Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5575784-20180801003619

If you’re here… you’re either going to a) gloss over this, b) Yell at me for having a wrong opinion or c) applaud me for having a correct opinion. I want to see your opinions on this whole season…

First and foremost… Ships are ruining the show. Enjoy the show for the plot and don’t hate a character because they interfere with your ship… it’s a little sad.

Anyways let’s talk about our 3 main characters:

(Preface: I’m going to be using these terms a lot so you might wanna know what they mean.

Active Protagonist - A character that is viewed as a protagonist and forces the plot to move forward.

Passive Protagonist - A character that is viewed as a protagonist and adjusts and adapts to the plot affecting them.

Clarke-

This season they tried to take Clarke in a different direction than we are used to seeing. In the four seasons beforehand she’s been more of an active protagonist, in fact she’s the main active protagonist. However in this season she’s been more of the passive protagonist as she’s trying to adjust to the situation that was laid in front of her. She’s been trying to save her, and Madi’s skin ever since the valley was under siege. She didn’t make plans to fight, she made plans to survive.

Pros: She’s taken a much more empathetic approach this season, and they’ve really sold the mother-daughter relationship between her and Madi. They did this exceptionally well. All of her actions have been based around her being a mother rather than a leader. It’s a different role than we see her in and she has been making decisions based upon this role.

Cons (My side): “She has been making decisions based upon this role”. Yeah, her pro is also a con. In the past four seasons she’s been known to have fantastic decision making and diplomatic strategies. This season threw all of that out of the window. It’s almost as if Madi is clouding her better judgement because she can’t think of a way to compute without it. This isn’t necessarily a horrible thing, but because we’ve spent four season of development for her, and they took a turn.

Conclusion (4.5/10): Clarke isn’t horrible this season as some people are turning her out to be. The only difference is that she took almost a complete 180 this season. If they were to have her character make actual good decisions whilst protecting Madi, then it would have been fine. They had the right idea when she was trying to make peace with Diyoza, but then they flipped her again and had her run away with Madi, leaving her friends behind.

Bellamy-

“You have a big heart Bellamy” This season has really torn Bellamy in two. They basically had Bellamy do the exact same thing that Clarke is doing, but in a scale that fits a little bit more with his character. He’s been both the active and passive protagonist in the story, but I’ll call him the active protagonist because he’s the only main character (besides Indra) that’s willing to take his issues with Octavia up with Octavia…

Pros (Half my side): This is a developed Bellamy. He has been fighting for the people that he's loved and cared for for about 7 years now. If Clarke were the mother figure, Bellamy is the father figure (yay… bellarkers... woo…) In Bellamy’s case, however, he’s had to make some calls. He doesn’t know the people in Wonkru and how they’ve been affected. So the calls that he makes are genuinely thoughtful emotionally. He’s trying to protect “Spacekru” in any way possible. He even calls them his family.

Cons (The other half): This has all come at the expense at what he came down in the ground for in the first place. His whole motivation. Octavia. “My sister, My responsibility”. Now I’m not going to say that my seen that drastic of character change in me (but then again she’s like 15 years older than me) but I know that she’s watched me grow up and then missed 10 years of my life. Now that I’m an adult and a complete a*****e, she still loves me just the same. The way the show is portraying Bellamy is that he doesn’t recognize his sister. This is crap. A character like Bellamy would be prying to either learn how she’s changed or try to bring her back to what she was like.

Conclusion (7/10): This isn’t the best we’ve seen Bellamy but it is far from the worst. It shows a little more of a logical side of Bellamy that we really haven’t seen in a long time. The character does good in circumstances when concerning the people he cares about, but the problem is that the character himself is actually losing the expense of his key motivator. Perhaps the show runners want it to be implied that he has a different motivator, but it’s kind of a kick in the balls if you ask me.

Octavia-

Alright, sharpen your pitchforks boys and girls. The show runners really wanted to make Octavia a secondary antagonist this season, I guess the active antagonist. You can tell in the way that the characters actions directly affect the rest of the main characters in a somewhat negative manner. But I’ll make the same point I made in my 5x11 review/rant… “Switch Clarke with Octavia… would we be having this same problem.” Towards the end of the episodes we finally see how defeated Octavia’s soul truly is.

Pros (My side): All of her decision-making has been to keep the glue of Wonkru together, and to be honest it is falling apart leading into the finale. Her militany strategy actually isn’t that bad, as she is quite smarter than she lets on. However, it’s because she’s thinking more with her head than her heart that she has let things go. This is the first thing she’s worked for truly and you can see the toll it has taken upon her. She doesn’t want to be like the people that ruled before her.

[Real life sidebar: My brother-in-law talked about his African Dictators class in College. He was given a task to try and become ruler of this nation and he was given a character to play. He didn’t want to do what the real-life person did, but in the end he didn’t have a choice. It was the only way to complete his task.]

Cons: She doesn’t have a care in the world about who gets hurt in the process. Her mind has been twisted to the point in which her empathy has completely almost been eradicated. She won’t sacrifice anything of hers. She always hinders somebody else. She also can go too far. Her “my way or the highway” attitude has left her with one choice, even though she had multiple. They could have stayed in the bunker with Monty’s algae batch but she wanted to go to war instead.

Conclusion (7.5/10): She’s made some bad decisions, and because she doesn’t know how to fail she’s forced those bad decisions on other people. That being said, her decision making about the worms is exactly something that makes complete sense. She didn’t do it blindly, they tested to see if the worms would survive in an environment of green shrubbery. They wouldn’t. So sicking that upon the Eligius crew is a fantastic strategy. The problem that people have with it are that Echo, Raven, Murphy, Kane, Abby, Emori and anyone else that is swinging for her team is also in that forest; However (this is where you start yelling at me), we saw this exact thing on a smaller scale in Season 1 when Clarke pulls the lever to blow up a bomb and decimate the outside of the drop ship even though Finn and Bellamy and many other people were on the outside. I feel as if most of the things that people hate about her are about her decision-making, but her decision making is hardly flawed. If it is… so is Clarke’s, who people have been somewhat rooting for since Day 1.

I invite Conflict in my Domain,

Master of Angels 