YMMV / The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Are all of the Capitol mentors besides Clemensia, Sejanus and Lysistrata okay with the Games, or do some of the others have qualms they just keep hidden throughout the book?
  • Was Arachne just cruelly taunting Brandy with the picnic and sandwich and had no intention of actually feeding her? Or was she really going to give it to Brandy once she'd had her fun teasing her, and fatally misjudged how angry the starving girl had become?
  • Is Lucy Gray a young girl with a crush on the charming Pretty Boy who gave her a rose the first time they met, took a special interest in her, brought her gifts every time he went to see her, and seemed like the opposite of her old Bastard Boyfriend who cheated on her? Or is she a Manipulative Bitch who isn't as taken with Snow as he is with her and is just stringing him along to motivate him to help her win the Games? Though this latter explanation is less likely considering that she still very happily continues her relationship with him well after the Games are already over. Did it start out as pragmatism on Lucy Gray's part, only for her to fall for him for real as the story went on, much like Katniss did with Peeta? Or are her feelings for Snow a form of trauma bonding, where, faced with her almost certain death, she develops feelings for the only person who is kind to her amongst all the mistreatment she's been receiving as a source of comfort in her final days?
  • Lucky Flickerman's Cuckoolander Commentator could be a form of Sanity Slippage or passive sabotage against the Games from a weather man unwillingly thrust into the job as host of a brutal death match, which is explicitly mentioned as being relatively unpopular with the Capitol at that point in time.
  • Did Arlo Chance really cause an explosion that killed three men as an act of rebel defiance? Or is he a scapegoat for a simple accident or an act of sabotage committed by someone the Peacekeepers can't catch? His girlfriend yells out that he is innocent as they hang him, but she is a somewhat biased source.
  • The Ring twins encourage their tributes to dance in the zoo and gain favor with the Capitol citizens. Was this, like Coriolanus' encouragement of Lucy Gray (at first), motivated by the twins wanting their tributes to stand out more so they themselves would get more glory? Or, given their kind natures, were they hoping that having favor with the audience would somehow help their tributes stay alive—if only to get some food before they're dropped into the arena? We never find out what the Rings think of the Games, or the treatment of the tributes.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Volumnia Gaul had the Hunger Games—where teenagers from each of the Districts are forced to kill each other—implemented into society to solidify the Capitol's oppressive regime, forcing Casca Highbottom to take credit for creating it even after he regretted what he had done. In the book proper, Gaul conducts horrific experiments on Avoxes out of scientific curiosity; has a girl injected with snake venom for lying to her; and has Coriolanus Snow kill a tribute to prove that killing is humanity's natural state. Nihilistic and misanthropic, Gaul manages to convert Snow to her worldview, resulting in him becoming the brutal tyrant he is in the original trilogy.
• Crazy Is Cool: Lucy Gray Baird. She's introduced attacking the mayor's daughter with a snake during her reaping and then calms the masses with her Beautiful Singing Voice. If that doesn't certify her as a crazy badass, nothing does.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Few people expected Coriolanus Snow of all people to get this treatment, yet here we are.
    • Some people claim that he was just a poor upper-class boy, whose Start of Darkness happened in a sudden change of fate, ignoring that the book already set him up as a selfish, possessive, Manipulative Bastard long before anything bad really happened to him. While he certainly had it rough, he was already far from a good person even before that. Then there's the fact that he betrays both his best friend and the girls he supposedly loves for the sake of his ambition, having already become a total monster even by the end of this book, before everything else he does to rise to power as the President Evil he is at the time of the original trilogy.
    • What's more, this is paired with Ron the Death Eater treatment towards Lucy Gray, simply because she may have been manipulating and/or using Snow despite there being far more indications to the contrary; meanwhile, we know that he's using her in the beginning, as well, to boost his own image and chances of success, and even after genuinely falling for her, is still occasionally manipulative to her, too (as well as everyone else, generally pretending to be an affable guy while actually looking down on most others). His inner thoughts also prove Coriolanus to be a quite possessive and entitled boyfriend to Lucy Gray, and very prone to jealousy.
  • Some people heap Mayfair Lipp and Billy Taupe with rather excessive amounts of sympathy, claiming that they were just innocent teenagers. This ignores the fact that Billy Taupe was a controlling and entitled ass towards Lucy Gray, with his sole redeeming quality (besides trying to save Mayfair's life) of caring about his little brother falling flat since he's trying to control him too. And while Mayfair's death was unjust, since she was killed in the heat of the moment by Coriolanus, who defended his action as a Crime of Self-Defense even though she wasn't targeting him specifically, it doesn't suddenly make her supposedly convincing her father to choose Lucy Gray as the tribute, essentially shipping her off to her death, okay.
