Others on the thread agree that perhaps Lucy Gray Baird does have legitimate feelings for Coriolanus Snow one way or another … but that she’s smart enough to essentially manipulate the situation at hand. After all, Coriolanus is her mentor in the Hunger Games, and he’s still (ostensibly) a rich and powerful citizen of the Capitol, so he’s somewhat useful. As u/Twodotsknowhy put it, “I think she did, but I think a better question would be if she would have loved him if she had not had to rely on him completely for her survival. I don’t think she would have loved him if they had met under different circumstances.” u/User Independent_Ad_1358 agreed, writing, “I think it’s possible that she did genuinely like him but was also manipulating him at the same time.”
u/leoxyz summed the entire thing up perfectly, illustrating that the final answer isn’t actually necessary here. “Personally I love that there’s no final answer to this,” they wrote. “I think Snow despises Katniss because she reminds him of Lucy Gray, but mostly because he thinks she’s always pretending (with Peeta, for instance). I mean, if she isn’t, then maybe Lucy Gray wasn’t either. And she truly loved him. And they could’ve escaped together and he’d have had true love, at least for a while. But he could only see the worst of people in the end and chose the safe path to preserve himself. And got old with all that power. But he never got an answer as to what happened to her and what she really felt.”
