Tag: lexa

clexaheadcannons:

Something needs to be said about Raven here.

Raven wanted Lexa dead at one point (probably longer) for Finn’s Death.

Lexa cut Raven with her knife when Raven was accused of trying to poison her.

Yet here Raven is DEFENDING Lexa. If nothing else Raven is putting her personal feeling towards Lexa aside to comfort Clarke and saying that Lexa herself wasn’t an AI that what Clarke and Lexa had were real. 

Raven is pretty much saying that Lexa wasn’t Artificial Intelligence, she was a REAL HUMAN BEING and HER FEELINGS WERE VALID!

Raven is amazing, just saying.

I do agree with others on this thread – I don’t think Raven was defending anything. She herself had been attached to an AI and she knew what it was Lexa had attached to her.  She understands it.  Question is: why didn’t Clarke understand the little chip inside Lexa was not Lexa?  Lexa – flesh and blood and bone, who loved her (and who died).  Clarke understands technology, what it can and cannot do.  The line, coming from her, sounded off, as if the writers wanted to suggest that Clarke no longer thought of Lexa as a real person (part of Lexa’s erasure).  If Clarke no longer sees Lexa as a real person, makes it that much easier for her to move on to someone else (crap as that is).  

I think it more likely that, if anything, when they were in the CoL, Raven might have seen her interactions with the Lexa there (a digital memory of her, ironically, not the real one), and while she might understand Clarke’s feelings for Lexa, I could picture her telling Clarke – that wasn’t her.  That was the chip. They do not equal the other (imagine if Lexa’s body were revived – it would be separate from the ‘enhanced’ version of her in the CoL.  All sorts of identity headaches would ensue).  

Thank you so much for answering my Lexa questions! will you post your analysis soon? I also wuld like to know if you think Lexa will be brought up this season? even a little? i cant’ believe theyd just forget her.

You are welcome and I am still working on it (though I’ve been posting bits of it here and there, so…).  I’m sure ‘Heda’ will be brought up, as an important figure in Grounder society, finding a new one might hold some narrative time (but who knows).  I cannot picture Lexa even being mentioned.  We might get a hint of Clarke in mourning, but it will be generalised, as there is so much to mourn for. Unlike Octavia, who wears Lincoln’s tattoo as war paint, I don’t even think Clarke will be in possession of the ‘flame’ for long, much less keep any other memento. I’d like to be wrong, but if Jroth won’t even discuss Lexa, I doubt he’ll write about her any further.  Spiting the audience that gave him so much would not surprise me. 

Now that the 100 trailer has dropped what do you think? Everyone on my dash is saying beII arke is happening. Does that mean clarke isn’t bi anymore? I just feel kinda sick. it doesn’t look like 100.

I thought the trailer looked messy and derivative and thought the choices for some scene spoilers was questionable. They started with the bit about the nuclear power plants melting down. Embarrassing, especially if you know a little of how those things work. So the science doesn’t look like it’s being corrected. Shame if that’s the case. Bellamy not wanting to sacrifice any more lives?  Didn’t he slaughter innocent people?  It sounds odd coming from him. A little…revisionism in his history going on, maybe?  By placing two intimate-looking scenes with Clarke in the trailer, I’d say they’ve embraced that more than half their fandom is gone and they’ll give what remains something of what they want. It does reek of a little spitefulness. Even if there is no romance between Clarke and Bellamy, the trailer is certainly implying something. Who is being baited now?  We’ll see.  I’ve written below why such a pairing would be outright offensive at this point.  

As for Clarke…and I’ll put this in as it answers a couple of similar asks right now (regarding her legitimacy as a bisexual character):

A fictional bisexual character created by a straight male, who is given a brief romance with a lesbian character who is then killed off to make way for the fictional bisexual to have a romance with the male hero is the problem, if it happens, not that she’s bisexual or offers good (or bad) representation on her own.  

It upholds the heteronormative VISUAL that demeans f/f relationships time and again.  Another toxic trope.  “She was just experimenting.”  “It’s just a phase.”  “She really belongs with him.”  Clarke Griffin becomes a prize that Bellamy ‘deserves’ to win.  It’s an appalling stereotype.  Ask why it’s ‘okay’ that she ‘belongs with him,’ but not ‘her.’  

Answering a previous ask about ‘salty Clexas’: Fans who want Clarke to be reunited with Lexa are fighting against the heteronormative they are constantly slammed with.  The constant degradation of their own fantasies and desires to see just a tiny bit of positive representation on-screen.  They are also fighting back against the deliberate queerbaiting they went through at the hands of the showrunner and members of his team throughout 2015 and early 2016.  

