Lucy Gray Baird: Victim or manipulator?

Lucy gr beard the icon the legend herself is arguably one of the most ominous characters in the world of Suzanne Collins she is charming and mysterious everyone's constantly theorizing whether she's alive or dead I don't think that was the point of Lucy gray and I think Suzanne has had another sort of meaning for Lucy gray since the beginning of her introduction but let me not get ahead of myself let's start from the beginning to understand Lucy gr as a full character let's start from what we do know about her her that is fact her full name is Lucy greay Barett her cousins are ma Ivory and Barb Azure Barett the three of them are amongst members of the cvy singing group The cvy is a nomadic group and the cvy consisted of ma Ivory Lucy greay beard lcy Gray's mother father oldest sibling and middle sibling so she had two older siblings beforehand and they used to travel throughout the country of panm am missst the first Rebellion but it's unknown where they originated from we also do know that a few years before the book of the ballot of s birds and snakes Lucy gray and her family and other members of the Cy were rounded up by peacekeepers her father was shot for trying to speak out and trying to fight for being rounded up according to Lucy gray herself her mother got her head broken by peacekeepers for trying to keep her family together her oldest two siblings died as well leaving Lucy gray as the only surviving member of her own immediate family and leaving her and her cousins to remain in the cvy Lucy gray also says that since they were the only survivors they were trapped in district 12 where they were raised by an unnamed man who didn't really care for them but he didn't really mess with them either after the man died of a disease called The Black Lung the cvy made their living by doing musical performances at some point while she was performing she meets Billy top and while we'll get into that a little bit later I wanted to establish the groundwork for what I'm about to say so all those things I mentioned previously we know as facts but the thing is about Lucy gray is that because she is somewhat ominous as a character she herself is a mystery a lot of the times while I was reading the book I always had the feeling never to trust 100% of everything that she says but the one thing I do notice about her character is why you may not be able to fully trust everything that she says you can trust her lyrics you see a lot of the truth of Lucy gray lies within her music by using her music she expresses herself and expresses her true desires but also doesn't make it perfect personal to any one specific person therefore not leaving her as vulnerable at least until she interacts with Billy top and snow Lucy gray also comes across as a very confident young lady but it is in her songs you notice how she truly feels now I could be biased here but as someone who writes lyrics it's very hard for you to hide yourself when you are creating music a lot of the times the lyrics speak to very personal events how one is feeling or how one wants to be represented so I wanted wanted to use this opportunity to break things down and to delve into Lucy gray herself Lucy gray has a lot of different songs for a lot of different occasions the two most interesting songs that I wanted to use this opportunity to dissect are The Ballad of Lucy gray bar and Lucy gray while I was researching this I was trying to see the origins of the song Lucy gray only to my surprise the song is actually not just a song within the ballot of s birds and snakes but was originally a poem that was written WR by William wardsworth in 1799 in the original poem Lucy gray was a young little girl she lived in the wild Moore with her parents she had no friends and her father told her to go to the town to go find her mother unbeknownst to her a snowstorm arises as she's on the way to the town and as a result she dies well at least we think she dies her body is never found and her footsteps stop at a certain point and I quote the father says tonight will be a stormy night you to the town must go and take a lantern child to light your mother through the snow Lucy gray replies and says that father I will gladly do to scarcely afternoon the minister clock has just struck two and Yonder is the moon these verses tell us the story from a more active point of view and letting us know the interaction between Lucy gray and her father how he tells her to go find their mother and she gladly agrees as the young child she is after this Lucy Gray takes the lantern in her hand and goes on to try and find her mother and so it continues not bther is the mountain row with many a wanton stroke her feet disperse the powdery snow that rises up like smoke the storm came on before its time and wandered up and down and many a hill did Lucy climb but never reached the town The Wretched parents all that night went shouting far and wide but there is neither a sound nor sight to serve them for a guide it is Within These lines that I noticed something and I might be going a little too far and this might be me officially being unhinged but bear with me so within these lines it gives us a scenery of what preluded Lucy Grace's death how she's walking through a snowstorm and kicking her feet through the snow but unbeknownst to her there is a storm that is brewing specifically a snowstorm but she keeps on walking instead of turning back she climbs the hills desperate to go see her mother and it is in that snowstorm that she continues on in which she dies now this might be me going a little too far but I think it is very interesting that this innocent child not only dies within nature but also dies within the harshness of a snowstorm and the Lucy Great Bear that we know and even though she is presumably dead again we're not sure dies or presumably dies at the hands of a snow and with his ever famous saying of snow lands on top there might be some sort of correlation here these two versions of Lucy gray they both meet their ends at the hands of snow whether it's in a figurative