Me again. Was there ever a moment where you thought "y'know maybe Octavia isn't that good of a character?" I've had plenty of people ask me especially after she burned the greenery down so I'm curious what you think.
Hmmm...I guess it depends on which definition of “good” we’re going with. Are we talking about her being a good person, or a compelling character? Because I do think there’s a difference, and I think that difference is part of what allowed me to ride out the low points of Octavia’s story arc - the burning of the hydrofarm being, perhaps, the lowest.
Octavia has definitely struggled with being a good person, but I think all of the other characters have, too. What separates Octavia from a characters like Bellamy or Clarke is her willingness and insistence in being a weapon, in directly getting her hands dirty. Because of that, I think the blood on her hands is a bit brighter, even though she has a pretty similar body count to her brother and to Clarke. Her “crimes” are harder to ignore.
But at the same time, Octavia has never killed for pleasure or purely for personal gain. She’s killed out of self-defense, as a soldier in war, as an assassin, and as a tyrant forcing survival cannibalism - all definitely fucked-up reasons to kill, but very similar to the reasons everyone else has killed, too. She’s certainly not bad in the way McCreary was, despite the way some in fandom like to view her.
So do I think Octavia is a good person? Yes, and no, much in the way I view pretty much every other character on this show. We’re talking about mass murderers and colonizers and warlords, after all. “Good” is very relative.
But I find her struggle very compelling to watch. If she was always making the right decisions, if she was perfect and never made any mistakes, she wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. Watching her fall and then rise again is part of what makes her one of the better characters on this show, imo.
I feel sad for her when she makes mistakes, when she loses herself. I don’t think the worst things she’s done - mercilessly beating up a bound Bellamy, burning down the hydrofarm, and shooting the non-compliant people in the bunker - are good choices, and it hurts to see her do those things. But even as it hurts, I can’t look away.
Ultimately, this is a show full of gray characters. What draws us to one or the other is really hard to say, and I think it’s totally different for everyone. I can’t really explain, for example, why I love Octavia but find myself frustrated by Clarke. So I do understand why some people just can’t get behind Octavia, and don’t like her.
But I don’t think that makes her a bad person, or any worse than the other mains. They’ve all got a metric ton of blood on their hands, and some of them haven’t even had to do the work to earn redemption the way she has.
That alone makes her a good character to me, even if her moral compass has been wonky at times.