The Hunger Games Prequels: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes with Traci Thomas

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0:33Traci Thomas: The Hunger Games are a series of books about many things. They're about violence, they're about propaganda, they're about fascism, but they're also quite simply about hunger. Almost every character in The Hunger Games goes through a period of starvation and this has always been like a really evocative theme for me and in children's literature in general. Like when I was growing up I learned a lot about the famine as an Irish person and it was always so frightening because the famine in Ireland in the 19th century happened, yes, because we had a potato crop that failed, but also because, you know, all the rest of the food that was in the country, all the kind of orchards full of fruit and all the vegetables and all the livestock was completely and 100 % owned by the British who had colonized the country and they were not interested in sharing.

1:24Traci Thomas: So essentially it was a man-made disaster that I believe halved the population of Ireland if I remember correctly and so it's naturally very evocative reading about famine in fiction it's very evocative seeing famine in the real world so so this week I'd like to turn you on to a charity called the World Central Kitchen now the World Central Kitchen has been providing meals for people who are affected by this man-made famine in Gaza and the other day they had to stop providing meals. Let me read a statement from them. So World Central Kitchen teams in Gaza have run out of ingredients to cook warm meals.

2:05Traci Thomas: We served 80 ,000 meals on July 19th, emptying the last of our replenished stocks while aid trucks remain stuck at the border. Our brave teams are still baking bread and delivering water each day, essential lifelines for Gazan families. World Central Kitchen remains steadfast in its commitment to serving communities in need. Your contribution today will directly support our emergency food relief efforts in Gaza, providing sustenance and hope to families affected by this humanitarian crisis. I'm going to put the link to World Central Kitchen in the show notes and if you have anything left to donate, I urge that you do.

2:45Traci Thomas: If you cannot donate this week, I urge that you write to your MP and maybe possibly ask why that this food isn't getting through. Okay, thank you. Hey guys, so me and Tracy Thomas this week are talking about the Hunger Games prequels. That's The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which came out in 2020, and Sunrise on the Reaping that came out earlier this year now we thought we could talk about both books in one episode and uh you'll see very shortly the folly of that because we just get so involved in talking about um sort of the various different ways in which hunger games feels like such a relevant series for right now and we got so stuck in the conversation that i actually decided to split the conversation across two weeks so this week will be mostly ballad songbirds and snakes but again we didn't think this was going going to be two episodes so there's kind of this chat about Sunrise and the Reaping in part one and then next week will be sort of mostly Sunrise on the Reaping.

3:45Traci Thomas: I hope that's not too confusing or too annoying.

3:54Traci Thomas: Hello and welcome to Magical Garbage, the podcast where young adult novels continue to have a menacing sense of foreshadow. My name is Caroline and as always snow lands on top and joining me is the Flintstriker with a heart of gold. It's Tracy Thomas. I love this. Hi, Tracy. How's your summer going? It's so strange. I never do this with people where I've never met them. And then we have our podcast a few months ago, back in March, I think. And there's been this whole wedge of time where we went away to read these prequels. How has it been? How's your life been? How have the books been? How have the books influenced your life?

4:32Traci Thomas: Et cetera, et cetera. It's all been great. I was sort of dreading reading the ballad of Songbirds and Snakes because I'd heard so much like people didn't like it. And so I kind of needed this as an excuse to be like, okay, I'm going to do it. And we can get to my thoughts about it, obviously, as we go. But I have just had like a very Suzanne Collins summer. I mean, I did Songbirds in June. I just finished sunrise in july and i love suzanne collins you know what even when she's mid she's great this is what i think we can talk about this because these two are not nearly books one and two of the original for me i did not find four and five slash zero and negative one or whatever I just didn't find them to be as far as like the storytelling goes to be as good.

5:33But the political thought in these books has shown extreme growth to me from Suzanne Collins.

5:41Traci Thomas: Very. Yeah, I am inclined to agree with you. I would say, I mean, we're talking about both of them. I think let's go kind of chronologically in terms of release and also timelines. so let's do ballad first and then sunrise and the reaping next but i think that like where um songbirds for me where it falls down on storytelling really it exceeds in sort of the kind of political points it's making quite i think like you could you could really argue the original hunger games trilogy is an incredible kind of introduction to teaching young people about like the power and the sort of the power and peril of media I suppose in general media and the power of the image and the power of violence in the image but I feel like the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes despite I think being like really quite patchy on storytelling and really like I was quite surprised by how thin some of those characters were because I've never really felt that way about Suzanne before um I felt like in terms of nuanced discussion particularly about young men and power it was it was amazing it was it was incredible to me and and like we hear so much about how you know young men becoming radicalized young men becoming radicalized has been like the story of the last decade right of like we've empowered girls to sort of be you know like I don't know be their own little Hermione Grangers or whatever we've somehow left boys behind they've fallen into this gulf of sort of media that has expressed sort of trained them to be toxic and we're like oh no the young boys but what i feel battles of songbirds and snakes does so well it's famously from the point of view of coriolanus snow who is the president snow of the uh hunk game series but we're really diving right in but i have so much to say to you um i know it is it is very much about like how the the way boys are radicalized when they have an unsatisfied sense of entitlement like when they feel like they were supposed to get something and they didn't but it also it's about how that society in general teaches them they should have high expectations do you know what i mean right yes totally totally i mean so i ended up liking ballad i think more than sunrise i think me too on balance shocking for people i do think some of the like I think that ballad was too long for sure like and there were things that I wanted it to do that it didn't do story-wise there were pieces that I thought we were gonna get to that we never did but I think to what you're saying about like young men and feeling entitled and being radicalized I think that's very true but I also think that like she for me I was able to feel sympathetic towards Coriolanus Snow in a way that I know other readers were not.

8:40I spoke to a lot of readers who were like I didn't like being with him. He was just an entitled this and that. But I was also like, well, he also lost his family and you know, if he had been the good guy, like if he had been a Haymitch or a Katniss or whatever, if he had been on the victim whatever side of the power dynamic, he would have been extremely extremely sympathetic, like losing your family, being hungry, not having like all of these things. So I thought she did a really good job of being like, look, if he had been in the districts, we would have been rooting for him, but simply because of where he was born.

9:20Right. Like, because we know where he goes, but at the start, like, we don't know. And I thought she did a good job of showing his turn and kind of building up this believable villain arc. I didn't think that she started with a presumed villain. And I appreciated that.

9:43Traci Thomas: I really appreciated that too. And I also found him really funny. Yes, I liked being with him. People, I'm like, but I love a villain. How are you on books with like unlikable characters or stories with like very tough hangs? Love that stuff. I mean, I would say my favorite book of last year was Taffy Brideser-Akner's Long Island Compromise. And that is a book that I don't know if you've read it, just wall to wall assholes. It's just like perverts, dickheads, people who are like, like the most sympathetic character in that book is like trying to build like a. like luxury college dorms where a homeless shelter used to be like and that's the sympathetic sibling in that family and I love it and like to me like um the function of like novels is my favorite are my it's probably my favorite art form I would say and I think they are my favorite art form because it's an individualistic experience that nobody else gets to see like you're reading a book and there could be anything happening in there and so you get to commune with the kind of darkest freakiest parts of the human psyche the darkest darkest parts of yourself and like kind of stepping into like this post-war society where a young man who is like starving in his kind of air zatz luxury apartment wearing old clothes and hating everybody and like just following him through this freaky little society where he tries to make ends meet and tries to sort of preserve any sense of dignity watching him become like i don't know this like awful like but by like page 300 he has done some of the most unspeakable things and i totally understand every step how he got there and i find that yes so far a greater feat of writing than oh wow hey mich a guy i always liked i like even more now you know yeah totally and i feel like she set it up to the point where it's like when he the choices that Coriolanus is faced with that she gave him the agency to make those choices there's a version of this book where he chooses different when it comes to his friend or he chooses different when it comes to Lucy Gray and and the book plays out differently and I felt like I mean I knew what choice he was going to make obviously yeah but I felt like there was a world where maybe I would be surprised like I was with it enough to be like maybe she'll surprise me maybe he'll surprise me yeah yeah yeah and you know what I was I was actually surprised by my own conservative expectations because what I thought was going to happen in this book is that like because also I think I had seen the movie trailer as well and okay I had I hadn't seen I watched the movie now and I think it's fine um but I'd But I'd seen the trailer and I had the impression in my head somehow that it was a love triangle and that it was like, you know, Corio and Sejanus were these kind of brothers in arms who like they were different, but they were friends.

