Profile:
Sarah’s profile is pretty standard. It has an issue in that 90% of discussion of her hobbies is about her interests in photography and film and such. She has only one other hobby and it is very briefly mentioned. Otherwise, it’s decently fleshed-out on the kind of person she is, but rather sparse on details like family that are otherwise standard. I’m not sure whether the thing with the umbilical cord is sound, though.
Pregame:
Sarah’s first thread is her interviewing folks for her project about the senior class. Aside from some formatting weirdness in her first post (italicizing dialogue and leaving thoughts normal), she comes off as a pretty sensible person who doesn’t want anything to do with the conflict that erupts with Monty. I also like that she’s the only one who doesn’t repeat all previous dialogue in their posts.
Second thread follows up on the previous one, with several characters popping in, including Sarah Xu presumably just to make things harder. I think this scene is sort of establishing Sarah as a sensible sort, surrounded by the weirdness of the fight and also Sarah Xu being really into Communist Russia. I do like the continuation of the previous stuff and hope it continues.
Not much to say about Roses Without Thorns. It definitely gives the sense Sarah is an outside observer towards crazy stuff, but she also doesn’t end up participating until someone approaches her.
Toppings is weird because, for some reasons, this actually leads into the memory thread? Sarah has one memory thread. It features a side of Sarah that’s kind of interesting, trying to charm Chris into paying for something for her, and though she isn’t malicious (she seems to actually plan to pay him back) she’s also happy to justify it. It then continues to a memory thread, for some reason.
The Long Walk Home itself is actually really good for her I think; she does a good job bouncing off of Chris’s slight fumbling. It goes into more detail about her home life and her passion for creating video media, worrying about her parents once she was gone and feeling defensive when he calls her a camerawoman. I also get the sense that, despite these things, she’s a pretty nice person who knows how to be encouraging and is willing to put up with stuff for her friends’ sake.
Irritating Thoughts is pretty unremarkable. I imagine there’s some kind of activity context here because she joins and leaves after one post. She’s tired and hates math. Not much happens.
Prom:
I Wish She Was Here continues the arc of Sarah and Chris’s prom. I like how they did this, with 4 threads total dedicated to their interactions. It’d be nice to see her with more stuff going on, especially since Chris gets a lot more pregame, but having a restricted pregame arc is better than wandering aimlessly and doing nothing. Otherwise there’s not much going on here; if anything, Sarah’s parents are the focus. Closing Time is a bit of a blah note; Sarah appears in one post on the first page and seemingly never again.
Pregame overview-Sarah has a short one with a few dead scenes, but I get a sense that she’s a fairly upbeat, typical teen who is able to be slightly selfish but is still a pretty nice person.
Island Leadin-Sarah’s story is somewhat well-known to me, at least in that I know 1-2 of her kills and also how chat reacted, in that her story comes to a poor end. That aside, here’s what I found:
Island:
THREAD 1 (Intravenous Nightmare): I chose to ignore the ‘recommended listening’.
I am seeing where the neck phobia thing comes in as she freaks out at the collar. I wasn’t able to find scientific evidence that being choked by the umbilical cord can cause lifelong trauma, though there’s certainly anecdotal claims. I’ll let someone else thing about it. She pulls on the collar to get it off, but it doesn’t explode, something on an inconsistency before V5 when that trait was explicitly removed. Another earlier version weirdness; she keeps her camera but using it to see the collar on her face is a good though.
Basically, Sarah and Adrian, Simon, Ben, and Jacob end up in the infirmary, the latter two from a different thread, Sarah is panicking at their situation and jumps at Simon for his gun, but he avoids her and exits. Ben and Jacob run in to see what happens and she claims Simon attacked her. Adrian backs her even though he knows she’s lying because he thinks he’ll look bad throwing her under the bus and doesn’t want to screw her over either. Jacob also notices that its bullshit but doesn’t call her on it yet. At this point Sarah does something I’d seen from her before; she justifies selfishness on her part (lying and grabbing for a gun), but unlike before she knows this is too much and can’t really convince herself.
The remaining group decides to leave together and look for Jacob’s girlfriend Paige, finding Paige some Cymbalta first. Not how prescriptions work but some of my pills would be better than none. Sarah has also more-or-less explicitly started using the camera to disconnect from reality here. She also grabs a scalpel, apparently just left around by the terrorists. Even not noticing the knife, Ben and Jacob are unnerved by her. The narrative helpfully notes that she really was scared and not making that up, she was just [a] ‘
tiny
bit
crazy.’
