That post about the LSOH focus-group ending made literally everyone in my friend circle rewatch or listen to it and now we’re all talking about it. I’ve read a lot about it – everyone seems to have strong feelings about which ending is the right ending and has written an essay on the topic. Predictably I have Opinions.
When your cute pulp scifi musical is explicitly about how the desperate, good-hearted poor have no shot at social mobility and are slowly being crushed under the status quo of capitalism, it’s really smug to say that the moralistic ending is required of the story. And you can’t convince me that classist assumptions about the inherent immorality of the working class poor aren’t a factor in people’s judgmental attitudes here because I’ve read too many comments in the last day about how Audrey ~isn’t so innocent herself because she wants to live in a nice fucking house. And I had no idea people felt so strongly about the moral necessity of saving domestic abusers when they accidentally overdose on their own drugs.
It’s worth noting that Seymour’s speciality in life is plants. He clearly devotes a lot of his time to studying them. Being able to succeed at the things you invest your time and work into is ~The American Dream~. It’s the promise of capitalism that keeps people exploited in a system where you have to exploit others to succeed or be the person who is exploited, and that’s what the story is allegorical for from start to finish. Even as the story develops, starting with feeding the plant his own blood but being forced to sacrifice other people, or to sacrifice himself.
So I mean, maybe it’s fair to say that even if you very reluctantly let people die to appease an extra-terrestrial Venus flytrap, you deserve to die, but this is a fantasy and it’s not Seymour’s fault he was being exploited in the first place so I think after learning his lesson about exploitation that’s enough knowledge and he doesn’t have to die to complete the journey. Seymour’s not less moral than other people are. He just has fewer options.