12:51Traci Thomas: And then Lucy Gray Baird was going to be the kind of the girl who got between the two of them. And that would be sort of the path to radicalization would be him losing the girl to his best friend or something. And I think maybe that's why I put it off for a long time because I felt like I could see the whole thing coming. And it just sort of subverted my expectations at every possible turn. Yeah. Yeah. That's how I sort of felt too. That's an interesting. I'm so glad it wasn't that. That would have sucked. Yeah. Because it's like, I mean, do you want to go through the plot beats of it? Because, yeah, I could get distracted.

13:31Traci Thomas: So, okay, so let's just begin with like where we find ourselves in the story. So, Battle of the Songbirds and Snakes begins 10 years after the war, the unspecified war at an unspecified futuristic time. You know, we kind of, we have to sort of remember the Hunger Games does not really take place as far as in Suzanne Collins' mind in an alternative universe. is this is very much the future she's writing about and sometimes you can forget that or what she thinks of as the future and uh so we have Coriolana Snow of the great Snow family he lives in a kind of a yucky once great penthouse apartment with his once great family who consists of his cousin Tigris who we know from the Hunger Games books and the grand ma 'am yes tell me what you thought of this whole setup

14:30i so i mean i like it i i went in thinking he was gonna be the richest of the rich like already in line for the presidency like in a legitimate way more like royalty than a true president or whatever elected person so i like this setup of his family sort of believing in their once greatness but it not actually being a foregone conclusion like I liked being like oh

14:58Traci Thomas: how will he get there you know yeah and it's very like I mean the ways in which I was kind of originally turned off by the novel was the kind of there's a when you've come from like Katniss Everdeen she's an archer she's a huntress she's like starving to death at the very edges of society to like what essentially feels like a dark academia comedy of manners yes in choreo's world which is like he goes to fancy school every day people at fancy school are kind of bitchy about like little status things about who has a new shirt and who has this and like it's it's it's kind of it's fun but it's a difficult setup because you're like your kind of empathy dial has to reconfigure a bit you know yes yes because he's not the worst yeah of the group right like that's also such an interesting choice because she could have made him the biggest bitch of them all but she doesn't he's actually like the one of the more humble sort of unassuming people like you know he has a bravado to himself yes and like an ego to himself but outwardly you know he's nice to Sejanus he's the only one who's like not on purpose nice to him but outwardly he's nice he's not making the snarky comments he's not teasing the uh the tributes like so I thought I I again I just think some of the choices of how she played him really worked for the turn like the heel turn that comes later and like so much of this novel as well because it's it's um it's the only of these novels that's in sort of a close third person close third yeah yeah and so all the other ones are first present yeah they're like not even past sense they're like this is happening to me now yeah exactly um and i it's interesting with this because i think so much of ballad is very much concerned with the the gulf between your actions and your thoughts which is a really interesting notion really because especially how people perceive you yeah yeah how people perceive you and like because he'll often he'll do noble things for example he's nice to the one kid who's bullied because he's a district kid but he'll kind of legitimize his own niceness to himself as being like yeah i'm gonna sort of like rise above it and maintain my sort of classy patrician veneer by not stooping to the level which is like yeah you're not doing it for empathy reasons you're doing it for a sort of your own private status reasons but like it kind of then it leads you to like oh well does it really matter if the outcome is still you're being fairly nice to a lonely child you know well and especially like you know this book came out in 2020 i believe yeah and that was a time where everyone was like intent and impact and like impact over intent and it's interesting because with that logic a lot of the stuff that he does is like the correct thing right like the impact was good like he was nice to the bullied kid but his intent was to be a bitch it just didn't come off appropriately yeah because he's constantly like he's making these little digs at sejanus um and she's like wow thanks you're my best friend right right and like everyone's like that's your best friend he's like i don't like that i don't like him and they're like no you do he's like okay i guess he's my best friend that is one of my favorite jokes of this whole novel was this whole thing of like he's not my best friend and then it's like yeah well it's like well if he's not your best friend then where were you last night i was like i was with him okay my best friend and then what's i mean like we're jumping to the end but like the the really satisfying conclusion of that he's like by the end when like sejanus has been fucking hung and he's like replaced him in his family or whatever he's like yes sejanus my best friend my brother my brother basically brothers more than friends actually um right so uh yeah so we have um this whole kind of dark academia sort of jane austen comedy of manners full of these post-war kids or whatever and um we're given this whole it's really fascinating actually it's a great little invention this thing of this is early on in the hunger games as a tv show it is deeply unpopular Most people think it won't last very much longer.

19:47Traci Thomas: And so this kind of academy that they're part of is taking part where they're assigning their top students to be mentors in the games because they think it will help. And like there's these two sort of teacher figures called Dr. Gall and Dr. Highbottom. Dr. Gall is very evil. Dr. Highbottom is a drunk. And that's how that's who they are. and uh and they um yeah assign everybody a sort of a mentee from the districts and this is going to be the way that they're gonna like you know or what the way choreo is going to distinguish himself among his peers um so he's assigned district 12 it's the lowliest district and they all watch these reapings on tv his tribute is this girl called lucy gray baird Now tell me all of your thoughts on Lucy Greybeard.

20:41Traci Thomas: Spare none.

20:46I liked her. I just, I love Katniss so much. And it just was like a little bit too like, she's Katniss, but a singer. But of course I liked her. I'm rooting for her, obviously. Like she's a Covey girl, which is basically like, they're like a family of singing. You know, they roam. They roam the, well, so they roamed the country, But then when the war broke out, they were the last place they were was District 12. So they get stuck in District 12, the covey. And so they become sort of these like outlier District 12 people, which I also liked where it's like she's not really a district girl, but she is.

21:24But she's really more of a wanderer. I liked her. I mean, she's very she's very like cunning. And, you know, she drops a snake down. another person's dress, the mayor's daughter. She's a tough cookie. I love a tough cookie. She is Katniss, but pre-Katniss.

21:45Traci Thomas: She's kind of like Katniss through a Dolly Parton sort of filter, isn't she? I don't know. In my mind, she was more like sad girl, I don't know, folk singer. Like Joni Mitchell, like a sad Joni Mitchell in Rainbow Ruffle. I sort of thought like her whole like if it's very Appalachian folksy wisdom kind of like if someone doesn't have a smile give them yours kind of like yeah okay sure sure sure so I think I just I can't separate Dolly Parton from like the blonde hair and the sequins but yes very like um very I don't know not kitschy but whatever I don't have the bobbing her shoulders side to side I'm doing my shoulders kind of like, I don't know.

22:32I don't know what I'm doing. But yes, full of sort of country wisdom, if you will.

