akernelofnonsense replied to your post “So, how was your Christmas?”
Amazing time spent with family. I got the new Bloomsbury Harry Potter box set in paperback. So beautiful. Hope you had a lovely Christmas!
I'm glad you had a great family time :) And that box set sounds amazing!
My Christmas didn't really feel like Christmas, but it's fine, at least I was with my family, so it might have been worse.
Have a great day/evening!
feliccitysmoak has told me to post this so please direct all arguments toward her thank you
So, on last night's episode of The 100, Grounder leader Lexa (<3) demanded Finn Collins' life in exchange for a truce between the Grounders and the Sky People (I just really like calling them the Sky People).
I did a lot of happy-spazzing, for a few different reasons that I will explain here. One, out of self-satisfaction, because I totally saw that coming. Two, because I am tired of Finn Collins and I want him gone, and this brings us one step closer to that. Three, because somebody has to make Finn pay for what he's done at least once in his life — at this point it seems like "consequences" will be an entirely new concept for him, and I'm glad that someone is finally willing to teach him how the world works for people who aren't privileged and/or blind to their own privilege.
The reason I saw Lexa's (<3) demand coming was that the writers do not pretend the Grounders have any reason to see Finn as a hero. Nor are they the kind of people who would let what he did slide, even if they were getting something (like the cure for Reaperness) out of it. This land is theirs, and they believe in retribution for anyone who comes into their home and kills their people. The Sky People might have been willing to overlook what Finn did, while the audience sat and shook their heads in disgust the entire time, but the Grounders never would.
So, they have promised us the thing most of us have wanted all along: to get rid of Finn Collins. Raise your hand if you're sick of Finn and want him gone! I'm raising my hand because he brings down the show. He hinders the action by not doing anything ever; he hinders the show's overall well-done characterizations by not having a specific personality or set of values; he hinders the romantic subplots by being the Boring Guy All The Girls Want for No Apparent Reason; and it's like his character is trying very hard to hinder Clarke and Raven, or the way the audience sees them, by somehow being forgiven by them over and over when he does not deserve it. For her entire life, Raven has needed Finn, and that's okay — but she doesn't anymore, and however good he might have been in the past does not give him license to do, to borrow the phrase, "whatever the hell he wants" without consequence. Raven didn't need him long before she realized she didn't, and I'm so glad she's finally told him to suck it up and deal because that's what she's been doing all along. Raven Reyes does nothing but suck it up and deal. Clarke has never needed Finn and will never need Finn — not as a confidante, because a) she has Bellamy and Abby for that, and b) he never says anything useful, usually either agreeing with her logic or disagreeing with her moral process (Clarke says "guns!" Finn says "Guns is bad!", or Bellamy, operating under WWCGD, says "Don't shoot!" and Finn says "EXECUTION!"). Clarke doesn't need yes-men or people who question her morals; she needs people who will provide different empirical perspectives. She doesn't need Finn as a romantic partner, because ain't nobody got time for that. What else would she need him for? What would anybody need Finn Collins for? They've all learned the woods pretty well, so don't even tell me they need his "tracking abilities."
Now, let's get to the biggest, most imposing reason why I happy-spazzed when Lexa (<3) demanded his life. Frankly, I am tired of being told that Finn Collins is the hero — and that's what's happening here, because how else do you explain the forgiveness he has received for everything else he's done? How else do you explain the writers' refusal to let our heroine let him go? What's even worse is that Finn believes he's the hero too, no matter how many dirty looks he gets from other people. He has to do something to redeem himself, but he's just sitting back and waiting for everyone to accept his reasons for massacring a village of innocents. Now, let's take a stroll through memory lane to figure out why he thinks this is a valid method of operation:
Right in the pilot, we see Finn not paying for a terrible thing that happened because of him. He never acknowledged the fact that two people died trying to imitate his genius and "spacewalk." Moving ahead, he never apologized to Raven or Clarke for what he did to them — and don't give me that "He never thought he'd see Raven again"; it hadn't even been ten days yet. Ten days, and he couldn't have enough loyalty or decency not to immediately worm his way into another girl's pants, when the girl he had taken care of for most of her life, who depended on his loyalty for survival, was still up in space. Or, more accurately, she was hurtling through space in a pod whose engine she rebuilt herself, just so that she would see him again. He never even thought about how much she did for him; his reaction to her arrival on Earth was "Oh, crap, two girlfriends..." and then: "Oh, hey! Two girlfriends!" He made Raven believe he was still loyal to her, while in the meantime he was still pursuing Clarke (who was not having any of it, bless her soul) while Raven was not around.
