Do you think Octavia realizes how guilty Bell feels
No. I don’t think she realizes how guilty Bell feels.
I think Octavia, at least until the end of season 4 (I don’t know how she developed in the 6 years) showed a remarkable inability to recognize the realities of other people. She only recognized her own perspective in any story.
She only believed what she believed was right and anyone else’s experiences, struggles, or considerations were irrelevant and unimportant.
So this made it very easy for her be righteous and feel she was always on the good side and anyone who had a different perspective was wrong and bad and evil. And when she felt she was on the good side and her opponents were on the bad side, she felt entirely justified in destroying them to the best of her ability. Which is pretty destroyed. She uses the weapons she has on hand to take them down.
Oh heck. I swear to god I was just talking about Octavia. Does anyone else notice that my description of how Octavia behaves actually fits the 100 fandom?
All right. Back to Octavia. No, she doesn’t recognize Bellamy’s feelings of guilt because she has a remarkable sense of entitlement– borne out of being kept in a cage all her life. Bellamy was HERS. He was her brother, her protector, her pain in the ass, her defender, her substitute father, her teacher, her captor, her everything. He was her world. And as her world, he did not exist outside of her.
This sounds REMARKABLY awful, right? But it’s actually not, when you recognize that it’s an extreme version of a stage of growing up. It’s extreme because she was an illegitimate human living under the floor and only knew Bellamy and Aurora. But it’s normal when you think about a child growing up and learning to individuate from their parents, to BECOME their own person.
Kids almost never recognize their parents’ humanity– are mom and/or dad. They are supposed to put the needs of the child first and not have any needs, desires or motivation outside of the child. Or at least that’s what the child feels. And sometimes the child needs to break away from the parent, to rebel, to make them the bad guy, before they are able to become their own person, and then learn what it means to be an adult, to have to be responsible for their decisions, to understand motivation, multiple perspectives, the complexity of life and the feelings of others.
Some people never grow out of the self centered existence of a child. Now that Octavia has been faced with being responsible for 1200 lives, and facing the horrible and morally gray decisions of leading them, it remains to be seen if she will mature, or stay the black and white, judgmental and unsympathetic character she was last season.
I kind of feel that she will start to understand Bellamy and his decisions, the weight of his guilt and his strength. I wouldn’t be surprised if Octavia’s mantra in the bunker was “What Would Bellamy Do?” If that’s so, then it might help her be a better leader, but it won’t help her avoid mistakes, because Bellamy made a lot, and not all of his choices were good. And he made ruthless choices for the good of his people– thus learning that he needed to focus more on doing what was right instead of what was right for his people.
Was she paying enough attention to him to learn that lesson without making all Bellamy’s bad mistakes?
With what they’ve been hinting about s5 Octavia, I’m betting not.