22:38Traci Thomas: Country. I don't know. I mean, there are, we see a lot of the Covey in these two prequels. We see Lucy Gray-Baird in Ballad and we see Lenore Dove in Sunrise and the Reaping. And I got to say, I read these two books in quick succession. and by the end of it, I never wanted to hear about the fucking Covey ever again. I was so over it. Covey is too much Covey and too many song lyrics, babe. Just, Suzanne, I love you, but I don't need the entirety of The Raven. If I want to read The Raven, I can do it. We'll get there. I mean, I'm just like, honestly, like, Suzanne, join a band. Do you know what I mean?

23:20Traci Thomas: Like, you know, in the 80s, Amy Tan and Stephen King and a bunch of other authors, They were in this band called the rock bottom remainders. It's like, see if they're auditioning, Suzanne, clearly you have a desire to sing. Yes. Or at least to write the music. I don't know. In the earlier books, there's a little bit of the singing and I did love like the origin story of the hanging tree. Yes. Love that. But didn't need every folk song Suzanne's ever heard of. Didn't need it. It's like, this is a folk song. I was like, yeah, it is. Thank you. particularly I like um I uh did audiobook for one of them and the audiobook person was just reading with the least flowing intonation ever just oh not even singing it no no and it was it was tough going now to be honest but like yeah I would just the covey are basically they're kind of part Romany gypsy inspired and they're sort of part manic pixie dream girl inspired they seem very good at producing winsome girls who are always gathering their skirts and you know running through the corn it's very that yes they're very much running they're they're in my mind they look like trad wives but they're tough like catniss you know like it's like they're not real trad wives but they like you know lenore loves geese this other one loves snakes and birds they love a bird they love a bird whatever um which is i think you know a slightly heavy-handed metaphor for if katniss is the mocking jay yes are the song the songbirds that predate her i was a little a little tough for me yeah um but yeah i think i mean so this is the stuff where like this book was too long and it was too long in these places it was too much covey i think the covey is an interesting idea of these people that like get trapped in the system because they are undefinable like I think that's an interesting idea when we talk about wars and like these two sides and the people that don't fit tightly anywhere but I just didn't need so much of them right and especially as well where it's like it would seem that the the the Covey's kind of main role in life is that because we're and this comes up and is very fascinating we're living in a kind of a post book society there's no personal technology anymore um Suzanne says that at some point that like after the war was so kind of long and bloody and factories just were completely given over to making you know weaponry and so the like there's no one's had a mobile phone in in decades at this point and also books are rare um and kind of out of circulation and people don't really have them And so the Covey's kind of role is to keep these kind of ancient ballads and poems alive, which is interesting.

26:14Traci Thomas: But like, I find it difficult to have these groups that have such a strong parallel to, you know, Roman Egypties or Irish travelers or even, you know, certain kind of parts of Judaism at different parts of history. Like these kind of roaming nomadic people that don't seem to have any kind of ethnic identity. they don't seem to have any kind of like um you know racism or xenophobia they come up against just like they love poems and songs and they travel around i felt like as much material as we got about them we got very little actual detail right i agree i also think they exist to show that like there is another thing that is possible like outside of the world that we're being told exists right because like they we don't know about them in the early books but obviously this song the hanging tree is this very powerful thing that Katniss's dad is like don't sing it like that's what you know so like there's definitely some sort like the Covey is hanging over the first three books we just don't know it and I feel like in the second two books that Covey really is about like, well, we don't know anything about them.

27:31You're so right. It hadn't even dawned on me that like piece of them, like they would be discriminated against in some way. Yeah. Whether it was like people thought they were stupid or people thought like - Right. Whatever. They would be the butt of jokes or something. Exactly. Even if people love their entertainment. But they are there to show us that like, while these are the two options we've been given, capital or district, this world does have space for other things.

27:55Traci Thomas: but also if another way of life if that were the case though wouldn't just everybody be a coffee i like to sing i don't i don't mean that people could choose that i just mean yes i mean like she's telling us that it actually doesn't have to be binary by having them exist yes you know what i mean like she's signaling that to her reader in some way yeah and i think it's good i think it's good as well about like because the you know the hunger games original trilogy takes place in a world where president snow's power is total um right that like by the time he's reached his reign that's been going on for like 60 years he has stamped out the covey and stamped out most of their songs which is like a really interesting and chilling new kind of shade that it gives the books yeah but like anyway lucy gray is reaped um we later find out that she was kind of her her reaping was kind of was rigged i guess um because of she's got this whole beef with the mayor's daughter which wasn't that satisfying to me um but uh then we kind of learn more about like where how tributes are treated at this point in the hunger games history so they are taken from their home districts they are piled into like cattle carts and then they are put in the zoo which I found so funny.

29:21Yeah, I mean, I loved the evolution of the games. The strongest part of the book, I think. To me, so good. Just seeing how different things were, that they were struggling, that they just were like, because one of the greatest parts of the original Hunger Games is Katniss getting to eat all this fancy stuff and seeing this fancy, elaborate world and sort of being not wooed by the Capitol because she doesn't buy into it, but seeing what the Capitol actually is versus in these early books immediately after the war or close to immediately after the war, there's so much resentment from the Capitol and so much like direct hatred, whereas later on it feels like the Capitol's like, oh, this is just like such a fun little thing that we do and like, sorry to these kids, but we don't hate them.

30:11It's just like, we do this.

30:14Traci Thomas: That's so what it is. yeah whereas there's so much active revenge going on still they're still you know that people the adults of this world have fought in this war the children of this world have memories of this war and like I think it goes a long way to because you know this is a novel ballad is just full of you know damaged parental figures who are trying to shape the next generation and doing a terrible job. I mean, who is it that said to me recently that there was like more serial killers in the 70s than any other era because they were the children who were raised by World War II vets? Is it that book Murderland that just came out?

30:56Traci Thomas: Possibly. I haven't read it, but I think somebody was quoting it to me. Yeah, I haven't finished it, but I started it. But she also talks specifically about this Pacific Northwest. Really? Okay. Yeah. But like, like the world of the Capitol in Ballad, it really is giving that like it's like, like Corio is slowly becoming a psycho because everyone around him is a traumatized psycho. Right. And I don't know. Do you are you a Shakespeare person at all? Not so much, but I like hearing about it. Well, so I didn't I love Shakespeare and I didn't do a deep dive. I just totally forgot. But Coriolanus is a Shakespeare play.

31:37Yes, a very violent one, right? Very violent. And it's all, there's a huge argument at the center of the play about who should lead the people. And it's like between these like factions, the plebeians, plebeians, and like someone else, I can't remember. But also worth noting is that the mother, Coriolanus' mother, is Volumina, which is the name of Dr. Gaul. So Dr. Gall is Dr. Volumina Gall. And one other character, I can't remember who it is, also has a name from Coriolanus. So I thought that was interesting. But the argument in Coriolanus is like the people should be ruled by royalty or the people should be ruled by other like regular people.

32:22And Coriolanus sort of takes by force and then someone else later, spoiler alert for this 500 year old play, someone else lander comes in and takes by force from Coriolanus and by takes by force means kills um overthrows but there's a lot of like argument in the play about who should be in charge and a lot of like these characters who are talking to the people and like basically doing these debates there's like two or three scenes of debates to the people from different sides and so she's definitely getting at that obviously Coriolanus is also just like an extreme person who gets power turns bad um so that name like as soon as I saw that his name was that long before I read the book I was like okay so we're doing so we're doing this heel turn like we're going there I mean yeah it would be like naming a character Iago it's just like so you're a liar and you're gonna ruin everyone's life do you know what I mean like it's like there's certain names we just know and it's sort of like that.

33:24So that's all. I don't know why I'm telling you this, but that's also part of it. No, I love that. I don't remember what the question was.

