Hello people. This idea for a blog popped into my head a few days ago and it wouldn’t leave me alone so I had to write this. If you’ve read my other blogs, you know I write about Sam a lot. This blog is also about Sam. If you can’t tell already, Sam is my favorite character EVER. Usually when I watch shows, especially comedy shows, I could care less what happens to the characters in the long term or who dates who. Victorious is an example of such a show. I like some of the characters because they’re funny or seem like good people, but it really doesn’t matter to me how things turn out for those characters in the long run. The Sam character on iCarly is different. The way the writers have portrayed Sam throughout the series has made me root for her. Ever since I got into the show back in November of 2010, Sam was my favorite character. iOMG is what really drew me to her though. Before iOMG I still liked Sam a lot. I saw the butt kicking take no crap side of Sam and I thought it was awesome. iOMG showed me a different side of Sam. It showed me that below her tough exterior she’s an insecure girl who’s capable of falling in love but is absolutely terrified of facing those feelings. At that point I wanted to know everything I could about Sam and how other people saw her. So I read a ton of fan fiction and character analysis on iCarly forums. I also went back and watched older episodes like iKiss and iReunite With Missy and saw that side of her was always there. Everything I read and saw made me love Sam even more. The more I learn about Sam the more I want her to be happy at the end of iCarly. iOMG made clear that only Seddie will make Sam happy. If Dan doesn’t make Seddie endgame, he’s screwing Sam over and that would piss me off to no end. This blog shows how Sam’s life started pretty bad but got better over the course of the series through character development. It concludes that the last step in making Sam end the series with a good life is to make Seddie endgame.
To show where this is going, I want to examine what type of character Sam is. What do I mean by “type” of character? Well, I can’t really explain what I mean by that in words, so I’m going to use examples by briefly examining what “type” the other main characters are and then do the same for Sam, except in more detail. First, let’s look at Carly. She’s basically a Mary Sue type. Sure, over the years we’ve seen her flaws, but as a general matter, Mary Sue is a good description. This type is a magnet for the opposite sex, very happy-go-lucky, almost always gets what she wants, and the one time she doesn’t, it becomes a huge deal (in this case the cause of the main plot for iLook Alike). The character development for this “type” is minimal, as it has been. This character starts happy, ends happy, and doesn’t have any major issues throughout the series. Let’s look at Spencer now. Spencer is just a wacky, funny, caring character. He seems pretty static as far as character development goes. In the end, he’ll probably stay the way he is, possibly with a permanent girlfriend. Then you have Gibby. He’s the weirdo/outcast of the group. He’s weird, random, and not likely to change. Again, there’s minimal character development here. (Going from running around shirtless to saying “Gibbeah” seems to be the only change.) What about Freddie? Here’s where it gets interesting. With Freddie, the analysis becomes more important, in large part because it can’t be completely separated from Sam’s analysis. While I can’t completely separate Freddie from Sam in this “type” analysis, I’m going to try to do so as much as possible for the sake of simplicity. Freddie is very important for this because the way the writers developed him has implications for what’s going to happen to Sam in the end, which of course is what this blog is about. Where Freddie started and how he got to where he is today isn’t as important as where he is now/destined to end up. So all I’m going to say about his character development is that Sam seems to be the sole reason he is the way he is (as in he has a backbone and can stand up for himself). Besides that, I’m just going to look at where he is now. Right now (and most likely at the end of the series) Freddie is big and strong, but he is a “nice guy” who cares deeply for both his friends and would never do anything to hurt them. iLove You showed us that he not only cares about Sam, but he’s in love with her. He clearly understands Sam, why she is the way she is, and accepts her. Anyone in his place that doesn’t understand Sam would have run away a long time ago. All of this becomes very important later. Now I’m going to try to analyze what “type” of character Sam is. There are a lot of things that could describe Sam for this purpose, but no term is perfect. Sam is just so complex that her character evades a perfect description. A lot of people might use the term broken. I can see why people would use this term, considering how her environment has affected her. I really don’t like that term, because it implies something is fundamentally wrong with Sam. That is simply not the case. Nothing crucial to Sam’s personality needs to change for her to be happy. In other words, her personality doesn’t need to change. Many who use the term “broken” also use the term “fix” to describe what might happen with Sam. For me, the term “fix” implies that Sam changes who she is. That is not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Sam shouldn’t have to change who she is to be happy. There are some things about Sam’s life that have changed and I think will change that will give Sam the happy ending she deserves without changing who she is. To describe what “type” of character Sam is, I’m going to say that Sam is “hurting”, and that over the course of the show she has “healed” and will continue to do so. I’m not exactly crazy about using those words because I don’t think they convey what I’m trying to say, but I can’t think of any better words to convey the message I’m trying to get across. So I’m going to say that she is hurting and she will be healed over the course of the show. That “healing” is partway through at this point in the show and I think it will be complete by the series finale. At the beginning of the show, Sam’s life was pretty bad. She didn’t think her mother loved her, and the only people she felt cared about her were Carly and Spencer. She probably would have gone hungry if Spencer didn’t let her eat at his place. Over course of the show, things got better for Sam. I’m going to go over each step of things getting better for her in the next paragraph, but for now I’m just going to say that her life is almost where it will be at the end of the series. I think there will be a happy ending for Sam and for all the other characters as well. For Sam, I think the last step in giving Sam the happy ending she deserves will be Seddie happening. We all know Sam is in love with Freddie, so at this point the only happy ending would be Seddie.
