What Went Wrong with THE HUNGER GAMES | Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Explained

Sorry this is late I just had a pretty horrible respiratory infection and the antibiotics also kicked me down. So much I didn’t touch on, like the similarities in Volumnia and Coriolanus from Hunger Games to the Shakespeare characters, talking about ballads and their specific use in the story, how Lucy Gray gets her name from a ballad while also becoming one. Who Tigris becomes in the later movies... There's a lot to dive into! Let me know your thoughts

my biggest issue with the movie is that a lot of people have walked away with the impression that losing lucy gray made snow into who he became. but the book’s internal monologue explicitly shows that he was steadily becoming that way and that’s what lost him lucy gray. the movie gives you the complete opposite impression.

It's interesting that this prequel reveals that Lucy Gray wrote "The Hanging Tree", which makes it even more of a slap of a face to Snow when Katniss performs it.

In the original trilogy, one of the defining traits of Katniss and Snow’s relationship is this understanding that it’s pointless for them to lie to each other because the other could see right through it. I love how that contrasts Snow’s relationships in this book, where they’re all pretty much built on lies and facades.

I'm in a few fan groups and it's STAGGERING the amount of people that still see Snow as the victim of heartbreak and Lucy Gray as the awful awful meanie who betrayed him and broke his heart?!?! Like what??? I haven't read the book yet I only watched the movie and I feel like you can still see straight through him!! It's scary what people forgive for someone they find attractive

District 12 being in Appalachia, and having such a deep relationship with music is one of my favourite through lines in the Hunger Games. Appalachian folk musics is sort of proto-country music, but also one of the places where old english/scots/irish folk ballads were preserved. The way that the Covey's songs are preserved from before the Capitol and Districts, and Katniss's father passes her The Hanging Tree, in turn preserving pieces of Lucy Gray.

I think there should have been more focus on Snow and Tigris' relationship. Like how they come from the same background and basically wanted similar things but how their actions completely change them.

The best way to emulate Snow's internal narcissism is to have a monologue same as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. It'll be weird though not sure if it will work. Probably not

The single biggest flaw in the movie was it's inability to truly portray Snow as the narcissist he was. They tried to make him sympathetic instead of leaning into the flawed main character, just like they did with Artemis Fowl. Like Snow never was nice for niceness's sake. He was nice to get something in return. He did not love Lucy; he "loved" her. His inner dialogues never once made you believe he ever truly cared for Lucy; he always saw her as property that he was owed because he's a Snow, and Snows deserve whatever they want.

I think a snow narration would help some parts of the movie to really see what goes on in his mind. I know the whole "show don't tell" but it feels like we lack so much of his twisted narcissistic inner monologue. Like whispers you hear of his mind racing and the disconnect between his actions and intent behind them. Like calling Sejanus his brother, that's purely for selfish reasons

40:47 In Snow’s mind I’m sure he believes he loved Lucy Gray more than anyone and that she nearly destroyed him, but I think the thing he loved most was himself, and in the end that is what destroys him. In this story his ambition and sense of entitlement destroyed any potential for good he had left. And throughout the trilogy his tendency towards becoming obsessed with something—as described in the opening pages of TBOSAS—which in this case was Katniss, caused him to lose sight of the bigger picture and allowed Plutarch and Coin to beat him.

So much of the book was the horror of not only knowing who Snow truly is because we've seen his future from the original trilogy, but also the fact that we're seeing him constantly have insight into other people and scenarios but draw the absolute wrong conclusions from them, watching him continuously be misunderstood by people around him like characters in a horror movie: you can scream at them all you want not to go into that creepy basement, but they can't hear you.

My issue is that you get Snow's decent in the book because you're in his jealous narcissistic head the whole time. So when he's hunting Lucy Grey at the end it makes sense. Here you can tell he's conflicted but you never get the same cruel selfish vibe that you get from him in the book. So I think it worked best because I had read the book and knew the context. I can't imagine what people who read the book were thinking. Also Tom Blythe, god bless him, is just too hot to fully hate. 😂

I was SOOO sad when they cut out clemensia. Clemensia is so important to snow in the book, shes his one real genuine friend, and what he sees happen to her and the state she returns him scars him for the entire book, and its what he reflects on the most when he thinks about what will happen to his family if he gets caught defecting with Sejanus and that entire nuance is lost completley

on a real note, I’m legally obligated to demand amanda’s retrospective analysis of the original series

While the movie isn’t perfect, it does have a degree of re-watchability that I can’t quite pinpoint… coming from someone who read the book before watching the movie, I think the directors and screenwriters did a great job of condensing the source material to only what was absolutely necessary. Though the movie was good, it seems everyone agrees it could’ve been better with a longer screen time. My personal theory is that given the mixed reactions to the premise and the downfall of YA in general, the studio didn’t want to risk it.

I’ll tell you what was wrong with it: it didn’t have enough cowbell during Rachel Zegler’s singing scenes.

Love the character study in the book and thought the movie was a fine translation, though I did miss seeing more of Tigris and Coryo's relationship. Should have been made into two movies or a mini series imo, but didn't expect that with how the book was received.

I want to add that we do actually "read" about Lucy Gray in the Hunger Games. Katniss mentions that District 12 has had 2 victors but we only ever meet Haymitch. I caught this on my reread of both Songbirds and the original trilogy.

What I liked most about the books, is that through Snow it shows how easily people can be radicalized through propaganda into standing by and enabling horrors and violence. Snow isn’t humanized but you understand his anger, his pride, and his obsession with gaining power and how it leaves him susceptible to the pro-Hunger Games/Capital rhetoric. There are moments in the book where I was like, “omigod, you are so close to understanding why the Hunger Games and the subjugation of the districts is bad”, only for him to steer right down the path towards Dr. Gaul…and then you realize, no he’s always been this way. Lucy Gray was a distraction, a way for Snow to justify his later actions, however, he was always going to go down that path. You see his clear cognitive dissonance, the mental gymnastics he does to tell himself that he’s doing the right thing. An example being, him trying to make a case that the Covey is neither District or Capital, so therefore he can be with Lucy Gray and she can come to the Capital to become rich and famous. He’s not trying to save LG or the Covey, he just wants to have her and keep his status. But also, he continues to dehumanize the citizens of the district, saying they deserve to be punished by the hunger games. In one breath he’ll praise Tigress, but then will look down on her when the possibility that she’ll need to turn to sex work for them to survive. Instead of being angry at the Capital who has done nothing but perpetuate the violence and villainize the districts who are powerless and suffering, he falls in line with their teachings. Even if he escaped with LG to 13, his paranoia and need for control would likely have him claiming power in 13, where he will still do terrible things. He’s kinda written like the protag in Catcher in the Rye, Snow is charismatic and engaging that you the reader can easily be lead by his lies/twisted ideas, that you want to give him a pass, only to realize at the end that, no, Snow is a narcissistic monster who successfully and brutally took power. And that’s the sad thing about the movie, you don’t get that nuance of what the author is trying to tell you about how easily it is for “civilized people” to justify abject cruelty. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend listening to the audio book. It really adds to the immersion of the reader standing by as Snow did to allow the Hunger Games and the violence to be packaged as a spectacle instead of the horror that it is.