33:31Traci Thomas: No, I mean, what are we talking about? I mean, it's all relevant. It's literally the character's name and like Suzanne is never subtle with her naming, you know. No, no. She literally named the bread boy Peeta. Go off. The baker's son. Wheatloaf. I'm sorry. But I also think she sort of has to. She has to. There's so many fucking names in these books. It's like you have to have 24 kids every time from these different places. So she's like, you're from the mining district. You could be coal. Or like you're from the electricity district. How about Wiris and BT? Yeah. And then I love how sometimes she puts so much thought into it.

34:15Traci Thomas: And sometimes she's just like, I don't know, Mags. Yeah, she's like, Michael. Michael. How about this one's called Wyatt? All right. Yeah. Great. Whatever. Sure. But yeah, I mean, definitely with Coriolanus. And then by making the doctor who sort of becomes his maternal sort of leader, Volumina, who is a pretty ruthless woman herself. She has a great speech in Coriolanus that's like, you know, do what you need to do, my son. like like telling his wife to like shut the fuck up quick quick crying lady like we gotta do what we gotta do I mean and that's very much the character she's imbuing in this I mean she is you know his main kind of sort of his thought parent really I guess and yeah and like and she kind of sets him this sort of series of tests throughout the book which feel like I I mean a kind of a critique that Suzanne Collins often gets is that she doesn't write characters she writes essays with faces and I think there's a lot of essays with faces going on in these two prequels and but one of the ones I really appreciated because there's a lot of like quite baroque insane Hogwartsian shit going on with uh with uh Dr.

35:37Traci Thomas: Goll like the whole thing with the spider the the snakes in the tank and she wants to figure out which student is lying and she almost murders one of them and all that kind of stuff but it does really set up these brilliant conversations that they have and one of those conversations is basically about like how war is constant war is inevitable and the only thing that we can do is to stay on the most powerful side of a war that will last forever um which was very echoes a lot of like you know the end of 1984 right the idea of like an eternal war and so in the acknowledgements of these both of these books Suzanne Collins like specifically names the philosophy that she's dealing with in the books and and that again felt different than the first three books like that's why I'm like these books are so much more political because she's really grappling and I think this one it has to do with like can the people lead themselves or do they need a leader is essentially like what these this this book is supposed to be about of like she says you know I'd like to thank my parents for their love and always supporting my writing my dad for teaching me about the enlightenment thinkers and the state of nature debate at an early age which is like if there's no government that steps in what happens to the people kind of debate which she's clearly grappling with like if if dr gall isn't sort of forcing the issue of the games and sort of pushing people towards the games that the games are never created what would the resolution look like between the districts and the capital yes totally and like the there's a point at later in the book where for various reasons coriolanus is sent into the arena in order to save sejanus who has sort of snuck in there um and while he's in there the kind of the tributes turn on him and try to kill him and then he narrowly escapes with his life and dr gall kind of says to him you know they're they had nothing to gain by killing you they wanted to kill you they just did and to defend yourself you killed one of them and like that's what humanity actually is is that it's a boy beating another boy to death with the stone um which is of course a false equivalent because they didn't need to be in there in the first place yes exactly you put them in there a peace keepers in they could like there's that's the thing about this book is it's like like you were saying the early books all of these books are really about the propaganda and like what what is seen and what is not seen and what what people know and what is kept from them by the powers that be but this whole thing of like see what they did to you they didn't even need to kill you when they were going to it's like well you have them in their program to kill everyone and also you sent this kid in when you easily could have sent in the adults who have weapons to get Sejanus out like you did not need to throw Coriolanus in there you that was a choice that you all made so that really shows the nature of who people are not what the kids do after the fact yeah yeah totally it's like this kind of tilted lesson it's like the the dice is loaded at every turn it's like yes of course um but like the whole kind of bond that builds between lucy gray and choreo which is that you know once again he wants to distinguish himself um so he can kind of be eligible for a scholarship prize um and in order to do that he sort of like puts himself in lucy gray's way a lot He sort of makes sure that the audience sees her as a human being and not just another tribute.

39:20Traci Thomas: He finds ways to get her to sing on TV and all this stuff. And this is kind of a theme that runs across both of these prequels, which is the the attempts to claw back the power of the image from the people who own the kind of means of production, which is the government and the people who, you know, the government owns the TV station and the TV station owns your life kind of thing. and uh you know it's Lucy Gray is constantly on a battle to humanize herself uh to the people of Panem and then in Sunrise on the Reaping we have Maisley Donner who is Haymitch's the other kind of the female tribute of District 12 who is this kind of you know a real girl's girl which I like to see in this book like she likes jewelry she likes you know she's kind of a bitch and she likes eating nice meals and I like that and uh but but the thing that comes up I can relate I can relate it's kind of a bitch who likes nice meals and the the thing that comes up with her again and again is you know I'm like I'm going to eat this sandwich with a napkin rather and like with a knife and fork or something because I want to show them that I am a real human being and to make it as difficult for them as possible to dismiss me as like an animal even though they've literally put me in a zoo right right yeah I mean Maisley is a great character yeah I liked her a lot I liked her so much um yeah and I think that is like such a big part of both of these books of like who are these who are these kids and like who who is to say who they are like who gets to define them yeah and like I know we talked about this back when we did the original trilogy but there are still there is still a war going on there's still a genocide going on in gaza both months apart and like it is interesting reading these books and then you know watching footage of people sort of being queuing behind cages for aid and knowing that these images are specifically like that that like treating people this way is meant to dehumanize them to both the people who are torturing them and to themselves and to the world that sees it you know let's use it yep and i i've i mean i felt more than any of the other books i did feel the gaza the genocide in gaza more than ever in the fifth book like i to me the fifth book Suzanne Collins showed more of herself and her political beliefs in the book than any of the others I mean there's a I know we're kind of kept jumping ahead so sorry but there's a part at the end of of um Sunrise on the Reaping where Haymitch is talking to Plutarch and I can't remember who says it but I think it's Plutarch who's like you showed them that another world is possible and to me i was like that is just straight up prison abolition language like she just lifted those words from like that's like sort of just groundwork for prison abolition language is like we've got to show that another world is possible like our job is to show that there's another like that's just like you know the bread and butter of the talking points and i I thought that was so interesting because as soon as she said it, I said, oh, of course, this is the abolition book, right?

42:58This is the book that's like, this does not have to exist. Even more so than the early books that fight the system, but they're not nearly, like Katniss is in the dark about so much. Haymitch is actively trying to say this is wrong and does not need to exist. And I'm going to show you how. and we're all these all of these people are working together to prove that there's another way and like there's the scene with the kids at the tree with the crying career where he drops the chocolate down yeah and i'm just like she's talking about hurting children she's talking about starving children and the yes and like babies these babies i mean the scene where maizley and Hamish set out the picnic and she makes flowers with the napkins, I'm like, yes, she's trying to show her humanity, but also these are children using their imaginations.

43:56They are in make-believe because the world is so bad. And I just felt like in this book, there's no other way to read the politics. Whereas we talked about before, you can kind of read the politics of Gail and PETA and kind of make your own story. And I know people are mad at me because I don't like Skit Peeta, but I still don't like him. You must stand in your truth. Well, people were like, Gail kills Primrose. No, babe. Gail doesn't drop the bomb. Gail makes the technology. But if that's how you want to read what happens, that it's Gail is the murderer here, you are so, you are so indicted. You are a murderer too then.

44:37Like if we're going to say that anyone that has anything to do with anything that kills someone else is the murderer, he made the technology. He didn't know they were going to drop it on Prim.