This paragraph identifies points in the series that that really say a lot about Sam. It shows that as time went on, Sam’s life got better. If one follows that trend to the end of series the logical result is a happy ending, in other words, Seddie. Some of the moments show that Sam is a good person deep down, some show her life getting better, some point to insecurities, and some simply drive home the point that her life is pretty bad at the beginning. Before I continue, I want to point something out. All of the moments that show how bad her life is occur at the beginning of the series. The latest episode in that category is near the end of season 2. So from season 3 onwards, it’s all positive. I’ll start by summarizing the situation in iPilot. At this point the only people she felt cared about her were Carly and Spencer. She was eating food out of their apartment to avoid starving to death. As much as she cares about Carly, she also compares herself to her “perfect” best friend. We’re talking about the “pretty” one who has all the boys chasing her, she gets perfect grades, and stays out of trouble. Being compared to someone like that would be hard for anyone, but is especially hard for Sam, who didn’t exactly grow up in a loving environment. The first episode I want to mention is iHate Sam’s Boyfriend. We all know what happened there. It looked like someone actually loved Sam for herself, but he turned out to be cheater who was using Sam to get to Carly. We all know Jonah was a sack of crap and Sam deserves way better than him. But this episode simply drives home the point that Sam’s life was pretty crappy in the beginning. Specifically this pointed to her love life, in which Sam hadn’t seen a boyfriend since the 5th grade. I’ll just briefly mention that sad face she made in iWin a Date after Carly said “it must be awful to love someone who doesn’t love you back”. If you want a full explanation about this, you can check out my blog about it by clicking this link:
http://icarly.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:3cooldog92/A_Very_Important_Moment_in_iWin_a_Date_Revisited
The gist of it is that while on the surface it was just another example of the writers using Creddie for comedic purposes, if you look closely you can see Sam make a sad face, and she looks sad because she feels unloved in general.
The next episode worth mentioning is iKiss. I think we all remember that awesome episode, but I’ll review what happened for the sake of making my point. Sam pranked Freddie by putting a dead fish in his locker. This was part of their “game” that they had been playing since the 6th grade. Freddie pranked her back by handcuffing her to Gibby. After she was released, she vowed to get him back. She ended up doing so when she found out he’d never kissed anyone. Sam revealed his secret on iCarly. When she was doing it, she thought it was just a continuation of the “game”. Now, there are Sam haters out there that will point a ton of things that Sam has done throughout the series to “prove” that she’s evil or undeserving of happiness. Everything Sam has done was meant for comedy and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Telling everyone that Freddie has never kissed anyone is the only exception. What makes it different? The difference is the other characters (namely Carly) took it seriously. That’s how we know this wasn’t for comedy. When Carly tells Sam how much she hurt Freddie, you can see by the look on her face that she feels bad. Until Carly told her how bad she hurt Freddie, she just thought what she did was part of the “game” because she didn’t realize otherwise. If the look on her face isn’t enough proof that she feels bad, her actions also prove that. Sam haters will say she made up with Freddie to please Carly. Like everything else the Sam haters say, this is simply a load of garbage. She went above and beyond what would be needed to please Carly. To please Carly, all she had to do was go apologize, since Carly couldn’t have contemplated her doing anything else to make things right. But she went as far as admitting she never kissed anyone either on iCarly to deflect the ridicule. Then she went to apologize to Freddie ON HER OWN. Carly never told her to do any of this. Carly thought nothing would fix the problem. Clearly Sam wanted to make things right, whether Carly was involved or not. Then they kissed. There we saw the first real sign of hope that the greatest ship in the history of the world had a chance. What does this say as far as Sam’s development goes? Well, it proves that Sam is a good person deep down, and I guess you could say her life got better since she had her first kiss. The next important episode is iMake Sam Girlier. Sam had a crush on Pete and she got Carly to teach her how to act