Or, "how I saw shades of a common story in an unlikely place".
As the heading of this blog states, I watch more TV than I ought to. For the most part, I watch things that have nothing to do with my life. I list things like Reign and Gossip Girl among my favorites because even in the ridiculous soap opera I often live in, most of those plotlines go places that the people in my world never will. Similarly, I drown in futuristics because my life isn't on that level. Except that this year, that coping mech got blown straight to hell by way of two fictional ladies whose stories are all too similar to my own.
We're not going to talk about the first one yet - that's a post for another time, an evolved version of an essay I wrote a few months ago, and a bit too painful for my current mental space. Sufficient to say, after watching one post-apoc show that featured a ladytype all too much like myself, I convinced myself it was an anomaly. Just one isolated incident, yeah? Oh, if only.
I got talked into watching The 100 because one of my internet friends said I'd like it and, because she is a terrible influence and I love her for it, I figured it was worth a shot. Bunch of teenagers running wild and presumably going for all the obnoxious teen-drama clichés? BRING IT. Except that's not exactly what happened. What could've been a godawful love triangle got killswitched, fail!parenting was averted, the platonic relationships were every bit as interesting as the romantic ones if not even more so in some cases, and... there, in the middle of it all, was a character I related to far more than I wanted to.
(The rest of this post contains spoilers abundant for the first season, so stop reading now if you don't want to know the entire plotline of a secondary character. Or, alternatively, keep reading because this is something that - had I known about it - would've made me that much more interested in watching.)
From the very moment she makes her onscreen debut, Octavia Blake is - if nothing else - one to keep an eye on. Most of the titular 100 are in the situation they're in because of something they did; Octavia's only crime was her existence. And while that's established early on, the details don't kick in until episode 6, by which time she's managed to annoy the living daylights out of everyone else who has a name and presumably most of the background kids as well, make her sexual debut with someone who ends up dead two days later (for reasons having nothing to do with her and everything to do with acid rain), attempt to have some time alone and get lost in the process, and get "captured" by something that isn't supposed to exist. (I used quotation marks there because the situation and motivations are more complicated than they initially seem - all will be explained later, I promise.) Quite a run for someone who, at that point, has done absolutely nothing to move the overall plot forward unless you count giving her older brother a perpetual migraine. But... then said backstory kicks in and suddenly the most irritating character on a show full of 'em is the most sympathetic.
I did not expect a particular character's background to resonate with me. The main reason I watch questionable teen dramas is because that doesn't happen. But all rules have exceptions, and this was one of them. I wish I'd been more surprised. As revealed in flashbacks (sidenote - The 100 does flashbacks really well, and I say this as a person who usually hates them), Octavia spent the first sixteen years in the confines of her family's living space, and a good portion of that in a barely-human-sized hole in the floor. No wonder the girl we see in the show's main timeline is so over-the-top and reckless - she's finally free and she's got a lot of life to catch up on. And that's when it hit me. Here, on a post-apoc teen drama - one of the last places one would expect to find such a thing - was a story that finally paralleled my own experience within the homeschool community, not to mention the common thread of others who can only be called survivors.
It resonated in a been-there-done-that sort of way. Yeah, maybe my experience wasn't on par with some of the horror stories one can easily read elsewhere on the internets (a different rabbit-trail that has little to do with this post so no links for y'all today), but it still mirrored. I'd been one of the lucky ones - the option to participate in the normal world had been offered, at least. But as an introvert with unnoticed depressive tendencies, not to mention a few well-deserved trust issues and a natural tendency towards being a loner, I didn't take them. Until I was eighteen, every activity I participated in was, if not explicitly homeschool-centric, at least had a majority of kids like me.
You know the funny thing? I've never felt more alone than when I am among people who've had those "shared experiences", because I'm not like them either. All the ones I knew growing up, at least the girls, were either academic prodigies or musically gifted (with one notable exception who is now thankfully - and hopefully permanently - out of my hair). I'm neither of those things, and I don't have a superiority complex the size of fricking Australia or weird moral standards either, so... involuntary lone wolf status among people who should've adored me. Weird how that happens.
Anyways, back to the story that resonated all too well and why I think it's powerful. One of the great things about The 100 is that, with either one or two exceptions depending on how one feels about a particular irritating cockroach of a character, everyone gets positive character development over the course of the first season. Octavia, obviously, has an interesting starting point compared to everyone else and a bit further to go towards becoming a genuinely decent human. Or... not. At the end of episode 6 (the one with the flashbacks interspersed with current-timeline!her being chained up in a cave), she gets rescued. What's the first thing she does? Attempts to tell her brother and the rest of the rescue party not to hurt her "captor". (Again, quotation marks, and this time an explanation - at the beginning of this little plotline, girl fell down a hill, and the person who found her did what he did for her own good. Even more context later - this thing's running away from me.) Why? Because she knows what it's like to be in an undeserved situation and she wouldn't wish that on anyone. But, because tiny inexperienced girl, no one listens to her. Their loss.
((To be continued - this is long enough as it is, and there are still two more episodes to be discussed in explaining why this means so much to me...))
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