#but to prevent it from happening again by having systems in place to idk ferry people across without them relying on exploitive assholes

[cha0tician]

one more thing before i either get up and be productive or take a nap--

how many times have you not read terms and conditions? how many medication commercials do you think run every day on any given channel where the side effects include death? what doesn't contain chemicals known to cause cancer in the state of california? you ever sign a waiver for a haunted house? zip line? sky dive?

thinking it won't happen to you isnt divisible by class. we have to think about our mortality all day every day and then nothing happens and we go to bed. nothing is safe so everything is.

[bliphany]

(cw: rant because i really don’t understand Harold-hate.)

I hope people stop calling Harold Finch a dick or claiming that he doesn’t care about people because he decided to separate the relevant and irrelevant lists and programmed the Machine to delete the latter.

This always reminded me of all those times when my friends and I were on the street for a protest or petition and some people passing by would yell at us calling us selfish bitches because we dared to say we cared about A but didn’t also mention B C D E F no matter if those were in the same topic or field or beyond our limitations since we said we cared but failed to care about everything happened in this country or on this planet we were clearly hypocrites.

Back to the context of Finch’s choice. That was an American government’s project aiming to prevent events like the 911. The feeds were from the government. They just needed a machine to process and make the prediction. So to build the machine the creator - if they EVEN care - had to balance between two things. To achieve the aim while to make sure some lines are not going to be crossed too much. The government’s feeds meant useful information but also people’s privacy. If they let people know about they were being watched the government would have to shut the program down. Hence they would fail to achieve the first aim which was also the project’s only aim.

If Finch didn’t separate the two lists, the Machine aka the Northern Light wouldn’t be functional in the first place. The government would then buy someone else’s machine who might not even care about the privacy thing and would make it an open system so the government could track ANYONE they wanted no matter which purpose the government had.

Deleting the irrelevant list was a move that definitely caused sentimental reactions we can see it from Nathan and the audience. A move that later Finch also considered a “Mistake” of his when he had to witness his best friend’s death. And then he did what he could to live with the mistake while trying to do something about it. But it didn’t mean it was “Wrong.”

Making a mistake doesn’t make you a bad person. Making a mistake doesn’t automatically prove what value you had in mind while making the decision is wrong. It only means the way you choose to face the consequences speaks your character as a human. We all make mistakes caused by the right decisions/mindsets. That’s where the value of humanity lies. And judging people by the outcomes of their decisions despite the contexts and situations and the reality is, sorry I really have to say, utterly and upsettingly utilitarianism, by which I mean it really rings the “I adore you BECAUSE everything you do is perfect you’re good at everything you never makes a mistake you’re not a human you’re perfect that’s why I love you.”

And even the Machine made mistakes. And who are we to decide a person’s value by judging how perfect they are or how many mistakes they’ve made even when they caused those because of sensible decisions but no because the outcome was bad “they should have known better or I hate them.” It rings the opposite of the show’s value. Not a machine learned to love like humans. But that “humans can only be loved when they’re such a flawless, perfect machine.”

A person who makes no mistake and hence claiming they’re perfect or the smartest of us all is actually someone never cares enough to act.

And I don’t even mention that most of the time when a story is highly plot-driven of course characters’ good intentions always turn bad to serve the plot because that is a trope?????? In stories, there’s always a dynamic balance between characters and the plot and sometimes to benefit one the writer has to compromise the other a bit but as long as it isn’t overwhelmingly biased that is good writing. And to hate a character for a writing choice is really too hard for me to understand. It was like when I was a kid, and my friend claimed she hated Sherlock Holmes he was such an asshole, and I was curious and asked which story she read, and she told me oh that one with Arsene Lupin and I was like????? But it was a story written by Maurice Leblanc??? And it was natural that he wanted to show how good his own character was??? And if the plot was set like that and you judged a character’s value and personality by that one material??? But no, I failed to convince her because since writers wrote a certain character in a certain way then no matter who the writer was which purpose the plot was serving and which pov the story was written in, what was shown on papers must be the only truth.

Sorry back to the subject. Nathan’s reaction was relatable, and I love to see it as pure goodness in humanity. But that still didn’t make Finch a dick because on the spectrum between sensible and sentimental Finch was closer to the sensible end than Nathan. It only made them two different characters who were relatable in different ways. A thing they might consider to do at that time was to hand the irrelevant list to the police department. WELL BUT COULD THEY REALLY? The American government only wanted a machine to prevent another 911. And giving the list to anyone would harm the privacy dilemma discussed earlier.

Nathan decided to save people one at a time was a noble act. That still didn’t make the choice of deleting it cruel. We might donate our time and money to help a nearby neighborhood/location/country damaged in an earthquake, we probably won’t and can’t do it beyond a certain scale. We help the world by helping whom our road crossed with in our lives. That’s called being a kind person. That’s called a realistic way to improve the world to become better.

