This is from an old ask that I probably already answered long before: why are the 100 not heroes?  Note: this is just my considered and rambling opinion, feel free to agree/disagree on your own blogs.  

The 100 come from a largely autocratic/fascist way of life with a top-down society that only benefited the most powerful, useful (and, even then, not much).  The 100 themselves were problematic misfits who, once on the ground, resorted to an almost primal survival system that involved bullying, threats, withholding food and physical violence. They destroyed a grounder village and Finn would later murder 18 in another village. They tortured Lincoln.  Even if you try to justify their behaviour as defensive, they still acted against common sense and murdered at every opportunity (this includes Mt Weather).  Anya, shot in the back.  The mass incineration of soldiers.  The mass-murdering of Lexa’s protection forces (in an effort to steal land and terrorise the locals). Bellamy openly murdering two messengers.  They offered nothing to the coalition they joined, never tried to integrate or have a better understanding of grounders, seeing themselves as superior. Their ambassador (Clarke) manipulating the grounder leader to change her laws in order to benefit her own people, Jaha aligning himself with Alie and helping her subjugate and kill grounders (even if under her control, he, unlike Raven, never fought it). Lincoln’s murder.  Octavia’s turn to assassinate grounder leaders, including her poisonous judgement and killing of Luna (who was, conveniently villainised by the writers) and her offensive assumption of the Commander title. Later in series 4, they would have left all of the grounders out to die, taking the grounder’s bunker (and origin story) for themselves. They basically helped wipe out all of grounder culture – and their leadership in just under a year.  With no obvious remorse.  

This show centres its story around the sky people, making them the protagonists so we see things (mostly) from their point of view. We learn to like Clarke and Raven and Monty, etc. We like them on an individual level, but they are very much of our own society that rarely acknowledges how racist we can be, how indifferent to suffering, how inured to a oligarchic state we are, or does much about it.  

On The 100, the sky people represent the lowest common denominator in survival while believing they are the most advanced society.  The Grounders were more often than not, portrayed as savages which made ‘the 100 as heroes’ seem palatable. It really isn’t.  When Lexa ascended to a point of importance on the show, it looked like Grounders might have their day and be treated with some equality in the narrative.  Of course, this didn’t happen. 

The show continues to return to Clarke and the others (since the show is about them) as the ‘hero protagonists’ but rarely if ever allows itself to question whether they really are heroes (’maybe there are no good guys’).  Bellamy, in particular is highlighted the most in this, as his murderous actions are swept under every rug and he is given a ‘redemption’ that he does not earn (and is now labeled by JR as ‘valiant’).  Clarke, too, is given more consideration even though she has been responsible for killing more Grounders than anyone (she knew of the bombing of Ton DC and warned no one, she ordered the mass incineration of the 300 grounders, she – with Bellamy – threw the lever that killed all the people in Mt. Weather, she convinced Lexa not to retaliate against Arkadia after Pike’s rampage (setting up the conditions for Lexa’s death) and, grotesquely, it was her idea to steal the bunker from the grounders (she almost made herself Commander, except Roan, for better or worse, called her out for mocking his culture).  

If the show had been more even-handed with its portrayal of the differences between Skaikru and the clans, offering a more balanced view (you can still have drama), gave more thought to the Grounder’s backstory and offered (whether in Lexa or some else) a long term foil to the Skaikru’s plans and isolationist identity, the characters of The 100 might have shown more nuance with its characters and the storytelling might not have resorted to superficial tactics (like making the Grounders so simplistic and savage as to be unrelatable, save for a few recurring characters like Lincoln, Lexa, Anya, Indra). 

I’m disturbed when I see fan posts about how awesome Octavia or Bellamy or Raven are: within the context of the show, they are mass-murdering colonialist usurpers (this might be accidental, but it is still their choice to carry it out).  Clarke, as the only Sky person to be written with any nuance or resolvable complexity, is given more of a hero’s notice because, within the narrative’s terms, she is only doing what she can to help her people survive. This is the excuse. But she has spent enough time amongst the others who live on the planet to know they are all human beings with value and also worthy of ‘more than surviving.’  

It’s hard not to see Clarke as merely a desperate manipulator of others to achieve a frightening goal (what could she have had other than to remove the obstacle that was the Grounders and Mt. Weather?) that would only benefit her people.  ‘Doing it for my people’ is often made fun of, but it is also Clarke’s version of ‘my country, right or wrong.’   What makes this worse is, we know how intelligent Clarke is, how insightful she can be, how close she got with Grounders like Lexa and Niylah, and how, in the end (before the radiation blast) she was willing to let all of them go just to save her own (more valued) kind. Metaphorically, we might see Clarke as the privileged white woman of power who won’t use it to benefit other, more marginalised voices.  That she was left alone on the surface, to raise a Grounder child, whom, in the teaser narrative of last summer, she is already telling fairy tales about her people to (whether that squares up with the upcoming series, who knows), is a chilling moment of a colonialist triumph – did Clarke never learn the lesson?  The child is so clearly a reminder of Lexa (brown-haired, green-eyed Nightblood), we want to believe Clarke is finally at peace with the two cultures she helped make war amongst (and, if she really did love Lexa as she claimed, wouldn’t she want Madi to know more of her own history and follow Lexa’s example).  

It would be a fine bit of turnaround if the show ended with the final decimation of the Sky people’s ‘superiority’ – but the show has been so deep in the POV of Clarke, et al, who would appreciate it? It might just be seen as more destruction for destruction’s sake.  For the Sky people to really become ‘grounders’ – losing their connection to technology – is a strong narrative urge that would round off their misadventures against the original clans. It won’t make them heroes, but it would realign the plot to something that might be close to some kind of karmic justice.  

Yes, all of this can be twisted any way you like to come up with a viewpoint favourable to your own, but I’ll stand by this as a troubling interpretation of a story I found too troubling by far.