What happened to Lucy Gray Baird?

Whether you watched or read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the big question on everyone’s mind is what happened to Lucy Gray after she left Snow in the woods. Some say she died, others say she went back to District 12. Today, I want to share my own personal theory. 

(Snapshot from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes)

Coriolanus Snow first meets Lucy Gray Baird when she steps out of a cattle cart in the train station; she knows these might be her last few days to live. Snow introduces himself as her mentor. Right away, a power-imbalanced relationship is established, Lucy Gray is trapped in a situation she doesn’t want to be in, and Snow is the one who is supposed to help her survive. Lucy Gray is smart; she sees how much of an advantage it could be to have Snow as a mentor. I mean, he was the only mentor to reach out to his tribute by probably breaking a few rules. He’s desperate to win the Plinth Prize, and Lucy Gray sees that and uses it to her advantage. I think, in a way, she manipulates him with her sweet words. She tells him that he's all she's going to think about during the game. Which doesn’t really make sense, during a life and death game, wouldn’t she think about the covey, her family? Whatever her true intention was, it worked. Snow did everything in his power to help her, even if it broke some rules. He gives her food, promotes her, and even gives her rat poison to help her during the games, and gets the snakes used in the finale of the game used to her scent, leading to her winning the games. She lives and can go back to her family.

When Snow gets sent to District 12 as a peacekeeper, he and Lucy Gray get reunited. I believe that she tries to give him a chance, since if it wasn’t for him, she probably would be dead. Things seem to be going great between them, of course, apart from his obsessive and narcissistic thoughts. The part where things start to shift is when Lucy Gray and Snow witness a murder and plan to run away so they don’t get executed. As they’re running away from 12, Lucy Gray tells him that trust is more important to her than love, and when she catches Snow in a lie about how many people he has killed, she starts to question whether or not she wants to be with him. When they reach the cabin house, Snow finds the guns used in the murder hidden in the house; the gun and Lucy Gray are the only things tying him to the murder. Snow realizes that if he gets rid of the guns and Lucy Gray, he can go back as a peacekeeper and work his way back up to the capital. I think Lucy Gray also realizes this.

Here’s where my theory comes in: I think Lucy Gray made up the lie of going to pick some katniss to give her and Snow a chance to think about their options. In a way, her trust in Snow is broken because of the lie he told. Why would she continue her journey with someone she didn’t trust? Snow goes to the lake to get rid of the guns when he notices that Lucy Gray is not by the lake picking katniss, and he goes out to look for her…with a gun in his hands. I think Lucy Gray was probably walking around the lake or maybe the woods, thinking things over, when she saw Snow calling out to her, gun in hand, asking to talk. What else is she supposed to think other than, “Oh my god, he’s going to kill me”, so she starts running away and accidentally drops her scarf. Snow finds the scarf, and when he goes to pick it up, a snake jumps out and bites him. Right away, he assumes that Lucy Gray left it there to kill him. We later learn that the snake wasn’t even poisonous. He sees her running in between the trees and, with zero hesitation, shoots her. I think that the bullet just grazed her and didn’t do much damage because she was able to get away before Snow got to her. I believe that to buy her more time to get away, she starts singing to get the mockingjays to pick up her song to confuse Snow. Well, it doesn’t just confuse him but also makes him go crazy, and he starts shooting at the birds, and she gets away.

(Snapshot from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes)

I don’t think Lucy Gray went back to 12; if she did, they would have just pinned the murder on her, and she would have ended up dead anyway. I believe she continued heading north in the woods, trying her best to survive on her own. Maybe she found a nice place to settle and was surviving, but eventually illness, or hunger, or the cold killed her. What makes Lucy Gray’s story so interesting is the fact that we don’t get her perspective at all; everything is told through the eyes of Snow, who is an extremely unreliable narrator. We will never know what she was thinking or feeling, and her ending is completely left to interpretation. The fact is that Lucy Gray was a songbird, never meant to be trapped in the games, District 12, or by Snow. In the end, she was truly free, even if it meant she was dead.