Choose: Octavia Blake and the Importance of Agency
We all know this word, and we know how it applies to The 100 - it is something Octavia says over and over, but do you really understand the full context of it?
The most important thing to Octavia has always been agency - âthe capacity of an individual to act independently and to make their own free choices.â She spent the first 17 years of her life with no agency to speak of - first essentially locked up by her mother and brother, and then locked up by the Ark Council. Thatâs why, the moment she touched the ground and was free, that it was something that she seized upon.
You see it in one of her first conversations with Bellamy after they land - she says âIâve been locked up, one way or another, all my life. I am done following orders.â To most, she might just look like your average rebellious teenager, but given that sheâs never had the opportunity to exercise her own free will - this isnât rebellion, this is freedom, for the first time in her life.
For the first three seasons, we see her exercising her free will and her newfound agency to do so many things - fall in love with Lincoln, become Indraâs second, as two examples.
After Lincolnâs death though, Bellamy was there again trying to stop her and take away her agency, this time though as a way of trying to assuage his own guilt. But by trying to âsaveâ her, he was doing the exact opposite - pushing her further away and into a dark spiral. Eventually, after she runs away from Arkadia, Bellamy and Kane finally realize the one truth about dealing with Octavia - you canât save someone who doesnât want to be saved.
Octavia, of course, is no damsel in distress. She doesnât need saving. And at the end of season 4, she saved herself - her time away with Ilian and then her subsequent victory in the Final Conclave gave her what she needed to centre herself again. And that was *her* choice. She was still in pain, but perhaps a bit less broken.
Of course, this is The 100, and all good things come to an end. In the bunker, she was right back to where she was prior to season 1 - except this time the tables were turned. She was the one in charge, but still with the same lack of agency as when she was the girl under the floor. Indra, Gaia, Jaha, Abby - they all wielded her as their weapon and for their own purposes.
Octavia hates having her agency taken away, and likewise she hates taking it away from people - thereâs a reason why she formulates every order as a choice, even when it is really an impossible choice (that is, there is no âfreeâ choice between similar or comparable options), because thatâs the only way she can even tolerate making such demands of people. âYou are Wonkru or you are an enemy of Wonkruâ. âEat or die.â âStay here and die, or march with me and live.â
But she knows as well as they do that it is an impossible choice. And thatâs why the guilt and pain of those six years weighs on her. Someone who didnât value agency as much as she did would have shot those people in the cafeteria without a second thought. But she cried and broke again, because she hated the necessity of it.
Which then brings us into the present of season 5 - for all that a lot of viewers say âOctavia punishes disagreementâ, it isnât true. She is constantly asking for options, only to get none in return most of the time. The only one who ever gives her any is Brell, and I have more to say on her in a different post, but back to the purpose of this one - agency.
It seems that Bellamy didnât learn anything from seasons three and four. There was nothing he could do to âsaveâ Octavia. All he needed to do is *be there* for her while she saved herself, which he utterly failed at, and recruited more people, like Indra, into his circle of miscreants to take away Octaviaâs agency again and again and again, through ultimatums and murder and poisoning. Naturally, she strikes back, as anyone would, but as she especially does when her ability to make her own choices is threatened. It is ironic that Bellamy and Indra were trying to âmake peaceâ, when everything they did ensured that the exact opposite would happen.
It means more than it does on the surface.
(If youâre in FB groups about The 100, you may have seen this post already.)
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