keplercryptids:

Lucretia is complicated. Even her victory isn’t clear.

She did the wrong thing for the right reasons. She acted out a plan for over a decade that was destined to fail. The anger she’s met with in the finale from her friends is partly because her plan won’t work. The most scientific minds among them had thought about it for a hundred years; Lucretia’s plan was never going to save them. She tried anyway. She was myopic and hasty and backed into a corner, as they all were. If no one had stopped her, she would have destroyed everything.

The judges were right, though. Her betrayal was necessary, but not because her plan was going to work. On the contrary. Her betrayal was necessary because they needed to truly face the Hunger, once and for all. They needed to stop running, stop disassociating, stop distancing themselves from the horrors that chased them for a century, and from the horrors they inflicted. Lucretia’s plan was bound to fail; it was her failure that was necessary. To get them together, all in one place, backed against a wall and facing the Hunger for the first and only time.

What a lot of people seem to forget is that it was Taako’s plan that saved them. And this, I suspect, will complicate his feelings toward Lucretia even more. He’ll tell himself that if she’d only talked to them, if she’d only listened to the wisdom of her friends, if she’d never believed the lie that she could fix everything alone, then none of the rest would have happened. He never would have lost everything. This will make him angry, a kind of righteous anger that usually belongs to his sister. He’s wrong too, of course. Taako wouldn’t have listened to anyone but Lup. As long as Lup said the relic plan was working, he would have trudged along with it, as city after city got demolished by the objects they created. He would have wished he could take a different side, but he wouldn’t have even tried. “I’m with Lup.” “Taako, you won’t even consider my plan?” “You know, I wish I could.” He was on Lup’s side, always, automatically. So Taako, too, was both wrong and right at the same time.

None of them would have come up with a Plan C unless faced with the apocalypse again. The relics were better than the Hunger. This was their mantra, repeated over and over. There would have been no reason to risk everything all over again, without Lucretia’s betrayal.

And so it’s complicated, more complicated than we can really grasp. Lucretia’s arc is messy and it’s meant to be. It’s not meant to be tied up at the end with a neat, happy bow. Balance ultimately had a happy ending, but it was a complicated one too. A wedding at the site of a good friend’s death. A man, reunited with the love of his life but leaving his friends in order to do so. Whole communities, still destroyed by what they had done. An ending where they’re happy, but also one where they’re changed and adapting to this new world they created. 

This is why it’s frustrating to me when people take all-or-nothing stances with Lucretia. That she was totally right or totally wrong. She’s a good person who did terrible things. She’s a good person who was desperate and traumatized and struggling. Which is true for all of them, incidentally. They are all good people who did terrible things. They’re flawed, and they’re heroes, and they’re messy, and they’re trying. That’s all they can do.