And there was no evidence in the show that showed Harold Finch didn’t give a fuck about people’s lives when their roads crossed. Back before the ferry accident, he tried to talk Nathan out of the thing he planned to do because it would get Nathan himself killed in the end. Although he didn’t approve, he went to meet Nathan to face the thing together because he cared and tried to help him. After then, also with his own character arc but really I don’t think his character changed to a totally opposite it was more like since he now chose this full time helping numbers life he allocated more time and energy into this field. He asked John and Shaw to bring Root with them so she’d not be killed. He confesses he built the machine so Collier would kill him and not someone else. He argued if it was necessary when John went to help Riley because John as a friend was closer to him than Riley who had just shot John at the moment. The fact that he wanted anyone harmed Grace to be killed was on the revenge topic so I won’t go into that here, but it still aligned to the traits we humans have, that we care about those who are friends/families/closer to us.

But really, time and time again in fanfictions we wrote about how in the heat of the moment John chose to protect Harold over someone else. Or time and time again people in the fandom adored shoot relationship saying how Root came to care about few people over the rest of humanity or saying how beautiful it was when Shaw avenged Root. Deleting the list was the same thing. It’s called priority and the only one doesn’t need to consider priority is God because they have no limitations and can be everywhere at the same time. Deleting the list didn’t equal to killing people. It meant those who might have died in another 911 would be saved. Before the Machine those killed in an attack and those victims on the irrelevant list would just all die. The Machine Finch and Nathan worked together to bring to the world, its aim was to save those would have been dead in an attack. That’s the meaning when he said “save everyone not someone.” And the priority here felt cruel wasn’t because the one who called the decision was evil. It was because he was not God and the fact humans have limitations IS CRUEL. Just like John couldn’t save Jessica when he was on the other side of the planet. Just like if you only got one shot you can only choose to save a person. Just like every character in the show had to choose between this and that. And we called it beautiful because while it showed limitations it also showed connections.

But somehow Harold Finch was not allowed. He was not allowed to be a human. He was not allowed to be a decent and reasonable person by considering “I really want to do something to help my country and people but given my ability and life plans/choices and resources I picked this specific project I wanted to devote to.” He was not allowed to make mistakes. He was not worthy of love and acceptance and forgiveness even when everything he did all had good and sensible reasons. We said that Harold had hubris issue and god-complex which I agree. But this specific kind of Harold-hate hates him because he was a human and he had to choose or he couldn’t finish the Machine in the first place was actually expecting him to be a god. He was expected to have no limitations. He was expected to save every single person on the planet if he did half way omg what a dick. He was expected to devote and lose everything if he even dared to do a thing to save people in the world. (Which he did, btw)

By hating Finch for being a limited human who just tried to do a thing to help his country which he also succeed was in fact giving his an un achievable standard. It rings so many bad memories like “if you can’t convince me that you also care about B C D E F or you fail to do A to 100% you’re such a lame activist you don’t really care about this world.”

And yes “everyone is relevant to someone.” I love this line, too. And I adore how the writer did the delicate “replacing and advancing the meaning behind a word to charge emotional effects” and probably they did it too well it seems people really believe that Harold Finch used to believe some people were “irrelevant” so apparently he was a dick and didn’t care about humanity, unlike Nathan. But No? Friendly reminder that the full sentence/context of “relevant and irrelevant lists” is actually “relevant and irrelevant to terrorist attacks”?????

And yes about the opening theme. I laughed at Harold after I knew it was him who separated the two lists and deleted one of them, too. The funny part is seeing how in the tv show writing and prompting process sometimes the writer will give something for them can tell/sell a story first but after a while, some things might conflict each other a bit. It’s like the writer might just put some hint as a foreshadow and if in the later episode there’s a chance to pick it up and develop then nice but if by some reason maybe the actor’s scheduled or there’s some plot change then the hint will remain an unexplained detail or even a tiny plot hole but as far as it’s tiny it’s fine. And the show introduced the whole world setting by introducing Finch who at first functioned as not only a character but also a device to tell us/the main character aka John everything the writer wanted us to know at the moment so we could enjoy the story. And when the story just began and there were only two main casts to make the fictional world work it was entirely workable to instead of giving us the simplified but informative enough opening they let Finch say “I build it and actually it was me who separated the lists because brah brah brah and it backfired and I wanted to live with that, so I need a partner.” In this way, the show would be so appealing.

Idk just... I don’t like a bunch of characters for so many different reasons, but I try to separate which ones are the character’s personalities and flaws and weaknesses and which ones are byproducts of a writing choice so that the plot will continue.

:(((