i maintain that both helen and elias are characters that exist to make you ask yourself when does the punishment fit the crime.
with helen you have like, the struggling with the picture of a perfect victim being broken or symphatizing with someone who was really quite a bad person and trying to make sense of that; whereas with elias the tragedy was more like, he was really still very young and it was just a ton of wasted potential in terms of him now not being able to grow as a person.
could elias have been a better person if given the chance? does the crime of being middle class and sort of entitled and coasting through life with the help of money and the privilege of daddy’s status deserve the punishment of being killed and worn as a skin suit?
is feeling guilty for the death of a woman immoral if the woman was a bad person? did she deserve everything and anything bad that happened to her? is the tragedy that you felt bad for her, or that you can’t feel bad for her anymore, or that you wanted her punished but not like this? how do you separate yourself from the senseless violence of it when you feel personally responsible?
do horrible things only matter if they’re done to innocent people?
can you escape the horrors of capitalism even with all that privilege, and should we care if someone with all that privilege gets killed?
how much privilege is too much?
how much participation with capitalism is too much to be refused rehabilitation?
how do you know the person was a lost cause if they’re now dead without any push from anyone to figure out they should change?