Due to recent comments such as
“Clexas are so petty”, “Let it go already” and many others because we are
downvoting the new trailer, celebrating our trend yesterday and that article
dragging the show, I think we need to make one thing clear here:
What people outside the Clexa
fandom don’t know (or simply don’t want to know in most cases and ignore it)
it’s that the loo situation goes way beyond “not liking something” and most
important: it goes way beyond Lexa’s death itself!!
the
writers/actors/staff of the show started tweeting SUICIDE HELP NUMBERS right
after the episode of Lexa’s death aired. You all think that happened “just because”?
Many others known characters (especially LGBT ones) were killed this year and
none of them had a reaction that came any close to this. Did you ever stop to
wonder why?? Why this backlash was so huge and still is? I am telling you now
why: because the LGBT fandom was used, played with and queerbaited in the worst
way possible on SM by Jason and the writers every since that first Clexa
kiss.
And all the receipts of it, so you don’t say we are being “extra” and
making things up, are all here, in details and organized in a timeline of
events. This is actually the best link because that Variety article does not
address all the things that happened, only a few of them in a general view, so if
you want to pick one this is better: http://wedeservedbetter.com (btw kudos to
the people that did this).
Please take 1 hour
of your time and read it all (it’s really long I know, but it’s all there)…try
to understand why this fandom is so angry at Jason, CW and writers, why 9
months later this fandom STILL feels like this and is so aggressive and petty.
We were all actually expecting Lexa to die after the end of S2 and Jason and the
writers literally went out of their way to convince us the contrary for buzz
and ratings (even if her death was already planned and filmed).
You think the
fandom WANT to feel like this? That the fandom doesn’t want to move on and be
able to ignore it all? If you think like that you are, forgive my language,
stupid! NO ONE wants to fell like this, to feel stuck as if the only way of
being 100% free and having closure is seeing the show cancelled, and none of
this would have happened if they didn’t behave like that on SM or even if the
CW had done “damage control” the right way. Guess what? Jason, Shawna and
others didn’t face ANY CONSEQUENCES for their actions. They didn’t even get
called out by CW superiors or pushed away from their involvement on the show.
No, on the contraire, Pedowitz says he completely trusts his showrunners and
gives them the freedom they want to tell the stories they want…hell Jason even
got a new show on the network next year. I guarantee you all that if Jason was not part of the show anymore no one in the fandom would still be
doing any of this, because it would feel like justice was done.
If Lexa had
died the EXACT SAME WAY but none of this had happened on SM, the backlash would
have lasted a couple of weeks at most (because she was a beloved character, fan
favorite, and the death was stupid and fell into the trope). The baiting and
the SM behavior are responsible for at least 80% of the backlash/anger. Period.
The funny thing is that the
only person, among the people responsible, that we are ok with is actually
Javi. The writer who wrote Lexa’s death. You know why? Because that night and
the days after, he took a lot of his own time to listen to fans and acknowledge
all theirs mistakes. He answered all his asks on tumblr/twitter with respect
and, most important, with the TRUTH. Such as:
You know what
Jason did? Nothing! He tweeted the few reviews that were good from that episode
and hid behind a 22 year old actress and another network to put the blame on.
He denied knowing enough about the trope, he denied knowing that Shawna
infiltrated a LGBT forum and lied to the fans, he denied knowing about Lexa’s
real affect on people and what her death would cause, even if fans tweeted him
about it every day since the end of S2 and even made many WW trends about it
too (his twitter icon up until the episode was a fan art of his saying “don’t kill Lexa” on the background). He hid behind a horrible PR apology letter released 2 weeks later only because
of the con he would participate. Not only that he actually retweeted a tweet on
the following day of the episode calling fans “bullies”. The same ones that
were crying, desperate and even calling help lines because of their pain. And
you know what else added salt to the wound: CW renewed the show the WEEK AFTER
her death!! Wow talk about a slap to the face to all the fans that were already
in so much pain. If there was any doubt left that they were used, that was the
proof of it.
