Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-6500074-20130829103240/@comment-14909251-20140207023526

BenRG wrote: I think that's why Roman was so calm when Blake had a blade to his throat - he's dealt with enough killers in his time that he knew she was unlikely to be able to kill him in cold blood. In a fight? Well, that's another matter, which is why he didn't hold back with her. Nah, that's just Roman being Roman. Seems to me that he is a bit of a psychopath.

82.12.156.248 wrote: after all you don't just convert people like Blake who have lived a pacifistic life until five years ago (as far as we know at least) into cold-blooded killers at the click of the finger. Guess there is a lot of tendency towards hyperbole on this subject. I doubt she was living a "pacifistic life" prior to the White Fang's turn towards violence and I do not think she ever became a "cold-blooded killer" per se. Given her ragged appearance during the flashback, she was probably a street kid and/or orphan living under hard circumstances. This, to me, means she likely committed petty crimes as a child simply to survive and sometimes just out of discontent with her station in life.

Violence was probably not something from which she refrained in her early years as frustration with an inability to improve her situation by other means would make violence an inevitable recourse. None of it would have been brutal or malicious, but simply her getting hot-headed over something and lashing out. The White Fang would have been presumably involved in her life from a very early age and she would have grown accustomed to seeing them as protectors and friends. She may have come to see them as a surrogate family.

Her becoming a dedicated activist likely only made her propensity for hot-headed and combative behavior worse, though it may have helped mitigate any violent tendencies. Failure of such peaceful efforts to gain headway would have made the White Fang's turn towards violence more easily accepted by the young and impressionable Blake. At first she probably would have been a somewhat enthusiastic participant in moderately violent "direct action" that would essentially be her returning to her early delinquency except in more virtuous trappings.

What would follow is essentially an escalation. Actions would become increasingly violent, she would find herself confronted with it more and more until at some point a person ends up dead. Maybe one of her own gets hurt and she kills the responsible party in the heat of the moment, perhaps being under threat of getting killed herself. At some point it ceases to be about protecting someone during an action or protecting herself and more about insuring the safety of her people.

The key is the longer she stayed in the harder it made it for her to resist the pull towards violence. Every violent action dulls her to it further and further until it almost becomes second nature. At that point a sort of listlessness sets in as the initial adrenaline rush and anger fade. Regardless of whether the people she killed would have deserved it or not the whole thing would weigh on her conscience. Blake begins to see where she is headed and where the White Fang is headed and realizes this is not the person she wants to become.

Most important point to remember here is that she broke away. Even if she was an assassin with multiple kills, Blake left to become a better person. She would struggle to avoid regressing, but her resolve to redeem herself would be just as powerful an influence. Take good decent kids then throw them into a warzone and you will make killers out of them in time. It does not mean they are killers by nature except to the extent that is in everyone's nature to be a killer.