I'm totally with you, I love that everything and everyone is shades of gray on the show. My issue was and is basically with the writing of Finn's character-- they just didn't do as good a job with it. And my perception is skewed because I made the mistake of following the showrunner on twitter for a bit and either he was trolling hardcore or he just refused to understand why people were having such an issue with the Finn storyline. (And writing off those who disagreed with him as shippers who were just mad because Finn was in the way of their OTP, which oh man, there's a quick way to get me mad.) Looking back over the whole series, I'm no longer as bothered by Finn's character as I was, because I see now where they were trying to go with him. I just don't think they did it as well as they could have. In the end, he turned out to be a plot device for Clarke's character development. Which I'm okay with.
This was kind of the crux of it for me: "I just really hate how they centered the entire episode around showing us how noble Finn was and how sad we should all be for him so that the ending would be Super Tragic but if he had been written well all along then we would already feel how tragic it is without the writers metaphorically grabbing us by the shoulders and going SEE? SEEEEEEE!!!"
I like that Finn wasn't all dreamy hero or all bad guy - he was a confusing mix that made him hard to root for.
Exactly, I'm totally with you. The thing for me was that while the episodes were airing, before I knew how it was all going to turn out, I couldn't tell if the show really did want to make it hard to root for Finn. Because the twitter postings really made it sounds like we were supposed to take his side. So the thing was, I just didn't know if I could trust the writers on this one. I've been burned by shows before where the narrative doesn't address the bad stuff done by the protagonists and I was so worried this was going to be another show where that happened. Obviously I'm very glad that's not what happened! Just in the moment of it, it was a tortuous episode to watch because I knew what I wanted/needed to happen but I didn't trust the writing staff to do it.
ETA: So the moral of the story is, don't follow showrunners on twitter. It just fucks with your enjoyment of the show.
no subject
This was kind of the crux of it for me: "I just really hate how they centered the entire episode around showing us how noble Finn was and how sad we should all be for him so that the ending would be Super Tragic but if he had been written well all along then we would already feel how tragic it is without the writers metaphorically grabbing us by the shoulders and going SEE? SEEEEEEE!!!"
I like that Finn wasn't all dreamy hero or all bad guy - he was a confusing mix that made him hard to root for.
Exactly, I'm totally with you. The thing for me was that while the episodes were airing, before I knew how it was all going to turn out, I couldn't tell if the show really did want to make it hard to root for Finn. Because the twitter postings really made it sounds like we were supposed to take his side. So the thing was, I just didn't know if I could trust the writers on this one. I've been burned by shows before where the narrative doesn't address the bad stuff done by the protagonists and I was so worried this was going to be another show where that happened. Obviously I'm very glad that's not what happened! Just in the moment of it, it was a tortuous episode to watch because I knew what I wanted/needed to happen but I didn't trust the writing staff to do it.
ETA: So the moral of the story is, don't follow showrunners on twitter. It just fucks with your enjoyment of the show.