44:47Traci Thomas: Like, I'm sorry. Anyways. No ethical consumption under Gail. Right. Like, I just feel like we're really going to say that Gail is the murderer in this. He was mentoring underneath Beattie or whatever. Anyways. Yeah. Who we're still fine with, by the way. Yes. He's very much a hero of Sunrise on the Reaping. But everyone's mad at Gail because of his perfect bone structure. Yes. I'm like, I'm so sorry. peta still sucks and you want to blame gail for prim's death like i get it he shouldn't have helped develop the weapons but i i mean whatever we could you if you want to blame him you can't also okay sorry i think i think we should get back to that because yes he did create technology that helped kill prim and that blows i'm sad that prim's dead we remain sad but like yes he katniss also does live in a peaceful post-war society and gail is working in the government do you know and like and also the choice to drop the bomb was president coin right she's the one who did that so i don't think like i am anti-military like i think the military is not great but i also don't blame individual soldiers for a war because like then you'd have to blame Katniss for Prim's death too right because Katniss is leading this revolution like if you want to go back and sort of find a way to make Gale a quote-unquote child killer you could do that but in the world of this book where everyone is literally cool with killing kids and he's fighting against that like you've got to give me some you're so right this is literally a series of books where kids are killing kids in their droves and gail has a part to play in the death of prim and suddenly it's fuck gail yeah i just i saw some of the comments on the post we had and someone was like because remember i hadn't finished the book and you were like oh gail does something bad and then i got to it and i was like i mean i guess it's bad to develop weapons technology yes but also they were fighting against a force that had advanced weapons technology so what were they gonna do what like i just i i don't want it i don't want that fight with you people because i think you're wrong um but anyways in sunrise on the reaping she doesn't even leave space for both sides she is very clear this is not an argument this is correct and you all are wrong like anything other than making this world a better place for these kids and fighting to that end is incorrect anyone who's in the middle ground is a villain in this book yes it's feeling like the most direct critique of uh Palestine and Israel the thing of like just because something has always been this way doesn't mean it always has to be this way this thing of like right the way in which people are often told to shut the fuck up about this um this issue is like oh well this has been going on since sort of the 1940s this has always been an issue there's always been stuff in this region and this kind of assumption that we should all throw our hands up and leave everybody to get on with it just because like well it's always been this way it's like the sun does not have to come up on another reaping my friends like it just doesn't like correct and that's i mean again that is the whole like the covey that's the best bit of the covey that i think we get is like the this way of thinking that we get from Lenore Dove of like, question it, question it.

48:34Yeah. Like it doesn't have to be this. And again, another world is possible. Like this is all just like so abolitionist talking points or like ideology in a way that she is much more, she's much more out there, I think, in this book than any of the other books. And I have to imagine that it's not unrelated to the fact that she wrote this, you know, with a vision of what's happening in Israel and Gaza. Again, in this acknowledgement, she also thinks her parents, what does she say about her dad here? I wish my dad was here to see that our discussions on David Hume inspired Sunrise on the Reaping.

49:22And David Hume, I think, is one of the epigraphs at the beginning about – it's two of them. One of them is that the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation that it will rise, which is really the whole crux of this book. Yeah.

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51:34Wait, we have to talk about the ending of...

51:37Traci Thomas: yeah we yeah we've barely touched the middle of Ballad um so let's get back to that I know we're doing such a bad job everyone we're so excited I'm sorry they're two massive books the only people who'll be listening are people who've read them both everyone gets it we're we're very smart and good um so I think we're doing a great job we are great you're right why am I being hard on us um okay another weak part of this book that not even weak it's just that like I kept expecting it to come to fruition or mean something more than it did um which was that before the games even begin like half the cast of characters gets picked off it's dead dead like Coriolanus's um fellow students are dying in like random terrorist attacks in the arena like one of the the tributes breaks loose and murders another person and it's like i get it because like by the time you get to the arena you want to have a finite number of personalities that you want to be dealing with um but i i what i thought that was going to be because like you know you're they go into the arena which is basically like a sports stadium right just a A stadium, basically a football stadium, which is like the way the games are done is they just plop a bunch of weapons in the middle of a football stadium and they wait for them to kill each other, which does sound like terrible television.

53:06Traci Thomas: And they go in and there's bombs that have been planted in the stadium. They go off, a bunch of people are killed. And this is before the games have even begun. A tribute called Marcus escapes, all this kind of stuff. And like, you think that there's some kind of rebel plot brewing or something but it just kind of comes from nothing i thought that the capital placed the bombs did you why yeah i thought it was like i i just thought it was like propaganda like they wanted they wanted the students to buy into the idea that the rebels were really bad because they were getting too chummy with the kids and feeding them and like so i thought they did it to be like see it's really dangerous still here wow that is very the capital they are killing their own pretty indiscriminately and like feeding their kids to snakes and shit so i had not put that together at all i was just like waiting for like oh is this like sejanus is leading some kind of district to revolution or something but no there there does not appear to be any like robust revolution at this point it's just like no billy tope in the backwoods of district 12 like hoarding six guns in a pillowcase you know billy tope what a name fucking billy um yeah no i mean i don't know that's just how i read it like i was like oh i don't trust these people so it's got to be them but it's there's no resolution either way they i'm not any more right than you i think you could read it however she leaves it pretty open yeah and and yeah so i'll have to confess to you that like this was around the part where before the games where a bunch of people are dying it all seems quite random and the way in it's very you know the way in which the capital kids are mourned is so over the top and they're state funerals and like horse-drawn carriages and then the way that the um then the kind of the the tributes responsible are basically lynched and uh it's this kind of it's the sort of like the the roses for the noble dead and then the kind of castigation of the of the rebels kind of thing and it's like okay I get it um but okay so we get the we get the games um some of the yeah another kind of thread of the games is that uh the kids are the kind of the mentors the students are being asked to come up with ideas to help the games be more interesting and cory lane has comes up with some ideas including introducing bedding into the games and also introducing um gifts for the tributes into the games and this is then managed via this is one of my favorite parts of the book actually this is managed via communa cuffs which is essentially an apple watch like yeah you get an apple watch if you have a living tribute and that is where you kind of manage all the kind of donations that come in for your tribute.

56:09Traci Thomas: And the way the students start talking to the camera about the donations they need is absolutely copied word for word, like influencer YouTuber language. It's like, okay, guys, like and subscribe if you want to see more of Lucy Gray or whatever. Yeah, it's so, I mean, that stuff, again, this bat stuff, all of the stuff about like the evolution of the games. loved yeah yeah i just it really made me think like does suzanne collins have like teenage kids who are like she does have kids yeah she thanks them in the acknowledgments i think she has two boys or one boy like like is she is she just watching them watch all these youtubers being like okay guys i can subscribe do you know what i mean like this is where this is coming from yeah oh my god i hadn't even put that that it but it totally is that exact same kind of like to front to camera stuff.

57:04Traci Thomas: Yes. Yeah. I mean, I love that. And I love, I love the whole, like the fact that they're all camped out in this TV studio with lucky flickerman. Yeah. Who I loved as well. And it's played very well by, Oh no, that young boy. I like who's, who's a man now. What's his name? He's a couple. Why can't I remember his name? He's in all of Wes Anderson's films. Jason Schwartzman. Yes. Or as I know him, that young boy I like who's a man now. The young boy I like who's now a man. What's not to like? I gotta watch the movie. Yeah, it's good. It's okay. I mean, like the, I would say the production values are really interesting because of like how it's styled, like kind of the Capitol almost feels like a 1940s sort of landscape.