sense or in a literal sense not only this but if Lucy gry died in a snowstorm you can also say that snow landed on top which is quite unfortunate in this context but the poem then continues end quote at Daybreak on a hill they stood that overlooked the more and then they saw the bridge of wood a furlong from their door they wept and turning Homeward cried in heaven we shall meet when in the snow the mother spied the print of Lucy's feet then downwards from the steep hills Edge they cracked the foot Mark small and through the broken Hawthorne Edge and by the long stone wall and then an open field they crossed the marks were still the same they tracked them on nor ever lost and to the bridge they came to end it all the poem continues and says yet some maintain that to this day day she is a living child that you may see Sweet Lucy gray upon The Lonesome wild oever rough and the smooth she trips along and never looks behind and sings A solitary song that whistles in the wind I think these last two verses are very important and they help tie in the point that I was making earlier that in this poem it says that you may see Sweet Lucy gray upon The Lonesome Wild As We Know That Lucy gray Beed herself has always lived within nature right she's very freespirit and I wouldn't go out to call her wild but she is definitely her own free spirit and her own person I mean this is one of the reasons that her and snow had an argument uh later in the chapters in the books because she was very much a person who adored the idea of freedom and being free from the idea of the capital and the districts versus Snow who was the complete opposite and relished in control to mention singing a solitary song that whistles in the wind we know that Lucy Gray's sort of gift is through song it is through music she creates the Hanging Tree song passed down amongst Generations within District 12 for Lucy gray and for Lucy gry be their Spirits live within the Winds of their dwellings and their surroundings I'm not the best poem analyst but I thought that theme definitely existed and that's the best way I could sort of describe it in fact in one of the lines her Footprints are not seen any longer up to a certain point similar to how Lucy Gray's body is never found within the end of the ballot of s birds and snakes it might be a little bit of a reach but I think it is such an interesting choice that Suzanne Collins has made and it tells me that if she truly took inspiration from this poem then that meant she intended for Lucy great to be an ominous figure from the beginning at least I personally speculate so if you look at it from a deeper context this poem is also about child loss and I also wanted to note that I noticed this theme in Suzanne's work where she uses a lot of other plays and literary works as a basis for her characters just like Cory elanus and sanus that is what I think sets out the Hunger Games from other ya novels or books is the sheer depth of its own characters and it's parallels to our normal everyday Society I mean she does this with corilanus now I don't want to go too much into coralus cuz this is a Lucy gay video moving on from this poem is another actual song called The Ballad of Lucy gy bar that in itself is not poetry but is a song written by Lucy gray which ALS tells us so much about her personality and her truth but there's first something else I want to tackle to be able to land my point one of the reasons I said earlier that I do not fully trust Lucy gray is that sometimes the things she says do not really make sense to me for example earlier in the books when Cory elanus meets Lucy gray for the first time he brings her a rose then she says that her mother used to bathe her in roses and milk and she eats the rose actually funny enough one of the people who watched one of my previous videos mentioned that roses are actually quite common in the districts I could not find this anywhere in the books to help me support this to make this point because my initial thought was how is it possible that in the country of PanAm where the districts are suffering that roses and milk would be an easy commodity for someone to take a bath with I want you to understand how much a bath of milk would possibly cost someone considering the fact that the COV were performers I'm guessing during the time of Pand that performers were not making that huge incredulous amount of money to be able to afford huge bottles of milk to be able to bathe in that just doesn't make any sense and when Lucy gray says that that is the first minute I start to distrust some of the things that she says I understand that the cvy does separate themselves and they call themselves a nomadic group however the truth is is that for as far as we've seen in the country of PanAm we haven't really seen that many sources of other lands outside of panm snow himself says that there's no such thing is this fact we're not necessarily sure but if that is true and PanAm is the only country in this dystopian world how is it possible that the cvy could come from such a far away place and land in panm to me personally I personally feel that the cvy were definitely born District I just it just I don't know what it is in my spirit but until I see full actual evidence of it I cannot believe that I personally think that the cvy wanted to separate themselves in some shape or form because it's just easier to that way they have a sort of Mystique and also being a performer you definitely have to decorate yourself a little bit with your own story so I wouldn't be surprised if the actual covery were born from different districts and somehow disbanded together it's a possibility now this will trickle down into how I personally see Lucy gray and her relationships with men now the thing is is that Billy taupe also has some alternative opinions about Lucy Gray of course since he is not necessarily the greatest person in this book in fact he's quite an who cheats on Lucy gray but one thing that he does say when Billy top has a confrontation with Lucy gray and the rest of the cuvy he tells snow that she's full