Jaycee Woods

Recently adding to the draft for Boudica and The Butcher, Boudica confessed to him, “I love you.” While this was already evident through her actions, choices, and inner monologue, she verbalized it for the first time. Given her propensity towards the verbal, this exception of not saying until much later adds weight to her confession.

As she is often under strict discipline, requiring permission to speak, she has an atypical filter that prevents the utterance of her every random thought as if it were important. Her inner monologue often expressed her hesitation to burden him with her verbalizing her thoughts. Several times he explicitly denies her speech with an instruction to think so she can organize her thoughts with her silence only broken later when she begs permission to speak. Thus, this sharing of her deeply emotional secret verbally makes her inability to suppress saying it a meaningful statement.

In light of this I thought she deserved a direct response from him. While my subconscious reflex was “I know,” that was Harrison Ford’s deviation from the script in Star Wars. Ford has explained his thought process of being true to the character by saying something different, less naturalistic in the statistical average sense. Thus, I had The Butcher reply, “I understand and I’m sorry.”

Understanding is more than awareness of a discreet fact as it is within context (“Je comprends” vs. “Je sais”). His knowledge of her feelings is within the context of the war and what the war has done to him. As a result, he is sorry; sorry that she feels that way about him and that he can’t reciprocate. This latter because at that time he doesn’t love himself in light of what he has become (figuratively a revenant). His apology to her is exceptional as he has never apologized in the story for any of the horrible things he has done.

In the end (not yet drafted), Boudica will be successful in redeeming him when he is able to say that he loves her as then he would also love himself and see himself as worthy of living after the war despite the things he chose to do to end the war.