So go ahead
and defend a person like him. Pretend that nothing serious happened and we are
all exaggerating. Pretend that our salty posts/tweets (that actually function
as a coping mechanism and help us deal with our irritation/stress regarding the
show) are only bitter fans with no reason and we are “pissbabies”. Pretend that a person that says that
“leading without feelings is the same as being asexual” and that “the bisexual
character can get with any other character on the show (except her own mother because that
would be weird)”, is a person that actually gives a fuck about the fans and the
LGBT community that gave him and his show media attention. Pretend that all the receipts of their SM behaviour (baiting and lies that went beyond just answering fan questions and interacting with them) does not exist, so you can still defend them. Be blind still and only see the things that you want to see and ignore it all.
Actions have
consequences and as Jason said “The pain will be delicious”. Well Jason here it
is the fandom’s pain, it turned into anger, pettiness and a lot of salt…I hope
you are all enjoying it.
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.
I answered this a bit recently – no, I don’t think they’ll bring Lexa back. I think they want to get as far away from her as possible. Not discussing her, not bringing her up, hoping to move on from the media/fan fiasco. It’s a common strategy (not a kind one, but common). I believe part of the (Clexa) fan disconnect with the show stemmed from an unusual problem: the difference between ‘Lexa of the show’ and ‘Lexa the fan creation.’ But I’ll discuss that at another time.
I’ve been asked about series 4 theories and while I don’t think there’s enough to go on, I’ll pull this out of my head for you and try to keep it simple (over-thinking it always leads to disappointment):
In spite of the many scientific inaccuracies regarding nuclear plants, we’ll agree that there’s a major radiation problem looming and they’ve got to figure out how to survive it. That’s a given.
There will be disagreements over what to do.
Raven will be key to forming a plan.
Octavia will want no part of anything.
Bellamy will try to convince her otherwise, all part of his search for redemption.
The Grounders will be a mess without leadership and angry over the CoL business, some, perhaps, wanting to return to it.
Clarke will somehow reconnect with Luna and renegotiate with her since, I don’t know, they need her leadership (and, likely, her boats).
There will be Difficult Discussions over who will survive or is worthy of such (Luna only has so many boats). Lots of soul-searching moments.
Maybe Luna will take the flame, maybe no one will. Maybe it’ll wind up a keepsake that is never really mentioned again (what was the point of that thing anyway).
Clarke and Luna will work together to make Raven’s suggestions possible, in order to save as many people as they can. Hard going: Luna has no reason to trust Clarke.
Roan will help somehow or be a hinderance.
Octavia will not be on the journey. She will choose to stay behind, with the Grounders that refuse to leave. So will Indra. Raven and Jaha may not be on the journey, either. Bellamy will resist going, but someone will talk him into it, y’know, cause they need him or something.
Clarke, too, may resist the journey, feeling unworthy – and we think she’ll stay behind, but her mum convinces her.
I imagine the survivors will leave North America and travel elsewhere (because there are enough random Classical and Biblical allegories, why not) via Luna’s fleet of boats, to some spot that Raven will have figured out will be relatively ‘safe’ and a good place to start over. The last episode will be of them setting sail or arriving to their new destination.
This finale I think works because if there is no series 5, you can just leave it there and assume whatever you want and if there is a series 5, say goodbye to the 12 clans and their storyline (we hardly knew ye) and ever having a Clexa reunion (Lexa will be completely forgotten by then). It’ll be a whole new paradigm, as the survivors build a new world…together (swell of dramatic music).
Well, everybody IS full of it, regardless of this show’s existence or not, so that’s settled. 😉
I don’t know what to think of ‘theories,’ I’ve only seen the odd bit of gossip, which is what this really amounts to. If an actor wants to move on, she probably will, but you won’t know about it until you know about it. Until it is confirmed by an official source. A typical contract is for six years – unless the show ends sooner. We’ve had enough hints about the BTS culture of this show to get a picture of something a little unpleasant, but then we don’t really know. We get lots of selfies and shots of people smiling and maybe it’s all an act. It’s just gossiping about when we speculate on things like that.