You see, Finn has a history of doing awful things and not having to pay for them or even acknowledge their awfulness. What a useless slimeball.
And then you've got what the writers call "broken Finn" (if you ask me, he was never really a whole person), who insists on leaving people to die and kills dozens of people and still expects to be treated like a hero. "You can't even look at me," he said to Clarke, as if he was disgusted with her for being disgusted with him. All along Clarke has been giving him signs that he is not the hero he thinks he is — telling him that he doesn't get both girls; telling him that he is too idealistic to be of any use in war; and now being unable to tell him anything because what he did was so far beyond her realm of acceptability that she can't even look at him. But he doesn't believe her. He insists on being the hero, despite all evidence to the contrary*.
*contrast this with Bellamy, who believes he's the villain, believes he is a bad guy, but holds on to everything Clarke tells him about who he really is. She reminds him that he's the guy who would do anything for his sister. The guy who does what he has to do to protect all of his people. She reminds him that they all need him. He hates himself, but he listens to Clarke when she tells him he doesn't deserve that hatred. He understands Clarke's value as a leader because he has experienced it firsthand; she's made him believe in himself. And because of that, he's started acting with the same forethought and respect for other people that she would. He is an antihero who's slowly becoming a hero by paying attention to the heroine.
And then — and this is where I start to distrust the writers a bit — Clarke forgives Finn. She sees how "broken" he is, and she wants him to be okay. Sure, that is something that Clarke would do; she always wants everyone to be okay. But her forgiveness makes me think that it's not only Finn who doesn't believe he's not the hero, but the writers also. That they intend for him to have a redemption arc. The thing is, a redemption arc does not work if everyone has already accepted him back into the fold. It does not work if he has not been punished and is not even punishing himself. Maybe we're supposed to believe he's got some internal battle going on over what he did; he obviously feels guilt over it, but I struggle to believe that it's enough guilt to really learn that he can't keep doing these things and expecting people not to look at him with disgust.
Personally, I would rather Finn die than have a redemption arc. At this point I think I have so much hateful apathy (aka so much apathy that I hate him for not convincing me to care) toward him that I would not bat an eye at his redemption, if I even bought it at all. He is an obstacle to the flow of The 100; it feels like he has been in the way for far too long now. A character (or, ahem, non-character) like Finn wasn't made for this high-stakes world, so please, just get him out. Let us watch the characters who actually take action and face consequences.
ETA: I wanted to include this but didn't know where it would fit, so I'll just say it. Jason Rothenberg was arguing with fans on Twitter about their forgiving Bellamy for the things he's done vs. not forgiving Finn for what he's done. Basically, he was insisting that they were the same thing, and seemingly trying to justify Finn's actions (though he says he was not). To which I call bullshit. Because everything Bellamy has done, he's done to protect his people. He destroyed the radio because he thought that the Ark people would come and lock the 100 all up again, because they're criminals. When he realized he was wrong and that people would die because of it, he tried to help find the radio and fix it. He felt guilt. When he shot Jaha, he did so to protect his sister. He had evidence that his sister was being sent to Earth, and he wanted to go with her, so he did what was ostensibly his only option at the time. And once again, he felt guilt — that hallucination in "Day Trip" was clearly his conscience manifesting as fear. None of this is the same as believing without proof that Grounders had killed or were holding his friends hostage, and then murdering an entire village of them while several people were shouting at him to stop. The things that Bellamy did were not the same, and he still paid for them dearly. Hell, Bellamy punches a murderer and gets locked up in chains; Finn massacres dozens of civilians and ??? nothing.
You can argue mental illness with Finn all you want, but I need a) proof that it's been there all along, or b) acknowledgment that prior to his mental break, he was still a privileged person who got away with far too much — including being horribly boring.
