#but secondly redemption arcs are the product of the good vs bad binary

[bloody-wonder]

Any time I see a post going “fuck Nora for killing Seth” and lamenting that he died before he could get “redemption” I just get so confused. Nora’s the author; she didn’t physically murder a real person, she killed off a character she created, as was her right, whose place in the story was to die, to up the stakes and push them all to work together. Narratively Seth performed his duty. And “redemption”? AftG is not a story about redemption. It’s about living. And it wasn’t Seth’s story anyway

it turns out i’ve written An Essay on seth already so here it is if you’re interested

at first reading i didn’t think much of seth at all. there’s so much exposition and information about the characters and exy that the reader needs to get from the first book in order to understand and enjoy the other two, that i was quite overwhelmed and so the only things i remembered about seth were that he was kinda dick and that he died in retaliation for riko roast #1, which made the foxes work better as a team. then, after reading all the extra info on nora’s blog and re-reading the books i took a better look at him. he is certainly interesting. first of all he’s a symbol for the ‘old foxes’, those boys who were even more problematic than him and who failed to use the chance wymack had given them to make their lives better. unlike them he persisted, but at the same time – he gave up (he tells matt as much in their dialogue about the foxes’ chances to play better and for them to go pro). this aspect of his character is very relatable, for me at least. i mean i love neil and his unshakable will to make the most of any situation as much as the next guy, but i love it exactly because this is the inspirational shit i’m not able to do irl at all (riko roasts are so satisfying precisely because this is the kind of talk we dream we’d be able to give our offenders but most of us just can’t). seth on the other hand is my day-to-day mood.

he’s pretty down to earth and holds no illusions about his possibilities – this i would say is his most basic feature and at the same time it’s his fatal flaw. for if he were able to dare to imagine a prospect of more successful life for himself, if he were able to overcome his fundamental dislike of kevin, he wouldn’t disregard the team’s decision not to live the campus in the wake of riko roast #1 and, who knows, maybe he’d live. andrew saw matt’s addiction problem and chose to help him the hard way because he was positive that matt would survive, that he’d fight because he had it in him to overcome it. he didn’t regard seth in the same way – for many reasons, primarily seth’s being an asshole to andrew’s lot – but also because seth unlike matt had already given up on himself in a sense. we don’t know if he took the drugs that killed him of his own free will or if he was forced to take them, but i think he did it himself.

i find some of his characterization in the extra material very revealing: he was okay with his teammates’ shitty behaviors towards matt and the girls, with them doing drugs, with calling nicky the f-word, but he drew the line at some guys trying to rape allison while she was drunk at a party. most importantly this latter one wasn’t his instinctive action, like any person’s trying to save a fellow human from violence, like neil’s choice to stand up for kevin against riko at kathy’s show – this was a conscious decision (he passed the guys leading allison away, he went on, but then he thought no and went back for her). seth existed in this ethical grey zone, neither here nor there. every character in aftg is morally grey as we’ve established, but seth most of all, i think. if moral integrity was a scale, he’d be right in the middle of it. his inability to move brought his downfall. he’s a symbol for the ‘old foxes’, as i’ve said, and the story is about the ‘new’ ones, so it makes perfect narrative sense that he should die to make this ‘new era’ possible (it’s no coincidence that his death marks the end of the first book, the first act of this story). evolve or perish, so to say.

in this context he’s a tragic hero. he literally says ‘my life isn’t less important than kevin’s because he’s more talented’. this can be also read as ‘my life isn’t less important because i’m a minor antagonist in someone else’s story’. which he kinda is. he’s a secondary character whose death is a plot point, he’s a symbol and he’s the agent of tragic irony – all of which seems fascinating and rich to me. which is why i’m really sad that most of the fandom discourse on seth comes down to two camps: he deserved better vs. he deserved to die because he was homophobic and anyway he isn’t that important to care for him. the latter group also tends to view his death as him being punished by the narrative for being ‘bad’, which is the shallowest reading i can imagine. this is a common plight i see among my peers: people just dividing characters into the good ones and the bad one’s and debating whether those who are ‘bad’ deserve death or not. nobody deserves anything, people just get stuff or they don’t.

as for the former group, i can understand that people emphasize with seth’s struggle and would like a happier ending for him, because that’s humane, but i disagree, because although him living on would certainly dry some readers’ tears, it would impact the story in a bad way, make it less measured, it would remove all the complexity i’ve listed above. to put it simply, not every character who deserves development, redemption and what not has to get it, there’s absolutely no such rule. people who take to flawed characters and then feel robbed of a redemption arc if there isn’t one are missing the point of characters as a category in storytelling. 

as for me, i neither know nor care what he did or did not deserve as a human (which he is not, he’s made up), but i think that as a character he couldn’t be crafted better to play his role in this story and his death, i will repeat myself, makes perfect narrative sense.