like. imagine you're paul, this guy who's content (complacent, even), with where his life's at — with a job that he isn't particularly passionate about but isn't awful* and pays the bills, and a few casual friends in his coworkers, and you've finally taken the risk of making an initial connection with this one barista who you may or may not have feelings for. when you imagine the future (which you rarely think to do), it's just this, for the rest of your life. and you're happy (or, at least, fine enough) with that.
*(there's a less fortunate version of you out there in the multiverse, who would literally kill you to have your life. but you don't have to worry about that. not this time.)
but then the apocalypse starts. and one of those coworkers of yours — you knew she was struggling with stuff in her personal life, but you never really cared enough to pry or offer support/advice (maybe you didn't know where to start, but is that an excuse for not trying at all?) — dies, because she was left with her zombified shitty husband while you all weren't paying her a second thought. and you realize you've been taking the life you'd been living, the people you care about, for granted.
so when your other friend gets a call and says he's going on a suicide mission, you muster the courage to go with him, into your personal hell, because you don't want to lose him too (lesson [x] of being a protagonist, paul: if you want something, you have to fight for it). and you can't just stay behind while he goes; you don't deserve to survive more than he does.
and that choice, that act of heroism, doesn't end up making a damn difference in the end. because, like charlotte, bill couldn't let go of the person he'd lost. because ted, in the most practical sense, was right: in this story, trying to be a hero, and clinging to your connections with others, gets you killed.
you don't get killed, out of sheer luck. in fact, your choosing to go out there is rewarded with the offer of an escape: a military evac chopper. you can secure your survival. you've been given an easy way out.
but paul doesn't take it. he insists on going back, for emma. because he wants her to be safe, to make it out of hatchetfield once and for all. and he wants, he can admit now, to be with her. because they understand each other intuitively, match each others' hater energy; because she doesn't ask him to change for her; because he admires her perseverance, her ability to decide on a future she wants for herself and make a plan and work her ass off to make it happen; because she's funny and smart and deserves to have someone who cares for her, to tell her she's not a total fuck-up or a supervillain.
and: if he has to start his life over, he wants to do it with someone he already knows, someone from that past life; if he’s going to lose everything (his friends, his home — the place he said before join us and die that he still didn’t want to leave even with what it's become), he at least wants to have gained something from it (and after all this, he will never take her for granted).
if he gets to survive this, he wants to have saved someone (remember how “paul’s greatest dream is to be the hero of hatchetfield”?).
he wants to be worthy of emma. maybe then, he’ll get to keep her. hasn't he lost enough? (isn't that how the story goes? if he answers the call, steps up to the plate, commits to the role of hero, won't he have earned his happily ever after with her?)
the Hive offers that ending. it says he doesn't have to lose anything — just his ability to choose. he'll have emma, and everyone else he lost.
it is, in fact, the ending he's guaranteed.
but paul doesn't know that fact. instead, he arrives at the meteor after the escape plan fell through, and, as he's surrounded by the infected, concludes that that's not the kind of story he's been written into. he can't save emma and live to be with her (not as himself).
everything he took for granted has now been taken from him, and everything he's admitted to wanting after realizing that, he's been denied. the lesson it seems he was meant to learn: he isn't owed anything; he doesn't deserve anything. he doesn't get to have what he wants.
and so, he says: it doesn't matter what he wants.
…and he's wrong. though he won't live to see it, it turns out there's more than one way to lose — and "getting what you want" and "losing" are not opposites, and not mutually exclusive. in this story, more often than not, they are the two sides of the same coin.
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
janainaart
origamiaround
stormborns