57:59Traci Thomas: Right. but you don't really get his internal monologue you don't get Corio's internal monologue so it doesn't really feel quite as potent they get through the games long story short Lucy Grey Baird wins and because Corio Linus helps her cheat cheats with her exactly he is found out and then in what I think is one of the more interesting parts of the book he is sent to District 12 to be a peacekeeper which is basically the kind of yeah the the police force of panem who are i mean they're very interesting to me they're brought up in all the other books which is basically that they are cops who have to take a kind of a vocational role like they're not allowed to get married um and they live in kind of barracks and they don't have any family communications and it is but it is the the it's like the hugest possible loss in status for him right right and that and that people from like districts one and two do this job and it's sort of like a proud job to have but for him it's pretty shameful to be like demoted in this way totally um sejanus comes with him um because sejanus is like i want to i don't want to live in the capital because importantly i don't think we mentioned this sejanus is a district two kid whose father is a weapons manufacturer who is so rich he's managed to kind of buy himself a kind of a tenuous status in the capital but everyone hates them because they're district and uh yeah that's they they're out there and it's it pretty much sucks except cory elanus can now reunite with lucy gray baird and sort of have a life and they're in love now also they're in love now what did you think of that no i mean i i understand that it needed that it happened but i don't i mean i was like we're in love now okay the thing is i just didn't ever believe they were in love i just i always thought it was a plan up a scam i was like waiting for the other shoe to drop on their love story right and i like that she was playing him like when they first saw each other that she was going to be like, oh, you're here.

1:00:15Yikes. I'm still with my boyfriend. Like, I just was using you. Like, I thought that's what was going to be the love story. Like, that she was fucking with him and just using him because she saw that that was her ticket to win. But really, we're led to believe that they both loved each other for real.

1:00:30Traci Thomas: It's really tough because I don't think Suzanne Collins excels at romance writing in general. like in Sunrise on the Reaping Hamish and Lenore Dove are supposed to be this paragon of passion love, mutual respect, etc and I just didn't fucking feel it I didn't care at all about that not at all which is enough to say that I can't care deeply about love in YA books I can be very swept up by it I just don't think it's where Suzanne Collins excelled I mean like she talks about the sort of the famous love triangle between Katniss, Peeta and Gail as being not so much a love triangle as two sides on a moral war debate.

1:01:11Traci Thomas: It's like, that is not what Suzanne is here to do on this earth. I feel like that love triangle worked for me because Suzanne Collins was passionate about the debate. Whereas like the love story, there is no argument. It's just like, we love each other. We love each other so much. We are in love. We love each other. And I'm just like, that's boring. I know. And like also there's like a really great triangle waiting right there with them because Heyman, she's getting close with Maseley Donner in the arena and it's like, Oh no, she's my sister. I love her like a sister. And it's like, okay, fine.

1:01:50Traci Thomas: Like maybe you have a little kiss. Like, I don't know. Yeah. We could do it. Yeah. I thought he was gonna, I thought he was gonna, I thought he was gonna turn to Maseley for a little. Yeah. In the adult, in the adult book, I think maybe they go there but I think maybe because it's why it's like we don't really need to like muddy like the like the moral ambiguity of that I feel like really complicates Haymitch in a way that maybe we don't have time for in a YA like you know what I mean like I just feel like a different audience maybe she could have punched it up but I don't know it's because like the moral ambiguity in in suzanne collins books is like we love this character even though he's killed four people or whatever we're like we can't love someone who loves two people at once that's too much sure sure but i feel like don't you feel like i mean you you've written for young people oh yeah i continue to and and i feel like there are expectations similar to how they are in romance where it's like the cheater can never like be happy that it's like there's like some expectations from YA audiences that like it would take too much work on her part to like flesh that out enough so that people aren't like hey Mitch is an asshole you know because like there's a more less like there's like a less interest in some of that kind of complicated characters because of like the rules of those spaces do you know what I'm getting at I don't I actually disagree with you on that one I do think well you're the expert I don't know so that was my theory I in my original trilogy that I wrote there was like um the the main character had two people had like a a boyfriend long-term boyfriend of the series and also a kind of a a evangelical fundamentalist Christian Nazi who who who she had a kind of like a soul connection with that I mean it's a whole thing I won't get into it right now but I I had some tension between them that never actually came to anything physical and all i get now is all i hear from his kids who wanted them to kiss all i hear from his kids who wanted her to kiss the nazi so like kids want this kind of like romantic complication i think and they do want that kind of thorniness um but i mean sure uh but like i i think it does get to a broader point which is that like so the battle of songbirds and snakes is the first and maybe only of Suzanne Collins' novels or Hunger Games novels that mentions sexuality explicitly.

1:04:26Traci Thomas: And like, so in the, the way. Oh, because they call Lucy a slut. They call Lucy a slut. And so the, I think the way it's tracked. Nicer than that, but. They kind of do though. They basically do. I mean, what the grandmam says is like, I mean, Tigress says about Lucy Greyberry, she's only a girl. And the grandmam says, that one hasn't been a girl in a long time. And like, you know what she's saying. Yeah. Yeah. there's a few references to her promiscuity yeah and of having a past life and a past boyfriend and whatever and and this all kind of bleeds into sort of Coriolanus's like wanting to possess her and he every time it comes up that she has like a romantic history with like Billy Taupe et al um he just like flies into like this kind of inner rage and uh yeah and it's yeah I mean tell me more about what you thought about this kind of sense of yes it's on the start again this is the kind of so much of ballad is about the gulf between what you're doing and what you're thinking um which is like he's behaving like a boyfriend to her and behaving like a lover to her but internally his monologue is not actually that affectionate it's about owning a thing that other people want yes i mean so this gets into to the ending for me like that he wants to be in the light he wants to be the hero so badly and so he constantly is like aligning himself with lucy because he sees that she is the thing that people desire um and so i think like He just wants what she has.

1:06:14He wants to be loved and adored and thought to be smart and interesting and fun and cool and all of those things. He's just jealous of her, I think, in a lot of ways. That was sort of my read on his wanting to own her. He wants to be in her light as well. And that's just not possible because she's a cubby girl. Cubby girls don't belong to anybody. that was my read on him of like so desperately wanting to control this uncontrollable thing

1:06:49Traci Thomas: which is lucy yes and having very little to do with romance or sensuality at all like there's i think there's a few kisses that they have and uh i think it's so funny i love how much this is why he's a great character i love how much he hates music and singing because he's like he's like i i appreciate that she's good at this and that people find value in her because she is good at it but i i myself do not like songs because i can't hear my thoughts when i'm hearing a song right right right right he's like uh the arts are my hell um the arts are my hell I love that he hates singing and I also love that he hates nature yes because he's like they like they have this little the covey have this kind of fishing swimming hole lake thing where they head out to which I believe comes up in the um in the Hunger Games trilogy I think it's a place where Katniss goes a couple times and uh it's like oh it's a three hour trek from district 12.

