#(wrote this yesterday and i don't know if it's insufferable of me but slamming that post button anyway why not)

[madamescarlette]

Actually one thing that fascinates me about the shift between the book and the movie for TBoSaS is the actual intent put behind two of Snow's biggest game-changing (ha) actions, dropping the handkerchief in the snake's tank to save Lucy and recording Sejanus' confession and subsequently betraying him.

Obviously with the shift of medium they have to make things more obvious, but it's just opened more depth of thought to me because in-book how he recounts these actions are as reflexive, things done in the moment without really thinking about it (when using the remote he literally says his hands "acted on their own [...] before he had been aware of deciding to do it") vs. how in the movie he seems to actively think through and enact them knowingly. You can still make an argument that the Sejanus situation is pretty much the same, especially given that he more goads Sejanus into talking, but with Lucy's situation he literally RACES out, tears his stitches and finds the tank and doesn't just drop the kerchief, he literally has to stuff the stupid thing in a side vent, a far cry from the book's version, where he drops it and wonders if he hallucinated the entire thing.

I actually really, really am intrigued by it as a narrative change though because a) him actually consciously doing these things puts more weight behind them, they're not just things that HAPPENED to him (a common stance he takes internally), they're things he cared about making happen so he did them, but also b) it places Lucy Gray as continually the one being who makes him most human, so it makes sense that his most kind-hearted action is a decision to try to save her.

One thing that made me saddest about his character from the book was that he has this seeming inability to view anybody as a fully-fledged human besides himself (even his Capitol classmates are differing levels of crass or try-hards until he needs a reason to be emotional about them, and THEN what he cares about with them is their shared childhood memories, almost never anything about them in the present day) but when he's a mentor is the time that he becomes most fully-fledged, he has sympathy (however fleeting and easily retracted) for Clemensia and Jessup besides wanting Lucy to survive. And perhaps he only does it because he feels that he owes Lucy a debt for saving his life, but it still happens, and he still ends up seeing them.

To me, this disproves his and Dr. Gaul's thesis; I don't really think the most base human instinct is for us to hurt each other, I think it's closer to not wanting to leave each other behind. When he has the least to gain from these people, what he cares about is their survival, the least amount of their pain. What we want from each other is for you to get home safe. That's what gives it such beauty that he would risk so much to get Lucy home safe, and so much more damning that he would throw Sejanus to the wolves. That there is equal impetus behind the choice to save somebody at risk to yourself, just as there is behind condemning somebody who placed their absolute trust in you; these are the choices that make a man. Sometimes, even a flicker of humanity can save your soul within you. The tragedy is he simply didn't want it to be saved, so the flicker burnt out before it could even take shape.