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Peacekeeper
The reaping is the ceremony where the 12 districts draw names to choose their two tributes for the Hunger Games. Televised nationally, it takes place in public in each district, and all residents of a district are required to attend.
Reaping Quotes in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
The The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes quotes below are all either spoken by Reaping or refer to Reaping. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
By now the smell of the car, musty and heavy with manure, had reached Coriolanus. They were transporting the tributes in livestock cars, and not very clean ones at that. He wondered if they had been fed and let out for fresh air, or just locked in after their reapings. Accustomed as he was to viewing the tributes on-screen, he had not prepared himself properly for this encounter in the flesh, and a wave of pity and revulsion swept through him. They really were creatures out of another world. A hopeless, brutish world.
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Chapter 12
Quotes
His girl. His. Here in the Capitol, it was a given that Lucy Gray belonged to him, as if she’d had no life before her name was called out at the reaping. Even that sanctimonious Sejanus believed she was something he could trade for. If that wasn’t ownership, what was? With her song, Lucy Gray had repudiated all of that by featuring a life that had nothing to do with him, and a great deal to do with someone else. Someone she referred to as “lover,” no less.
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Reaping Term Timeline in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
The timeline below shows where the term Reaping appears in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...him, he knows he must eat it—it won’t do if his stomach rumbles during the reaping. Nobody can know that his family, once one of the most powerful in the Capitol,...
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...it for years now. Coriolanus pokes at his soup and realizes he can’t skip the reaping. His communications professor, Satyria Click, has arranged for him to get one of the 24...
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...to afford the apartment on Tigris’s meager salary. But a bell rings, signaling that the reaping is about to begin.
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Chapter 2
...barely available these days—and looks ready to cry. Sejanus mutters that someone probably rigged the reaping, and Lucy Gray’s name probably wasn’t on the slip.
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...Then, Mayor Lipp draws the District 12 boy, Jessup Diggs. The camera cuts to the reapings in the next districts, but Coriolanus only pretends to pay attention. He knows Lucy Gray...
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Finally, the reaping is over and it’s lunchtime. Coriolanus forces himself not to rush for the buffet; he’s...
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Chapter 5
...doesn’t the Capitol feed the tributes? Lucy Gray says she hasn’t eaten since before the reaping, and then she asks viewers to bring any food to share to the tributes. Lepidus...
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...monkey house. Sejanus says if he was in District Two still, he’d be in the reaping. Then, he says his tribute, Marcus, was a classmate and hates him. Sejanus laments that...
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Chapter 11
...now she’s going to die. She says she’s “the bet that [he] lost in the reaping” and asks what he’s going to do when she’s dead. When she finishes, the audience...
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Chapter 12
Since the reaping, Lucy Gray has been Coriolanus’s property. But her song contradicts this by showing she had...
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Chapter 23
...complicated harmonies, unsettle Coriolanus. Lucy Gray ends by singing the song she sang at the reaping.
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Chapter 25
...giving Mayfair piano lessons, and not long after, the mayor called her name in the reaping.
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Chapter 27
...Coriolanus she doesn’t miss him and explains that somehow, her name was called in the reaping after she and Mayfair found out that Billy Taupe was trying to see them both....
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