Overall, not terrible. I wish more focus was put on how she was feeling that was making her unstable, giving a little more insight to her mindset at the time. I think the guys are all pretty good balancing factors in that everyone knows she’s unstable but for various reasons don’t want to bring it up.
THREAD 2 (Conquistador): This thread opens with an immense amount of focus on Jacob/Paige which is unfortunate because since they’re both Brackie’s it really is just him writing with himself. It’s not bad writing per say, but it’s very awkward and very melodramatic. But this isn’t about them!
Somewhat interesting is Sarah, not surprisingly, immediately picking out the movie-like stuff and catching on camera. Jacob and Paige embrace while Ben, Aidan, and Sarah watch, and Dan Kesrue comes along after Paige. Rob Jenkins is in another building and Marty Lovett runs in…and falls asleep on a bed inside a house and immediately recedes from post order.
Everyone goes off to find shelter and finds Rob, who is apparently a notorious racist, and Paige does not like him. Based on his reaction to her demanding if he’s planning to hunt down a particular black student, I can’t say she’s wrong. He intends threatens her so she doesn’t reveal him being a racist on camera, but that just makes her more angry and she calls him a Nazi so he shoots her.
There is death post with music lyrics in orange, flashbacks, and dramatic last words. Sarah films it on camera, starts screaming, Rob starts screaming, everyone else starts screaming. The announcement comes on somehow. I kind of lose track of time here because of that, but by the end of it Sarah runs since she’s got a gun pointed at her. She’s very much not the focus of this scene and has almost no part except to get the stuff that happens on film.
I really love Sarah’s post directly after the kill tag, which opens with, “...and Sarah had caught the whole thing on camera.” I like that, while it’s directly telling you she’s an observer, you as a ready already know this, so it has a striking effect.
THREAD 3 (The Prime Time Of Your Life): Kill thread! Teen mom Eve Walker-Luther (whose surnames I always mix up) arrives at the cliffs. Her posts throughout follow some kind of weird thing where they intersperse her narrative with that of her daughter’s father, which makes it kind of hard to read. I’m not gonna touch too much on him except that he basically is reacting to everything that’s already being explained.
Sarah arrives covered in blood and scratches from panicked flight though the woods. She has an argument with an inner voice that tells her to ‘play her part’, and a hallucinatory monster hand reaches out ‘from the void’ to beckon her into killing essentially. I’m not one for this, it’s a very weird attempt to explain her snapping when I think this outside force just adds a level of excess to it.
Sarah drugs Eve with ketamine in a water bottle, drags her off, binds her to some saplings with Eve’s underwear, and starts torturing her with the scalpel, also talking to Eve’s boyfriend in the meantime. Eve struggles and lets Sarah cut her fatally earlier than intended, and Sarah goes nuts and violently keeps stabbing Eve until he dies. It cuts back to Jack who decides to honor her wishes and raise their daughter.
By this point most of Sarah’s internal stuff is gone except with references to her ‘debut’. Somehow, neither character feels like the focus here. It’s less about them and more about the scene, and while I suppose that’s suitable for Sarah’s intent, I think she loses out by separating from the narrative.
THREAD 4 (No News Is Good News): Lily and Miranda meet up and establish that neither are interested in killing. Sarah comes in and tells the girls that Eve was murdered in front of her. It goes into some of her logic, that because people’s lives are mundane, if she made a name for herself, she’d be famous and go down in history. This is a good development to clarify that she has some kind of logic behind her actions besides ‘the evil voice told me to’.
Sarah attempts to split Miranda and Lily up, but neither are interested in separating because that’s a dangerous plan, even disregarding that it’s a would-be murderer suggesting it, though the announcement has yet to play and reveal Sarah’s actions. They do agree to move somewhere with more cover (this scene takes place at the felled forest) and move out together. Once again, Sarah seems less like a character and more like a force where her actions are just sort of attached to a nametag without a person behind them.
Also props to Outfoxd here. Lily is a sensible figure but a good-hearted one. She isn’t hyper-pragmatic or horribly naïve, but a decent mix of both.
THREAD 5 (Hearing Is Believing): Kill thread 2: Electric Boogaloo! Oh dear.
After an internal narrative elaborating further on following a role, Sarah is revealed as killing Eve when the announcements come on, where she gives a psycho speech to Miranda before stabbing her in the throat with the scalpel. She turns her attention to Lily, but she runs, and Sarah chases her briefly. Lily escapes while Miranda throws the scalpel into Sarah’s back and bleeds out. Sarah mutilates her corpse and then goes off to collect her BKA.