more girly and also to dress her up so she looks more girly as well. Normally, someone who does this could reasonably be called shallow. Sam isn’t a normal case, however. A girl who is willing to change herself to score a date is shallow. But Sam felt she HAD to become more girly for ANY guy to like her. This doesn’t mean she’s shallow. It means she’s insecure. It means she has low self-esteem, at least when it comes to dating. In the end Pete liked her butt kicking nature. Since they’re not still together in the next episode, one can infer that they broke up before the next episode. While we’ll never know for sure why they broke up, but my guess is that while Pete liked how Sam could fight, he wanted her to dress girly and when she went back to dressing more Samish, he dumped her. What does this say? Well, it highlights Sam’s insecurities for one thing. Plus the whole love life thing is kind of echoed from iHate Sam’s Boyfriend. I also think there’s a (implicit) stand-alone message that isn’t really attached to the episode that has implications for later (in other words Seddie). The message is that Sam shouldn’t have to change to be loved. Let’s go forward a few episodes to iTwins. This episode is really interesting. We find out Sam has an identical twin, Melanie. Melanie is a lot like Carly. Personally, I like Sam WAY better than Melanie. I’m suspicious of the “perfect” characters of any show. I always get the feeling they’re hiding something. At least with Sam, you get what you see. Anyway, while most of us probably like Sam better, it’s reasonable to believe that Sam sees Melanie as another Carly: Someone she feels she can never live up to. Again, this ties into her insecurities. An analysis from Sam’s perspective wouldn’t be complete without discussing Melanie kissing Freddie, now would it? It’s hard to say if Sam was jealous. Her reaction to the news could be interpreted in any way. iTwins came out 2 months before iSpeed Date, the absolute latest point where Sam could have realized her feelings for Freddie. She could have realized her feeling much earlier in iKiss, or even before that. There were Seddie hints back in season 1. Given how close it was to latest point, I’ll just say that it’s more likely than not that she was jealous. Even if she wasn’t jealous, the fact that her sister was getting guys and she wasn’t brings back the bad love life point, as well as plays to the insecurities Sam has. There is some good news at this point though. The good news is that iTwins is really the last episode where we can see negative. Everything from here on out is positive. Things are really starting to look up for Sam at this point. From here on we’ll be seeing Sam’s good side/soft side as well as seeing her life improve.
iSpeed Date doesn’t really matter for what I’m trying to say, even though it’s a major episode for the development of Seddie so I won’t say anything about that. iSaved Your Life is up next. Here we see Sam’s good side, although it might not appear that way at first. Freddie saved Carly’s life and the “love” she felt was really admiration. Sam said it perfectly. Carly didn’t love Freddie, she loved what he did. Was Sam jealous? We already know she had feelings for Freddie at this point, but it’s very possible that she was suppressing those feelings, hiding them even from herself. So it’s very possible that she didn’t feel jealousy. Whether she was jealous or not really doesn’t matter in the end. Sam saw their relationship for what it was. It wasn’t based on love, it was based on admiration. To be honest, I don’t think Carly knows what love truly is with the way she goes through boyfriends like Spencer goes through girlfriends. Anyway, that admiration was going to fade eventually. The longer they stayed together, the more painful and damaging the breakup would have been. If it went on long enough, it might have destroyed their ability to go back to being friends. Sam saw this, and she acted before any permanent damage was done. Sam cared about her friends and didn’t want to see them get hurt. She probably saved their friendship. If she was jealous, jealousy is not what drove her to do what she did. Sam would never destroy one of Carly’s relationships if she thought that relationship would make Carly happy. If it were the other way around, Carly just might throw Sam under a bus if it served her. The point is it’s not the other way around. If there is one thing Sam is, it’s loyal. Sam is the most loyal friend Carly could ask for. Sam intervened because she thought (and she thought right) that if Creddie continued it would hurt everyone, so she did something to prevent that. Sam did Carly and Freddie a HUGE favor. Sam’s “bacon” comment simply hastened the demise of something that never should have existed to begin with.
