Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25112275-20141218163520/@comment-24.99.67.19-20141223192709

Let me explain what I meant by "execution makes for a very black and white world". People are seldom all bad or all good. The fact that we have degrees of murder, for example, takes into account that there are varying circumstances that can lead to the crime. Premeditated murder is worse than man slaughter. There was no malice in the latter. But even here, things can get complicated. Even a terrorist can have a back story. Still would you equate someone like Dr. Tsing with Finn. Tsing is cold blooded and selfish. She has no empathy or respect for other human beings. She'd be a perfect Nazi. That's not Finn.

Finn was fundamentally good hearted, unselfish, peaceloving, and respectful of human life. He was a good boy who did a bad thing. That's gray. I think he was more fragile than the others, so that he was more traumatized by the violence of the war. The loss of Clarke was the stick that broke him. His was a temporary moment of insanity. He didn't plan to kill those people, but something inside him just snapped. Once he had fully processed what he did, he was tortured by it. But the Grounders weren't willing to take any of that into account or their own culpability in what happened in that village. Their "blood for blood" reflected the black or white view of the world. You kill, you die, and nothing else matters. Their means of execution was inhumane, cruel, and barbaric. It was revenge, not justice; and Finn didn't deserve that.