I do not like this scene. I think a killer being revealed and going on the offensive is fine, but I am not enjoying Sarah’s direction here (pun not intended). She clearly doesn’t believe her claims—that she’s doing a performance, that she’s a good person playing a bad character—and is planning how she’ll explain herself when she wins. She gets a lot of pleasure out of stabbing Miranda and generally being menacing. The issue is I think this upfront sudden and extreme bloodlust is much less likeable and makes much less sense. It’s hard to have a character who believes ‘yep, I’m an evil, terrible person who likes hurting people, and I’m okay with that!’ and I think it misses the mark here. She’s not an evil and terrible person, she’s just evil.
As far as the rest of the scene, she has a long and melodramatic soliloquy at Miranda, who doesn’t run despite it taking, from the sound of it, as much as 15-20 seconds to more or less slowly walk up to Miranda while talking. Sarah refers to terror being paralyzing, and it comes off that it’s explaining to the reader why Miranda doesn’t run. It’s awkwardly on-the-nose. Lily thinks of her as a ‘parody of a movie villain’ and I suppose that’s accurate, but I don’t think we’re supposed to think she’s a parody or a pastiche.
Good points; her methods and motives are consistent, she’s not just getting kills however but with specific intent, which is a good thing. Sarah becomes indignant at being stabbed by Miranda, which is obvious hypocrisy that doesn’t need to be pointed out by the narrative. However, I dislike that she carves ‘Selfish Bitch’ onto Miranda’s stomach. She’s using a scalpel, so it makes sense, but it’s also hard to picture. I guess I can see it but it reads as cheesy.
Props to Lily again, as she ties in being a reporter in a less gaudy, character-devouring way. Sarah picks at her over it, and I think it’s a little awkward, but Lily isn’t thinking like that until after Sarah accuses her.
THREAD 5 (The Wrong Tool for the Job): Sarah’s BKA oneshot.
Sarah picks up her reward and is annoyed that it’s a huge sniper rifle because it’s hard to use. Throughout, she continuously dismisses thoughts of her parents, her brother, and her first day at school. I like the direction here better; rather than the part where she likes hurting and killing people, there’s more emphasis on fulfilling a role, and here she’s making it more a conscious choice to reframe the situation in that role, making it more of a (very twisted) coping mechanism. I actually relate to her here more than any other time on the island thus far because it shows cracks in her delusion. She’s still evil and twisted, but she’s a person now, and that kind of awareness by the handler is really important here.
I will credit Sarah for improving my attitude towards her. Repeated lines (‘I’m forgetting something’) are a personal fondness and though it’s a little awkward (how much is the wondering an actual question she’s thinking about?) it’s a weak spot of mine.
THREAD 6 (Heartbeat Symphony): Kill three! Sort of!
First, though, Alice Boucher! Alice is caught off-guard by Sarah and immediately picks up that she is batshit insane, so she claims to be her assistant ‘from Cannes’. Sarah seems to be completely accepting of this because she is batshit insane. There’s no indication that she recognizes Alice as not someone who just got dropped there to help her. This is an interesting development, but also one attached to another turn, which I’ll get into later.
Sarah goes on about props and Brock Mason shows up, so Sarah tries the ketamine bottle again. Alice flashes back to a description of a paleontological discovery by her mom, that humans truly were preyed on (can confirm this find happened) Brock has a flashback to meeting Sarah and remembers her name as getting BKA and calls her on it. He attacks her and Sarah is forced to recall him from school as well, but Alice decides she fears Sarah coming back on Alice enough to defend her, thinking Brock won’t kill her. She knocks him out with a rock.
I am familiar with this scenario already, because I know it was controversial; Sarah tapes Brock to the gun so that if he pulls on it, he will pull the trigger and shoot himself in the head. She tries to torture him by playing Never Have I Ever, but as he tries to break free, he triggers the gun, shoots himself, and dies. Sarah is not credited for this kill; whether she should have been was up for debate. I won’t make my case here. Meanwhile, Alice reluctantly films the scene. ‘Scene’.
Alan Rickhall and Jimmy Robertson come in to find Brock but are too late and hear the gunshot. Alice is still conflicted, Alan refers to players as ‘The Turned’ which is a little dramatic, and then Hilary, Brock’s romantic partner, arrives, and is understandably distraught that Brock was dead. Mia Kuiper comes in and OOC calls dibs on the rifle, which…yeah. Leila Lanford arrives and pulls Hilary to a new thread. Sarah recognizes Chris, her prom date, out on the mountains and runs off with Alice. They leave behind the sniper rifle but take Brock’s handgun.
