feel bad for him at any point in the book, even before he begins to make the decisions that lead to his eventual rise in power. Every decision he makes is tinged with a sickening sense of superiority. He looks down on other Capitol families for preserving their own survival because their methods are beneath him (in what world is it fair to judge your classmate because her father fed her family, almost definitely without their knowledge, with the dead?); rather than drawing parallels between himself and the poor residents of District 12, he thinks they’re worthless because clearly they’ve “given up” rather than trying to work their way out of the Capitol-imposed squalor in which they live.
This is never more clear than in his interactions with Sejanus Plinth, Coriolanus’s District 2-born Academy classmate. Sejanus serves as “Coryo’s” perfect foil in every way. He’s new money to the Snow family’s old; he despises and actively protests both the Hunger Games’ existence and his forced participation in them. All the while, Sejanus truly believes that Coriolanus is his only friend; all the while, Coriolanus tolerates Sejanus at best and hates him at worst.
All of this is thrown into sharp relief with the presence of Lucy Gray Baird. Coriolanus is assigned to be her mentor as part of a burgeoning program that attempts to get the Capitol more invested in the Hunger Games; for some reason, it seems, people don’t want to watch children slaughter each other, so the Games are experiencing some retention issues.
Coriolanus puts Lucy Gray on a pedestal, but never one higher than his own. He grasps at every possible straw to convince the entire Capitol (and himself) that she’s not actually from the Districts. Being from the Districts, of course, is the lowest thing one can be, and that is exactly where Suzanne Collins’s politics shine off the page as reflections of the real world.
To many of the citizens of the Capitol, and especially to the future president of Panem himself, District children are sub-human. They are closer to animals than people; upon arrival in the Capitol, the Tributes are even dumped in the monkey exhibit in the Capitol Zoo. They aren’t fed until Sejanus takes it upon himself to bring them food himself, and in a conversation that could not possibly be more transparent, a Capitol child scolds him, reminding him that the signs say not to feed the animals.
“They’re not animals, though,” said Sejanus. “They’re kids, like you and me.”
“They’re not like me!” the little girl protested. “They’re district. That’s why they belong in a cage!”
The truth is this: The District children are treated as less than because of the misfortune of the location of their birth. They don’t receive medical treatment when injured before the games; the zoo vet tends to them instead, despite her “repeated requests” that the Tributes be admitted to the hospital. Coriolanus’s father himself used to say that “those people only drank water because it didn’t rain blood”. Even their funerary customs are considered primitive to the people of the Capitol.
This implied savagery abounds in our country today. We have watched time and time again as children are ripped away from their families and put into literal cages for nothing more than where they are born. We have watched children murdered for the color of their skin; we watch the people who protest and try to protect them get called fragile snowflakes at best and get murdered at worst. Meanwhile, “outsiders” are blamed for every conceivable problem possible, because the fault cannot possibly lie in our own country’s policies.
The right thing to do. Coriolanus realized that this was what had always defined Sejanus’s actions, his determination to do the right thing. That insistence, the way, for instance, he would defy Dr. Gaul when the rest of them were just trying to get by, was another reason he alienated people. Frankly, he could be insufferable with those superior little comments of his.
Lucy Gray, meanwhile, is branded time and time again (both by the Capitol and by Coriolanus himself) as “one of the good ones”. As Covey, she’s not quite District, and Coriolanus hangs on to that with every ounce of strength he has. He sees her as “an exception to the rule”, not as a sign that the District people aren’t the savages he thinks they are. Everything about his infatuation with her is centered around his bid for power because, for once, Coriolanus feels powerful. He knows he holds her life in his hands, and he expects that she love him for not destroying it. Lucy Gray is a thing to be kept, a prize he may eventually be awarded for his success in the games. And all the while, he compares her plight (being thrown into an arena to kill or be killed by other children) to his own.
The last month had upended their lives and changed them irrevocably. Sad, really, as they were both rather exceptional people, for whom the world had reserved its harshest treatment.
Collins’s decision to write the book in third person rather than first, as the Hunger Games trilogy and Sunrise on the Reaping are both written, seems purposeful: We are not meant to relate to Coriolanus Snow. We are not meant to insert ourselves into his story; we are not meant to identify with his beliefs or his choices. Instead, he is a cautionary tale, and we the readers are meant to look on it horror as he makes decision after decision that shapes the games and kills those he cares about and those he doesn’t in equal measure.
A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes isn’t meant to endear us to Coriolanus Snow. This novel is not a tragic love story because Snow was never in love with Lucy Gray; he confused his infatuation with finally feeling powerful with caring for her. Coriolanus used her, like he used everyone in his life, until he no longer needed her.
No, A Balled of Songbirds and Snakes is a chilling reminder that our country is not so far off from Panem. We, too, put children in cages. Our country’s white supremacy imposes animalistic traits on people of color. The belief in an “American dream” has been so corrupted that poor people are blamed for being poor despite the fact that the majority of people are far closer to being unhoused than they are to being a millionaire.
And, like so many people who experience privilege in the United States, the blinders never fall from Coriolanus Snow’s eyes. In the end, he comes to a sickening conclusion: Everything was Lucy Gray’s fault, and she’s no different than anyone else in the Districts. The only thing he learns from her brief stint in his life, despite a deep hatred for both the Covey and mockingjays, is how to use poison to his advantage so he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty again. After all, why should he have to suffer? Everything would be easier if he wasn’t such an exceptional person.
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