Fast forward to iSam’s Mom. In this episode we finally meet Sam’s mom. Sam had referred to her a lot in past. Based on the information we got from those references, as well as what we see in this episode we see that Sam’s relationship with her mother is well, not the best. Everyone is product of their environment, and that is true for Sam as well. A lot of what Sam is today a result of the relationship she has with her mother. Sam didn’t think her mother loved her until the end of this episode. What does this episode say for Sam? Well, her life continues to improve now that she knows her mother loves her. I’m going to skip iOMG for now and go right to iParty With Victorious. We find out that Sam’s dad left her sometime before iPilot. So that’s one more person that abandoned her, giving her another reason not to trust people. This happened before iPilot, so this really doesn’t affect the trend of Sam’s life getting better.
Now for the huge moments of iOMG and the Seddie arc, starting of course with iOMG. iOMG is my favorite episode simply because it showed me a side of Sam I never really saw before. This is the real deal here. Jonah, Shane, and Pete were all crushes that Sam forgot about eventually. The promo confirmed she was in love, and she admitted it both in iCan’t Take It and iLove You. You’d think a girl like Sam wouldn’t feel love like that. But she does. Beneath her rough exterior she can fall in love. She’s human just like everyone else. But she also wants to hide that side of herself. Every time she’s shown that side in the past she’s been hurt or even heartbroken. She doesn’t want that to happen again so she suppressed her feelings and denied everything. Then in that last scene she couldn’t take it anymore and all her feelings came out in one kiss. Now her secret was out. Anything else I say about iOMG will just be me going on about how great Seddie is, so I’ll just move on to iLost My Mind. Let’s be honest about why Sam really checked herself into the mental institution. Sam wasn’t crazy, and she knew it. She didn’t go to Trouble Waters because she thought she was insane and needed help. She checked into Troubled Waters to hide. She went there to avoid facing Freddie and the rejection she was sure was in store for her. Remember when Freddie asked “Can we talk about the kiss?”? She suggested they never talk about it. She thought for sure Freddie would reject her and tried to avoid facing that. She didn’t want to be left heartbroken yet again. Her insecurities were the main reason she was sure she would be rejected. Right up until the kiss in iLost My Mind, her insecurities told her she would be rejected. Remember after the kiss she asked “You mean that?”? Her insecurities still lingered after he confirmed he likes her back. As much as I loved iDate Sam and Freddie and iCan’t Take It, they don’t really apply to what I’m saying, so I’ll skip those two. Now it's time to look at iLove You. At the beginning of iLove You things seemed really great for Sam (Freddie too). The last piece of the puzzle was in place. She was complete. So why the step back? I think there are two main reasons Seddie broke up. One involves the show and the storyline and the other involves real life considerations of Dan’s. The reason in the show is they don’t have anything in common and even though they loved each other they felt like the odds were stacked against them. The real life reasons that caused Dan to break them up are more compelling, but still insufficient. Dan wanted to break up Seddie by fair means or foul simply so he could return to the old dynamics between the characters. The reason I say that is insufficient is because unlike Creddie, Seddie doesn’t require a huge change in the way the characters interact with each other to work.
Okay, I’m done with the analysis. So where does that leave us? What’s the answer to the question in the title? Well, as I have shown above, over the course of the show Sam’s life has gotten better, and we’ve seen glimpses of her soft side in the process. The Seddie breakup sent Sam one step backwards as far as achieving a happy ending. It seems that since Sam and Freddie are in love with each other, the only happy ending would be a Seddie ending. Anything else would leave Sam and Freddie less than happy and incomplete. Both Sam and Freddie deserve to end iCarly happy. Seddie is a way for both Sam and Freddie to be happy. I think Dan will give them the ending they deserve. There are of course, Sam haters that would hate such an ending with all their hearts, but unfortunately for them, the Sam character wasn’t meant to be hated, she was meant to be “healed” or fulfilled . Again, I don’t think that term is ideal for what I’m trying to say. Hell, it’s barely adequate. But it’s the best word I there is to describe what I’m trying to say. To summarize, Seddie would be the only happy ending for Sam and Freddie. Dan could arrange for the other characters to have a happy ending separately. I think Dan will give all the characters the happy ending, and that includes Seddie.
Wow. Thanks for reading this. I’ve never worked so harder a blog than I’ve worked on this one. I’m at over 4000 words and I’m on my 6th page. I wrote this in 3 sittings. This one lasted 5 hours, and the other two lasted for at least 3 hours each. That means I’ve spent 11 or 12 hours on this total. I’m sorry for any grammar errors. I did my best to correct them, but I’ve it’s almost 7:00 PM where I live and I’ve been awake since noon yesterday. So I’ve been awake for almost 31 hours. I hope you got as much out of this blog reading it as I have writing it.