1:08:00Traci Thomas: And Corey was like three hours and me reading it. I'm like three hours. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, I'm unfortunately I'm Coriolanus for some of this stuff. Enough with the singing enough with the track to the lake, like get a hose rinse off. Like it's fine. I'm like, isn't there water here? I don't know. Yeah. And he just like, is so not of this world. Like he's just a city boy. he doesn't want to be out with the mosquitoes and shit me neither yeah and he has like a fun day going swimming with lucy gray and he's like you know hanging out with her cousins like maud ivory and all all this yeah and he's like this is okay and he's very much looking around thinking like i am having an okay time um if i can't be the most famous powerful person in the capital and i have to be a peacekeeper like this is like okay I'm okay with this and so um shortly after that he is uh you know she's playing some there's a lot of this is okay this is a very interesting thing that I thought um ran across both prequels which is that like the district 12 of battle of songbirds and snakes has a very lax rules like there's there's hoedowns there's music there's clubs people are getting up to stuff like everyone's poor but they're having a bit of crack i think and then in sunrise on the reaping there's like district 12 is poor but it's a kind of a rugged hardy poor like there are rich kids in district 12 in haymitch's time like the donners have jewelry and their parents own a like a candy shop and there's like a a nice little story about how a peacekeeper left his bicycle behind and they all rode a bicycle all day and it's like it's quite like enid blightney or something hamish's district 12 but by the time you get to katniss's district 12 it is like so unbelievably impoverished to the point where like even peter who's considered one of the richest kids in town has to eat like stale bread um right that's been unsold or whatever and so it's and then meanwhile you get like in in ballad you get the capital which is kind of impoverished as well then in sunrise they're doing a bit better and then by the time we get to the original trilogy the rich have gotten so much richer and the poor have gotten so much poorer and i found that really fascinating yeah no i agree that's like a perfect spot i have nothing to add you nailed it sorry i feel like i'm talking at you a lot no no i love it i just like there's so many things that I feel like Suzanne Collins is doing in these books that like the thing, some of the things that you picked up on, I hadn't actually like picked up on in the same way, even though I had sensed it or like felt it, but I would not have been able to articulate that, but you're so totally right.

1:10:52I do think part of it is that like with the rise of the games, yeah, there is, there has to be like, and with the rise of snow as the president, there has to be more of a dehumanization of the districts, which means like a more strict ruling class. Like the hob in the first books is like, everyone's at the hob, even the peacekeepers. Like we're all sort of the same. We're all out here. Like we're technically in charge, but if you don't make us be in charge, like we can all be friends. And I feel like that's like before Snow becomes in charge. And by the time Snow becomes in charge, like he does start to crack down.

1:11:34Because the only way the games remain viable is if the hatred for the districts remains viable. And as you move further and further away from the actual war and less and less people remember it, then you have to make them enemies rhetorically or like through propaganda, through these other things, which means you have to crack down on the enforcement by the peacekeepers. They can't be your friend anymore because they have to you have to teach them to hate these people. right like so i feel like that's also part of like the tightening of the snow like purse strings if

1:12:11Traci Thomas: you will yeah i mean he like he's a terrible dictator but a very efficient one you know yeah something he said that was my biggest thing i hated i disliked about this book is i thought we were going to get more of his rise to power so i'm hopeful that we get a sequel to ballad that stays with Coriolanus and it fills in that gap between him going back to the Capitol and him becoming the president and like how he gets there and what his first games are like, what changes he implements. Like I just wanted, I was thinking that was what this book would do. Yeah. It's, it's really interesting that exact thing because like, I would love that as well.

1:13:00Traci Thomas: I would love to get Corio in his 20s in his 30s even even in his 40s like I want to see like the rise and rise the poisoning and the killing of all his different rivals and stuff and like all that stuff but like the and I think Suzanne could definitely do it but because these books technically fall under YA you can't have a main character who is in their 40s do you mean like you can't even if there's like some kids in the hunger games that are still like i wonder i wonder i remember like having this conversation with an editor of mine where like for one of the books i was like oh i'm gonna do a point of view character who's in their 20s and they were just like you know you can't like it's kind of it's sort of an unspoken rule suzanne collins can oh yeah i can't do it but she can do it she can do what she wants yeah and i think we want her to want to do it you know i don't want to tell her what to do but if she was listening suzanne a big fan of your work would love a coriolanus yeah rise to power mid cool yeah i just i i need it i need to know how it happened and maybe you do it as part of that universe but you focus like maybe you do the first quarter quell or whatever and we get to see that from another district 12 person who ends up dying She's never done one from the point of view where the person dies and the book just ends.

1:14:27Traci Thomas: She never, I know. And it's so crazy how she's never done that. And she probably never will. And like very few books end with people just dying or whatever. But like the fact that, you know, all of these various games have you on the edge of your seat, even though you know the narrator won't just stop. Do you know what I mean? Die. Like, you know, there are at least 100 pages left. And it's like, oh, how's he going to get out of this one? sorry to come to the end on the ballad of song birds and snakes it ends when um choreo and lucy gray baird are accessories to a murder of a um some local people who i don't really care about billy tope is in there i don't i just can't be bothered for that um and they choreo freaks out he's like oh no you know it's only a matter of days before people realize i killed this person that means i have to flee with lucy gray baird and so they decide they're going to live in the wilderness together and literally it is hour one day one and Corio is like I hate this I hate nature it's starting to rain I can't build a fire I'm cold this sucks and then Lucy Gray kind of figures out that he has murdered several people before there is sort of a sense of distance that goes between them on this first day as escapees he starts getting in his head about how Lucy Gray is going to turn on him or whatever.

1:15:49Traci Thomas: And he sort of decides in the closing pages of Ballad that he's going to murder Lucy Gray. And he's like literally out in the wilderness with a shotgun being like, Lucy Gray, like a fucking serial killer. Come out wherever you are. It's very that, it's very that. Like he's like turned on her in the course of an hour and she has kind of disappeared essentially. it's very it's purposefully written quite vaguely where a snake bites him we know that snakes are her creature he kind of has a bit of a hallucination he sort of thinks he's shot her, he sort of thinks she's disappeared there's a whole thing with a poem about her footsteps being invisible but essentially Lucy Gray disappears shortly afterwards he is invited back to the capital by Dr.

1:16:42Traci Thomas: Gaul, he is like re-enlisted into university and then he begins his climb to the top okay so i obviously think that he murdered her because it's left kind of like does she run away does something happen to her we don't know but my question is like do you think lucy gray caught on to choreo or do and like she left on her own or do you think that choreo became paranoid which caused her to run away and like that's what all the hysteria is about like do you think she left or do you think he had a psychotic break oh that's very interesting the way i read it was is that she noticed the turn because she asked him a few questions with which he sort of like he sort of i don't know he kind of admits that he killed some people and it gets sort of tense between them and i think she's been going off him for some time and then she sort of makes the decision to just fuck off um but she like goes out and she's like getting sweet potatoes or something do you think that she purposefully like ran away then or do you think she just was taking longer and then he was like she's left me like i gotta find her and kill her oh no i do think that she ran away i do think she fully bailed oh well you know i i famously love oh like like a murder like a premeditated murder situation and so i think this was like she just took a second too long and he like freaked out like i think that he is a monster at this point and like it wasn't even that she had figured it out yet she was maybe starting to put the pieces together but he didn't even give her a chance like he decided this is what I have to do because I want to go back I got into officer school like fuck this lady this is not my life she's a liar and like he spirals out wildly and just kills her and that the snake bite is not her I think he like everything becomes part of his own justification for what he is going to do interesting yeah okay so we've sort of I have sort of skipped over that but only because I'm conscious of timing and the fact that we've for some reason agreed to do two books in a one-hour slot how did we do three books last time i'm so confused i'm like how did we do this it's really hard um but yeah the whole thing with like he there's the officer school thing which you know he's gonna progress up the ranks of peacekeepers so that's attractive but there's also the whole thing his real psychopath turn has been in selling out Sejanus like he is Sejanus is the main casualty of Coriolanus which is that like Sejanus is sort of like joining the Billy Tope who's some rando hillbilly who used to go out with Lucy Gray um he's got a revolution thing going Sejanus wants to join it because he hates the capital Corio is like everyone knows Sejanus is my best friend even though I literally hate him if Sejanus like joins the revolution I will be implicit in it so I'm trying to control Sejanus and then Sejanus goes beyond his control he's like I'm gonna have to just get rid of Sejanus and then he essentially like grasses him in yeah he records him using a Jabberjay and then sends a ductical and then Sejanus is hung to death yeah well I don't think you can hang someone to hurt you gotta go all in or all out That's it.