The only solid thing right now about whether the show could end soon is that the network ordered 13 episodes instead of 16. Suggests they may not want to invest in it much longer. They did an interesting poll this past year asking viewers if they were affected by the demise of Lexa and whether it would affect their viewing of the show. Why ask about that? They want to get a lock on how big the Lexa debacle really hurt them. It should go without saying that the bad publicity brought about by Lexa’s death and Jroth and co’s reaction to it will always be brought up in any conversation about the show. It could affect the network’s decision to keep supporting it.
Sorry I’m not really helpful here. There’s just too little factual information to go on and too much gossip filling in the gaps.
Sorry I’m late on this reply, but have had to give this a think.
I don’t know. I really don’t know. All I can say is, it’s not going to last, not the way it has been, at its height, earlier this year. It just won’t. Fans will grow, find something else and move on, eventually. You may always love it, revere it, hold it dear, but at some point, ten years will have passed and you’ll realise that you haven’t thought about them at all. That’s the reality of it.
I do think ‘Clexa’ as a fandom is always going to be a ‘thing,’ even if just a politicised sense, as a beginning of a movement to change discriminatory practices in telly writing. Whenever you see t1oo mentioned, ‘Clexa’ and Lexa will likely be mentioned as well.
Since most of the fans are still very young and not all of them have migrated elsewhere (to Supergirl or Wynonna Earp or what-have-you), and since there is still a lingering lack of closure for so many, I don’t see it ‘dying out’ too quickly. Once the show ends, removing any possibility of formal closure, possibly.
But there’s something to the way the fans have developed these characters so far beyond what the show could ever have done. An echo of Clexa will always show up now and again (just as they are an echo of Xena/Gabrielle, et al).
Ugh. Just hit me how awful Clarke’s lie really was. Lots of foreboding here.
Within this ugly colonialist narrative, Clarke (in this scene) is placing herself in a position of importance within Lexa’s clan (her ‘relationship’ with Anya) – which from the outside is offensive and likely offensive to everyone in that tent (and should be to Lexa, too – but she’s meant to be the Betrayer of her people), but we don’t pay attention to it really because we see things from Clarke’s perspective and we want Clarke to succeed and bring an alliance with Lexa and her people. It benefits Skaikru.
It will, however (and oh how Gustus was right) be the end of the Grounder’s way of life.
Discussing virtual realities / simulated environments today and been wondering if t1oo will follow the pattern of legendary SF stories like Simulacron-3 and The Matrix and involve the protagonists learning they have always existed within a simulation. The ‘City of Light’ simulation being just an interior level of the greater simulation.
It would also be an easy way out for them – everyone who has ‘died’ in the simulation is either transferred to ‘the real world’ or another simulacrum.
Addressing quantum universes as endless simulacrums?
Here’s the thing: Lexa, as a character, only featured in a dozen or so episodes, was mostly underwritten and killed off too quickly and written out in a cliched manner that was a terrible shock to an audience that had been systematically led to believe the opposite would happen. For months prior to this, fans had been carefully building their own universe around her, Clarke and t1oo, enriching that world, those characters and themselves with serious character and world-building, exploring the inner lives and outer turmoil, the potential alternatives – they saw more in her/them than the show’s entire writing team did and they have done it so well, that their work eclipses anything the show could ever offer.
When fans conversate about Lexa and all related matters, they are not ‘over the top’ or ‘looking too deep for shit that isn’t there,’ they are re-imagining a whole world and giving it more life than its creators did. It’s important to them because she is/was a beacon of incredibly rare representation that was badly misused and the fans have reclaimed her. That is something to be joyous about, really, not cynical. What the show tore down and took away, the fans have loving rebuilt and kept alive.
