I am one of those viewers who avoided it because the promos and snippets made me believe that it would be about one thing–teenage angst in the middle of some sort of crisis, full of all the tropes and cliche characters you can imagine. I genuinely love the CW but they do stick pretty firmly in their wheelhouse. I imagined Clarke as a “heroine” who has traits pulled from Buffy, Katniss and Bella Swan–complete with the exasperating love triangle with two guys (lolz, this statement and the reality of the show) and that the conflict the world was under would fall into the vague “humans destroyed the world for reasons that are never fully explained and it’s really only important to know that your heroine will save it.”
LOL!
I first heard about ‘The 100’ when outrage was pouring out of social media over Lexa’s death. I’m not even on social media and I still heard about it. At first, I presumed it was a cut and dried case of the showrunners being jerks (OUAT has desensitised me to that), so I wasn’t too interested. But I kept hearing about it and eventually the to-do piqued my curiosity. Plus, it was on Netflix, so I thought, “Why not?”
I liked it straightaway. The writing was strong, the stakes were high and it subverted expectations at every turn. A male lead bad-boy whose primary relationship was with…not a lover, but a sister! A female technical genius. A little girl who was a murderer. The show was also wonderfully thought provoking on issues of morality when survival is at stake.
My favourite season is probably S2. If I had to break it down, I’d say it was the second half of S2, the first half of S3 and the first half of S1. The AI storyline didn’t work for me. It was kind of a cool concept, but some parts didn’t make sense. Why weren’t the grounders more technologically advanced if Becca the genius was their first commander? Why didn’t the chip impact scientific knowledge to the commander? For me, the show is at its best when the sci-fi aspects are part of the background and the focus is on character dynamics when negotiating impossible situations. I hope S4 returns to this.
Which brings me to…Clexa. I feel like you can’t really talk about The 100 without bringing up Clexa and, invariably, the “bury your gay” trope.
Very true. I would go further to suggest that this may well be The 100’s lasting legacy, which is bittersweet. Bitter because it’s a good show and probably deserves to be remembered for more than perpetrating a horrible trope. Sweet because some good things (the Lexa Pledge, funds raised for at-risk LGBTQ teens) did emerge from the furore, which may have changed television’s treatment of queer characters for the better.
I have many more thoughts about…Clexa, Bellamy and other things. But I’ll write them out tomorrow when my brain has recharged.