1:20:19Traci Thomas: You just haven't done it really. Oh God. To me, that was one of the kind of most haunting scenes of the whole book. Cause this is kind of motif of like mocking J's hanging around hangings and the idea, and there's like this whole thing with like Sejanus and his mom and he's like calling for his mother. It's like, it's very babe. It's very. I mean, not to make this too serious, but it also, so, I mean, again, this came out sort of before, but it's very Black Lives Matter. Eric Garner called out for his mom famously, as did George Floyd, though this George Floyd's death, I think happened right after the book came out.

1:20:59But it has those, like the calling out for the mom from the unjust state killings is definitely like a thing.

1:21:07Traci Thomas: Jesus, you're completely right as well. And it's like the imagery is very kind of borrowed from kind of classic American lynchings, you know, it's... Right. I was like that's another thing the hanging yeah the hanging piece of it is also obviously evokes black American terrorist the treatment of black Americans like by the terrorist state of the government right like yeah these extra judicial or judicial hangings um but yeah I mean the the birds I mean I think that's why the song the hanging tree in the early books is so powerful Yes, totally. Do you think that like, because we know these, I mean, we spoke in our last episode about like how characters are explicitly black and explicitly Southern and that kind of, and they're kind of drawing from sort of classic American traditions because this is still America, just several hundred years in the future, I guess.

1:22:03Traci Thomas: um but do you think the fact that like characters are identified not really racially but by their district may like do you like the fact that kind of the the lack of ethnic importance in the book what how does that how does that sit with you i think i think that that is a choice by suzanne collins so that she doesn't have to be mired in the way that anything that has to do with race becomes only about race like I think that's a tactic that she's using because at least I don't know how it is where you are but here in the states like as soon as you explicitly say something is about a black person and it's like oh you're playing the race card or whatever so I think by do like by giving cues without actually saying it you know like darker skin could mean a very tan person or it could be a black person like there we use the language of race in a very weird way here yeah um so if you say like they had a tan you could be talking about teresa judici from housewives of new jersey or you could be talking about me or you could be you know like it's like there's such a range so i think it's like a tactic to not have to do race talk in this book and in the series yeah when the movies came out people were so mad that certain characters were black because they had envisioned them as white.

1:23:32But it's like the girl works in, like it was with, what's? Rue's character. Rue, it was Rue. It was like, oh, why is Rue black? It's like, babe, she works in the South as an agricultural worker, like on a plantation. What did you think she was? You thought it was gonna be Scarlett O 'Hara out here? Like what?

1:23:53Traci Thomas: They were expecting like Mara Wilson or something. Yeah, I'm just like, this is so bizarre. But I think that's why she did it so that she didn't have to do full American racial politics. And it's smart because it's like any it means that like any anybody reading the books identifies with District 12, regardless of where they're from kind of thing, whether they're even American or not. You know, it's like everyone who reads The Hunger Games is from District 12 because that is the district we know intimately. And yeah. and they're definitely described as like having dark hair and like darker kind of tan skin and it's Appalachia and it's like yeah well there are black people there like there were black people in Appalachia so it's she's I have heard arguments that Katniss and Gail and all of them are black and then obviously like they're portrayed by white people but I think there are arguments being made that some of the people in Appalachia are not white yeah I mean what's interesting is that like i mean this come we're about to let's let's like move on to sunrise in the reaping although we may not have much time left um but like this comes up again and again the thing of like oh you know we have in district 12 we have the seam who typically have darker coloring and we have the kind of um the sort of town kids who are typically merchants and are fair-haired or whatever and it's very hard to buy that they were like literally haymitch says you know he's talking about astrid who's katniss's mother and his friend burdock who's um katniss's father um like oh you know a seam kid never marries a town kid unless something's gone badly wrong and like it's just not the dialogue that you really get about people who are blonde and brunette like there is like definitely there is a racial difference between these two groups of people that seems fairly explicit yeah there's something going on there uh which again i think backs up the idea that Katniss is not white um which you know the movies obviously were not going to do that especially in 2012 or whatever but I think there's an argument to be made that Katniss is not a white person um okay this is the one thing about book about book four that I have to ask you okay the thing that I hated the thing that just stuck with me as an irritant was that in the end Dr.

1:26:15Gall's like we erased all the tapes no one will ever know about lucy because nobody in the district watches the games and it's gone and i have the one tape but it's basically over and nobody knows about her and i hated that because you're expecting me to believe that a group of people the covey people and the district 12 people who passed down these folklores and all of these stories none of them remember these people and remember lucy graybeard winning and if that's the case like i just i found the whole thing to be like you have not justified this choice of there actually having been another victor from this place like somebody remembers and people do remember a little bit in the purple book but like by the time we get to katniss it's like no one's ever won this has never happened but it would make sense that katniss would know about this folklore at least of like oh there was rumor that someone once won but she like but then she never came home like i don't know it just it is not rooted in the text no i know what you mean and

1:27:17Traci Thomas: like i mean i would say that the easy explanation for that was that suzanne collins wrote those books 20 years ago and she came up with this idea five years ago do you know what i mean like totally i know but she did something yeah to like usually though i feel like she makes the things work like she made the story that she wrote about haymitch's games in book two she she made those work and yes five she was like okay we got to make this what i said here work and for me it's not even just the people in the districts wouldn't remember if everyone is so crazy for the hunger games in the capital and this is the hunger games that put your president on the map there are people in the capital capital historians capital of the games who remember like you're just telling me games 10 nobody remembers who won like or did you just erase that games completely and we're really on games like 11 is really game 10 again like i just what about the people who are alive then we would remember i know exactly and like okay yeah okay so fair enough that like in the original trilogy lucy gray baird is not a thing and there's never been a district 12 winner but like in sunrise and the reaping we should definitely have more lucy gray baird memories right there are like he literally loves the cover girl and the brothers or whatever uh cain and abel what are their names Clark Kenton whoever they're still there they know her they're that's her friends yeah Amber Tam and Cam McClane Clark Clammer whatever Amber Tam and Clark Clam yeah Clam's a color it's fine like but those people remember Lucy Greybeard and you expect me to believe that Lenore Dove doesn't know who Lucy Greybeard is like that she doesn't bring up because she is ostensibly her niece right My sense was that her mom was the little girl.

1:29:08Traci Thomas: Was Maud Ivory. Yeah. Now that was the sense I got as well. Yeah. I don't fucking know. I mean, I did read this book about over a month ago. So I do think there was a couple of references. Okay. So there was a few references to her, but it's like, oh yeah, there was, they say there was a girl who won, but they never talked about her again. It's been 50 years. People would remember. like a lot of the people like people are still alive who knew her so i did take from that that the people who would remember her ig clark clam and the whatever yeah that um okay so this was actually my argument against the idea that she died so i think she is still alive and they're protecting her identity by not discussing her.

1:29:58Ignoring her. Yeah. Was my. I need a murder. It's gotta be a murder. He has to kill her. Yeah, he has to kill her. He's the villain now. He's the ultimate villain. He can't just, he can't, he couldn't have missed.

1:30:08Traci Thomas: Yeah, no, but I like the idea as well in my kind of head canon that like part of the thing that has driven him insane is that Lucy Gray has been this kind of figure on the wind. He's never been able to pin down. And he is like. That's good. He's sort of persecuted the covey and gotten rid of all these songs and deleted everything to do with her Hunger Games because it's the thing that's driven him insane. It's the things we love most, Miss Everdeen. Right.

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