Humans start out at birth with milk white blood. The more crimes they commit, the darker their blood becomes. One day, you meet your soulmate. Skip a few years, and things are amazing… Until your soulmate trips, falls, and exposes black blood…
“Dude, I have not paid for music since 2006.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot that was a crime.”
“Me too, tbh.”
-fin-
This would have been a fascinating background narrative for the Commander…pity.
Oh jesus god in heaven, the Pike plot. Michael Beach deserved so much better. I refuse to believe he wasn’t promised better, and then ended up with hash because of BTS drama. (I am a bit of a Pike apologist – not in the sense of what he became on the show, but what I feel like they were originally planning with his character looking at the first half of the season. I’m convinced he was set up to be a very different character before everything fell apart at the seams.)
Way, way back in the wilds of 3×04 (or so), I thought I knew what the point of S3 was. I even meta’d about it – something I try not to do midseason, since it feels like tempting fate and I often feel like I end up giving writers/the show too much credit in retrospect. (Ahem.) But looking back at what I wrote:
(you brought this on yourself by asking, you know 😉 oh my god here comes verbiage.)
So if the first season was about survival (who we are outside of the context of everything we know and understand), and the second was about war (who we are in the midst of life- or ego-threatening conflict), then the third season is about trauma. Or: who we are when we’ve managed to come out on the other side still breathing.
Because, as this season has made abundantly clear, winning is not the same as thriving.
Which is why I’m tired about the comparisons of Pike to a certain controversial American politician. (Yes, he scares me, too, that’s not the point.) Pike is a trauma victim! Pike spent the last few months having his only friends and comrades picked off one by one by an enemy they never saw coming. Aside from the more obvious and disturbing attitudes, the show gives you all kinds of delicious little details to show how that truly fucked over him and his crew: that they were dressed like Ice Nation when they attacked the vehicle (yes, to move through Ice Nation territory possibly undetected but still: why did they wait so long to attack people who clearly had more than Grounder tech? why attack AS Ice Nation until they heard Monty’s name?), that they still refer to each other as Farm Station when rallying for support.
Does this excuse their actions? I shouldn’t even have to ask that question rhetorically, it’s a disgusting question, but since internet communication often lacks nuance: NO.
But my point is that any time a character’s decisions drive you up the wall on this show, for my money? It looks like the aftermath of trauma. […]
Arguably it’s every Grounder as well. I know the fandom likes to joke about how Grounders turned out to be the good guys all along, but that’s not really the case. We have more sympathy for them now because we know and love individual characters, but the entire Polis storyline shows they are entrenched in the trauma of warfare (with the Mountain and each other). Their culture rests on a never-ending cycle of violence so intrinsic to their identity they might try to eliminate their leader for daring to suggest that, hey, maybe there’s a different way of doing things. Pike’s people didn’t start this cycle, they’re just feeding into it from a different angle.
That’s a common response: fighting back, although (psychological spoiler alert) with trauma the enemy is within you, no matter how hard your brain tries to convince you otherwise. So good luck there.
The other common response is to flee, to get as far away from the terrible things trauma makes you feel, and by any means necessary.
The City of Light isn’t about drugs. It’s still about trauma.
[…] Jaha has also lost the memory that not only brought him to this place but which helped define him as a person, in fact defined most of his actions on the show to date. Jaha hasn’t just lost the pain of losing his son. He’s lost his son, in every way possible. It was brilliant to pair him with Abby in this exchange, because as much grief and conflict as she and Clarke share, if you told Abby she’d be better off never knowing her daughter I bet she’d twist your arm right out of its socket. (I knew Jake Griffin was doomed the moment Abby begged him to reconsider for Clarke’s sake, and he erred on the side of the greater good. Do you remember her expression in that scene? I literally said “Dude, you are fucked,” out loud.) And if the show is going in the direction I think it is, it’s kind of genius to start this concept with a premise most of its viewers might not relate to (the pain of losing a child) and go from there. The seed of wrongness is planted, even if I think we’re going to get a lot more immediate and main character-oriented examples of how denying your pain can be the same as denying your self.
