emma.dilemma

i find starkey’s death and his character arc as a whole really interesting the more i think about it. in my experience reading undivided for the first time and getting to his death, i was kinda left with this “…that’s it??” feeling. it felt super anticlimactic—and i think that was the point. since he was such a major antagonist and also literally nicknamed the ‘bloodthirsty lord of storks’ iirc, you’d expect him to die in some extravagant way, like in some intense battle against the juvey-cops or during a harvest camp liberation. but as we know, that wasn’t even close to what happened. he quite literally begged connor to kill him, which seemed very out of character, because up until that point we had known him to be very arrogant and confident in himself, e.g. viewing himself as a god. in that moment when he realized he was about to be unwound, he completely dropped the act. also, as soon as he was introduced in unwholly we find out that despite his cunning and the charming facade he always flaunts, starkey is a very insecure person who has felt unwanted his entire life due to the fact that he was storked. he finds fulfillment in becoming leader of the stork club, but somewhere along the line his club morphs into something more like a cult and goes completely off the rails (side note i am aware his intentions from the beginning were to overthrow connor’s leadership but i don’t think he intended to start a *cult* from the beginning, if that makes sense). when he felt he had control over everyone, he started to get very overconfident in himself and his judgement, so then he made an alliance with the clappers, which eventually gave him away to proactive citizenry and landed him on the lady lucrezia with all the other kids awaiting their unwinding. so, circling back to his actual death, it represents the fact that even though he made himself out to be this larger-than-life leader, in the end he was nothing but a coward that hid behind a mask and manipulated others to hide his own insecurities.