The big thing for Sarah is the introduction of the black text-voice, which doesn’t ever seem to come up again. It appears to represent Sarah’s ‘normal’ personality trying to tell her ‘crazy personality’ not to attack Alice or kill Brock. I’m not a fan of this mechanism; it’s kind of a ham-fisted way to show internal conflict. Otherwise, it mostly establishes that Sarah is even more delusional.
I like Alice Boucher as well. In just the one thread I get a strong sense of who she is and why she goes along with this crazy killer, and it’s both despicable (she’s selfish enough to let others die so Sarah won’t hurt her) and relatable because she knows it’s wrong but can’t bring herself to be the hero.
THREAD 7 (A Moment Remembered): Kill three. Or is it four? You decide!
Sarah opens with some muses on her reason for loving film; she liked people and liked that film let you learn about and understand a person. It also brings back the ‘I’m forgetting something’ from her oneshot, presumably due to Chris’s presence.
Chris throws a rock at a camera but misses, but Sarah is enraged by this attempted abuse of film equipment and tries to shoot him but leaves the safety on. Chris takes cover, slips around on Sarah, and grabs the gun from her, tackling her and grabbing it. He’s unable to shoot her, though, and she stabs him in the heart with the scalpel. He tries to go at her but collapses and dies. Alice also collapses and panics because she was hoping for Chris to kill her.
Sarah, however, snaps back into reality, realizing once again that these are real people, again with the ‘Forgetting something’ only now she remembers. Alice attempts to shoot her, but Sarah’s sudden breakdown forces her to reconsider. Sarah commands her to shoot her, but reconsiders, deciding instead to hunt down other killers (Specifically Maxwell Lombardi, launcher of a thousand revenge-ships). She shames Alice for her involvement and commands her to help. Alice isn’t sure she buys it and is pretty confident that either way Sarah is still crazy but goes along with it.
I think Sarah’s return to some form of sanity is good in that she is shaky but doesn’t dwell on it, and still has a bit of unhinged-ness here. I think the break could have done with a couple more post cycles though, it seems like she refocuses pretty quickly.
THREAD 8 (Just a Kid, Napping): I like the title here.
The two girls walk in on Tyler Franklin napping in a house. Sarah is tempted to kill him but Alice’s presence restrains her. Annaliese also arrives. Sarah continues fantasizing about killing people but restrains herself (she thinks of killing Annaliese as ‘arousing’ which is…yeah). They discuss Maxwell; there’s a nice note where the other two don’t know which Maxwell they’re looking for. Alice continually restrains Sarah, who seems increasingly annoyed but relents. Anna and Tyler both think they’re lesbians.
The others both seem interested in coming along and Alice is very concerned by this. She makes up a story that Maxwell needs medication that the girls have, and that Sarah can talk to him but more people makes it dangerous. Anna leaves so she doesn’t get dragged into lesbian sexcapades more than anything and Tyler thinks better of it. The girls leave and acknowledge that the other two definitely thought they were lesbians.
I think this scene is a mixed back. The issue is, it’s two very good scene ideas together, but they’re opposites; whimsical thing where two girls are mistaken for lesbians and all the interactions are built off of that, versus a dark and pensive thing where Sarah is strongly tempted to return to the easy way of being uncaring and violent but held in check by Alice as both of them reflect on how their relationship got here. I think I prefer the latter as part of Sarah’s story; it’s more of what I wanted from the last thread, with Sarah not being truly rehabilitated and still very dangerous, but now having someone to tether her that is, to some extent, interested in her remaining functional.
THREAD 9 (Tactic Static): I believe at this point Sarah is adopted by Storyspoiler, who has also been handling Alice. Overall, they’ve been together this far and I think in this scene at least the transition isn’t a problem.
Violet and Sarah are friends and Violet, with her ally Mike Moretti, are understandably defensive. Sarah is now continuously reflecting on Chris’s death, reminding herself of how bad it had been and that she didn’t want to go back to that. She decides to insist Violet take the tapes of her kills with the camera, so she doesn’t have the recordings of her past kills to tempt her to relapse. Mike doesn’t want her to hand off the responsibility to Violet, but Violet agrees and takes them.