• Ending Fatigue: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is nearly twice as long as a regular Hunger Games novel, with over 500 pages rather than the usual ~300. This is because the actual 10th Hunger Games are a Red Herring, as the story really is about the downfall and Start of Darkness of Coriolanus Snow. The Games are over by the end of the second third of the book, and the last third is a detailed description of Snow being exiled and losing his innocence completely, turning into the monster that we all know and loathe from the original trilogy.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Has its own page.
• Epileptic Trees: Unsurprisingly, one of the most common theories post-release is that Lucy Gray is Katniss' ancestor, possibly her paternal grandmother. If not her, then Maude Ivory. It's definitely agreed upon by most that Katniss and her father are of Covey descent.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: After The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes was released, many a Fix Fic has been written about Coriolanus Snow/Lucy Gray Baird being the Official Couple, rather than the implied Coriolanus/Livia Cardew. While the fandom does understand that Coriolanus would eventually become President Snow, many readers liked their chemistry too much to throw it away, even if it means rewriting history.
• Fanfic Fuel: Which districts did the first nine Victors come from and what kind of post-Games lives did they lead compared to Lucy Gray? Were any of them forced to mentor once that responsibility was assigned to Victors, and, if so, how did that affect their initially Games-free post-Games recovery?
• Fridge Horror: Iphigenia Moss's anorexia to "get back at her father" leaves one with the impression that she has been and/or is being molested by him.
• Ho Yay: As Coriolanus's foil, closest friend, and companion throughout the story, Sejanus is ideally positioned for this kind of interpretation. He's described as "shy and sensitive" and is certainly devoted to Coriolanus, calling him his only friend and trusting him with his life on multiple occasions, and apparently spent their school days "watching [Coriolanus] watching other people." As for Coriolanus, his first description of Sejanus makes note of his "soulful brown eyes" and the way his elegant suit "add[s] flow to his tall, angular frame," and his greeting line to him is the flirty "Getting a workout this morning?" Immediately after Sejanus is hanged, Coriolanus refers to Lucy Gray as "the one and now only love of his life." This may be read as Coriolanus lamenting his imminent death preventing any future loves, but it may also come off as perplexing, since several of Coriolanus's other loved ones are still very much alive.
  Coriolanus: Do I look okay?
  Sejanus: Gorgeous. Trust me, that lip is working for you, soldier.
• Jerkass Woobie: Coriolanus Snow. He suffered a lot of tragedies in his life, such as being orphaned at a young age and living in poverty, but he also spends the novel manipulating and backstabbing people, not to mention the monster he would grow up to be.
• Narm: Plenty of it, as we see the novel from Coriolanus' perspective, who is something of a drama queen and tends to exaggerate small things, making some of his inner monologue unintentionally funny. Examples include:
  • When Coriolanus is unenthusiastic about having to eat cabbage:
    Coriolanus released the fistful of cabbage into the pot of boiling water and swore one day that it would never pass his lips again. But this was not that day.
  • Later on, he says, in all seriousness:
    When he removed the lid, a mush of congealed, shredded potatoes stared back at him. Had his grandmother finally made good her threat of learning to cook? Was the stuff even edible?
  • The fact that one of the major characters is named Lysistrata. If you know what kind of act that name is associated with, the name becomes unintentionally hilarious every time you read it.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Arachne's death. Mostly since it comes completely out of nowhere; just a few sentences ago, she was half-lecturing, half-bullying her tribute, until said tribute pulled a knife and slashed her throat. And to make it worse, she's still alive for about a minute until she finally dies from blood loss. In Coriolanus' arms, who has nothing to patch the wound and can only watch her die helplessly. Tigris' statement afterwards is also painfully realistic: you might see a person you know, not realizing that this is the last time you'll see them.
  • Clemensia being suddenly attacked by Gaul's genetically modified snakes, since it again comes completely out of nowhere. Gaul has most likely planned this for punishing Clemensia for lying to her. Later, when recovering in the hospital, Clemensia visits Coriolanus to show him that she is ''mutating'', as her sclera has turned yellow, her tongue is pushing itself out of her mouth and she's growing scales, and they are ''spreading''. While Clemensia later shows signs of recovery, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Gaul was ''permanently'' turning her into one of her experiments.
  • Jessup fully succumbing to the rabies he contracted at the zoo, chasing after Lucy Gray in the arena like some mindless zombie. All Lucy Gray can do is keep her distance and watch him die slowly.