Because while no one is defined by their pain, you have to know who you are – good, bad, painful – in order to work with it, to work from that, if you want to change. Or you might end up losing a lot more than you originally bargained for.
I still think that was supposed to be Alie’s function and the function of the City of Light. Especially considering Clarke’s final conclusions about pain. But it was so badly done. They set off all their shock bombs but neglected the emotional follow-through – which was their real problem with the Bellamy storyline, IMO. I can totally see him as someone who murdered 300 allies in their sleep, because he grew up in an abusive system/family and he’s got the moral relativism (and arguably a disassociation from violence) to show for it.
But the show didn’t do the work. There’s a great essay by W.H. Auden about Richard III where he walks us through how Shakeapeare gets us root to for a villain – by making us complicit. By involving us in the sheer, devilish fun of planning and executing his schemes. Richard tells us every detail about what he wants to do before he does it, and in this way wins our reluctant sympathies… until he murders the two princes. It’s the first murder of the play without an accompanying soliloquy. And, arguably, that’s what all fiction has to do with anti-heroes or fallen heroes or moral ambiguity: brings us into it. Show us the details of the painful descent. We don’t have to empathize with Bellamy’s actions in order to have sympathy for him, we just have to understand why he’s doing it, and why him of all people, and what it does to him to do these things.
We got none of that. Instead, the show decided to show as little of the atrocity as possible in the hopes we would disconnect Bellamy, who’s supposed to be one of the heroes of this piece, from massive and unprovoked slaughter. Then they doubled down on his “redemption,” hoping to draw our focus to his remorse. But if we have no idea how he got to such a dark place or why – if the show doesn’t show us that – then we have no feeling of urgency to see him recover from it, no reason to root for his struggles. It’s like someone walking into a room and announcing, out of nowhere, that they just arm-wrestled a bear and won. Like… good for them? But it’s hard to believe or get invested.
And that’s what the show failed to do with almost every character. We have no idea why Hannah Green would turn on her own son, or what she felt about that. We don’t know what it did to Monty to kill her, or where he even got the strength. What turned Ontari into the kind of person who can murder sleeping children? Does Roan really just… wander around, doing whatever, for unknown reasons? Why was Titus someone who would rather go against his own culture rather than trust the leader he supposedly venerated? Where the fuck was Clarke’s emotional catharsis about losing the possible love of her life? Or Bellamy’s about realizing he could stray so far from the path of righteousness and Octavia’s good regard? Like, sure, he accepted he did wrong, but why?
The character to come closest to emotional follow-through was Octavia. As much as I dislike the metatextual implications of Pike’s death (although I’m glad Beach is free), I still consider it a high point of the season, because here is a character making a big, meaningful choice for reasons we actually understand. I don’t have to think it’s like, an example of good behavior to understand how Octavia got to that point and be invested in how it will affect her.
So that’s the show’s problem, in my opinion. Not the choices it made, per se, but its neglect in interrogating those choices and keeping them grounded in the characters. Which is ironic, because for all its “shocking twists” that’s one thing that Game of Thrones is fairly consistent about, and why it still has viewers. I have my own suspicions about why that crucial approach didn’t translate to The 100, but I’ve already written a novel, so I think I’ll just… slink away…
Very well reasoned.
There are no ‘reverse angles’ to show us how a certain plot point came about, how certain decisions were come to (the s2 finale is a huge failure of logic that sacrifices the intelligence of The Commander, for one, in order to pull its ‘shocking twist’), and no time spent in building the inner lives of these characters to where we can connect with their decision-making. Time compression is cited as a reason for this, but I think it’s more to do with the ability of the writing staff to analyse their narrative.
For the record, I’d read a couple of novel-length examinations from you on the topic.
Television can be so much better, it’s deeply frustrating when poor writing is so consistently forgiven and never improved upon.
The Doctor Is Out 