Sarah realizes that she has not only done wrong, she has done harm to people, and is ashamed. Alice thinks that Sarah is beginning to truly be human again. Mike lies and directs them to the tunnels for Maxwell and the two go that way.
This scene is good for the two, it makes them feel even more reliant on each other, but now rather than enabling Alice is tempering Sarah, and it’s become healthier. Her interactions with someone who she knows, Violet, puts her back in the place of someone semi-lucid, and it’s an improvement for her. It feels better that she’s still a messed-up person but less whole-heartedly enthusiastic about it.
THREAD 10 (Cruel Justice): Sarah’s death thread. It’s 7 posts but they’re all quite long. Looks like they found Maxwell at the mines anyway. He’s asleep in a wooden building in the mine. Side note; this is I believe the third time Sarah has walked into a building to find a sleeping person.
Fanatic has taken over Sarah again. They are now searching the mines, with Sarah having been discussing her plans to torture Maxwell if she finds him, and she does, with him sleeping on the floor. Maxwell awakes from dreaming about accidentally killing a friend of his from England, and is still awake when Sarah pops in. The two fight, with Maxwell noticing the camera, and catches her off-guard by identifying her and then taunting her while he edges towards his gun, but is surprised by the announcement, especially that Maria Graham was not dead.
Alice becomes concerned and goes to seek out Sarah after some time. She references other wanting to take ‘cruel so-called justice’ on Sarah, which is another soft spot for me, referencing the thread title.
This last post is extremely long; Sarah attacks, but is overwhelmed in close quarters by Maxwell’s martial arts training. Maxwell references justice again but it feels extremely forced. She insults him and he beats her violently, cuts her ankles, then starts stripping her and then stabbing her. He then declares his intent to rape her.
I’m gonna interrupt myself more informally; this is bad writing. Maxwell has no particular reason to do this and is very scummy about it (he calls her a ‘fuckable…little slut’). It’s extremely uncomfortable and serves no meaning for either characters’ storylines, it’s just him wanting to be a bad person because he’s Evil. Whoever had this idea, I hope they know better now. I don’t like it and I don’t think I’m alone here.
Thankfully, Alice comes in, shouting something in French (Google Translate says ‘Fuck you, you psychotic piece of shit’ which seems pretty appropriate). She starts shooting at him with Brock’s gun, and Maxwell decides it’s not worth it and runs.
There’s another recommended listening, this time ‘Strongly Recommended Listening’. I don’t listen to it.
Sarah is dying and delusional, trying to call for her mom. There’s another Strongly Recommended Listening, but this one leads to a video that is no longer available. This time it’s for a flashback to Sarah’s home; her brother is home from active duty because of the circumstances, and her parents embrace. It’s a bit much. Though it's the post after Sarah dies, I also read Alice’s point of view here, where she’s trying to comfort Sarah and ultimately deciding that in spite of ‘justice’ Sarah doesn’t deserve to die from the agonizing wounds inflicted and slits her throat so she bleeds out quickly.
Conclusion Time!
Sarah is a tough one. There's basically no scene she has that's good without a caveat. Her strongest moments are with Alice, especially the last three threads. I appreciate the use of repeated stuff (the scalpel and ketamine, but also 'I'm forgetting something' and a lot of the motifs Alice clings to such as 'We committed a crime together. It ties us.) The big issue is a lot of her stuff is very extreme; how far she goes when she goes nuts borders on absurd, and things like the attempted rape are wholly unpleasant.
The best part of Sarah is when she's on the edge but not totally over, which amounts to maybe half her scenes overall. She copes with the fear of mortality by inventing a story for herself, one where she is immortal in spirit if not in body. I think the focus on that would have been better, but she ends up more developed on the 'mad director' angle which I think is more gimmicky and weaker as an arc. When she's confronted with reality and has to redo her narrative to fit what's happening, I think she feels like she's grown as a person, even after falling so far. She's a messed-up girl who never really recovers but she makes an effort when she crosses one line too many. I just wish that more of that had been emphasized instead of the torture stuff.
Overall, Sarah's functional. She's maybe better, perhaps ironically, as a supporting role, seen from the metaphorical lens of other characters. From her stuff with Sarah, I think Alice Boucher is a great viewpoint and I hope to see more of her along the way this Readathon. I appreciated her role in Sarah's story both as enabling and genuinely supporting and feeling the growth between the two from how it started to something like a real bond was one of the best parts of Sarah's redemption. I wouldn't recommend Sarah but she's also got some actual good stuff especially by the end.