That's the thing though, I loathed the Finn storyline. He snapped and murdered a bunch of innocent people, OK, that's a valid storytelling move. What almost made me stop watching the series, though, is how everyone else reacted, and how the writers seemed to expect the viewers to react; the other "civilized"/"white" characters, after being horrified for about five minutes, all treated it like an accident that happened to him, rather than a crime for which he should be held accountable. Again, his murder of grounders became all about his trauma, not that of the people who actually suffered for it, because they didn't quite count. The conflict between either feeling sorry for him (as the sky crew all seemed to do) or torturing him to death (as, of course, the savage grounders wanted) rang so ridiculously false; if you're so civilized, and you want to prove it, defuse the situation and put him on trial yourselves.
It bugs me all the more because The 100 is, on a surface level, one of the best shows on TV when it comes to diversity. Ethnicity, gender, sexuality, even age seem like non-issues among both sky crew and grounders. And yet, again and again, the conflicts they set up seem to hinge on the viewers not being expected to award the same level of humanity to grounders as to our "heroes", and it's reinforced with some very dodgy stereotypes (right down to having the grounders speak an incomprehensible language even though they all speak English fluently). Season 3 started out a lot better in that regard, so them back-pedalling into this now is just... well, we'll see where it goes, I guess.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2016-02-21 11:18 pm (UTC)It bugs me all the more because The 100 is, on a surface level, one of the best shows on TV when it comes to diversity. Ethnicity, gender, sexuality, even age seem like non-issues among both sky crew and grounders. And yet, again and again, the conflicts they set up seem to hinge on the viewers not being expected to award the same level of humanity to grounders as to our "heroes", and it's reinforced with some very dodgy stereotypes (right down to having the grounders speak an incomprehensible language even though they all speak English fluently). Season 3 started out a lot better in that regard, so them back-pedalling into this now is just... well, we'll see where it goes, I guess.