MURDER Without Motive: The Fascinating Narrator of Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees

Comments · 282

• HA

  @hasturthekinginyellow5003 · 1 year ago

  One thing that is surprisingly overlooked is that Sam never seeks the validation of others, she doesn&apos;t even sees other people as people BUT, while in the woods, Samantha seeks the validation of another: the bear.<br><br>She introduces herself to it, she tries to befriend it and ultimately she follows it&apos;s steps, the only thing Samantha ever saw as an equal was a wild animal.

  1.3K

• MA

  @Manticorn · 1 year ago

  I thought this story was a clever use of anthropomorphic animals. Sam literally has the murderous instincts of a bear, still trying to fit in to polite society, and it seems that Lola, in her old age, knew and accepted the natural order too, despite their society trying to ignore it. Very sad world the author has built.

  1.7K

• JE

  @jessilynallendilla5014 · 1 year ago

  &quot;the closet thing,&quot; thing, she doesn&apos;t even see Lola as a person

  581

• PO

  @PotatoPatatoVonSpudsworth · 1 year ago (edited)

  Nigel being more of a &quot;typical&quot; serial killer really helps emphasize all the ways in which Sam isn&apos;t. I think you&apos;d call her specific flavour of psychosis &quot;high-functioning,&quot; as she&apos;s able to keep it entirely separate from herself and her identity. She is simultaneously more alien and less monstrous than others of her ilk, as she doesn&apos;t enjoy causing pain or getting attention. The actual moment of murder is kept simple, clean, and fast. She doesn&apos;t seem to even particularly savour it. Instead it&apos;s almost like a self-care routine, something you do because you need to, not because you want to.<br><br>It makes her very interesting, but also very unusual. It&apos;s important that folks don&apos;t walk away from this story believing that people like her exist outside of fiction. While certainly one or two surely have throughout history, it requires too specific a mix of internal and external factors to create someone capable of behaving as she does.

  686

• AW

  @Awaken_Trash_Panda · 1 year ago

  “there’s a good soul in Nigel, unlike with Sam” <br>I feel like that statement would be even more true if you were removed to the word “good”<br>“there’s a soul in Nigel, unlike with Sam”

  269

• TH

  @thomasjones7006 · 1 year ago

  That bear is so evil, mentally i renamed her Winnie the Shit

  646

• _N

  @_NIKOS9_NIKOS · 1 year ago

  Honestly, I personally do not view Lola&apos;s death as all that tragic considering she is partially responsible for alot of it. She admits that she knew Sam was a serial killer way before Nigel moved in with her and never did anything about it because Sam was her &quot;friend&quot;.<br>Like, if you take a step back this is beyond F up. Imagine being complacent in SEVERAL murders, just because you are friends with the killer

  788

• GE

  @GetUpGetUpGetUp · 1 year ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWHTeM0cLJQ&amp;t=780">13:00</a> I actually view Nigel more negatively because of his redeeming qualities. It feels like Sam was always going to be this but Nigel willingly traveled this path. We see with the death of his mother that he had empathy, he had the capacity to care about other people. Despite this he still brutally murdered innocent people, disfigured their bodies and then public displayed them. He knew that that would hurt people and more than just intellectually, he personally understood pain and grief. He chose to cause that suffering anyways, not out of a deep compulsion but out of a desire for attention. <br><br>I&apos;m not saying Sam is good person, far from it. If Sam wanted to become a better person it would take a herculean effort to overcome her nature. For Nigel all it would take is the barest restraint.<br><br>EDIT: Typos and tense corrections

  449

• МА

  @Малэволензэ · 1 year ago

  I&apos;m surprisingly pleased with how the story developed and how Sam manages to be at her most frightening when she&apos;s showing the ropes to Nigel right before blasting his peanut off. How she reveals just how alien the concepts of morality and emotions are to her, and how she really doesn&apos;t need any reason nor shows any initiative to stop her evil ways. I think that if the reader comes out loathing and fearing Samantha Strong at the end of the story, <i>the writer has successfully done his job.</i>

  441

• HN

  @hnaw1360 · 1 year ago

  Find it so simply cool how she&apos;s the only predatory animal in the entire book. It&apos;s not some kind of MASSIVE thing but it&apos;s a cool tiny detail.

  518

• AR

  @arcanonn · 1 year ago

  One point I love about Sam’s character/circumstances is her job. She owns a hardware store passed down from her parents. Not only does this job let her get away with carrying around her tools for her killings and help her broken engine ruse hold up until the very end, but it suggests something about Sam that makes her seem all the more put-together, or ‘neat-and-tidy’, as she’d say.<br><br>She says at one point that it was her parent’s shop, and that she was out traveling for a long while before she decided to come back and take over the place. To me, this suggests that she figured that she could finally set up a stable location with all the ideal factors mentioned above to get away with her murders.<br><br>Everyone in Woodbrook would know her and her family well, driving suspicion away from her as her family would be well-known and respected in the community, it could store all of the materials needed for her murders, it was close by the city, which is her preferred hunting grounds, and, she would be very familiar with her surroundings and the people who may grow suspicious of her over time, which I think she’d find beneficial. Also, as she mentions in the first few pages of the comic, Woodbrook is a quiet town that hasn’t had a murder occur in over 40 years. No one would suspect a killer to come out of there.<br><br>In addition to that, there are a few more questions raised by whatever Sam was doing before she took over the shop. Had she been traveling the world to find a good spot to settle down and find a stable environment to commit her murders? Was she running from place to place after killing people in her more inexperienced days before returning to Woodbrook to lay low and stick to one method of killing? We don’t know.<br><br>I know the author intends to write a prequel comic detailing Sam’s earlier days, so I’m fairly interested in seeing if those are answered there. Excellent video ^_^

  511

• SU

  @suncricket · 1 year ago

  Sam&apos;s line of &quot;how could you do that to her&quot; to Nigel is both cold and poignant. If Nigel hadn&apos;t gone out of his way to kill people, likely neither he nor Lola would have ended up on Sam&apos;s kill list.

  90