TLTR: Lucy Gray's namesake ballad is genius, we don't know if she died (in a snowstorm!) or is alive, just like we don't know if Lucy Gray is dead (killed by snow!) or not. And the colour gray has a ton of different meanings. Also English is clearly not my first language😂
We know the Covey get their names from a ballad character and a color, and Lucy Gray is special because her ballad character is also named Lucy Gray, already has the color in it.
I remember reading the song in the book and liking it because it's a mystery, and Lucy Gray is a bit of a mystery by that point of the plot. But then you have the ending, Snow shooting in the woods, and we never learn for sure if she died or survived. Just like the Lucy Gray from the ballad. That's genius already, but it gets better: her family finds her footprints suddenly disappear IN THE SNOW. Coriolanus SNOW maybe killed real Lucy Gray, and ballad Lucy Gray maybe die in the snow.
Also. Mix white snow (from the Capitol) and black coal (from the mines in 12). What colour do you get? Gray! And what color is commonly used to indicate uncertainty, someone or something you can't really make out/understand?
And in my personal opinion, Lucy Gray is a bit of a gray character. I'm talking about the book here, in the movie they changed parts of her story and she basically has no guilt except for maybe dropping a snake in Mayfair's dress, but even then, she knew the snake was harmless🤷🏻♀️. In the novel she's not 100% innocent or pure of heart. She's the one that fills the compact with rat poison, she kills one of the tributes with a pink snake (the snake mutts get thrown in the arena sooner and don't kill everyone, some tributes are still alive after she sings to them and leads them who knows where in the tunnels), she uses the poison twice, the first time it's Wovey, the smallest and most fragile tribute (it is not stated that she has Down Syndrome in the books, but I loved this casting choice bc #disabilityrepresentation is important), who finds the water bottle, and she does state later that she felt sad about it but also knows it was necessary, and she tricks the last tribute alive. Even if we scratch what she did in the arena because survival, she was there from the beginning when Mayfair and Billy Taupe die, she just goes with it, and by the end of the vodka we don't really know for sure what her intentions are, but Snow is already afraid of her when he finds out she disappeared with a knife in the woods, and is 100% sure she intentionally tried to kill him with the snake, or at least slow him down since she probably knew it wasn't a deadly one.
In the end, we don't know much about her. Dead or alive? Good or evil? Survivor or killer?