Talk:Finn Collins/@comment-25176701-20151015205753/@comment-76.17.103.248-20151018235050

The trouble with Skyzy is that everything is black and white. Life isn't like that. There are many shades of gray. When Finn set foot on the ground for the first time, he would never have committed a massacre. Something happened to him that changed him. That something was war. Finn wasn't like Murphy. Finn, through no fault of his own, had a fragile psyche. He had difficulty processing traumatic events like seeing his friends cut to pieces, being taken prisoner, himself, living in constant fear, and fearing that the girl he loved had been slaughtered, too. That made him succeptible to PTSD. No one knows how they would react to this kind of trauma unless you experience it first hand.

I'm not going to say that Finn wasn't at fault. He was always impulsive, and he always had trouble controlling his emotions. What I'd say is that PTSD exacerbated his other weaknesses. The grounders, with their violence and hatred, massacred those kids. Violence begets violence. They brought out the worst in Finn. So they are hypocrits for demanding Finn's death when they didn't answer for their own crimes against those kids. I don't care if those kids landed in their territory. Slaughtering them was wrong.

I won't say that Finn didn't deserve to suffer the consequences of his actions, but a just society recognizes degrees of murder. It also takes into account the extenuating circumstances. The penalties fit the degree. Only 1st degree, pre-meditated murder gets the death penalty. Finn didn't deserve that, and he sure as hell didn't deserve to be tortured to death. What the grounders wanted to do to Finn was savage and inhuman. No one deserves that. He was a traumatized 18 year old boy, for goodness sake. He should have been dealt with appropriately. Abby was right. That wasn't just revenge; that was sick.

Skyzy, your sense of justice is scary. A society that judges in black and white, without mercy is frightening. The Ark had that kind of Draconian system. So people got floated for trying to save their sick kids. Charlotte was locked up for assaulting a guard. She was a traumatised little kid, for goodness sake. Octavia was locked up for being born, as if she could help that. Don't you see the danger in your kind of reasoning that everyone deserves to be punished to the maximum, and torture is okay? Really? Surely we have evolved beyond this. Blood must have blood is Dark Ages stuff. IMO, only God has the right to take a life as punishment for wrong doing. We don't get that right because we have all done wrong. We have the right to protect ourselves, but we don't get to say who deserves to die.