Coriolanus Snow: My Favorite Villian

By Sarah Bijoy 

If you’ve read the Hunger Games trilogy, you know Coriolanus Snow, the President of Panem, the evil dictator who oversaw the Hunger Games. But Snow wasn’t just a villain, he was a good villain, and his backstory in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes makes him a more interesting character.

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!)

In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Snow goes to District 12 to be a peacekeeper. While he’s in District 12, he meets the mockingbirds, which mimic voices exactly, and mockingjays, which can mimic tunes after hearing them almost perfectly. He ends up hating them, calling them an abomination. He petitions to kill them all, and his request is approved. At the end of book, mockingbirds carry the sound of his lover’s voice around him, causing him to absolutely detest them and their counterparts, mockingjays. In the Hunger Games, Katniss is known as the mockingjay, which is a nice element since Snow hates those birds. 

In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Snow’s father is depicted as stricter and evil in a sense while his mother is portrayed as good. Snow has a few possessions he keeps when he goes to District 12: his father’s compass, his mother’s rose scented powder, and a family photograph of him, his mother and his cousin Tigris. By the end of the book, when Snow goes out in the rain with Lucy Gray, his lover, his mother’s powder is destroyed as well as the family photographs, which he throws out leaving him with his father’s compass, and symbolizing how he’s changed through the book to be like his father.

In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Snow is assigned to be a mentor for the Hunger Games. He is assigned to the girl from District 12, Lucy Gray Baird. Lucy Gray ends up winning the Hunger Games thanks to Snow and her own tricks, like snakes in her pockets, and her powerful singing voice. At the end of the book, he goes insane and tries to kill her, believing that she betrayed him. After he returns from District 12, he and the gamemakers erase every trace of her and the 10th Hunger Games, erasing Lucy from history, who was one of his only weaknesses.

In the Hunger Games, Snow is known for smelling like blood and roses. The trademark scent of roses comes from the roses his Grandmother used to grow in their garden, which she would give to him on special occasions to pin to his jacket. The blood symbolically comes from his death count, from the three people he killed in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and from countless others he sent to their deaths in the Hunger Games.