  • Remember "The Hanging Tree"? We get to see the couple from it in-person, and it's every bit as traumatizing as one would expect. Turns out, the man is named Arlo, and he was hanged for an unsuccessful attempt at a rebel bombing, killing three people in the mines. His lover, Lil, watches him getting hanged, screaming, trying to get to him only to get dragged away and arrested. He tells her to run, and gets hanged mid-sentence, the jabberjays pick up his helpless cries and echo them, as if his ghost was endlessly repeating his last words.
  • After her arrest, Lil never escapes and is hanged just as Arlo was.
  • The same thing happens when Sejanus gets hanged for treachery, as he tried helping the rebels escape, but Coriolanus ratted him out. The jabberjays repeat his cries for his mother. It's this in-universe, too, since Coriolanus couldn't sleep since he can still hear Sejanus' crying in his head.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Lucy Gray Baird has gotten this treatment from some of the fandom, with people disliking her for allegedly using and manipulating Coriolanus and leading him on, and later on abandoning him after she realises his betrayal of Sejanus. Even though we don't have a way of knowing for certain whether she was using him, whether she was genuinely in love with him, or whether it was a mix of both, as the novel is told from Coriolanus Snow's perspective and Snow is both paranoid and tends to assume the worst in others, because he himself manipulates everyone. Although even if it was all manipulation on Lucy Gray's part, a 16 year old faking a romance to stay alive (just like Katniss did in The Hunger Games) isn't a reason to assume that she's a bad person in general who deserves hate.
  • Sejanus Plinth has also gotten some of this treatment, although not nearly to the same extent as Lucy Gray, with some fans disliking him for being impulsive and emotional and saying that he whines too much instead of appreciating his privileges, despite the fact that his privileged lifestyle was the result of his father selling out his native District 2 to the Capitol.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Not a single one of the previous nine victors appears, or even gets mentioned in a meaningful way when it would have been interesting to see what kind of lives some of those early victors led, or what some of the pre-career era victories were like.
  • Of the mentors, Iphigenia Moss (whose father is in charge of feeding the nation but who starves herself for some reason), Felix Ravinstill (grand-nephew of the man who first approved the Hunger Games, with it being unrevealed whether he revels in this status, feels awkward about this or somewhere in between) and Domitia Whimsiwick (one of the only mentors who seems to befriend her tribute) can feel underused, without much insight given into them, particularly the former two.
  • Even if they were still going to be killed off, it would have been nice to see Sheaf and Panlo (District 9's tributes in the Tenth Hunger Games) get at least some character development. However, like their counterparts in the Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth Games, they do nothing of note. It would also have been a good opportunity to see how District 9 tributes fight, but because they are among the tributes who die before the Games officially begin, we don't get the chance.
• Tearjerker: The description of the few remaining animals in the zoo.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some fans of the original trilogy dislike this book due to the Games being very different in this novel. In the original series, the Games are held in high-tech arenas, the tributes wear fancy costumes and makeup, and the whole event is much more glamorous. In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the Games are in an early, primitive form, before they started parading the tributes around in costumes and putting them in fancy arenas, forcing you to focus on the brutality of the Games and social issues in Panem, without any love triangles and fewer and less detailed descriptions of clothing and food to distract you from it. Some readers don't like these changes, finding them to make the 10th Games less entertaining than the Games in the original trilogy. However, when you consider that, in addition to the Games being in their infancy, Panem was still recovering from a civil war, these differences are justified.
• Unexpected Character:
  • The main character of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is not Haymitch, not some Original Character... it's Coriolanus Snow.
  • The Deuteragonist is Lucy Gray Baird, the previously-unnamed District 12 victor who had been alluded to in passing during the first chapter of the first book of the original trilogy.
  • Also playing a major role is Tigris, who had briefly appeared towards the end of the third book.
• The Woobie: Sejanus Plinth. A genuinely nice kid who was bullied in the Capitol for being born in District 2, he doesn't feel like he belongs in the Capitol and always wanted to return to the district, but his father wouldn't let him, having higher expectations. When his former classmate, Marcus, gets reaped and turned into a tribute, Sejanus tries his best to build a connection to him, but fails miserably as Marcus refuses to talk to him. Marcus is later displayed in a cage, half-dead, which causes Sejanus to lose it. After he didn't succeed in retrieving Marcus' dead body and barely escaping alive, Sejanus is reassigned as a peacekeeper in District 12. He's trying to help the rebels escape, but Coriolanus betrays him by recording their conversation in secret, leading to his arrest and hanging for treachery.

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