Volumnia Gaul

The sadistic Head Gamemaker of the 10th Hunger Games and the woman who shaped Coriolanus Snow.

Volumnia Gaul, a sadistic and misanthropic mad scientist, is the indirect creator of the Hunger Games and served as the first Head Gamemaker of the 10th Games. The Games grew out of a pre-war assignment by two of her university students, Crassus Snow and Casca Highbottom.

Quick Facts

Role: Head Gamemaker, 10th Hunger Games
Division: Experimental Weapons Division
Students: Crassus Snow, Casca Highbottom
Co-host: Lucky Flickerman

Facts from the source article.

Background

To Gaul the Games demonstrate, in a Hobbesian fashion, how little control and order there would be without the Capitol. Besides heading the Capitol's Experimental Weapons Division, where she creates many of its muttations, she teaches military theory at the university. Her behaviour in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is eccentric, and she sadistically puts mentors in harm's way. Coriolanus Snow's ideas about the Games and about control and order earn him her particular favour; in the end she arranges his honorable discharge from the Peacekeepers, gets him into the university and makes him a Gamemaker intern.

Forty years on, in Sunrise on the Reaping, Haymitch remembers her as a relic of a woman who co-hosted the 25th Hunger Games, the First Quarter Quell, alongside Lucky Flickerman. She is credited with coining "may the odds be EVER in your favor", which caught on as a way of wishing luck; to Haymitch it is a sadistic thing to tell a tribute when twenty-three of twenty-four cannot survive.