Add with the disgusting amount of homophobic taunting that went on with certain members of another end of the fandom (who are now revelling in what they feel is their triumph over the ‘Clexughs’) there is more going on here than just whether or not Clarke’s bisexuality is valid and good representation. A lot more.  

teddywestsidelove:

thedoctor-smith:

alyciadayumcareys:

throwback to season 2 where Lexa had already lowkey sworn fealty to Clarke + highkey took care of her wifey (▰˘◡˘▰)

This is what gets me about Lexa’s storyline. She was never written to be a romantic hero/foil for Clarke.  She was written to be the Betrayer.  The tribal leader who capitulates to the desires/needs of the would-be colonialist overlords.  Gustus and Titus both see what the Skaikru are or what they could be (the end of the Grounder’s way of life) and are desperate for Lexa to uphold the will of their people instead of being swayed by Clarke.  They know it will end badly.  

Lexa was never intended to be anything but a tragic figure who betrays her people and must be punished by them for it.  Her relationship with Clarke is the heart of that betrayal.  Only when she is offered the ‘deal’ is she forced to return to the path of putting her people first.  She means well.  She wants peace.  But her people will not accept Skaikru.  In series 3, she tries to pull her people into her way of thinking, but Titus recognises she is so besotted with Clarke, she will not put her people first (even if she sees a bigger picture than he does).  That he becomes the one to mete out her ‘punishment,’ adds another layer to her pointless tragedy.  

And the fans saw something so much bigger and better in that storyline and completely rewrote the narrative to suit themselves.  It created a disconnect between the audience and the show – which is a shame. The producers could have looked through the eyes of this audience and seen how much bigger their show could have been.  Such a shame.  A waste.  

Love this.  

I think it’s clear that Jason never intended for Clexa to be this massive thing that took over the show.  Once he realized how popular it was becoming in season 2, he saw $$$ and brought Lexa back in season 3 to bask in the hype and positive press that Clexa was getting during the hiatus.  

The problem was that he never actually cared about the character or the relationship the way the fans did.  Storylinewise, Jason brought back Lexa SOLELY to kill her and reveal his “brilliant” AI plot twist.  That was it.  All the clexa stuff that happened before that was just for ratings and media hype.  

Very well put.  

The differences between ‘show Lexa’ and ‘fan Lexa’  are jarring.  On one hand you have The Commander who is only a tiny sliver of the overall narrative, on the other, you have fans building an entire universe around all the possibilities of her character and her relationship with Clarke.  The show isn’t going to explore those possibilities, likely not even if there was time to do so. I doubt the producers were ignorant of how the fans saw her, it was simply, as you say, nothing they cared about.  A writer is going to write the story he wants, not the one his viewers want.  

Where it took such a cruel turn was the naked greed of using and manipulating that vulnerable audience to increase numbers and achieve renewal.  

Every showrunner looks for a hook to grab an audience.  Lexa/Clexa was JR’s unlikely hook.  He and his  team played into it.   They weren’t interested in investing anything real into Lexa – her death was assured from the first time she was seen on-screen – but they were going to play up the fan’s love of her.  They wrote the first half of series 3 in the manner of total fan fiction: all of it designed to please a Clexa fan.  All of it designed to keep them watching, keep them hooked.  Big, crowd-pleasing moments like Lexa kicking the Azgeda ambassador off her tower or kneeling to Clarke or fighting Roan and killing the Ice Queen. Clarke sketching sleeping Lexa (how did that scene come about?).  Nothing real.  It was all fantasy-within-a-fantasy.  If substance had been involved, we would have been given the Ice Nation as the big foe, we would have been given backstory on their history, on Nia and Lexa’s feud.  It would have somehow paralleled all that was happening with the sky people and their struggle.  All of it would have tied together into the greater narrative.  

 The AI storyline should have been the ‘filler’ for how the Grounders became what they became. Their origin story. Instead, it was given pride of place and wasn’t terribly well-thought out enough to make enough sense, to tie in to the Grounders fully. 

How, in such a short period of time, did the Grounders go from being within living memory of technology, democracy and scientific learning to a haphazard grouping of ‘clans?’  How did people who had known Becca and learned of her AI and took her ‘nightblood’ serum not pass on their knowledge of her?  How could Lexa not have known she was connected to a piece of advanced technology (especially if she had Becca’s memories)?  How did a religion form around Becca’s invention?  Anything that gave us a greater idea of Grounder history and culture would have made sense.  But that wasn’t the story they were interested in telling.  Lexa and her people were just pretty smoke, extras.   It’s a terrible shame because the potential is all there and they didn’t look to explore it. 