of surprises a sort of warning to snow which I never really understood and I'm not necessarily Keen to take Billy Top's opinion simply because he found it so easy to be able to discard Lucy gray and is one of the reasons why she ended up in the reaping thanks to his two timing with fair but like I said previously I truly think Lucy grace truth lies within her music and that is why I wanted to analyze the ballad of Lucy gray because it is in these lyrics that you actually see how she truly feels about the situation in the first verse she says in quote when I was a babe I fell in the holler when I was a girl I fell into your arms we fell on hard times and we lost our bright color you went to the dogs and I lived by my charm I danced for my dinner spread kisses like honey you stole and you gambled and I said you should we sang for our suppers and we drank up our money then one day you left saying I was no good now the thing is here Lucy gr admits that she fell for Billy top as a young girl considering the fact that she's 16 at the time of the ballot of Sunbirds and snakes when she fell for Billy I'm guessing she was around 13 to 14 years old which again emphasizes she is a teenager a young teenager when she first got into a first relationship in the stanza she describes how they fall in hard times which one can presume were perhaps the dark days and how they had to do different things to survive in the next verse Lucy gray mentioned that she had to dance for her dinner and spread her kisses like honey now you could see this in two different ways the most Fair interpretation is that she this could have meant that she just had to constantly perform mostly with the cvy to be able to afford to eat but the darker interpretation of this is that she might have had to do multiple things more than performing she might have even had to sell her own self to be able to afford food this is also another theme and links her to Tigress who also had to sell her own body to be able to make sure her family could eat again Lucy gray mentions how she just couldn't let mod Ivory and the rest of the cvy starve this is also helped by the fact that in chapter 25 Lucy gry tells snow that what Billy top was implying was not true that she sometimes had to flirt with people as part of her job but she was loyal and she kind of goes into this tangent about it and you can see that this is actually somewhat traumatic for her even though she might have had to do alternate things to survive she still had loyalty to this man who had no loyalty to her to begin with but also the trauma of having to fend for yourself at such a young age in such horrible times and still have this person call you names and tell you that you're no good has to do a number on you for sure especially as a young girl and we continue to explore this in her song in the next verse she says well all right I'm bad but then you're no price either all right I'm bad but then that's nothing new you say you won't love me I won't love you either just let me remind who I am to you because I'm the one who looks out when you're leaping I'm the one who knows how you were Brave and I'm the one who heard what you said sleeping I'll take that and more when I go to my grave if you look at the lyrics of her song she also details a deeper feeling of betrayal from Billy tote see their Fallout was more than just of a boy who tried to shuffle two girls and it ended up going badly from these lines it seems that both her and Billy Tobe were together and they survived together and she found a k ship and a deep connection well at least what she thought was a deep connection with him and then he switches up on her and then starts telling her that she is in fact no good when they both had to do horrible things to be able to survive such a dark period it almost seems like that is not the first time she's heard such a thing that is not the first time that he has degraded her that is not the first time that he has said something horrible to her and she somewhat accepts it but at the same time she reminds him of who she is which I think as a young girl having to endure all of that and still having some sort of self-confidence and self-esteem and having to build that on your own is quite admirable now I don't think Lucy gray was a perfect character either I do think that with a lot of characteristics and everything that she's had to go through she's also got a little bit of a manipulative side to her as well and she has a deeper understanding of how to use manipulation to get her way or at least portray a certain image about herself I definitely do think that is a certain possibility she knows how to flirt and to charm her way to get what she needs and what she wants so I definitely do acknowledge that possibility I don't think that she just outright used and wanted to discard snow because some people really have some alternative takes like that in my personal opinion I think she needed to do what she had to do to be able to survive does she have feelings for snow well in the books snow when he sees Lucy gray is imately infatuated with her he's obsessed with understanding her because she's completely different from anything that he's ever seen before so I definitely think at the beginning Lucy gray definitely noticed this and used it to her Advantage but again I don't think this was such a prevalent thing where she was manipulating him I really think she just noticed okay this boy likes me let's see how far this can go because let's not forget Cory elanus even though he liked how she looked and he was infatuated by her he also saw her as a ticket to winning the games that's one of the reasons that he wanted to reach out to her he just wanted her to be able to trust him so that he could win it's not like he was this innocent boy who was manipulated by a girl no they both had their own Mutual understanding understanding that they needed each other to survive and that's why I called them in my previous video um when I was describing the actual events I called them the iconic performing Duo of padm because it's so interesting