Twisted Hilarity answers “Hated the ending!!! I hate it, hate it,...”

Mariana Haruhi asked this question about Me Before You (Me Before You, #1):

Hated the ending!!! I hate it, hate it, hate it! He was selfish and he had no idea what love is. He left her! Anyone with me?

Twisted Hilarity

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[I am absolutely with you.

What bothers me quite a bit about the ending to this is a common theme in many stories: death before disability.

It simply reinforces the completely false idea that our physical health is the only thing that matters about us. Without that, we are only a burden, there is no purpose to life, no reason to go on, and there is 'no way' a human being could want to go on if we didn't have mobility (or 'pick your disability, for other media portrayal of this).

Dealing with a disability is hard in a way that society can't admire easily, so it must be too much to bear. If someone endures daily pain in order to, say, participate in the Olympics? Well that's all right then. Good for them. What a strong, admirable person.

But suffering daily pain to LIVE is treated as though that goal - living, continuing to be a part of your family and community and adding your unique knowledge to it - is not as worthy.

Coping with constant pain to run a race is seen as more noble than coping with constant pain to continue with one's entire life. There's something wrong with that, IMO.

Actually, I think Stephan Hawking would look at the sentiment behind that and call Bulls***. I think the huge swaths of the elderly and the disabled in our world, and those who love them, would look at this and call bulls*** (actually, they have: http://cdrnys.org/blog/advocacy/holly... ).

We always say that we fall in love with a person, not their outer shell. That still holds true if that outer shell is damaged.

If a person ever made this choice in their own life...that's their choice. But their choice says something about who they are, and in a novel, that's what we see. By the end of this book, to me, Will was a character who found life too difficult to cope with when his healthy, wealthy, male privileged existence suddenly changed to one where everything was no longer as perfect.

Checking out because he was too rigid to bend with what life threw at him didn't make him heroic. It might have made him human, because sometimes we all have flaws that make us unable to cope with serious challenges in our lives. But I couldn't find his choice admirable in the least.
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Replicant Rachel hmm you've been gone a while :D
I didn't hate the ending but I did dislike it..I liked the second book better though ...more
Jul 02, 2016 05:54PM · flag

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