Is this necessarily a fault?  No, not under ordinary circumstances.  Under ordinary terms, we’d just be disappointed at poor storytelling and move on.  But the unusual and (perhaps unintentionally) cruel manipulation of the audience put this failure on a completely new level.  Now that they’ve been thoroughly called out for it by those fans and various media, their party is somewhat over.  The exuberance of their earlier social media shenanigans are no more. Their show is forever tainted by their arrogant invocation of an offensive trope – one they should have had greater insight about (an insight the fans are now determined the entire industry will never ignore again).   After paying sycophantic fan service they might have thought would net them greater rewards, they’re having to scale back in various ways, including the diminishing of their series from 16 episodes to 13, even less space to tell their already limited story.  Instead of building up and outwards, they wrote themselves into one corner too many.  

I find these disconnects interesting as they speak to greater problems in our culture, namely the unquestioned supremacy of the male authority figure, protected by a male dominated industry that continues to marginalise minorities. 

If fans will continue to make noise, if the audience asserts itself as something other than passive, the industry must shift – and, perhaps, an active audience creating positive change will have positive effects in other areas of society.  

Can you think of any scenario where Lexa could have been killed off and it wouldn’t have been a big deal?

I think there are fans who would say that Lexa *could* be killed off if she were somehow *revived* at a slightly later point (aka Jon Snow).  If it were just some sort of cheat, something to fool others.  I’d add that if they had really invested in the AI storyline, in Lexa’s role in that (if we had discovered she was a cyborg before her death, if we had some knowledge that Lexa’s consciousness would be preserved), if they’d developed a proper virtual world that Lexa could live on in, later to be joined by Clarke (something ,strangely enough, presented in the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror), the pain might have been a little less. It wouldn’t change the reality of the trope, however.  

Remember how girls swooned over Jack’s death in Titanic?  Why didn’t they swoon over Lexa’s, even though her death was very much in that tradition of the noble lover who sacrifices him/herself for his/her beloved?  

In a perfect world, we’d have dozens of lesbian characters to look up to and choose from on the telly.  But we don’t.  Killing Lexa in any fashion you might devise, no matter how thrilling, self-sacrificing, bloody or deserved, still repeats the Dead Lesbian trope.  Within the narrative of the show, Lexa is a betrayer of her people and if she had been a male character, no one would have remarked about her death – it was always going to happen. She was always going to be punished. Within the narrative of the show, everything was designed around her death and the chaos it would bring. She was written no differently than if she had been a male character in that scenario.  We were supposed to hurt because they knew the fans loved her.  They thought the pain would be lovely, because it was *lovely* when Jack died. When these noble male heroes die.  We all swoon and they become legends in their deaths.  

It doesn’t really work that way, of course.  Straight people might like to present themselves that way, might like their heroes that way, but not everyone else cares for it.  Just once, it’d be nice to have our heroes alive and showing the world how it could really be done.  It’d be nice to change the world.

hey i rly luv your Lexa rambles is there something we can appreciate about her that you can talk about?

Thank you for writing. Sorry I’ve not replied sooner but had to think about your question a bit.  

There’s so much to appreciate about the character, and so much covered elsewhere, not sure what I can add (but if I think of something, I’ll certain ‘ramble’ about it).  

One thing I’d like to mention though: there’s lots of talk about Lexa being the poster child of consent. She doesn’t touch Clarke without permission, she’s gentle, she’s respectful.  I think this is interesting, especially since a common image in some films/telly is a distraught woman, forcibly comforted by another person (usually, a man).  He holds on to her while she pushes him away, screaming sometimes, until she’s too tired to fight anymore and submits and this is often suggestive that she is accepting of him (in spite of her earlier struggle and rejection) and that this is something she needs, it just takes his unyielding (and uninvited) strength to help her see that.  

Related, there are those scenes that show a woman struggling against a man’s unwanted advances (a kiss, sometimes more), until his hold is too much and, again, she submits, because, the subtext goes, she really wants this. 

I’ve always found that sort of scene/imagery to be deeply offensive and sexist. If anyone ever tried to do that to you in real life, he’s not likely to get away with it and no one would see it as ‘romantic.’  As someone who has trouble receiving touch, it would be nightmarish.  

So I appreciate that they wrote Lexa this way: even though we might all agree that Clarke needs comforting, maybe even Clarke would agree, too, it is up to Clarke what form that comfort takes. Lexa knows this and holds herself away.  She’d never disrespect Clarke’s boundaries. It’s a nice touch that we rarely see in other media.