that when snow was thrown into the animal cages that he immediately goes into performance mode with Lucy gray and they both put on this amazing show for the capital even though they have not known each other for at least more than 10 to 15 minutes it also shows how Lucy gray has had to put on a a Persona to survive she's clearly scared and is anticipating death and yet in that moment she's strong enough to be able to smile for the camera and she's covered in filth but she still continues at the same time because of this Mutual understanding a lot of people do theorize that they have some sort of trauma bond with one another which is also similar to what she had with Billy taupe they both had to survive in traumatic circumstances and that brought them together but once those traumatic circumstances were over it separated them because their foundations were never built on true love in the first place they were built on needing to survive infatuation also a little bit of lust and other things that are not true love in fact a lot of the times she had nothing in common with snow but because of how the games were and because she was stuck in the capital and had no freedom of her own and she thought she was going to die all those emotions became heightened and so what they thought they had would become easily dissolved when she was out of the capital A lot of people do say that there is a sign that she never truly liked him and that was the fact that when snowa became a peacekeeper and he was in district 12 that he would end up constantly looking for Lucy gray but she never really asked about him I would counter argue that first of all we don't know or have enough evidence of that and secondly think of it like this you're a young 16-year-old girl with no family besides the people you know as the covy your parents are dead your siblings are dead and what you call home has just been disrupted you are you have just been thrown into Arena where you've had to actually kill someone to be able to survive and it was the most traumatic few days of your life the first thing you do when you leave such a situation is not to look for the possibility of this Rich Capital kid that he might like you enough to want to find you in the district no what you do is you go back to your family with your money and try and continue surviving so I'm not surprised that you would not go looking for snow when she has other priorities another theme that I wanted to talk about was the theme of sex work I don't know if I'm allowed to say this on YouTube so I hope I don't get demonetized but I noticed this theme again with tigress and Lucy gray and also a lot of young girls in panm and how they get sort of mistreated or dismissed because the and the minute that there's a hint that Lucy gray might have had to do horrible things to survive snow just kind of pushes it away and he does not ask her about it not that he should ask her or interrogate her about it but instead comfort her I mean he doesn't even do this with his own cousin Tigress who sacrificed herself literally so that they can be able to eat and survive instead with tigers he just has a weird disdain for it and then he thinks of it as a sort of stain on the snow family name and I also think that Tigress as a result perhaps saw herself in Lucy gray which is one of the reasons that she was so fair to her in the beginning but it's also really concerning the fact that snow can discard these two women and the sacrifices that they made and turn around in the same breath and also do this exact same thing to people like finck clearly continuing the cycle of abuse and the fact that Lucy gray has had relationships with these kinds of men the one calls her names expects her to be loyal and and still publicly disrespects her by dating someone else therefore bringing her to her death the other one completely dismisses it and doesn't even say anything and is more infatuated with the idea of controlling her I mean talk about horrible relationships so if anything I'm not sure if Lucy gr is a master manipulator I personally think that she was a child a 16-year-old girl who was thrust into the situation that she didn't ask for and had to do what she needed to do to survive when I listened to the book I definitely thought that Lucy gry was still alive for sure um it's just too easy of a death there was no body found there's too many elements that scream that she could have possibly survived at least for a little bit before she would eventually die but I don't know you guys can let me know your opinions down in the comments below but uh thank you guys so much for watching if you guys have more theories or any opinions about Lucy gray or if you just disagree with my opinions that's okay let me know down in the comments below and let's have a fun discussion I will say I'm super grateful for you guys watching this Hunger Game series it's really opened me up to Alternative opinions but also this little community that we have where we can just discuss these amazing books and characters and give our unhinged essays about them I absolutely adore that so if you guys would like to follow me on my other social media my links and everything are in the description down below and I listened to you guys on the last previous video for S Janus plinth Supernova walk will be coming soon so stay tuned for that this was super fun and I think I will just be taking a break from the whole Hunger Games thing cuz I I feel like I've done more than enough but if I have any more thoughts on The Hunger Games I will definitely be posting and letting you guys know in my community tab as well thank you all so much for your positive comments and your thoughts and ideas thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video okay bye [Music] that's how you going baby walk show who you are that's how you going baby walk show who you are super know what that's how you go for FY walk show who you

Channel: Deborah The Explorer

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Id: KTo49iEfAnc

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023