Talk:Finn Collins/@comment-26269248-20150702033023/@comment-76.17.103.248-20150702174036

Jason Rothenberg is the executive producer and show runner. He writes some of the episodes, and he has the final say for the other writers as well. He said, more than once, that PTSD was involved in Finn's behavior. He ought to know his own intentions. He also said that he doesn't like to spoon feed information that the audience can figure out for themselves. He wasn't going to have some character state, "Finn has PTSD". But the audience should have known that there had to be a reason that a person like Finn, who was a pacifist, hated violence, and wouldn't even pick up a gun at first or blow up a bridge when the enemy was on it, would turn and massacre a village. Finn didn't suddenly become an evil villain. That made no sense at all. So there had to be another logical explanation.

The writers were trying to show that war changes people, and that even a boy like Finn can lose his innocence when these kinds of pressures are put upon him. If you think about it, Finn was much more realistic than Clarke and Bellamy. Are most people really that resilient? I think most of us would be traumatised by seeing our friends brutally murdered, having our own lives threatened and being in fear of losing people we love. But some people can process trauma better than others, so that they can adapt and adjust. When you're unable to process it, those memories continue to exert stress on your mind. This often leads to post traumatic stress disorder. That doesn't mean that you're crazy. But it does means that you can become hypervigilent, easily startled with exaggerated responses, irritable, have angry outbursts, etc.

Finn didn't go to that village to kill people. But he was under extreme emotional distress. He was also fearful and distrusting of the grounders, and he had every right to be. So the old man triggered a startled exaggerated response. When Artigus and the others tried to rush him, Finn panicked and lost control. Then all that stress,fear, anger, helplessness and hopelessness of losing Clarke just spilled over into violence. If this wasn't a symptom of PTSD, how else do you explain such behavior from a boy who tried to make peace and believed that the world could do better than the first time?

I think that one problem with all this is that the writers wrote it badly. Instead of showing us a slower progression of Finn's change as he reacted to the pressures put upon him, they tried to cram it all into only 2 or 3 episodes. The change was too dramatic and sudden to be coherent. People who aren't so analytical or can't read between the lines, just didn't get it. It puzzled me, too at first, though I was never willing to say that Finn was bad. He was, of course, flawed like everybody else and that was a part of it, too. But the involvement of PTSD is also valid. So there you have it. Make of it what you will. But, IMO, PTSD makes the most sense in explaining the massacre, itself.